A particular kind of performance happens when no one is watching.
It happens in the bathroom, under the fluorescent light, when we lean toward the mirror and inspect our skin. It happens in the shower, where an ordinary act of getting clean becomes an elaborate ritual of exfoliating, shaving, scrubbing, moisturizing, oiling, conditioning, cleansing and, somehow, cleansing again. It happens when we notice a darker patch of skin, an ingrown hair, a little texture on our thighs, or that our legs are not quite as smooth as they were yesterday. No one asked us to check. We checked anyway. And I keep coming back to one question: Who are we performing for?
I don’t mean this as an indictment of women who enjoy beauty, hygiene, or femininity; quite the opposite. There is something deeply satisfying about taking care of yourself. A long shower can be restorative. Skincare can be a ritual. Doing your hair can make you feel like yourself again. There’s nothing inherently frivolous about wanting to feel beautiful in your own body. But I do think there’s value in occasionally questioning the things we have been taught to call self-care. Because sometimes, the line between caring for yourself and monitoring yourself is much thinner than we realize.
We talk about the male gaze as though it requires a man, a man looking at a woman. A man deciding whether she is beautiful, desirable, feminine, clean, polished, thin enough, soft enough. The gaze is usually imagined as something external, something imposed upon women from the outside. But what happens when you have lived under a standard long enough? Eventually, the man doesn’t have to be in the room. The surveillance becomes so familiar that we begin doing it ourselves; that is perhaps one of beauty culture’s strangest accomplishments.
We notice the things we have been taught to notice. The hair that should not be there. The skin that should be smoother. The body that should be tighter. The discoloration that should be corrected. The scent that should be covered. The feature that photographs badly. The imperfection that nobody else would have noticed until we pointed it out ourselves. Then we fix it. Not necessarily because anyone asked us to, but because sometimes we have internalized the possibility that someone might.
This is what makes modern beauty culture so complicated. The standards no longer have to be a man telling a woman she is unattractive. They arrive through advertisements, television, mothers, friends, strangers, algorithms, comment sections, and millions of other tiny cultural messages about what a woman should look like. Eventually, the voice becomes familiar enough that we mistake it for our own.
You can see this most clearly in the modern ritual of the “everything shower.”
The phrase itself is almost charming. It sounds indulgent, harmless, even luxurious. And sometimes it is. There is nothing wrong with turning an ordinary shower into an hour of uninterrupted care. But somewhere along the way, self-maintenance became an Olympic sport. There’s a product for every inch of the body and a concern for every conceivable imperfection. Exfoliate. Shave. Prevent ingrown hairs. Brighten. Smooth. Moisturize. Layer fragrance. Match your body wash to your lotion to your perfume. Find the right deodorant. Find the right intimate-care routine. Make sure your hair smells good. Make sure your skin is soft enough to touch. Then open TikTok and watch another woman explain the routine she uses to achieve something you did not previously realize needed achieving. It can be difficult to know when the routine ends and the anxiety begins. Perhaps more importantly, though, who taught us these things were problems in the first place?
We are told that these rituals are about feeling good in our bodies, and sometimes they absolutely are. But there is something worth examining about a culture in which women can be made to feel negligent for possessing perfectly ordinary bodies. Body hair becomes a problem. Texture becomes a problem. Hyperpigmentation becomes a problem. Sweat becomes a problem. Pores become a problem. The body, in its natural and occasionally inconvenient state, becomes a project. And the project is never quite finished.
This is part of what makes femininity feel so strangely uncanny. Most women now, living in the age of TikTok, Sephora, and the “clean girl” aesthetic, are painfully aware of the expectations surrounding womanhood: how a woman should appear, what she should want, how she should behave, and what kind of life she is supposed to construct for herself. What makes those expectations powerful is not simply that they are imposed. It is that they can become internal. That distinction matters.
A rule does not have to be enforced by someone else forever. Eventually, you can learn the rule so well that you enforce it yourself. And sometimes, you enforce it on other women. That may be the most uncomfortable part. Once we have learned to scrutinize ourselves, it becomes surprisingly easy to scrutinize each other. We see a woman with visible body hair and immediately react. We see someone’s skin and notice the texture. We wonder why she doesn’t wear makeup, why she wears too much makeup, why she dresses that way, why she isn’t more polished, why she doesn’t seem to care. We may never say any of it aloud, but we have learned to notice.
Social media has made this particularly strange because women no longer merely consume beauty standards; they enforce them. We comment on strangers’ appearances. We recommend products to correct perceived flaws. We tell one another what is flattering, what is feminine, what is hygienic, what is “classy,” what is attractive. We have become very good at knowing what a woman should be. A man doesn’t have to tell us anymore. We tell each other.
There is something almost tragic about that transformation. A standard designed to evaluate women becomes so thoroughly internalized that women begin evaluating each other by it, often believing they are simply helping. Perhaps that is why the language of beauty culture can feel so gentle while producing so much anxiety. It’s self-care. It’s maintenance. It’s feminine hygiene. It’s looking after yourself. It’s just what women do. But who decided?
This is where I want to be careful, because there is an easy conclusion to draw from all of this. If a woman shaves, wears makeup, maintains an elaborate skincare routine, or cares about her appearance, she must be doing it for men. I don’t believe that. Frankly, I think that idea is just another way of telling women what their choices are allowed to mean. I shave because sometimes I like my legs smooth. I take care of my skin because I enjoy having a routine. I put on perfume and lotion because I enjoy smelling good.
There are things about femininity that I genuinely love. But enjoying something does not mean the desire emerged in complete isolation from society. We are shaped by what surrounds us. A woman can sincerely believe that she feels “cleaner” without body hair while also having absorbed, somewhere along the way, the message that female body hair is undesirable. Both things can be true. That is the nuance I think we often miss. The goal isn’t to identify every beauty preference as oppression. It is to become curious about ourselves. Is this something I choose, or something I am afraid not to choose? There is a difference.
So who are we performing for? Maybe the answer is no one. Maybe you really are doing it for yourself. Maybe you love the everything shower. Maybe you love your perfume collection. Maybe you feel most beautiful with freshly shaved legs and a perfect blowout. Maybe you would do every bit of it even if you were stranded on an island and guaranteed never to encounter another human being again. Wonderful. But I think every woman deserves the opportunity to ask herself the question. Not because she should feel guilty, but because she should know herself.
If no one could ever see my body, would I still want to change it? If nobody knew whether I shaved, would I still care? If I had never been taught that one skin texture was beautiful and another wasn’t, would I recognize mine as a flaw? If there were no audience, which parts of my routine would remain? Yet, perhaps the most important question: when I look at another woman, am I seeing her, or the standard I was taught to see?
There is freedom in realizing that you don’t have to abandon femininity to escape its expectations. You can keep the razor. Keep the body oil. Keep the perfume. Keep the 12-step skincare routine if you genuinely love it. Just don’t let the routine become a surveillance system. Because perhaps the real danger of the gaze was never simply that someone else was watching. It was that eventually, we learned to watch ourselves. And then, without even realizing it, we learned to watch each other.