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

To its credit, postmodernism breaks the overbearing and unwieldy weight of "the truth' into a thousand truths. But this does not mean that all truths are equal or valid; nor does this mean that there is not a consensus to be reached about what the shape of liberation looks like. We may not be able to pinpoint it, but we can certainly point in a general direction. And while it is hardly possible, nor desirable, to crawl inside each persons head and proclaim this one liberated, this one not, and so on, we can certainly point to specific puzzling behaviors or qualities and ask if they are liberating or not. And to do this, we don't always need to buttress our conclusions with complex social theory; sometimes just common sense will do.

Common sense suggests that there is something disingenuous about the slayer of the old beauty myth now modeling and celebrating a new beauty myth; something fraudulent about tying up, handcuffing, and causing pain to one's lover and hailing that as liberation; something dishonest about Madonna the profiteer pushing the old beauty myth (or is it the new beauty myth?) with a vengeance for her own considerable profit, dig, ging up and reincarnating past sex symbols like the orphaned and abused self-immolator Norma Jean Baker, also known as Marilyn Monroe. (One wonders: didn't her sacrifice serve as a warning to anyone? Will she ever be allowed to rest in peace?) Common sense also suggests that there is something unscrupulous about a free-speech fundamentalist like Camille Paglia who makes her career by hurling invective and denigrating almost everyone else. The cosmetically superficial "free choice" philosophy of these libertarians, libertines, and liberal feminists, shorn of any analysis of power imbalances or their remedies, can hardly represent feminist liberation, much less a true third wave.

It is deeply ironic that liberal feminists and sexual libertines have denounced radical feminists as lying in the same bed as fundamentalist Christians and the Moral Majoritarians because of a similar focus against pornography--albeit for completely different reasons and relying on very different tactics. Yet every time Madonna, Paglia, Bright, Sprinkle, Wolf, the ACLU et al. crow about the benefits of liberty and free choice, they implicitly endorse the other half of that antiquated nineteenth-century tradition of classical liberalism-namely, that espoused by George Bush, Dan Quayle, and their fellow freemarketeers and property-rights ideologues.

In the prologue to Pornography and Silence, acclaimed feminist author Susan Griffin, writing of the pornographer as libertine, makes this distinction between a politics of liberty and one of liberation:

Though in history the movement to restore eros to our idea of human nature and the movement for political liberation are parts of the same vision, we must now make a distinction between the libertine's idea of liberty "to do as one likes" and a vision of human "liberation." . . .If we are to move toward human liberation, we must begin to see that pornography and the small idea of "liberty" are opposed to that liberation.