Just Say No

I have been a lot of things, but never a Feminist. It's not because I don't agree with some of the pie-in-the-sky rhetoric. It's because the on-the-ground rhetoric is so very bad. For example, startling new feminist research indicates that feminists should stop being obsessed with beauty. It only took feminist researchers 150 years to come to the conclusion that women shouldn't tell other women what they should look like. This gets to my central beef about organized Feminism -- while seeming to focus entirely on widening women's choices, it has done a good job of channeling their choices. Who has the right to tell a woman she can't be a prostitute, a housewife, a porn-star, a surrogate mother? I understand the problem to be that women who find they have no other alternatives sometimes choose those professions. But how does prohibiting those professions mitigate the problem? Why can't we try to open doors in politics and business while not slamming other doors. We should not be like the early Feminists who imported their Puritanical dress prohibitions into the women's rights movements. Instead, we should reject the Puritanical prohibitions about sex professions and stop telling women what they shouldn't do. (And, yes, I realize that this is a way of telling people what they should do. But it's like the toleration paradox: the only thing tolerance can't tolerate is the intolerant.)