Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has feet. And she washes sometimes. In order to do this she takes off her clothes, the brazen hussy. I presume this to be the case, although the picture of feet in the bath that the Daily Caller published seems to have been falsely ascribed to her. Experts have been brought in to analyse the length of the toes in the image, because this is clearly the biggest issue in America right now.

This quite insane attempt to shame her is so bizarre after the video of her dancing on a rooftop at college backfired and she responded by dancing into her congressional office. She is more popular than ever. She excites the left because of her youth, her passion and her politics. She excites the right because she has a body – and, God knows, she may even enjoy that fact. This must be highlighted as sinful, over and over again.

wikiFeet: how online foot fetishists debunked Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s fake nude Read more

That, in 2019, the public mechanism of shaming women over their bodies is still thought to be effective stuns me, but on it rolls. Body shaming is nothing new, of course. It patrols its territory with ever smaller subsets of self-appointed police divisions. The monitoring of cellulite now looks positively old-fashioned, as every area of a woman’s body has the potential to look, and therefore be, wrong. Bits you never considered before are probably not up to scratch.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Experts have been brought in to analyse the length of the toes.’ Photograph: sydneyelainexo/instagram

The actual functions of a female body, from periods to pregnancy, childbirth and menopause are subject to shame and ever-growing regulations disguised so often as “advice”. Beneath all this “caring” and ordering of the messiness of femaleness in mainstream culture is a tangible disgust. That disgust reveals much anxiety about the biggest taboo: female pleasure.

That is Ocasio-Cortez’s transgression: enjoyment. Women’s pleasure in themselves remains an enormous threat to fundamentalists everywhere. That is why the continuing effort at shaming women in the public eye keeps misfiring. The refusal of shame is a powerful weapon. Someone alert the media that is currently guarded by various members of the establishment whose main message to young women is that they are attention seeking ( Lily Allen, Little Mix), and whose sole message to older women is: put it away (Madonna and, now, anyone over 50).

These messages are propped up by midlife crisis love gods, from Piers Morgan to Michel Houellebecq, and now some other random French bloke no one has heard of. If you look at any men’s rights sites the variety of ways in which women can be shamed is mind-boggling: being fat is not just bad; being a foodie when you are slim is also bad. Using birth control, “cake-face makeup”, acting like a porn star in bed: these are all things women should be shamed for.

When an actual porn star such as Stormy Daniels talks back, the power of her almighty sass comes from her absolute refusal to be shamed. Ariana Grande simply pointed out that women can be both “sexual and talented” – as though this needed to be said again. But it does. Shaming exists to keep us objectified, even to ourselves. And, of course, we all internalise it. Shame is the water we learn to swim in and in which some of us drown. The 14-year-old girl pressured into sending a nude selfie is not the same as the celeb who chooses very carefully how to be portrayed. However, the mechanism by which we watch ourselves being judged remains. Humiliation lurks, embodied as impure femininity.

Girls grow up seeing female pleasure exaggerated in porn, where women orgasm while being choked and spat on, but denied in real life, where any hint of female desire is condemned as sluttish. I just got sent a dress code for my teenager’s school, which focused only on what girls must not wear; nothing about boys at all. When we ask that female pleasure be integrated into sex education, it is because it is key to any discussion about consent. This is not radical – it is realistic.

The taboo on female pleasure surfaces in the oddest of places. The Osé “ personal massager”, made by a female tech and using micro-robotics, and promising “hands-free” orgasms for women, won an award for innovation at the Consumer Electronics Show in the US. But that award from the Consumer Technology Association has been withdrawn, with the organisation saying that the Osé broke a rule that entries not be “immoral, obscene, indecent, profane”. This from an organisation at whose show a sex doll for men was launched, and which features VR porn exhibits.

We have “rapeable” robots, but something that may pleasure women is profane. All this endless shaming is about the male gaze and the idea that women are there only to please it. All this is disrupted the minute women refuse to be ashamed of ourselves, our bodies, our pleasures.

This is much easier said than done when we live in a world where the powers that be think a clever young woman can be brought low by a picture of her bare feet. But she can’t. She will keep on dancing. As we all should. For the sheer hell of it.

• Suzanne Moore is a Guardian columnist