The defense of the face-lift marks a return to the era of “choice feminism,” a strain of thought that rose from the third wave in the 2000s. Through the lens of choice feminism, anything a woman decides to do is empowering: flashing the camera in Girls Gone Wild, spending thousands of dollars on beauty products, abandoning one’s career to support a husband’s aspirations, letting him screw around in a skewed rendition of nonmonogamy. Never mind the social pressures that influence these behaviors or how enacting them affects the broader project of gender equity. Feminists could not judge any of it if a woman was choosing it for herself.

Many of us who lived through the height of choice feminism cringe at the memory. I’m not sure I can stomach another round of pretending that our actions have no effect on the world; neither am I eager to return to the policing of the early 2010s, when we journalists who cut our teeth in feminist blogging brought out our gavels to judge each new entry in the cultural discourse as either good or bad for womankind. But there is a self-congratulatory, self-delusional tone to these pro-face-lift narratives that I haven’t been able to shake from my brain. I expected to see some outspoken feminists like Jong-Fast and O’Donnell cave to the pressures of their moneyed, image-obsessed circles. I did not expect them to marshal the intellectual dishonesty required to spin it as an act of liberation.