No, Virginia, feminism is not about "choice"
I can't believe I can still say this in 2024, but I am still running into women who insist that whatever they want to do is feminist because "feminism is about women making their own choices."
My answer to this, as it seems to be to a lot of questions these days, is "It depends."
If you really bugged me about it I would have to say that the feminist part of women and girls making choices is where we fight for women and girls to be allowed to go through the decision-making process without, in particular, some male person preventing them going through that process. Certainly that is a legitimate feminist aim. No problem there.
The problem is when we think an outcome is Automatically Feminist because a woman or girl caused it.
If we argue, and I do, that feminism is the movement to liberate female people from patriarchy, then first we have to understand that it's not just male people maintaining patriarchy. Female people are roughly half the worldwide human population: outnumbering male people slightly in some parts of the world and being outnumbered slightly by male people elsewhere, but it all sort of balances out in the end. The point is that there aren't enough of them to hold us down. They require help from some of us to do it.
Until you understand that, you won't understand why some outcomes of female decisions are not feminist.
These women argue that a mother normalizing the wearing of stiletto heels for her impressionable daughter is a feminist act. They will then shout you down if you suggest that a Chinese mother getting her daughter's feet bound is a feminist act. I see very little difference. Both actions result in bodily damage. Both are (were, in the case of foot-binding) performed in the name of making the young woman desirable to men.
These women argue that paying for your daughter's elective mastectomy if she decides to identify as trans is a feminist act. They will then shout you down if you suggest that an African mother ironing her daughter's breasts is a feminist act. I don't see much difference there either and, when you listen to what trans-identifying young women are saying, a great majority of the time the removing the breasts is about being NOT as desirable to men. Breast-ironing African mothers get their daughters ironed for the same reason.
These women argue that getting cosmetic surgery on your vulva, even if it results in loss of sensation to the clitoris, is a feminist act. They will then shout you down if you suggest that a Middle Eastern mother putting her daughter through female genital mutilation is a feminist act. In both cases the reasoning is that the vulva has to look a certain way to be pleasing to men. We can quibble about how the former example involves an adult woman with the right to consent and the latter example does not. That's fair. My question is why we are not, INSTEAD, rejecting men who don't like the way our genitals look. If they don't like it, they can't fucking have any.
Here are some easier ones:
Is it feminist when a woman decides to beat her children?
Is it feminist when a woman decides to dump toxic waste into a stream?
Is it feminist when a woman decides to vote for Donald Trump, the infamous pussy-grabber and wife-beater (Ivana never denied this happened, only changed her characterization of the act) and serial cheater? Who got abortion banned in like half the United States?
If not, why not? These are all hypothetical women's decisions -- not quite so hypothetical for the first and third examples. (Possibly not for the second either; the polluters of streams can't all be men, surely.)
I think part of the reason we are still arguing about this is that when we argue that whatever a woman does must be feminist, we also tend to think that if a woman does even one thing that is not feminist, that means she is not a feminist and furthermore, that means she's not entitled to have the feminist movement fight for her rights.
I have [a homepage] and I mention there that I think it is more useful to aspire to feminism than it is to identify as a feminist. This is a big reason why. I'm about to spout a cliché, but we don't want to let the perfect become the enemy of the good. Every move in the right direction is another victory, even if sometimes you go the other way. I know what it is to be paralyzed because I'm afraid of making the wrong choice. All that happens in the end is that you sat there scared out of your wits just thinking about what you wanted to do, and not actually doing anything. I messed up my whole life that way. Lots of women doing that is probably another big reason the feminist movement is messed up. (The first one, which I mentioned in my previous essay, is that too many women claiming to be feminist are there for the power trip much more than for the work we need to do.)
And here are a few more thoughts about this:
-An action or a behavior can be feminist in some circumstances and not feminist in others. I suspect a lot of the reason FGM has not died out as a practice is because there is a very real threat that some young women could wind up murdered on their wedding nights for being intact.
-It is okay, as a female person, to acknowledge that something you have done is not a feminist act. We live in an anti-feminist culture and sometimes your particular situation means you just have to do things you would rather not do, or that you want to do things even though you know they don't actually make your life better, or that you want to do them and they make your life better on an individual level but they also validate male people's prejudices against female people as a class. Do what you can do. But try to balance it out in some way. If you just go "well, I fucked up, guess I don't care about female people's rights anymore," how does that help the overall situation? If you're still speaking to your anti-abortion Baptist-minister father, make an occasional donation to Women on Waves. You don't even have to tell him you did.
-Don't judge how feminist an action or a behavior is by whether it ticks off boxes on some "feminist ideology" checklist. Judge it by whether it benefits female people.
-Male people's opinions about this are not important unless they are also concerned about the benefit to female people and have analyzed the situation correctly. Any dudebro going "that's not feminist because it killed my hardon" is safely dismissed. They make Viagra now. His sexual happiness is not all on you.
And if I need to tell you "no, focusing on a man's sexual pleasure to the exclusion of your own is not a feminist act," maybe you need to read this essay again.