Jennifer Weiner is the author of 11 books, including, most recently, "All Fall Down." She is on Twitter.

Are you a female person? Do you have a face and a body?



Are you, perhaps, confused about who gets to decide who can see your body, and who determines how your face can look? Do you think that the answer to either of those questions is “you?”





The latest round of photo leaks and Botox-shaming has a point, and the point is to keep women quiet.

It’s an easy mistake to make.



Luckily, pop culture has provided helpful recent examples of how things work. Take notes!



1. Your body is an object, available for public consumption. To paraphrase one of the gentlemen of 4Chan who hunted down and released private nude shots of famous actresses, "You’d never let an ugly guy like me see you naked. Well, ha ha, not your choice!" You don’t get to decide who sees you naked; some random angry stranger does. Then Seth MacFarlane gets to write about it.



2. Your body must meet certain standards. You have to be young, fit, free of sag, flab, flop, chub, droop, stretch marks, tan lines, grey hairs and wrinkles. Your body must be, essentially, an anatomical impossibility. Think Anna Nicole Smith’s front, Nicki Minaj’s back and Gisele Bundchen in between. Any variation and you’re either fat or anorexic. This is true for every moment of your life, except during the final two weeks of pregnancy, when you're allowed to look as if you ate a slightly larger-than-normal lunch, or the three days after giving birth, during which you are permitted a tiny paunch, but only if you promise to lose every ounce of weight within the following two weeks.

3. None of this can look like work. You must appear young, you must be fit, you must maintain a silhouette best emblemized by cartoon character Jessica Rabbit, but you cannot betray that this came at a cost, that it took work, or that – God forbid – you had work done. Show up visibly altered and you’re a punchline. Show up looking older and you’re pathetic. Maybe you should consider just not showing up anywhere at all!



The latest round of photo leaks and Botox-shaming has a point, and the point is to keep women quiet. You want to shut a woman up? Don’t tell her she’s wrong, tell her she’s ugly. Convince her that her face and figure are offensive, and she'll work on them, not the woeful lack of women in places like Congress, or how there are only 24 female C.E.O.s in the Fortune 500, and eight places left in Texas to get an abortion.



“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?” asked poet Muriel Ruykeyser. “The world would split open.” What would happen if more women – famous and unfamous – eschewed liposuction, shunned tanning beds and swapped the occasional run on the treadmill for a march on City Hall? The world might split open even more deeply -- and that could be a beautiful thing.



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