Lawrence KilliumFeminism: The idea that women should be allowed to make their own choices.
For example:
If you don’t want to shave, and you want to flaunt your body hair, radical feminists will support you.
If you want to be proud of your periods by posting bloody pads around town, they’ll applaud you.
If you want to have very high standards for the kind of man you want and don’t want to put any effort into making yourself desirable, they’ll be ecstatic.
If you want to work on your career instead of letting any man get in your way, they’ll be elated.
If, however, you want to be a stay at home mom and take care of your children, they’ll try to tear you to pieces.
See, feminists aren’t actually about women having the ability to make choices for themselves, they’re about restricting what women are able to do to a set of ideal traits that they have in their head. They’ll claim that they’re saving you from the oppressive patriarchy that’s trying to force women into a mold, but then they’ll try to force you into a mold of their own.
Let’s just look at some recent examples in pop culture:
In an interview last year, U.S. Olympic volleyball star Kerry Walsh Jennings made a few comments about motherhood, specifically that she believed she was “born to have babies.”
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“Before I had more kids, I was like, this feels trivial. I’d been playing for so long, and I was like I need balance. All my eggs are in this one basket, and it’s very self-centered and self-focused,” Walsh Jennings said in an interview. “They gave me that perspective and balance I thought I was missing. It took my game and my desire and my passion for life to the next level. I am hugely indebted to my children.”
Let’s go back even further and go to Natalie Portman’s Oscar acceptance speech. During her big moment, she thanked her husband, Benjamin Millipied, for giving her “the most important role of her life.”
Before that, Adele caused waves to go through the publication Vogue, where she said that having children had helped her find purpose in life. To her, her son “makes me very proud of myself. When I became a parent, I felt like I was truly living. I had a purpose, where before I didn’t.”
“My main thing is Mum, then it’s me, then it’s work,” she added, “I think I had to take the right amount of time off to let people miss me.”
Again, these women have come out to say that even though their work life is important to them, they made a decision to put their family first.
Since it was their decision to make, shouldn’t feminists be supporting a women’s right to make their own choices?
Apparently not, according to a blog post from Slate reacting to Adele’s interview:
“This is a bold, potentially controversial, statement for a celebrity mom. Adele, ADELE, didn’t feel like she was truly living before she became a mom?! She, the universally adored force of nature behind, at the time, one of the best-selling albums of all time, felt like she didn’t have a purpose?”
… A major goal of feminism has been for women to be able to seek lives and identities that exist outside their traditional roles as mothers and caretakers. The degree that feminism has been successful in this has, without a doubt, been fantastic for women.
This might just be me, but that doesn’t sound very tolerant.
