On how you can’t win as a feminist in a capitalist patriarchy – or, the right to choose not to play ball

I remember very clearly the first time a friend of mine, a self-professed feminist, mentioned in passing that she uses Botox. At first, I was just really surprised. Soon enough, I realised that I felt disappointed. Worse, I felt deceived. I’d thought we had an unspoken agreement, a feminist pact not to engage with the bullshit inventions of patriarchy. But she mentioned it with such poise that I quickly realised she knew something I didn’t, that I was the one being naïve. What was this slippery slope I’d missed? Were we going for labiaplasty next?

I have internal battles about shaving. I know that I’m modelling a lot of things for my sons, and if I shave my armpits, that’ll be what’s normal to them. Then I cut myself some slack, knowing that this, too, is a conversation starter. They too will face all sorts of external pressures, and talking about the things people do and why they do them is probably not a bad thing. I justify wearing make-up, if far from every day, but I’ve vowed not to discuss my weight or talk about body fat as a bad thing. I draw lines in sometimes arbitrary places, justifying them to myself as I go, knowing that perfection is a goal that would break me but that, as a feminist, I have to try.

My body, my choice. It’s a pertinent slogan, utterly non-negotiable. And yet, like I’ve argued before, choice is a funny word. I’m not alone in that shower, removing body hair; I’m enveloped by every single message I’ve ever been fed by the patriarchal capitalist world that raised me. I’m self-aware and self-critical. I know that, deep down, I wish I wouldn’t feel the need to – but I only have the energy for a certain amount of rebellion, a certain number of battles. Not all of them. Not this one. Not today.

Can you use Botox and call yourself a feminist? It’s a ridiculous question, of course. I’ve yet to meet a feminist whose every action is a feminist one, and I’d hate to live in a world where we set the bar that high for each other. We’re already scrutinised by patriarchy itself and put under immense pressure to conform to beauty norms, and then judged for trying too hard and called shallow when we care. Injecting a neurotoxic protein into your face is not a feminist thing to do – but a lot of feminists do it. Their body, their choice.

On the other hand, minimising the issue by framing it as one about choice alone is both naïve and counter-productive. We make choices about scalpels and needles because we’re forced into corners. Some are left in those corners without the means to choose. Others can afford to buy their way out but are left worse off than before, already paid less than their male equivalents before they even begin to splash out on beauty treatments to stay in the game. And those who come after us start younger and younger, playing catch-up in a culture where refusing to play ball comes at a huge cost.

The takeaway? I don’t believe in shame as a catalyst for change, but I think we need to dare to consider the connection between the individual and the structural. The question isn’t whether you can have Botox and call yourself a feminist. The question is how we can break the cycle – because if we don’t, more and more of us will feel the need to play along, inadvertently perpetuating the beauty norms that got us here in the first place.

Ultimately, it boils down to this: I don’t want the right to choose whether or not to inject Botox into my face. I don’t want to have to choose either to spend money and time on beauty rituals and treatments in order to just about scrape in as good enough, or to blatantly refuse to conform and end up an outcast. For as long as that’s the choice we’re given, we’re not all in this together.  

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***This post follows on from a Bits of Me podcast episode, in which I spoke to Gillian Roddie of @evidentiallyyou about body image, ageing and Botox. You can listen here!***

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On reproductive justice, the failures of neoliberalism, and why ‘choice’ is complicated

It’s a funny one, the word ‘choice’. I spend so much of my time promoting it, explaining it, demanding it – yet whenever I stop to really think about it, I realise that it’s a word I’d much prefer not to have to embrace.

For as long as laissez-faire or economic liberalism has existed, ‘choice’ has been one of its most important buzzwords, second only to ‘freedom’. In fact, the Swedes, keen on optimising language to become its most functional and least wasteful, would talk about a combination of the two: ‘valfrihet’ – freedom of choice. In the name of freedom of choice, neoliberalism has torn down many a welfare state in the hope that the free market, as an invisible hand, would bring us all greater utility by way of rational choice.

In the context of present-day Ireland and the current discussions around reproductive rights, I am unequivocally pro-choice; yet if you tried to twist my words into some sort of neoliberal utopia, I’d cringe.

I grew up in a society steeped in social democrat heritage, where parents shared generous parental leave rights and state schools taught all children from the local area regardless of faith or socio-economic status. I grew up in a country where the school canteen served up free lunches for all, complete with a side serving of the notion of ‘folkhemmet’ – a vision for a society resembling a small family where everyone contributes and everyone’s looked after – and a glass of milk for strong, healthy bones.

Then, in 2006, the liberal-right alliance won the election and neoliberalism swept through the country, the since privatised trains stopped running on time, and finding a good school became all about social capital. Maternity wards got over-crowded, sending women in labour off to the next town or city and midwives home on sick leave due to exhaustion. Many school kitchens stopped serving milk.

I spent a good few years in London, watching the shift from Ken Livingstone to Boris Johnson and hearing David Cameron speak of the ‘big society’, which soon enough turned out to be a cowardly rhetorical device to describe what Thatcher had so bluntly asserted years before him: there is no such thing as society.

I don’t drink milk, yet I liked ‘folkhemmet’ better than what slogans about choice brought about. More often than not, choice-based policies turned out to be get-out clauses for governments who didn’t want to carry any responsibility, for leaders to be able to point to citizens and blame them for choosing wrong instead of providing choice in the real sense, along with care and support. Choice appeared to be to modern-day liberals what the big society was to Cameron – an empty promise, a chance to walk away.

