Certain feminists tend to get very upset about “choosey choice” and “I choose my choice” and “empowerful” feminism, which (as far as I can tell) is feminism that has no problem with women doing sex work or wearing makeup or staying at home and raising kids or having kinky sex. “A choice that a woman makes isn’t feminist just because a woman makes it!” they point out.
This is very true. For instance, it is not a feminist choice to go about shaming other people’s life choices.
The first problem I have with “I don’t support ‘I choose my choice’ feminism!” is that a lot of the women who talk about it tend to have bundles of unchecked privilege wandering around and getting in the way. For instance, criticizing Beyonce for calling her tour the “Mrs. Carter Tour,” without thinking about how a black woman embracing being a wife is radical in a way that it isn’t for a white woman. Surprising news, fellow white people: racialized misogyny doesn’t work the same way that regular misogyny does! There’s an assumption that “giving into the patriarchy” looks like the same thing for all women, an assumption which is stupid and privileged and horrible and needs to go die in a fire yesterday.
Rad Trans Fem has a parable she calls the “Parable of the Shitty Lemon,” which I also think is relevant to the “wow, anti-choice-feminism rhetoric is super-privileged” issue. Imagine a table with two plates, one of which is empty, and one of which has a lemon with a bit of shit on it. This is the situation a lot of marginalized people are in. Put on lipstick or hate yourself for being ugly. Change your last name or piss off your husband’s very traditional family.
A lot of anti-choice-feminism rhetoric is yelling at people “why are you eating the shitty lemon? Don’t you realize there’s shit on that lemon? You’re contributing to the social pressure for women to eat shitty lemons! You horrible anti-feminist shit-lemon-eating monster!” This is completely unhelpful. The point is to figure out how to get some food that isn’t a lemon and isn’t covered in shit!
But I disagree with their premise on an even more fundamental level.
My feminism is about people having freedom from the constraints of gender norms. Freedom means that no choices are off-limits. Freedom means that my wife can stay home with the kids, or we both can work, or I can stay home with the kids. Freedom means that I may choose to wear natural lipstick or no lipstick or bright purple lipstick. Freedom means I can have kinky sex or vanilla sex or no sex. Freedom means I can change my name to my husband’s name, or his to mine, or we can invent our own surname.
Staying at home with the kids isn’t empowering. Being able to decide for yourself whether you want to stay home with the kids is empowering. I mean, of course it is. “Being able to make choices with few or no constraints” is literally the definition of power.
Therefore, we ought to direct our attention at the people who are adding a bunch of unnecessary constraints onto women’s lives for no reason and away from the people who are trying to make the best choices they can within a patriarchal framework.
There are many groups of people who fervently believe that the health of society depends on what women wear, and thus women have a special responsibility to accept having their clothing choices policed. I’m always astonished when people who identify as feminists turn out to be one of those groups.
I liked your post.
Potentially slightly derailish, and if it is too much so feel free to ignore this/if you think it important enough make another post, etc.
I’m super with you, and agree with basically everything you just wrote, but I do have one concern/question/confusion. You write at the end “we ought to direct our attention at the people who are adding a bunch of unnecessary constraints onto women’s lives” Which is wonderful, and true. And at the same time, confusing, because it seems to contradict the ‘feminism is for everyone’ thing that you are so on about, especially since, if I remember correctly, you don’t identify as a woman. Its offhand statements like that that make many wholly progressive men/genderqueer/assorted notwomen occasionally feel unwelcome/erased in feminist discourse. People simultaneously talking about how feminism has to be about everyone, of every gender, and saying things like that, in a post that is otherwise (unless I’m really misreading it) not actually gendered.
For clarity, I mean to say, wouldn’t “we ought to direct our attention at the people who are adding a bunch of unnecessary constraints onto people’s lives” worked just as well, and actually put to practice the idea of feminism being about fixing the gender systems for everyone?
Yeah, I think a lot of radical feminists, when making that lemon parable, don’t quite get that when they’re hungry enough, lots of people will eat anything, and saying “be strong, resist the shitty lemon, you deserve better!” means nothing to an empty stomach.
Or in less metaphorical terms, look, I gotta live in this world. I need to do what it takes to stay housed and fed, and I want to experience love and sex and gender expression. Any kind of political cause is at least sixth on the priority list. The fact that Maslow’s hierarchy of needs applies to me is not a moral failing.
