This video is sponsored by Curiosity Stream. Get access to my streaming video service, Nebula, when you sign up for Curiosity Stream using the link in the description. Alice Cappelle uploaded a great video essay a few months back titled, “the death of feminism and the future of activism.
” In it, she uses Ferguson to critique choice feminism’s implication that First, freedom or liberation is understood as the capacity to choose. Second, a woman cannot choose her oppression, so we should support any choice she makes. Third, it is based on the idea that the feminist movement fought for our ability to make choices.
So it implies we are in a post-feminist era. In Tee Noir’s video about submission of black women to male partners, she interviews Misha, who makes educational content on TikTok. And Misha also critiques choice feminism: Every decision that a woman makes cannot be inherently beneficial or inherently feminine because if a woman is in a societal pressure cooker, with patriarchy, with white supremacy, with religion, with all of these systems pressuring her into making that decision, that decision, even if she made it for herself, is not the most feminist nor the most beneficial decision for her.
What these ways of thinking point to, whether directly or indirectly, is the concept of adaptive preferences: it’s a concept that’s discussed by several feminist thinkers like Martha Nussbaum, Uma Narayan, and Serene Khader and it states that an adaptive preference or an AP is a preference that complies with patriarchical standards and thus is not a real preference. Like Misha said in her clip earlier, “it’s not what she would inherently want, but what she is believed to have wanted by the system around her. ” The idea is that these preferences are inauthentic, that if a woman was acting on her "true desires", she would not choose to say, be submissive to her partner or get 15 different cosmetic surgeries only to take them out once they fall out of trend.
This is such an intriguing and highly important topic to me because it asks: are women who have preferences in line with patriarchal standards perpetuating their own oppression? Alice gives examples of women like Ben Shapiro’s sister who claims that she chose to be a housewife because she wanted this life, not because she was oppressively forced into a traditional gender role. And I think Alice is right that intuitively, a lot of people would disagree with this reasoning.
There’s this feminist intuition that to do things in line with patriarchal standards is not a “true” choice; it is a result of internalized gender roles but if these women just broke free of their socialization, they would realize that housewife is not what they really want to be, at least not be a core part of their identity. But simultaneously, there is a second feminist intuition, at least in third wave feminism, that despite our disapproval or concern, we don’t want to say that these women are completely brainwashed by socialization. Even if they occupy a subordinate social position, like a housewife, their positions still deserve respect.
After all, hasn’t domestic life traditionally made women better at being sensitive to people’s needs and being able to create intimate relationships with particular people which are just as valuable as traditional masculine skills? We’ve seen the flaws that come from upholding one standard of life as the goal of liberation. Service workers, for example, have been and continue to be undervalued because of the standard that real meaningful work comes from intellectual, not bodily work.
We tell service workers that they should actually be grateful for increasing automation because we’re actually liberating them their menial jobs. Be free and crunch numbers on a computer instead! The 2000s and 2010s liberal girlboss mantra has instilled in a lot of us women that to be free from patriarchal oppression is to work like men and financially succeed like men.
These girlboss “feminists” have ended up criticizing stay at home moms or women who love makeup, saying that they are not freeing themselves from the shackles of their own mind. Many of you may have heard of recent TikToks from “stay at home girlfriends”: "The first thing I always do is make him a coffee. " and the comments are always full of people belittling them.
“If yall break up, is stay at home girlfriend going on your resume or” “What does stay at home girlfriend mean? Who are you outside of the relationship? ” “Help changing the water filter?
Oh honey. You need a job. ” “Blink twice if you need help” Don’t get me wrong, as someone has been heavily subjected to the liberal girlboss rhetoric myself, my automatic reaction to this TikTok was the same.
Like god, is serving a man and cleaning dishes really what fills you with purpose? But stepping back after my automatic reaction, I recognize that leftist communities online have focused so much on ripping apart norms and exposing the truth beneath them that we often feel as though if you are not embodying progress in recognizable ways, then I, who does have my third eye open, know better than you. And that grants me permission to dictate whether your choice is truly valid or not.
Adaptive preferences theory gives these types of people the power to speak on others’ behalf and say, “no, if you weren’t brainwashed by patriarchy, then you would choose differently. ” But this seems to imply that there is some authentic self that exists untainted by social pressure. That somehow we know what someone would choose, what someone would want, if they were critically woke like me.
It feels like how a parent regards a child. This leads me to a subtopic underlying adaptive preferences: if we agree that women with adaptive preferences do perpetuate their own oppression, according to our first feminist intuition, does this deny those women autonomy? Now like Alice, like Tee Noir, like Misha, I do not want to fall back into choice feminism where any and all choices made by women are feminist.
