Kathleen Stock writes that liberals have a fetish problem. She argues that liberals need to condemn people who have fetishes. Specifically, we need to condemn a teacher in Ontario who wears prosthetic breasts the size of the world record holder for largest breasts, and eunuchs who want to be castrated.
She writes:
The broad-brush story goes: consider liberalism as a historically embedded, culturally prevalent mood rather than as a carefully worked-out academic theory. Understood this way, liberalism has its own fetishes: “freedom”, “choice” and “consent”. Rather than pronounce on any substantive conception of the good life, it prefers to let individuals find their own versions, and so contains no resources to say what is wrong with people walking about with absurdly large fake body parts or chopping real ones off to get sexual kicks.
Yes. That is a feature, not a bug. Liberals believe that people are allowed to choose their own clothing. Liberals also believe that people can also change their own bodies: cut their hair, get tattoos or piercings, seek sterilizations, have abortions, and (yes) get castrated.
Of course, the right to choose one’s own clothing is limited in some circumstances. In particular, workplaces can licitly require people to wear “professional” clothing. While some standards of professional dress are deplorably sexist and racist, in general, clear guidelines for professional clothing make it easier for people to focus on work. They also help lower-class people who may not have osmosed the complicated clothing signaling of the middle and upper classes.
In this case, cartoonishly large prosthetic breasts clearly violate our culture’s norms for professional dress. Similarly, you can’t wear your Homestuck cosplay to work, or a T-shirt that says “Fuck Nazis.” The appropriate response to all three of those is your boss taking you aside and having a frank conversation about your dress, not an international incident and an Unherd article from a feminist philosopher of aesthetics.
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