Issues like taking husband’s names are… complicated. On one hand, I think every individual woman gets to make that choice. On the other hand, I’m disturbed that overall, so many women take their husbands’ names and so few men take their wives’ names. But while I am interested in changing that situation, I’m not interested in doing it by yelling “stop oppressing yourselves!” at women. That’s ineffective, rude, implies that women should follow a different set of arbitrary and unpleasant rules, and it’s victim-blaming.
*claps*
Oh, and the one thing that’s even less effective at social change than yelling “stop oppressing yourselves!” at women:
Sitting back and smugly saying “Well, I don’t oppress myself. Sucks to be you guys.”
woop: I chose “woman” because people rarely criticize “choosey-choice feminism” telling men or nonbinaries that all their choices are okay.
I think the problem is that when certain classes of the ultra-privileged make a choice, suddenly ITS THE GREATEST THING and we have to hear alllll about it (ad nauseum) and it suddenly seems coercive and judgmental. I am specifically thinking of Caitlyn Flanagan and her stay-at-home mom ilk.
1) First, they make a choice.
2) They extol it as the greatest thing EVER. Kids are fun! We love our kids! (Wow, and who KNEW?!?)
3) They explain why your life and kids are inferior if you don’t choose it too, you bad mom, you! Your kids are sobbing, snorting coke and eating cheesy poofs while you work at an inferior dead-end job.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
I wouldn’t even mind Step 2 so much, if I didn’t know Step 3 was coming right after it.
“Issues like taking husband’s names are… complicated. On one hand, I think every individual woman gets to make that choice. On the other hand, I’m disturbed that overall, so many women take their husbands’ names and so few men take their wives’ names. But while I am interested in changing that situation, I’m not interested in doing it by yelling “stop oppressing yourselves!” at women. That’s ineffective, rude, implies that women should follow a different set of arbitrary and unpleasant rules, and it’s victim-blaming.”
I think it’s the difference between critiquing societal norms vs. policing the activity of individuals. In theory, that all sounds well and fine, but in practice it’s actually sometimes really tricky, because for so many people it’s easier to understand the abstract critique of societal trends when it’s applied to individuals. I am extremely bothered by how many women take their husbands last name’s as well, but at the same time, I’ve only ever heard one REASON a woman gave for taking her husband’s last name that made me uncomfortable – and even then, the last name issue was a symptom of a larger problem and not the problem in itself.
I can sort of understand some of the anti-”choosey choice” feminists’ frustration – I think some of it is a reaction to the Stephanie Meyers of the world saying that her books are totes feminist and empowered because Bella CHOSE to be in that kind of relationship. And a surface level I guess that’s true, but…it also kind of misses the point of a valid critique.
That is an excellent point, thanks Ozy.
“I think it’s the difference between critiquing societal norms vs. policing the activity of individuals.”
That. And one of the huuuuge problems that I see every day in social justice movements (feminism certainly not immune) is people who have been fighting over Ideas for so long they forget that the core of the movement is to make life better for individual human beings on this planet.
Are there any people who are explicitly anti-choice who aren’t also saying “put me in charge”?
Very nice post. I agree most with Cliff here. When there’s a choice to make and you’re bugged most people are not making the “feminist choice”, it’s more effective and more reasonable to look at the societal reasons for such a trend than to start blaming individual people.
Honestly, though, I used to be more “libertarian feminist” – “the most feminist thing in the world is for each individual to have the widest range of choices available to her/him and to choose whatever makes her/him happiest” – but now I feel I’m a bit more “social justice feminist”. I wonder whether libertarian feminism ends up a little privilege-blind itself.
I’ve met so many pro-sex-worker feminists (well, I’m one myself, but not like what I’m about to describe) who are profoundly in favor of sex work as an idea, and the choice to do sex work, and are all sex-positive and everything, but are totally ignorant to the fact that many women with less privilege lack the choice to opt out of unsafe sex work and into safe sex work. They don’t realize sex work can be really difficult and dangerous. And ensuring that everyone has the CHOICE to do it only if they really WANT to might mean ensuring that everyone’s rich enough to opt out, which might be unrealistic.
I understand that choice is ultimately feminist, but I wonder whether focusing so much on people’s right to make choices is really better than focusing on the forces that cause people to make anti-feminist choices.
*S* I took my husband’s name. Although here it’s not particularly rare for the husband to take the wife’s name either (I mean, the wife taking the husband’s name is more common, but nobody raises an eyebrow over the opposite). My father-in-law still carries the name of his ex-wife, for instance.