When women want to save themselves for marriage because they believe virgins are more “pure” and “ladylike”, there’s gotta be some internalized misogyny there, right? But I also don’t want to say that I definitely know what a woman who lives a totally different life from me would want and that if they comply with patriarchy, they are automatically a brainwashed individual. We’ll touch on how this specifically affects the West’s perception of women in third-world countries and how it builds this rhetoric that we have to save them from their ultra-patriarchal society.
What I think the feminist theorist Serene Khader can show us is how we can affirm the concept of adaptive preferences but also protect women’s autonomy. Even when women perpetuate their own oppression, they can do it rationally and autonomously. "The start of a woman's day but only the start because a woman is all things to all people.
" Autonomy is commonly conceptualized as the capacity to make decisions that reflect our true values. We are autonomous if the choices we make are really our choices. Within this broad conception, there’s lots of variation and more specific details, such as what does it mean to make a choice freely?
Some thinkers have distinguished between 1st order and 2nd order desires and say that autonomy is complying with your 2nd order desire. For example, if your 1st order desire is “I want to eat cake” and 2nd order desire is “yeah, I agree, I could go for cake”, then you are acting autonomously. If your 1st order desire is "I want to scroll on TikTok" and your 2nd order desire is "Please, you’re better than this, free yourself from this prison of dopamine addiction" then choosing to scroll on TikTok wouldn’t be an autonomous choice.
But what happens if your all of your first order desires are inauthentic? Marx talked a lot about how capitalism constructs desires that you would have never otherwise had. I'll be right back.
Like, if I saw a macaron ad every other day and it subliminally made me want to buy a macaron, was that an autonomous desire? Salted caramel! I'll finish this later.
In the same vein, many feminist thinkers have said that feminine socialization has constructed desires in women so deep that they become our first order desires; even our fundamental desires are constructed by external situations. That's a pretty scary thought. So, how do we determine if a desire is autonomous or constructed?
"She must raise them, care for them, and pilot them safely to the threshold of manhood and womanhood. " One way is to examine the content of a desire. Is what they desire an autonomous desire?
This is the route someone like Angela Davis takes when she says choosing to be a housewife as your “career” is not autonomous. Even though raising kids is very valuable and definitely takes effort, being confined to the house limits women's interactions with others and impedes her opportunity to do other activities. As we can see, Davis' criticism is directed at what the desire is itself.
This is also the stance Martha Nussbaum, an AP theorist, takes when she says that an AP is a preference that is in conflict with intrinsically valuable goods such as life, bodily integrity, practical reason, and some other stuff. So the wrongful content of an adaptive preference is what makes it not a real preference. "Whether it's done by the day, by the week, or just once a month, meal planning presents the homemaker with her best opportunities to express her talent.
" Another way to determine whether a desire is autonomous or constructed is to ask whether a person has the necessary skills for autonomy. Diana Meyers writes, “Since one must exercise control over one's life to be autonomous, autonomy is something that a person accomplishes, not something that happens to a person. ” If, for example, I became insane and my insanity allowed me to break free of my socialization, even if the content of my desires now aligned with my true desires, I wouldn’t be autonomous.
I need to have skills like being able to interpret my feelings correctly, to imagine different life plans, being able to resist social pressures to conform. It can't have been accidental. I must actually have certain skills to be autonomous.
On this skill-based view the traditionalist woman who chooses to be submissive and domestic does have some autonomy, because everyone has these skills to some degree and virtue of being a human, but their skills are largely underdeveloped because of the life they live. The last way is to look at how a desire is formed. If the process of formation meets certain standards of critical reflection, then the desire is autonomous.
This is related to skill because skill often affects whether someone's process can meet these standards, but the focus is on the person’s thinking process, not their abilities. Someone with autonomous skills could still fail to exercise those skills and hence not engage in an autonomous process. This procedural view gives us the most inclusive picture of autonomy because it doesn’t care about the content of a desire or the character of a person.
If we have a career woman, a girlboss, and a housewife, so long as they both formed their desire in a rational, critical way, then they are equally autonomous. In general, more feminist thinkers that I've read agree that procedural autonomy is the best characterization of autonomy because it is the most inclusive and in the words of cliche, it’s about the journey, not the destination. Let me in the comments which account of autonomy you think is the best.
Regardless of how you characterize autonomy, we only hold people morally responsible for their actions if we believe that they could’ve done otherwise. That’s why in cases where people murder someone while sleepwalking, they're considered not criminally responsible. What they did is absolutely tragic, but the reasoning is that we can't hold them responsible for murder because they weren’t autonomous when they’re sleepwalking Autonomy also grounds non-interference with other people’s lives.
