2019 is so fucked i keep trying to google “feminist quotes on marriage” and “feminist quotes on being a wife” etc and 99.99% of the results are articles titled like “Yes, You Can be a Feminist and Still Love Being a Wife” and “20 Feminist Quotes About Marriage You Need to Read Right Now” and then you click the listicle and no lie it starts off with one audre lorde quote taken completely out of context and is followed by ones by john green, joss whedon, and ian somerhalder. Empowerment culture has given everyone brain worms and the only people who Get It are tween girls on tumblr who say stuff like “i want to shed my skin and eat dirt”
The modern everyday version of feminism being preached has become individualistic to the extreme. Women have been convinced that anything they choose to do is feminist simply because they are women exerting control over their own lives in order to achieve self fulfilment. the pro-wife, pro-consumer. pro-makeup, etc. brand of feminism isn’t progressive or revolutionary; it’s a brand of feminism that has been marketed towards us by big business in order to maintain the status quo and keep women subscribed to an economic system that is actively harmful to most of them.
Makeup brands target us with ads encouraging us to “express ourselves” by buying their products and upperclass white women who work as homemakers and mommy bloggers claim that all women can find fulfilment in marriage and motherhood simply because they have the luxury of finding happiness that way. It’s not feminism, it’s sanctioned conformity masquerading as individualism and empowerment.
Feminism has been so thoroughly co-opted that you can’t even call out how makeup culture preys on women’s insecurities, or how women have been sold the idea for their lifetime that they should get married and play caretaker, or that perhaps your “choice” to shave your legs isn’t as much of a choice as you think, without someone yelling at you about how you’re anti-feminist because “It’s my CHOICE!!! It’s my CHOICE and if you tell me that my CHOICE isn’t formed in a vacuum you’re being anti-feminist!”. I’ve gotten to the point where I start to lose my cool over those posts that go like “Things that are feminist: shaving or not shaving :), things that aren’t feminist: telling women they’re wrong for shaving UwU” because I feel like the idea that feminists are “telling” people not to do things is more just that feminists are asking women to really analyze the choices they make in the context of society, and that gets misinterpreted as “oh, they’re telling me I can’t be a feminist because I shave!!!”. Anyhow I’m rambling and I’ll probably delete this but yeah
Things that are feminism: women thinking critically about the ways the society they live in systematically disadvantages them
Things that definitely aren’t feminism, but you can still do, I’m not your mom or anything: buying mascara