Actually, me and husband agreed that we wanted the SAME name, but he wanted us to have his name and I wanted us to have my name. Eventually we settled the issue by doing the “love calculation”, which is a silly game everyone played when we were kids, where you got numbers out of the letters of the names and ended up with a two-digit number, which was supposed to be the probability that you lived happily ended after. Using this completely scientific method we found out that our probability of living happily ever after would be only 65 % with my name but a whopping 97 % percent with his name, so his name it was.
Bottom line is, I don’t think taking one’s husband’s name really mean the same thing in all contexts.
^This, and also women who come from crap families they don’t particularly want to commemorate, or women who got their names from fathers they had no real connection to, or women who view their husband’s family as their chosen family, or women who just don’t like their names…
It doesn’t cancel out the fact that “women takes husband’s name” is a problematic tradition people still follow, but it is yet another reason not to assume any one individual has made their choice for Terrible Sexist Reasons.
Who the fuck eats lemons?
@Deepa and the rest: Sometimes when people do criticise “choosing my choice”-feminism, I think what they actually criticise is some idea (which might be a bit of a straw-man, but not COMPLETELY so) according to which everyone always does what is best for them, forgetting both that lots of people might be in situations where all options are shitty, and that people can be genuinely self-destructive (“self-destructive” doesn’t necessarily mean anything particularly dramatic here, like physically hurting yourself… could be all kinds of little things that you do which are, for instance, slightly psychologically harmful and anxiety-inducing with no real compensating benefits).
I think it’s important to
- not replace suppressive norms with their polar opposite (like, don’t go from “all women ought to be housewives” to “all women ought to have a career”, don’t go from “all women ought to wear makeup” to “makeup is WRONG” and so on); feminist utopia should be a place of diversity
- not judge people for being self-destructive; remember instead that nobody is psychologically invulnerable and everybody could end up in a bad place
- and generally not smugly tell people that you know them better than they know themselves.
You can do these things and still allow for the fact that people sometimes are self-destructive, and still allow criticism towards societal norms and cultural messages that promote self-destructive behaviour.
Just… take the Twilight discussion, which was all over media a couple of years ago. Some people went “girls choose to read Twilight out of their totally free choices and you must respect that and don’t criticise these choices! Besides, girls are smart and can distinguish fantasy from reality!” Other people went “these books send horrible messages to young girls, and they’re horribly written, therefore, any girl who likes these books is a moron!”
So… the middle-ground I’d like to claim here is that “It’s fine to read romance novels if you want to do that, and obviously people get that they’re not documentaries. But everyone [adult women too, men too] is to some extent influenced by the culture they consume. Therefore these books might enforce the idea that it’s okay to overstep boundaries in the name of love, and this idea has actual bad consequences in many people’s lives”. Or something along these lines. Like… the Aristotelian golden mean between “as long as everyone chooses their choice everything is fine!” and “stupid girls don’t understand their own good!”.
I think it’s simple: personal assaults are not ok, assaults on issues are. The same rules as in any debate or argument.
In other words: it’s ok to criticize the actual issue, it’s ok to point out problems in a larger phenomenon, but when it comes to individuals and how they deal with Issues, you’re not allowed to attack their personal choices (unless those choices are seriously ethically iffy, but that’s kind of beside the point here).
Laplace @ 2/14 3:30:
And really, that’s what “problematic” literally means: indicative of a problem.
Taking names is dumb. Keep your own damn name and children of the same gender as you get your name. Problem solved. That one’s free.
Actually just don’t get married, it’s a stupid institution. Double solved.
@Volte: Are you saying that marriage in general is an objectively stupid institution, or that people who care so much about this problem should consider it a stupid institution?. If it’s the former, than ANGER!
Here’s my analysis:
-It could be some kind of cultural difference in individualism. A lot of the anti-choseyourchoice-ists seem to be older 2nd wavers? Empirical test: compare nonradical feminists from different cultures with different levels of individualism.
-It could be a reaction against the ‘A social norm? KILL IT WITH FIRE!!!’ attitude that I see here, and in other places, either mis-attributed to patriarchal attitudes, or that they really want women united against (their perception) of patriarchy by restrictive social norms, and do not like that they are being forbidden from living in a world with restrictive social norms.
-Daisy Deadhead seems pretty much correct about the highly privileged choice-choosers who then tell everybody that their choice is the right one for everyone. Add that women who have most of the other privileges (white, upper-middle-class or higher, etc) tend to choose choices that are only a little unconventional (such as non-monogamy when young, conventionally attractive, and in the 2010′s) , and meanwhile these people tend to set norms for others. Actually, there does seem to be a very common, very self-congratulatory form of sex-positivity that has failed to notice it’s own obsolescence. That doesn’t seem like a complete explanation but maybe it became a stereotype.
