The opposite of choice is…

Over the past few months the media has been full of essays complaining about the evils of something called ‘choice feminism’. It is, apparently, a very bad thing. So women should not be allowed to make choices, or what? Is there a point being made here, or is it just more vacuous punditry?

If you look up a definition of choice feminism it will probably say something about women being allowed to make a choice between having a business career and staying at home to look after children. You may also see comments about choosing to wear pretty clothes and make-up; or perhaps about choosing to work in the sex industry.

On a first look it seems like a fairly empty discussion. Surely the primary goals of feminism are dealing with issues such as equal pay for equal work, an end to rape culture and domestic violence, freely available abortions and so on. We are still on board with this, sisters, are we not?

And yet these articles persist. Choice feminism is a bad thing, we are told. Women are choosing to do the wrong things. It is crippling the movement. We must put a stop to it. Policing the behaviour of fellow feminists is so much more important than fighting patriarchy, at least in the eyes of these columnists.

There’s a very important point here in that for many women their choices are extremely restricted. The choice to stay at home raise a family is one that, these days, can only be made by women with partners who can afford to support them. The choice to be fashionable is open only to those who can afford the latest styles. The ability to make choices is, in many cases, a privilege that many women don’t have access to.

But choices are restricted in other ways too. Most significantly, the choice not to engage in sex work is available only to those women who are able to earn a living in other ways. In this world of zero hour contracts and squeezes on benefits, the number of women left with no choice but to sell their bodies is only going to increase. Those who oppose choice feminism rarely acknowledge this lack of choice, assuming instead that the option to not do things they disapprove of always exists.

As to choosing to be proud of your looks, well that’s easy to decry if you happen to conform to traditional white, Western standards of beauty. Far too often, women of colour, trans women and so on are told that they can’t be beautiful because of who they are. It is no wonder that they crave acceptance.  

For other women, their looks might be their only major asset. Choosing not to trade on your looks might seem a necessary moral stand to someone who has grown up being told what a beautiful little princess she is, but it is a very different choice for someone who has been told that people like her don’t get to be princesses, or someone for whom her looks appear to be her only ticket out of poverty.

All too often when I see someone decrying choice feminism, that person is middle class, white and well-educated. The people they are complaining about – the women making the “wrong” choices, are almost always not white, often trans, and mostly from poorer backgrounds.

The pioneering intersectional feminist, Audre Lord, once wrote an essay titled, ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’. She was talking mainly about the racism inherent in so much of the feminism practiced by white women. More broadly, however, patriarchy is about hierarchies. It is about one group of people looking down on another group of people and decrying them as uncivilized, immoral, unable to reason for themselves. That’s exactly the sort of behaviour I see in the criticism of choice feminism.

Long ago, when I was a student, the fight for the right to abortion was very much current. The phrase that has stuck in my head from many, many demonstrations is, ‘a woman’s right to choose”. I’m not about to start telling other women that they don’t have a right to make choices, even if I think that sometimes those choices might be bad ones.