stop denying women their autonomy.

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Alice Cappelle uploaded a great video essay a few months back

titled, “the death of feminism and the future of activism.”

In it, she uses Ferguson to critique choice feminism’s implication that

First, freedom or liberation is understood as the capacity to choose.

Second, a woman cannot choose her oppression, so we should support any choice she makes.

Third, it is based on the idea that the feminist movement fought for our ability to make choices.

So it implies we are in a post-feminist era.

In Tee Noir’s video about submission of black women to male partners,

she interviews Misha, who makes educational content on TikTok.

And Misha also critiques choice feminism:

Every decision that a woman makes

cannot be inherently beneficial or inherently feminine

because if a woman is in a societal pressure cooker,

with patriarchy, with white supremacy, with religion,

with all of these systems pressuring her into making that decision,

that decision, even if she made it for herself,

is not the most feminist nor the most beneficial decision for her.

What these ways of thinking point to,

whether directly or indirectly,

is the concept of adaptive preferences:

it’s a concept that’s discussed by several feminist thinkers

like Martha Nussbaum, Uma Narayan, and Serene Khader

and it states that an adaptive preference or an AP is a preference that complies with patriarchical standards

and thus is not a real preference.

Like Misha said in her clip earlier,

“it’s not what she would inherently want,

but what she is believed to have wanted by the system around her.”

The idea is that these preferences are inauthentic,

that if a woman was acting on her "true desires",

she would not choose to say, be submissive to her partner

or get 15 different cosmetic surgeries only to take them out once they fall out of trend.

This is such an intriguing and highly important topic to me because it asks:

are women who have preferences in line with patriarchal standards perpetuating their own oppression?

Alice gives examples of women like Ben Shapiro’s sister

who claims that she chose to be a housewife because she wanted this life,

not because she was oppressively forced into a traditional gender role.