Freshly legal girl sets up an OnlyFans? Self-employed girlboss. Influencers $3500 makeup haul? Self-care. Documenting painful, invasive plastic surgery taken to meet patriarchal beauty standards? A brave act of self-empowerment.
Postfeminism is the modern sensibility behind this type of rhetoric; it asserts that all traditional goals of ‘feminism’ (equal pay, voting rights, etc) have been met and further advancement is unnecessary/outside the scope of the movement. This means it often manifests, as in the above examples, in a “renewed embrace of activities and positions that current and previous generations of feminists have deemed sexist or oppressive” and uses the language and rhetoric of feminism to uphold patriarchal frameworks. This includes the logic of choice feminism, which operates in a purposefully obtuse vacuum, where all decisions made by women must be inherently feminist and ‘correct’, regardless of the patriarchal context they’re made in.
In our current era, choice feminism and postfeminism collide inside an online algorithm which favours therapy-speak and is designed specifically to dissuade nuance and maximise profit margins, creating a toxic narrative: the widespread and mindless glorification of values and behaviours that uphold patriarchy, using the language of ‘feminism’.
Note that these acts are obviously complex and varied in their influences; they are not all influenced solely by the patriarchy and capitalism and devoid of personal agency. Women are fully capable of consenting to decisions, of becoming sex workers or makeup influencers or both. But there has to be some capacity for criticism, and if the postfeminist narrative is that all decisions made by women are feminist — then all critiques of such decisions devolve into anti-feminism. You’re not a ‘girls girl’ if you question how constant consumerism of makeup products could reasonably constitute self-care, nor are you ‘supporting women’ if you question what social or cultural factors would incentivise young girls to budget for Botox.
It’s easy to dismiss this discourse as immaterial to the everyday reality of women, to brush it off as useless online nonsense, but this toxic postfeminist messaging goes beyond just being a digital echo-chamber phenomenon and bleeds into real life in a number of ways. In a world of capitalism and staunchly neoliberal ideology that favours the individuals needs above all, companies have found choice feminism to be a sharp tool in promoting excessive individual consumerism, with the end goal of women spending more money being achieved by the means of postfeminist marketing — the unconditional worship of ‘self-care’ as a ‘feminist’ concept has completely eroded capacity for meaningful pushback against capitalism. It quells any anticapitalist or anticonsumerist critique of the beauty industry, which is now a $532 billion dollar industry masquerading as an unequivocally feminist endeavour. Choice feminism serves to protect the material status quo above women.
This rhetoric also makes it incredibly difficult to have legitimate conversations and important questions about issues concerning women; you now cannot thoroughly discuss the exploitative and coercive nature of oft-glorified online sex work for young girls without having to navigate the ridiculous and frequently wielded strawman of ‘being anti-feminist’. In the best case, at its least obstructive, this brand of postfeminism detracts from healthy and often necessary debate.
In the worst case, it actively encourages women to make choices that can be dangerous and harmful. An atmosphere which does things like blanket generalise and advocate for online sex work as ‘feminist’ and dismissess legitimate safety and mental health concerns, can easily translate to numerous young girls opting in to platforms and experiences that they otherwise perhaps would not. In essence, discourse shapes decision-making: it is not extreme to imagine the number of unaware young women duped into starting an OnlyFans because of the lack of appropriate, nuanced, debate about the topic.
How do we ensure young girls are shielded from this? What’s a good counternarrative to put out there? How do we make it palatable and shareable (an unfortunate necessity in the digital age) enough to become widespread and combat the disease of choice feminism? We necessarily need a cocktail of discourse ingredients: a widespread shift away from capitalist and neoliberal logic, an understanding of nuance and good-spirited debate, acknowledgement of the patriarchal framework which unfortunately underpins the majority of our-decision making despite our insistence in ‘girl-boss-ifying’ everything. Without staunchly feminist voices advocating against the increasing plague of postfeminism, future generations of women are doomed to a world of the most shallow, capitalistic, destructive, ‘feminism’ known to mankind.
