To choose or not to choose: a politics of choice - two feminist movements and their stands on abortion rights

Humanist, May-June, 1993 by Steven Hill

In her book, and even more so on the college-lecture and talk-show circuit, Wolf speaks in favor of (and even demonstrates with her own fashionable appearance) a new feminist ethic in which women reclaim a self-defined glamor "as merely a demonstration of the human capacity for being enchanted." In other words, even as she slays the old "beauty myth," Wolf offers a newer, improved version to her audience, with the following condition: if women freely choose to dress and paint themselves like the old "beauty myth," then that's okay. The obvious corollary to this confusing distinction is that, if a woman freely chooses to maintain a fashionably thin body or to have breast-enhancing surgery or to wear back-breaking and semi-crippling high heels or to spend her time and hard-earned money remaking her clothes, face, and body into a "self-defined" work of art that hews to the standards imposed by the old "beauty myth," then that is a feminist position, a part of the new third wave. Sadly, these third-wave feminists are role models for girls and young women, and the spectacle of these emaciated females--now as young as eight years old, according to the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders--purging, binging, and starving themselves seems not to affect Wolfs celebration of glamor and choice" Third-wave feminism never addresses the issue of how much free choice is actually involved in the imitation, whether of adults, one's peers, or the fashions found in People, Teen, or Cosmopolitan. Are we really to believe that eight-year-old girls might be acting out a carefully considered feminist choice?

Wolf s convoluted notion of choice as it is applied to the beauty myth makes a feminist critique of bodily appearance and discrimination against those who fail to "measure up" virtually impossible, which is odd since that is ostensibly what much of Wolfs thesis is all about. In the feminist third wave, according to Wolf, any beauty-myth behavior may be defended and any critique or analysis of it may be countered by simply waving aloft the banner of free choice. From a feminist standpoint, her superficial--shall we say cosmetic?--politics of choice is ultimately disempowering.

Camille Paglia takes this shallow politics of choice to even greater heights of absurdity. Inveighing against all those feminist things that annoy her, like the "battered woman motif," Paglia makes the case that battered women freely choose to stay with their batterers due to their fondness for "hot sex" Everyone knows, says Paglia, that "many of these working-class relationships where women get beat up have hot sex. They ask, |Why won't she leave him?' Maybe she won't leave him because the sex is very hot.... How come we won't show that a lot of wives like the kind of sex they are getting in these battered-wife relationships?" With such a superficial politics of choice as her standard, Paglia brazenly proclaims what most closet sexists fear to say lest they be accused of bigotry and reaction. She assigns free choice to the battered, targeted prey, caustically tossing aside economic considerations, threats of retaliation and even possible murder by the batterer, and the general lack of support networks that 20 years of domestic-violence activism have shown is necessary for most women to leave their batterer. This conservative wolf in liberal sheepskin-complete with her resurrection of Freudian pop psychology and her passion for stinging personal philippics against those with whom she disagrees as a way of distorting the debate (odd behavior for a civil libertarian) --would have fit in nicely at the 1992 Republican National Convention alongside Marilyn Quayle, Phyllis Schlafly, and Pat Buchanan. But because Paglia couches her message in the liberal lexicon--free choice, personal liberty, and maximum autonomy--she is given undue attention by the liberal establishment, including some liberal feminists.