Being Amber Rhea

I feel like a fucking flake. But it just wasn’t happening. Sorry, Jill. :( Anyhow, this is as far as I got… might as well post it here:

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What makes a feminist choice? Too often, that question is construed in such a way that it becomes meaningless. Because it’s not about the act itself; it’s about the meaning behind the act. And it’s extremely important to remember who defines that meaning. It’s not defined by outsiders looking in. It’s defined by the woman herself, the one doing the action.

Take for example, a woman posting nude photos of herself online. The act itself is not the important part. The question of whether posting nude photos is a feminist choice is a question that doesn’t make sense if we don’t consider the woman’s motivations. That’s what makes or breaks whether it is a feminist choice or not. Just going on the act alone, we don’t have any information that can tell us if it’s a feminist choice.

And yet (sticking with this example), people feel free to make all kinds of assumptions about women who post nude photos. Similar assumptions are made by society at large and, distressingly, by some feminists. She must be craving male approval; she must have low self-esteem; she must be superficial; she must need validation… on and on and on. But the fact that people make such assumptions based on a particular act is far more revealing of their own biases and the stereotypes they’ve bought into, than anything about this woman’s psychological state.

Sure, she might be doing it out of any of those stereotypical motivations assigned to her without question. But she might be doing it for a variety of other reasons that are all about her and not about what other people say she should or shouldn’t do. She might be giving the finger to the dichotomy we draw between “smart” women and “sexy” women. Perhaps she’s challenging your assumptions, asking you to examine why you make them in the first place. Maybe she’s saying, “I’m not ashamed of my body, and I reject patriarchal norms that tell me that I’m ‘demeaning myself’ if I show it, or that I can only show it to certain people in certain contexts.” She might be stating, “Refusing to keep my sexuality neatly compartmentalized does not disempower me; the patriarchy disempowers me by dictating such compartmentalization.” Maybe she’s doing it because she wants to, and she doesn’t owe you any explanation.

That would be all too radical, wouldn’t it? Because it would mean centering her, the woman, instead of centering men. And even as feminists call out countless examples of male privilege, many of them continue to place a lot of importance on what men think and how men interpret things - even if their interpretations are dead wrong. Somehow those interpretations are granted more importance than what the actor (the woman) states as her intent.

Nothing new there.

And I get it, we don’t live in a perfect world. We live in a world which is, unfortunately, still very much controlled by sexism. So I can understand being concerned about how things may appear to and be interpreted by men. They are the ones making the rules more often then not, and therefore their interpretations are going to be given more credence by society at large. But do we, as feminists, have to replicate this structure?

Surely there’s got to be a middle ground. We won’t shake up the status quo by not doing the things we want to do, out of fear of how some men might take it. If we take that route, we’re still letting ourselves be controlled by men - only they’re forcing us not to do something, rather than forcing us to do something. Either way it’s the same thing - we are passive, reactionary. Instead of being true to ourselves, we base our decisions around what men might think. And that’s not radical at all.

So we have to push. We have to keep on pushing back against the stereotypes, dichotomies, double standards, prescriptive norms. Because if we push long enough and hard enough, people will notice. I won’t go the predictable, clichéd route of invoking the Civil Rights Movement; but the truth is, with any major societal change in our nation’s history, things changed because people had the courage to act instead of just react, to push back instead of just being moved around like a pawn.

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Maybe next time. Or, maybe writing for somewhere else isn’t for me? Who knows.