i need feminism because when jesus does a magic trick it’s a goddamn miracle but when a woman does a magic trick she gets burned at the stake
fabulous
i mean they did also kill jesus. that was a pretty significant thing that happened. like i understand where you’re coming from here but they very much did kill jesus.
i think my biggest problem with choice feminism is that it frames the choices you make as empowering when what’s actually empowering is having the freedom of choice.
personal choices whether good or bad arent going to lead to dismantling the patriarchy because it’s only about you and your lived experience but I think women will always be Shackled when they don’t have the ability to make choices. whether its direct in ability or inability via you have the ability but the systems around you very much pushy towards making a specific choice.
“Choice feminism” replaced “consumer feminism”, but the two ultimately come down to the same thing: that is, if a woman does something of her own free will – whether it’s pole-dancing or buying shoes – then it’s a feminist act. And more than ever, it’s not only about feminism; it’s about empowering the woman as an individual. When one woman casts judgment on another woman, according to today’s feminism, she is behaving worse than a misogynist man. The problem with this approach is that it leads to a great big pile of nothing. The suggestion that women should unthinkingly celebrate one another purely out of sisterly feeling is about as patronizing as the idea that women shouldn’t trouble their brains with opinions. Feminists who query whether things such as prostitution, pole-dancing or larking about naked while being filmed by self-described “pervert” Terry Richardson (as Miley Cyrus did for her video Wrecking Ball) are really empowering themselves are shouted down as angry anti-sex harridans. When Kardashian tweeted a topless selfie last month, she claimed that she was empowered by her sexuality and, thus – via the media of her iPhone and her breasts – she was striving to “encourage the same empowerment for girls and women all over the world”. Anyone who queried this philosophy was shouted down as an out-of-date loser who encouraged “body-shaming”.
Empowerment has become the cover for doing whatever the hell you like. It is a self-created safe space: as long as you say you are empowered, anyone who complains is trying to oppress you. So maybe the easiest way to deal with the kinds of arguments raised by choice feminism is to end with this simple truth: while the ability to choose is feminist, that doesn’t mean the choice itself is. Buying shoes is not a strike against the patriarchy. Telling other women to shut up online is not a feminist act. Tweeting photos of your boobs is not empowering the world. But the biggest irony about empowerment is not just how utterly meaningless – disempowered, I guess – it has become as a term, but how those who claim to feel it and those to whom it is sold are the ones who need it least. It is no surprise that I see so many adverts promising empowerment, because I am precisely the kind of person to whom empowerment is now marketed: white, thirtysomething, educated, middle class with disposable income. I don’t need to be empowered anymore than Kardashian does. Only those already in possession of quite a lot of power would feel empowered by leggings, or a TED talk, or naked selfies. Empowerment has become not only a synonym for self-indulgent narcissism, but a symbol of how identity politics can too often get distracted by those with the loudest voices and forget those most in need of it.