I agree that this whole thing is reminisent of the conflict between thoughtful libertarians and liberals, with unthoughtful libertarians taking the place of patriarchs.
On the matter of taking names: I kind of like the idea of family names that are not directly attached to a person, and the subordination of birth family names to joined (usu. by marriage) but actually doing this in practice would require the adoption of the practice by at least a significant subculture over a period of several generations.
Okay, so Volte is apparently very much NOT down with some kind of choice feminism.
Besides, why should children have the name of the parent of the same gender? Seems completely arbitrary.
My partner and I have been talking about marrying for citizenship reasons (complicated dual citizenship situation is complicated), so we wouldn’t really have the PRIVILEGE of saying “pfft, it’s a stupid institution!”, now would we?
You could argue it would be better if countries didn’t make immigration depend on marriage, but since they DO… don’t assume everyone getting married is doing it because they’re just blithely following tradition and can’t think for themselves. Sometimes it’s a very rational choice.
I often see feminists defending the choice to get married like Cliff does, and yeah, it IS important to point out that there may be lots of very mundane but still important reasons for getting married.
But guess what: When I got married to my husband, it had nothing to do with citizenship or legal rules and stuff. We felt that we had met our soulmates. That our relationship was amazingly unlike anything else we had ever experienced. We wanted to celebrate that. Just… manifest our love with a big ceremony and a big party. So we got married.
I fully support everyone’s right to think that the above is a silly reason to get married. But I also think we have the right not to be judged because we got married for fuzzy love reasons. And I think that’s one of the important points of Ozy’s post.
True. Sorry, I shouldn’t have implied that marriage needs a justification besides “wanting to get married.”
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Cliff, I didn’t take your comment that way either. Just thought I needed to add what I wrote, since Volte had started out with “marriage is stupid, don’t get married”.
I think that arbitrary stuff is underrated.
Meh. I’m with you in principle, but I’m really tired of “choice feminism” meaning “I don’t really want to think about how the kyriarchy affects my choices so how dare you suggest it does, I am above all that”.
So on the name thing, no, women are not Obligated to the Sisterhood to avoid changing their last name to their husbands, nor is changing her name proof that a woman is brainwashed. However, seems pretty silly to pretend that she is making the choice in a vacuum, instead of in a culture where men’s names are their names and women’s names indicate which male she belongs to – and equally silly to pretend that every woman who changes her name is doing so with just as little context as picking a white shirt vs. an off-white shirt to wear in the morning.
@Mythago: I get your point too. Yeah, I was defending taking your husbands name, although I’d probably feel different about it if the husband taking the wife’s name had been super-rare where I live (which I guess it is in the states?). I think the symbolism changes a bit depending on how common/rare it is for the name-taking to go the other way.
And one thing that DOES bug me about weddings is when the father hands over the bride to the groom. That’s not Swedish tradition; the tradition here is for the bride and groom to walk up the aisle together, and every parent just sit in the benches during the entire ceremony. So… everytime I do see that “father handing over the bride” thing in an American TV show or movie I sort of cringe a little and think “Oooooh that’s SO sexist”. And when Swedes do this because they want a wedding “like in Hollywood movies” (increasingly common) my spontaneous reaction isn’t “oh, you choose your choices and that’s okay” but “SEXISM”.
But still, I really should suppress my gut feeling here; one can intellectually discuss the symbolism of the whole thing and how that might be problematic without judging individual people doing it, or assuming that everyone does it for the same reasons.
Nobody chooses their choice in a vacuum, that’s true, and that’s why one ought to discuss such things critically… but for any given individual there might be all kinds of reasons that aren’t obviously sexist, and even if they did choose for sexist reasons blaming them will probably do no good.
Slightly off topic, but there was a huge debate about this in Sweden when the crown princess got married. She wanted an American-style ceremony where the king would give her over to her new husband, but the archbishop was upset and said it was a sexist ceremony and nothing he would condone… EVENTUALLY, after a really long debate where the archbishop’s posse of angry priests had been shouting all over media about this terribly sexist wedding ceremony, the princess sort of won by sheer stubbornness got it her way.
Some feminists pointed out though that in the special case of the crown princess, the king handing her over is sort of accurate, since he’s the one dad in the entire country who can legally stop his daughter from marrying someone he doesn’t approve of (jeez, monarchy is a stupid institution).
