But this growing strand of feminism — the one that wants to build the foundation of women’s rights on the idea that women are more virtuous humans than men, and that wants to buy t-shirts proclaiming it — is seen by many as a move in the wrong direction. Jessa Crispin’s new book Why I Am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto is a searing critique of contemporary feminism’s focus on individual choice and “self-empowerment” at the expense of systematic radical change and collective action.
Crispin takes aim at feminists who believe power can be located in the decision to watch one television show over another, to consume one product over another, or to use particular words instead of others. She calls this position “choice feminism,” and describes it as “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.” [...]
Crispin argues that “the actual obstacles and inequalities that women face are mostly obstacles only for the poor — middle-class women and above can now buy their access to power and equality.” She takes the mainstream feminist movement to task for focusing primarily on inclusion and adopting the traditionally masculine values of patriarchal capitalist society that prioritize paid labor as a source of freedom and empowerment, rather than mind-numbing work that dominates our time and provides too little compensation, as it is for the majority of people. [...]
It is not wrong to interrogate the goals and strategies of other progressive movements, or to question the implications of trans identity for our beliefs about gender essentialism or how to build a strong feminist movement divorced from biology — or even to criticize the elevation of Caitlin Jenner, a millionaire with the ability to avoid most kinds of suffering and discomfort, to the level of people’s champion. But it’s not necessary to attack other oppressed groups in order to engage in this dialogue, as though the achievement of self-determination by trans people somehow detracts from the ability of cis women to understand the ways that their bodies figure into gender discrimination.
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