“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 Anyone who queried this philosophy was shouted down as an out-of-date loser who encouraged “body-shaming”.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.
The refusal to experience the discomfort of real change, and this rejection of the radical feminist position, has led to what is called “choice feminism”. This is the belief that no matter what a woman chooses, from her lifestyle to her family dynamic to her pop culture consumption, she is making a feminist choice, just from the act of choosing anything. The idea is that under the more rigidly patriarchal past, women’s choices were made for them. So simply by choosing anything at all, you are bucking the patriarchy and acting like a feminist. This is what universal feminism, devoid of any real personal internal change, leads to. No debate, no consideration, no discomfort required.
- Jessa Crispin, Why I Am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto
