Are you bothered by the question? More than two decades ago, a dear friend, Andrea, ten years my senior, confided that she believed feminists had destroyed our lives. Back then, work-life balance did not exist. Back then, I was asked to terminate an employee simply because she was pregnant.
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| at Laguna Art Museum |
I didn't. I also didn't exactly refuse.
I told the company that it was more than welcome to terminate her, but as her direct manager, I saw no performance-related reason to end her employment and therefore would not sign her separation papers. If executive management wanted to terminate her, I would accept its decision. I simply would not lend my name to it.
She was not terminated.
I didn't refuse to sign because I was advocating for her rights. I refused because there was no reason to terminate her. I had terminated other employees for poor performance; pregnancy was not poor performance. And the order hadn't come from a man. It came from my boss, who was a woman.
I was in my late twenties when this happened. By my early thirties, I had left the corporate world. I didn't leave for one of the stereotypical reasons women are presumed to abandon flourishing careers. I left because I felt like it.
People often confuse being good at what we do for a living with ambition to succeed. I was never particularly ambitious. I was, however, very good at what I did—good enough that I could refuse a direct order to terminate an employee and suffer not a single consequence.
That is power.
It is also the quality that people have sometimes attacked in me by recasting me as intimidating. An unwilting ethical standard, delivered without apology and with confidence, can feel remarkably like intimidation to others. Perhaps because female strength is still expected to accommodate, even when accommodation requires surrendering the very thing that makes it strong.
Growing up, I didn't dream about what I would be when I grew up. When I entered the workforce, I had no grand plan to become a manager, a director, or a CEO. Work simply followed college, and advancement followed competence. One thing happened after another until, from the outside, it probably looked suspiciously like ambition.
Lately, Andrea's confession has been lingering in my mind.
Women have far greater legal and institutional protections today, don't we?
When a woman alleges that she was gang-raped by seven Cornell University fraternity members, shouldn't we expect the District Attorney's Office to investigate before deciding not to prosecute? Instead, prosecutors initially declined to pursue charges based on Jane Doe's statement to the Cornell University Police Department. Nearly two years later, after her civil lawsuit brought the allegations into public view, the district attorney reopened the criminal investigation and announced that the case would be presented to a grand jury.
So, how much of a dent has feminism actually made in women's rights?
Somewhere between demanding that women be permitted to have choices and celebrating those choices, possibility became expectation.
What has feminism done for women if women's rights mean being told we can have everything and then being treated like losers when we don't?
Have the successful career. Marry the supportive husband who also provides. Have the children. Have the fur babies. Have the Instagram-ready home and the influencer-ready life. Establish boundaries, but never inconvenience anyone with them. Protect your peace, but don't put negative energy into the universe. Speak up, but don't be assertive. Be confident, but remain accommodating. Know your worth, but make sure everyone else's needs are met so nobody feels bad.
Apparently, our rights come at a high price. Perhaps it should not surprise us that anxiety disorders are so prevalent among young women.
Feminism also has an inclusivity problem of its own.
For a movement built around expanding women's choices, it can become remarkably judgmental when women make choices that do not conform to its vision. The full-time housewife and mother is too easily treated as though she surrendered something rather than chose something. Now we have the tradwife, a woman whose domestic choices have become sufficiently offensive to feminists.
Before I met my ex-husband, my grand plan after graduating from college was not to conquer corporate America. I wanted to meet a husband and explore being a full-time wife.
There. I said it.
What exactly would have been wrong with that?
Why is committing one's life to a partner, parenthood, a household, a neighborhood, and a community somehow less worthy of respect than committing it to a corporation? Why is paid employment such a defining measure of women's independence and accomplishment? And why do women's rights so often seem to lead us straight back to the workplace, as though equality means earning the privilege of answering emails at 10 p.m. while our male counterparts are sleeping and earning more money than we do?
What about women's rights inside our homes? In our domestic relationships? What about women's power within our communities? What about the right of a woman to decide that professional achievement simply isn't the achievement she values for herself?
Feminism fought against a prescribed life for women. Yet somewhere along the way, it began allowing only its own version of a feminist life to qualify as an acceptable one for women.
Which brings us to Sydney Sweeney.
It is unmistakable that one of Sydney Sweeney's greatest commercial assets is her sex appeal, and she has learned how to commercialize it. What exactly is wrong with that?
Feminism tells us to feel confident in our bodies and embrace them. Wear what we want. A lower neckline and a higher hemline should not be used by men to determine our intelligence, our character, or our interest in sex. What a woman wears is not consent. What she reveals is not an invitation.
Yet apparently Sydney Sweeney's body requires a different set of feminist rules.
Sweeney appeared nearly nude in a campaign for Novig, a sports prediction platform in which she also holds an equity stake, with strategically placed sports equipment providing most of the wardrobe. Female athletes responded furiously. British sprinter Amy Hunt told Sweeney, in effect, that this—muscles, work, sweat, blood, tears—is what women in sport look like. Olympic swimming champion Ariarne Titmus called the advertisement a “kick in the face” to women who had dedicated their lives to sport. Former gymnast Gracie Kramer joined athletes posting their own performances under the message that this is what a woman in sport looks like.
And I am supposed to support them because they are female athletes criticizing the sexualization of women?
Why?
Sydney Sweeney didn't take their spots.
She didn't take their medals, their records, their training, their talent, or their accomplishments. She isn't pretending to be an Olympic swimmer or an elite sprinter. She is an actress and businesswoman using an asset she possesses—her sex appeal—to sell a product. The presence of a basketball in an advertisement does not transform Sweeney into a representative of female basketball players any more than holding a tennis racket makes her responsible for representing women's tennis.
I'm afraid of what a ballerina will do to me since I wear ballet warmers to run errands. They are quite comfortable, so I would hate to give them up.
Where is our intelligence?
Surely we are capable of holding two thoughts in our heads at once. Amy Hunt can be an extraordinary athlete whose body represents years of discipline and physical achievement. Sydney Sweeney can be a beautiful actress who chooses to commercialize hers. Why must acknowledging one somehow diminish the other?
More importantly, what happened to the choice feminism has spent decades demanding for women?
If a woman owns her body, then she owns the decision to cover it.
She also owns the decision not to. She owns the decision to sell her image.
If feminism only respects bodily autonomy when a woman exercises that autonomy in ways feminism approves of, then it isn't really defending her choice.
It is restricting her autonomy over her own body. How are feminists different from the very patriarchal masculine society we have been criticizing?
Isn't bodily autonomy precisely what we have spent years fighting over?
In Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, holding that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion and returning authority to regulate abortion to the people and their elected representatives.
The issues are different. The question I am asking is not.
Who gets to decide what a woman may do with her own body?
Perhaps the restriction comes in a different shade. Perhaps one arrives through law and another through ideology. But if feminism demands that women possess autonomy over our bodies, it cannot suddenly become squeamish about autonomy when a woman makes a choice feminists don't like.
Her body. Her choice.
Isn't that the point?
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