We let others make their own choices in life, even if we don’t think it’s the best choice, even if we know they would've looked better with a different haircut, or a different hair color, because we see their autonomy as something to respect. Thus, it’s a big deal for adaptive preference theory to argue that some women cannot even autonomously think for themselves because of internalized patriarchy. Martha Nussbaum believed that many women fail to question oppressive norms and just go along with it.
They end up being indoctrinated or manipulated as “dupes of patriarchy. ” She claims, for instance, that Bangladeshi women have a much lower participation rate in education because they have an internalized belief that education is not as valuable for women. She gives another example of Jayamma, a woman living in the slums of Trivandrum, India, who is paid significantly less than men for more demanding factory work and also has a husband who gambles away their family income.
Despite this, she accepts that this is just how things are. She does not complain about her situation. Again, Nussbaum argues that Jayamma not complaining about her situation is a reflection of sexist norms that she has internalized.
The goal for Nussbaum is to show that sometimes we ought to change public policy for women even when they do not want it. After all, she says, the malnourished women in Andhra Pradesh did not consider their poor living conditions to be “unhealthy or unsanitary” until an information campaign was held and gave them the facts about their situation. There is definitely some truth to Nussbaum’s point.
When people are born into unjust systems and are not given conceptual tools to understand their situation, they will have no way of conceiving their oppression. I talked about this in my recent video about insignificant existence where injustice can feel natural and thus, is never questioned. For example, a lot of sexual assault cases that happened in the 70s and 80s were only brought to court years and years later because the concept of “sexual assault” wasn’t really a thing back then and so victims had no way of conceptualizing what happened to them.
But to say that 1) adaptive preferences in line with patriarchy ALWAYS lack autonomy and 2) if a woman has internalized patriarchal norms, it’s okay, and in fact good, to decide what she would truly benefit from… it seems to go too far. Uma Narayan, a feminist scholar who is Indian herself, responds to Nusbaumm by pointing out that women like Jayamma are not simply brainwashed by patriarchy Most of the time, they have done a lot of critical reflection on their decision In some situations, they recognize that their options are limited to begin with and so them operating in limited ways is not because they are unaware of their oppression, and have internalized specific limited roles for themselves. They operate in a limited space precisely because they are aware of their oppression.
These women also experience an internal conflict about the acceptability of the cultural norms they follow. Narayan talks about the women she interviewed in Delhi who disapproved of women that showed too much skin or were too open about sex, but at the same time, envied women who had less restrictive families. They do critically think about their actions and the norms they follow and they recognize the nuance within them.
More often than not, they gain major benefits from complying with patriarchy that we just can’t brush off. It’s easy for us to say, "if you really wanted to break free from oppression, you to revolt against the system right now" when their lives and subsequently their children’s lives could get much worse if they disobeyed. The Bangladeshi women who chose not to get an education for example was not because of internalized patriarchy.
They do value education and they wish they could get it for themselves, but because of financial constraints, they are forced to choose between educating themselves or their male children and because they are aware of patriarchal norms, they decide that their sons' education is a better long-term financial investment. These are rational processes of deliberation. These women clearly do reflect on their own situation and choices.
But what Nussbaum and other adaptive preference theorists have done is the classic “third-world women are subject to ultrapatriarchical societies and us in the West need to save them”. These colonial stereotypes that third-world women have diminished agency justify first-world control of their culture, their land, their policies, their people. Back during the imperialist era, imperial European powers did this all the time where they would go to a third-world country see that the women were suffering and in need of help, and so they justified conquering their land and enslaving the men because they were saving the women from ultrapatriarchy.
. . supposedly.
And look, may adaptive preference theory wouldn't look as bad if they gave Western women the same kind of scrutiny, but AP theorists tend not to touch on Western adaptive preferences regarding beauty and cosmetic surgery or gendered labour practices. They often have a particular concern about third-world women is a little… fishy. As much as AP sucks, we can’t throw it out completely, no matter much I hate College Board.
ba dum tss I think a lot of us agree with AP theorists on a lot of things, most importantly that the patriarchal norms women participate in are oppressive. But the main problem seems to be that this theory doesn't fully understand women's reasons for being complicit with those norms. What if women reproduce their oppression all the while remaining an autonomous agent?
Serene Khader says that in order to recognize the rational capacity of women engaging in adaptive preferences, we have to keep in mind three things: First, oppressed individuals can make accurate judgements about their opportunities. They can accurately judge the situation that they're in or the environment that surrounds them or the options that they have at hand. Two, women who engage in adaptive preferences aren't simple-minded.
