A woman’s choice, whether it be related to reproductive rights, marriage or occupation, is of course important to the advancement and inclusion of women in society.
In many instances, women are forced to comply with society’s patriarchal standards with little to no freedom in choosing what they want. However, there needs to be a conversation about looking at these patriarchal systems more holistically. Stopping the conversation at a woman’s choice to do these things does not get to the core issue of breaking down the patriarchal barriers that created the system in the first place.
Simply reducing these abstract and difficult topics to allowing a woman to choose what she wants echoes the limiting nature of liberal feminism, which is neither progressive nor revolutionary.
In the book “Freedom Fallacy: The Limits of Liberal Feminism”, Meghan Murphy describes how context is important when deciding what exactly a woman is “choosing” in a situation. She offers the example of Dita Von Teese, a famous burlesque performer, who has said she is empowered from making $20,000 in seven minutes of dancing.
This colludes power with freedom, and makes income a basis for how free someone is in society. From this logic, women who are compensated for objectifying their bodies don’t progress a woman’s role at all and are left in the same position they started in.
Murphy summarizes the problematic nature of this best by saying, “[The dominant systems] offer us their version of choice, and tell us that empowerment is easily available to us — it’s just got to be pleasant. And sexy. And, hey guess what! We don’t even need the feminist movement anymore! We can ‘choose’ to objectify ourselves now because we are free. Slap an ‘empowering’ label on it and voilà! It’s freedom and everyone else needs to shut up because ‘it’s a choice.’”
By reducing the conversation to a simplistic argument about “choice,” we ignore the larger issue at hand for the sake of masking it with a feminist label.
Rather than describing feminism as resistance to the patriarchy, it has become women choosing to participate and make the best out of it or profit financially from it.
However, instead of shaming or judging a woman for participating, there needs to be a constructive critique of the system in place so that real progress can occur.