Man, you jump to all kinds of conclusions. For the record I agree with Ozy. Generally steer clear from the shitty lemons but if that’s all you got then that’s all you got. Recognise when people don’t have the easy choice etc.
I always found the name-taking thing in marriage a bizarre false-dilemma though. I think there’s generally something icky about the woman taking the man’s name which I assume needs no explanation, but it seems like the only possible alternative presented is the man taking the woman’s name; equally icky. Generally it’s assumed someone’s name has to go because you need a name to give to the kids. Well that’s dumb, I say! So I present my solution, which seems to be totally legally workable, which is to keep your own damn names and if you’re really worried about the kids just distribute your surnames however you want. I suggest passing your name to kids of the same gender as you as a kind of in-your-face to the idea that only boys get to carry the family name, but whatever.
This doesn’t really contradict choice feminism because in this case the choices are a) nothing, b) shitty lemon, c) shitty lemon and, as I see it, d) a fucking banquet. There’s probably a billion weird exceptions: maybe you want to marry a sexist jerk; maybe you’re immigrating by marriage and don’t want to complicate shit; maybe you super hate your surname and want it scrubbed from history.
You could also come up with your own system! That could be fun. Steer clear from double-barrelled surnames though, quickly runs into problems if your double-barrelled kids marry some other double-barrelled kids.
How about you try not to assume I believe that? :3
Yeah, my folks both kept their names, and their kids got both names, hyphenated. I personally would advocate blenderizing the names, rather than hyphenating, as blenderizing doesn’t result in tremendously long names. Or we could go with arabic or scandinavian naming conventions, in which case everyone’s name would be three sentences long.
My favourite sci-fi series, The Culture, has names that include one’s full address, as well as the usual family names and a chosen name! We could do that!
Course the family name comes from the mother for some reason, might not fit so well on Earth. There’s no sexist connotations in The Culture because gender doesn’t really mean anything in a world where you can have a perfect sex change just by thinking about it B-)
Overall I like sci-fi stories where you can change gender as you like, that would be super-cool if it were true. I’d be flipping back and forth all the time! BUT in the couple of Culture novels I’ve read, it felt as if Banks couldn’t really embrace his own concept. He creates this world where gender doesn’t matter, and then create male heroes that are manly hetero-men, and heroines who are all super young and thin and ultra-hot and bang the male hero.
Plus the novel Excession had this HORRIBLE species called “the affront”, where the male upper-class delighted in torturing animals, lower-class men and raping and torturing women. The thing is… we were supposed to LIKE this species. Eventually I just wanted to throw the book away and shout at Banks “Okay, so you’re a white rich dude, it figures you like to fantasize about this society where white rich dudes can do ANYTHING they like to less privileged people and go unpunished, but SERIOUSLY? Fucking SERIOUSLY?”
Um. Yeah. But maybe most of these books are great.
Volte: I like the symbolism of the two different families merging into one family, as shown through surnames! So there is totally a reason to prefer that everyone have one surname.
(Also my mom tried to keep her own surname for the first couple years of marriage and apparently it was such an ass and a half trying to convince people that her surname was different from my father’s that she just gave up and took his.)
Over the years, I’ve gone all the way from being a somewhat lukewarm “choice feminist” to being a “fuck you and your boring rationalizations for your idiotic choices, you apparently-vacuum-dwelling person” feminist. I’m not sure whether this is because my depression’s made a rebound and has turned me into a bitter and angry person, or because I’m genuinely fed up with people taking every single general societal criticism under the sun as a personal attack on their choosy choices.
Also, I make stupid totally-not-feminist choices too, but the thing is, I don’t declare them to be part-and-parcel of my feminism. I don’t bother to reconcile those things because I know that they are irreconcilable. A little cognitive dissonance won’t kill you. You don’t have to sully your ideologies by shoehorning every single thing you do into them.
In other news, I’m not very privileged. I’m just a poor Eastern European girl who cleans offices in the evening, belongs to an ethnic minority that’s being a bit screwed over right now (when was the last time you had a neo-nazi march in your town while you’re a minority too poor to move somewhere else?) and would like to be able to date women but how do you find a girlfriend in this homophobic shithole?
But whatever.
Dvar: …what!? I walked away with the EXACT OPPOSITE impression: all the male characters are kind of useless, immature dicks who barely have any idea what the fuck they’re doing; the only ones with their heads on straight are the female characters. And I seriously can’t remember a single time Strong Female Lead banged Dickass Male Lead either. They both tend to fuck side characters.
