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Summary: The piece explains that feminism is not about validating individual choices, but about collectively dismantling the systems of power that shape, reward, and punish those choices. It notes that not every choice made by a woman challenges patriarchy or advances liberation.
“Feminism is about giving women choices,” sometimes phrased as “feminism is about women making their own choices,” has become one of the most repeated explanations of feminism in public conversations, activist spaces, and online debates, often presented as self-evident, neutral, and beyond critique. You hear it in arguments meant to end discussion, you see it deployed as a defence, and you watch it surface whenever feminist politics start to feel uncomfortable to someone. The statement sounds simple, but simplicity here is deceptive.
It is important to state clearly that feminism does not exist so that women can make choices. Women have always made choices, even under patriarchy, even under violence, even under restriction, even when those choices were between survival and punishment. The existence of choice alone has never been the problem. Feminism emerged as a collective liberation movement because the choices available to women are shaped, rewarded, punished, and conditioned by systems of power, and no amount of individual decision-making dismantles those systems on its own.
Choice feminism collapses this distinction. By centring feminism on individual preference, it detaches women’s actions from political analysis and places intention above impact. Once this happens, feminism stops asking what a choice reproduces, who benefits from it, and which structures it upholds. It becomes enough that a woman chooses it, regardless of how deeply that choice aligns with patriarchy.
This framing is not applied evenly, and that inconsistency reveals its purpose. The language of “choice” appears most aggressively when women make decisions that further entrench patriarchal arrangements, choices women have already been conditioned to make, submission reframed as agency, sacrifice reframed as fulfilment, conformity reframed as empowerment. In these moments, feminism is invoked not to interrogate power but to silence critique, as though naming harm becomes an attack on women themselves.
Yet the same defence rarely shows up when women make choices that move against patriarchy. When a woman chooses not to marry, not to have children, not to centre men, not to perform femininity, not to live within the script society prepared for her, her choice is not automatically affirmed as feminist. Instead, it is questioned, pathologised, or treated as extreme. The absence of the “choice” argument in these cases is not accidental. It shows that choice feminism does not protect women’s autonomy; it protects patriarchy from criticism.
If feminism were simply about choice, then every action taken by a woman would qualify as feminist, including actions that directly oppose feminist politics. A woman choosing not to be a feminist would, by this logic, be performing a feminist act, which is obviously absurd. No political movement functions this way. Movements are defined by shared goals, collective struggle, and opposition to specific systems of domination. They are not neutral containers for all behaviour performed by members of an oppressed group.
Feminism takes positions. It is invested in dismantling patriarchy, not managing it politely. That does not mean every choice a woman makes must align perfectly with feminist ideals. Women are human, women are imperfect, women live under capitalism and patriarchy simultaneously, and survival often requires compromise. Making a choice shaped by these conditions does not make someone immoral or undeserving of dignity.
But it also does not automatically make the choice feminist.
A capitalist choice remains a capitalist choice, even when made by a woman who identifies as a feminist. Capitalism does not lose its exploitative nature because of the gender of the person participating in it. In the same way, harm does not transform into liberation through identity. A woman abusing a girl does not perform feminism. Gender does not sanctify actions.
Treating all women’s actions as feminist is not only analytically lazy, but it is also politically dangerous. It erases the difference between liberation and accommodation. It flattens feminism into personal validation and strips it of its ability to critique power. It also disproportionately benefits those already invested in patriarchal rewards, including men who profit when women defend these arrangements using feminist language.
Feminism has never been about affirming everything women do. It has always been about changing the conditions that shape what women are allowed to do in the first place. Individual choices, no matter how sincerely held, cannot replace collective struggle. Liberation is not achieved through personal navigation of oppressive systems but through dismantling those systems altogether.
Reducing feminism to choice makes it easier to swallow, easier to market, and easier to neutralise. But feminism was never meant to be comfortable. It was meant to be disruptive, demanding, and uncompromising in its analysis of power. When feminism forgets this, it stops being a movement and becomes a label, one that patriarchy is more than happy to wear.
