Chronicling the ongoing intersectional struggle to liberate women — inclusively defined as the legacy kind and transgender individuals — from the Patriarchy™, one microaggression at a time.
Rosie O’Donnell reports internal struggle over decision to get facelift, cites issues with patriarchy, ‘male gaze’
Rosie’s got a brand-new face that’s mildly less traumatizing to behold than it used to be, and she wants to assure the world that she did it in the name of feminism and definitely not to satisfy the “male gaze”:
Many of my friends in LA had deep plane facelifts. And they all talked to me about it and told me how much better they felt, similar to how I felt with Mounjaro. They’re like, you’re gonna feel free and you’re gonna feel better and you’re gonna not fight with the mirror so much. So I chose a lower deep plane, which is really from here down. So all of this stayed the same because I didn’t want, you know, I’m an actress, I didn’t want my face to be frozen or to be unrecognizable. I just wanted to get rid of what it got rid of exactly. And I had to wrestle with myself because as a feminist I always felt like, well, this is the patriarchy and this is the male gaze and this is not anything that I believe in…
Then I decided, you know, I have to do what\s right for me, and that’s the real power of feminism. That women get to decide what they want to do with their body and when.
Rosie O'Donnell concedes defeat to The Patriarchy, "male gaze" pic.twitter.com/44MxiwbRq2
— Ben Bartee (@BenBartee) August 4, 2026
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The low-hanging lipstick-on-a-pig jokes are too easy, and we’re better than that, so let’s just skip those and move on to substance. (Plus, it’s not necessarily Rosie’s fault that she got hit with the ugly stick, though her abhorrent personality certainly doesn’t do her face any favors, and for that she has no one to ultimately blame but herself.)
First, let’s note the delusional narcissism on display, in that Rosie believes she would ever, under any circumstances, have to contend with males unwantedly “gazing” at her.
Second, despite all of her principled reservations, Rosie went ahead with the facelift anyway, which seems an awful lot like tacit submission to The Patriarchy™.
After all those years fighting the good fight, toxic masculinity won out and forced Rosie to try to clean up her unsightly face for the sake of the male gaze, despite her insistence to the contrary.
Ladies and gentlemen, we got her!
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Of course, in the video above she parrots the oft-parroted feminist lie that her facelift was all about herself and empowering herself and “doing what’s right for me” and blah blah blah.
We call this in psychology a “coping mechanism.”
What she’s coping with here is the obvious cognitive dissonance of not wanting everyone — including men but also including babies, children, and other women (she is a lesbian, after all) — to recoil in terror at the sight of her face while also holding fast to the idea that she’s not a total sellout to the feminist cause.
In any event, no matter how she renovates her face, the Rosie I choose to remember is the Rosie we all know and love from 2016, the one whom Trump utterly destroyed in what was perhaps his greatest rhetorical flourish of all time.