They do have a complex Moral Psychology, which is evident from their mixed or conflicting ideas about the unjust norms they participate in. Three, because of their often limited options: Oppressed people can simultaneously try to advance their best interests while also perpetuating their own oppression. It can be a strategic choice to comply with patriarchal standards.
Or maybe they have to comply with patriarchal standards along the way because the path to advance their best interests is usually not straightforward. If a woman wants to be taken seriously in a professional setting, then we cannot blame her wanting to wear a pantsuit and specific type of makeup. By recognizing women’s autonomy, this entails that they should be treated respectfully.
Firstly, we should uphold noncoercion. we need to respect the fact that sometimes, women rationally decide not to change their behaviour, even if it stems from an adaptive preference. Their lives may be worsened if we coerce them into changing.
Think about women who are victims of domestic abuse. Maybe we know that abuse is happening and we desperately want to tell the police for the wellbeing of the woman. But there are stories of black women in low-income neighbourhoods who decide that it’s better to endure the abuse than to tell the police.
Because if they tell the police, they fear that their neighbourhood would become even more policed than it already is and despite the abuse at home, they don’t want to see their spouse be another black person severely injured or killed by the police. Oppressed women make difficult yet rational decisions like this all the time, and that's why I personally think it’s wrong to intervene with others' lives just because you think you have the truly “feminist” course of action. Secondly, we also need to include women who have adaptive preferences in discussions about oppression.
I think sometimes people feel that because certain women have been “brainwashed” by patriarchy, they have nothing smart to say. Leave them out of the feminist movement. I especially see this happen to young women in relationships with much older men.
Whether it’s Billie Eilish dating Jesse Rutherford or Taylor Swift and her several relationships— before she released All Too Well and proved her feminism to y’all— the men never really get criticized at all but the young women get most of the backlash. Like "ugh Billie Eilish, how could you write Your Power, a song about grooming, and then date a 31 year-old? You are such a disgrace to feminists.
" Now I’m not against the concerns about her relationship, I think the age difference is yucky, but being in a relationship that I disapprove of and am concerned about doesn't exclude her from being able to say something insightful about her own behaviour or strategies to ending her oppression even while partaking in it. Oppression is so complicated and we should never try to oversimplify it, especially when we’re talking about the victims. Now I also want to be clear that just because an oppressed woman acts rationally and critically doesn’t mean she is making the right choice.
This video is not meant to repeat choice feminism and prevent you from being able to disagree with their actions. If their oppressive preference would disappear once you expose them to better conditions or educate them, please try to do that. All I want to suggest is that even when women have harmful preferences, they do not lose their autonomy.
Again, that's at the basis of treating people with moral respect. We can criticize someone without taking away their agency, without coercing them or interfering without their consent. Also, just in case anyone misinterprets this video, it is not aimed as a take down against the creators I mentioned in the beginning.
Their videos inspired me to do research and thinking of my own, so I see my video as an expansion on what they’ve said, which was very valuable. If you enjoyed this video, consider checking out more educational content like this on Nebula. I joined Nebula a few months ago actually, and I wanted to test it out before I said anything, but I can confirm that it’s a really awesome platform and community.
Nebula is Streamy Award Nominated and features over 14,000 titles. Those titles include tons of content from your favorite educational creators on YouTube like Philosophy Tube, FD Signifier, Foreign Man in a Foreign Land, Tier Zoo, who you can watch ad-free, and get exclusive content from such as full uncut versions of videos, or even entirely new projects which you can find under Nebula Originals. I’ve personally enjoyed Legal Eagle’s Bad Law Words Good series which, if you’re interested in law like me, it does a great job of clarifying legal jargon that most people use wrong.
Nebula is a great place for creators to try out new things without having to worry about demonetization or other restrictions that exist on YouTube. Now, why did I say Curiosity Stream is sponsoring this video? Well, Curiosity Stream loves supporting educational content and independent creators like me, so they’re partnering up with Nebula to offer you a special deal.
If you sign up with the link in my description box, you not only get access to Curiosity Stream, but you also get a Nebula subscription for free. And for a limited time, Curiosity Stream is offering 26% off their annual plan at only $14. 79— that's less than $15/year for BOTH Curiousity Stream and Nebula.
It’s really the best deal out there when Curiosity Stream has thousands of high quality documentaries such as this excellent documentary called the History of Wall Street where you can see JP Morgan and the Lehman Brothers, the actual people themselves, grow their industries into the big Wall Street names we know today. So click the link below to get both Curiosity Stream and Nebula for 26% off. It's a great way to support the channel and educational content as a whole.
Thank you so much for watching, let’s keep talking, and I hope to hear from you soon. And of course thank you so much to the Patreons for supporting this channel. Ooh, gonna move it down for a second, sorry.
Bye!