And what the heck gave you the impression we’re supposed to like The Affront? I mean they’re kind of funny in a horrible way, but they basically exist as an example of a culture Doing It Wrong and seriously in need of a manual attitude adjustment.
Ozy: I can see why people would want one surname, but saying that does nothing to defend Man Always Keeps His Name as a truly pointless and avoidable form of sexism.
Volte; it’s pretty interesting how the same book can produce the opposite impression in two people.
Well, the male lead is supposed to be a hero, other characters refer to him as being an overall decent person, and he really likes the affront and wants to be one. Plus it’s just the overall description of them that really gave me the feeling that Banks sort of said to himself that obviously they’re evil and he doesn’t condone what they’re doing BUT at the same time… they’re sort of so funny and affable and it would be so cool to be one and so on, and I got this really strong impression that Banks at the end of the day find their society more exciting than evil, and that the main affront character were an overall nice guy despite being a torturer and repeat rapist. So the more I read, the more I got pissed off at Banks.
And yeah, the big female lead of Excession is this super hot nympho girl whom we’re repeatedly told is intelligent, but she comes off as a total airhead, and bangs the strong hetero-manly male lead.
But you know, I’m not gonna argue that I’m right and you’re wrong. It was some time since I read Excession, and maybe I interpreted it all wrong, and maybe you’re right. And maybe my subsequent readings of a couple of Banks novels were coloured by my Excession impression.
Actually, now that you mention it, Excession stuck out in that no human was really a hero. They were all mildly okayish people with obvious flaws. IIRC there’s the culture agent sort-of protagonist guy who likes the affront and cheated on his partner and seems pretty selfish; the spoilt “intelligent” lady who nonchalantly fucks him and his ex-partner who lives in a tower. I actually don’t think they’re remotely representative of the kind of characters he writes. That book in particular was actually supposed to be about the Minds, they were the main characters, so it might explain why.
Characters like Diziet Sma and the female lead in Matter are portrayed in a wayyyyyy better light than pretty much all of the female characters in his novels. The best male characters are either kind of bumbling, kind of selfish or have absolutely hideous pasts; I don’t think they’re portrayed romantically at all.
I agree that he was having fun with the Affront, I think he actually said in an interview that they were his favourite race. But I don’t think that contradicts them being totally evil, from time to time he has fun with a race of horrible bastards. There’s a somewhat similar race in The Algebraist that constantly displays utter callousness to its own children, but it comes off really funny.
It’s not like he portrays all his evil cultures in that way though, you wind up genuinely hating most of them. The apex-gendered guys in The Player of Games and the pro-Hell cultures in Surface Detail aren’t romanticised at all, you’re really given little reason to not hate them.
I was recommended Banks because I like Alistair Reynolds. Although they’re pretty different in a way, since Reynolds is doing more or less hard sci-fi. I really like Reynold’s female characters though, since it feels like he just writes CHARACTERS, and some of them (quite a lot of them actually) happen to be female… that’s rarer than it should be.
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Yeah I think Banks might overcompensate for shitty female characters in sci-fi a little, ending up making almost all of them totally badass and leaving the flaws and boringness to the men. Not to say he doesn’t do flawed/ boringly human female characters too, but I can’t really name any thoroughly awesome male characters.
I find this article so painful. :/ As far as I can tell you’ve made absolutely no attempt to empathise with the women you’re criticising, and you’ve framed the issue in a way that makes it almost impossible to respond.
I wonder if you could try to empathise with one of the “upset”, “yelling” women you describe, and understand why they might say and do some of the things you’re criticising them for here. I wonder if you could also be more honest about whether what you’re criticising is precisely what they’re doing.
Perhaps, for example, you could describe one or two situations in which you can understand why someone might feel frustrated in a conversation in which the other person is saying, “Well, I chose this freely, so everything you’re saying is wrong.” Can you imagine any common ground?
I’ve probably spent the last couple of hours writing and deleting comments in response to this article, and I still feel deeply uncomfortable with what you’re doing here. I actually can’t bear to get into a conversation with you or the other commentators about it, so I’m just going to leave this comment and move on.
“Who the fuck eats lemons?”
Yeah, I wondered that.
Or why the person yelling “Don’t eat the lemon!” doesn’t maybe suggest washing it, if possible …
Great post, Ozy. Argenti linked to it from Manboobz.
I’m a man. Do I get the choice to stay home while my wife works? In the name of choice feminism and gender equality? Please?