But what’s in a word? Choice can refer to ‘the action of choosing’, ‘the power of choosing’, the sheer ‘fact of having a choice’. At first sight, it seems pretty simple: you either have the right to choose or you don’t. But the action of choosing requires a lot more. I’ve heard campaigners, especially lawyers, point out when pro-choice representatives insist that healthcare and abortion rights don’t belong in the constitution that, in fact, the right to reproductive health should absolutely be enshrined as such. Without a guaranteed, positive right, many people don’t have any right at all.

It struck me as I was thinking about all this that the word for choice isn’t used in the reproductive rights discourse in Sweden. A friend who works in the field explained it to me: abortion rights have in Sweden for quite some time been campaigned for within the realm of sexual, reproductive health rights (SRHR), and in that context the conversation tends to revolve more around justice, access and intersectionality. The dualism of being for or against choice doesn’t really exist.

Turns out, the reproductive justice (RJ) movement, which is growing globally, has already problematised the use of the word choice and its discriminatory and exclusionary tendencies. The right to choose to have an abortion – the fact that a jurisdiction allows for a procedure to take place, more or less without judgement – is not enough for the woman who can’t afford to pay for one, the pregnant person whose local abortion clinic has closed down, the asylum seeker without valid health insurance. And does the right to procure an abortion really qualify as choice if the person needing it has been denied sex education or suitable contraception? What about those forcibly sterilised, what good does choice in regards to abortion and maternity care do them? If the alternative to procuring an abortion, in the event where said procedure is safe and legal, is a life in poverty, judged by mainstream media and society at large – what kind of choice is that?

I’m not sure about the idea of ‘folkhemmet’ as applied to society the way it looks today; I’m not convinced it’s got the scope for pluralism, at least not in its former guise. But the live-and-let-live ideology that left trains derailed and school children discriminated against won’t be good enough. I don’t want to be handed a token notion of choice only for the decision makers to turn around and walk away. I want to prove Thatcher wrong.

“My feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit,” Flavia Dzodan famously declared. Of course the right to choose is a hugely important issue in Ireland, for all kinds of historical and pragmatic reasons. And sure, before you have the right to choose, you’re not going to be marching the streets demanding access. So I will show up for every pro-choice march to demand that most basic of rights; but when the politicians think they’ve awarded it to us, I will keep showing up to try to make it real – to make it free and accessible, complete in every sense of the word, and inseparable from care and support. My reproductive justice advocacy will be intersectional – or it will be bullshit. 

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Termination or abortion - it's all about choice

There’s a lot of talk, yet again, in Ireland about TFMR – termination for medical reasons. People who have had the misfortune of having to go through this experience are writing blog posts and articles campaigning for new, proper legislation in Ireland to make the procedure legal, and opinion writers are producing powerful pieces in response to Ireland’s human rights record review in Geneva, begging for abortion to become a choice for all women, or if not that, at least in the case of TFMR.

There is no limit to my sympathy for those who have had to travel to another country in order to give birth to a baby that would never survive outside the womb, told by the powers that be that said horrifying experience would make them a criminal. I went through this while under the care of the NHS in the UK, and I think I would’ve burst out laughing if somebody had told me, at 21 weeks gestation, to keep walking around looking pregnant and answering well-intended questions about the due date, waiting for our baby to die. It is such a barbaric thing to ask of anyone that it seems absolutely ridiculous.

Yet: while I hated the word abortion, while I wanted everyone to know that we really didn’t have a choice, that we had planned the pregnancy and already loved this baby, this debate pains me. Campaigners are making the point so very clear: this is not an abortion; this is not about aborting an unwanted baby. They’re saying that if we can’t grant all women the right to choose, then we must at least grant it to these poor women – because this is different.

But is it different? Explain the difference to the woman forced to carry, give birth to and look after a baby she isn’t ready or able for.

This is only different if we don’t believe in choice, if we are happy to deny women the right to make decisions about their own bodies, if we accept that there is a limit to the amount of responsibility a woman is capable of carrying. If we legislate based on narrowly-defined criteria, suggesting that abortion is murder and criminal unless there is foolproof evidence that the baby is indeed already with certainty destined to die, we are still calling the shots, depriving women of bodily autonomy. In essence: we know better; they should do what they’re told.

It doesn’t matter how mind-numbingly nightmarish that experience was and how much I feel for every other couple that has the experience of an ultrasound scan turned into the most nerve-wracking, scary thing in the world; just because I can sympathise with them, that’s not to say that the decision of those whose experience I haven’t shared is any more straight-forward. We have to accept that if we value a woman’s right to make decisions about her body, that right has to last the whole way – and we have to trust her to be able to carry the responsibility for that decision, whatever that may be.

Some say that it’s a step-by-step process: if we legislate for TFMR now, people will get used to the idea, and some day, the rest will follow. I think, sadly, that those are the words of people who have given up on the possibility of Ireland ever legislating to support and empower women, instead settling for the second best. That’s a fight for sympathy and understanding – not choice. But a rhetoric that further demonises the informed, personal choice of having an abortion is not a step forward – it only plays into the hands of the pro-lifers, cementing the status quo.

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