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Summary
The romanticisation of softness and submission as an aspirational choice for women is a troubling trend, as it risks setting back the progress of women's liberation. This framing is not a neutral preference but is deeply rooted in centuries of patriarchy, where women's value was tied to their obedience.
The whole “I just want to be soft and submissive” thing isn’t happening in a vacuum. The problem isn’t that a woman expresses a preference for it. It’s that those words are not neutral.
They come loaded with centuries of patriarchy, where women were valued only when they were yielding and obedient. Calling that a “choice” today risks erasing the fact that this very choice was constructed for us long before we were born.
Feminism isn’t about anything goes or choice. That’s a shallow distortion. It’s about interrogating where our desires come from and whether they expand women’s freedom or keep us tethered to old hierarchies.
If the desire aligns perfectly with the role patriarchy has always prescribed for women, we have to ask if that’s empowerment or internalised conditioning repackaged as liberation. There’s also a power imbalance at play.
Submissiveness isn’t framed as aspirational for men, but it’s women who are expected to embody it. That asymmetry matters. If submission were truly neutral, equally advised and celebrated for all genders, then maybe it could be defended as a simple personal choice.
But it isn’t, and reinforces male dominance by normalising women’s subordination as femininity,y making that kind of feminism flexible enough to accommodate the very chains it was built to break.
The issue isn’t women valuing softness; it’s when those traits are collapsed into submission and upheld as the essence of femininity.
That framing doesn’t expand women’s options but narrows them back down to the oldest, most limiting script where a woman’s highest value lies in yielding. By romanticising submission, we don’t dismantle patriarchy; we reinforce it.
Editor’s Note: This was first published by the author on X.
