As feminists, we need to have enough integrity and clarity to convey to others that we are all interwoven in the wide web of life, and that everyone’s choices and actions have a great impact on everything else. It is good to realise that we are making an investment in the leaders of tomorrow who will have new visions and create new communities, new lifestyles, new relationships between people and the Planet.
These insights we gain may help us feel more in charge of our choices – and freer to live authentically, grounded in our own truth and aware of the self-created barriers that stand in the way of a meaningful and fulfilling life. It is because having choice is so important to people and many of us take for granted that the majority of us have the right to choose.
We all know what can happen in situations where choice is suppressed due to poverty, ill health and other external or internal factors. If ‘choices’ are informed decisions and not actually bore out of a lack of choices and these actions lead to health and this health leads to increased and living an authentic life, then choices are more efficient, not less.
When we talk of prostitution and pornography, many people use the word ‘choice’ as a valid and empowering reason for us not to challenge individual’s decisions.
For us to say but ‘that’s her choice’ well yes that is fair enough and I am not concerned with women who decide to make an adult and informed choice what she wishes to do with her body and her life - as she chooses. My concern is for the others – the others who are fooled into thinking they have choices, or the others who have no choices not even ‘pie in the sky’ choices.
I am tired of the way the word ‘choice’ is used to describe destructive and damaging life-styles, because somehow having made a ’choice’ is somehow empowering, somehow liberating and somehow seized upon by users of women’s bodies.
The concept of having a ~ choice~ was first coined and used within counselling and psychotherapy. Still used to convey to individuals that they do indeed have choices, many of whom can not ’see’ or acknowledge due to their social conditioning, present situation or health reasons.
It is used to challenge irrational beliefs and behaviour to help empower and liberate people from negative and self-perpetuating patterns of be-ing.
However, I feel it is now over used, contorted, and abused to sit and serve a few peoples attitudes and wants from the sex industry.
As someone who has made a living from therapy, having spent hundreds of hours examining people’s choices, what so many people talk of is the absence of choices not choices.
mmm, you have pre-empted me. For the last few days I have been contemplating a post on *choice*. I must get on with it!
This is not an essay on choice, just a stream of consciousness that has been brewing for a while. It’s a big one, that would probably take the shape of a book
I love this. Thank you.
I struggle with this: women who are somewhat privileged, at least moreso than others, and who claim they want to be prostitutes. My instinct is to say “fine” and move on to figuring out ways to help the other 90%.
But you’re right-that ignores the root problem. I’ve got a lot more thinking to do.
Thanks for that Sparkle.
I think the misuse of the word ‘choice’ obscures the fact that women’s options are limited in so many ways. At the very least, any so called ‘choice’ to enter prostitution is only possible as long as the option of prostitution exists and the option ‘prostitution’ can only exist as long as men think they have the righ to women’s bodies.
Men create prostitution. Prostitution is not about women making choices.
[...] These are the opening lines of my Wednesday Wow this week. It’s a thoughtful and considered piece about choices by Sparkle*Matrix whose view that: …the word ‘choice’ is used to describe destructive and damaging life-styles, because somehow having made a ’choice’ is somehow empowering, somehow liberating and somehow seized upon by users of women’s bodies. [...]
Two takes on the concept of ‘choices’: the idea that a choice is not simply something which allows to you absolve yourself of responsibility for what comes of your choice (part of what you talk about above) and the belief (sadly, seems linked to political conservatism) that having choices implies an obligation to use it with regard to others (don’t know why it has become linked to political conservatism because they don’t seem to do it).
I always felt the idea of choice was perverted by capitalism to mean the ‘choice’ between 38 similar brands of washing powder in a society where many are disallowed meaningful choice by the inequalities inherent in the system. And that’s linked to what you covered above, too.