The faux "AOC wore expensive clothes!!!" outrage is a classic reminder of the way people love to attack women for "frivolous" femininity. It's a trap: women are forced to adhere to certain beauty standards and then we're mocked for what actually goes into achieving it.

It goes back to Marie Antoinette, and the outrage the french people had towards her. Her dresses and hairstyles were highly visible, and so carried enormous symbolic power—but she had no REAL power. She didn't enact taxes to pay for her clothes, or make political decisions ---

And yet she's the figure who gets the most mockery, who's stood in the zeitgeist the longest. (She never said "Let them eat cake" but you all know that.) I bet if you asked 50 people on the street more people would know Marie Antoinette than the name of her husband.

Female spending is "tacky" and "frivolous" and incredibly VISIBLE in a way that stereotypically male spending (on cars, on boats, on companies, even on suits) only rarely is for some reason.

Tammy Faye Baker's "crimes" of spending too much money on makeup wasn't what brought her husband down—that was unrelated investor fraud. But isn't makeup so much more salacious? Easier to sink our teeth into.

For hundreds of years, women were told the only arena in which they could have any actual control was with regards to fashion and appearance. But god forbid we take any pleasure in that limited avenue of autonomy.

Are women considered frivolous because we're associated with clothing? Or is it the other way around?