I have listened to several youtube videos from an English woman that goes by the name of The Authentic Observer. She had one that caught my attention called: Has Feminism Made It Harder For Girls to Set Boundaries?
She tells the personal story of a sexual encounter she had as a 15/16/17 year old, somewhere in there. She had been interested, but the guy (also the same age) kept pushing her boundaries. Uncomfortable, she would tell him no, but then let him cross the boundary. This kept on until at some point, she burst out crying. At that point, he understood that he had done something bad.
She gives the background on herself that she always felt she could stand up for herself in the face of direct confrontation. If a kid called her a name or pushed her, she had no problem facing that down. But with friends who would run over her, she felt she couldn’t tell them no. Her description of this dichotomy gave the sense that this is actually a very common thing, particularly in young girls.
Then she mentions a few things that really caught my attention:
“You’d think that in this age of #girlpower empowerment, that girls would find it easier to set boundaries, but I don’t think that’s true. Instead it’s led to a lot of girls feeling like they can’t set boundaries, because they’re supposed to just be up for anything with anyone. They want to be seen as some traditional weirdo. To be cool with anything is what empowerment means. So I’ll pretend I’m ok with this, even though I’m really not. Despite all the talk about consent, I think many girls feel like they have less of a right to refuse nowadays.”
She mentions “society telling girls” these kinds of things. Now I have an issue with these kinds of statements: “Society says X.” It can be a type of personification fallacy, since ‘society’ isn’t a person that can say something. Often, I’m really distrustful of people making such statements about what society is saying. Maybe they’ve personally heard some people express an opinion, but that’s not the same thing as some wider social accepted belief. But I get that it is a way of expressing a wider socially accepted belief. Whether it’s true or not will be up for debate, but at least granting the phrase is meant to express some generally held socially acceptable view.
I know modern feminism has a lot to say about what society tells women. What feminism means in this context by “Society” is the mouthpiece of the patriarchy. Society then is the patriarchal systemic oppression of women that feminism is challenging, because what society (the patriarchy) is saying is said in order to maintain oppression against women.
But the switch that clicked on in my mind with her description is that she is describing an injustice, in this case equating empowerment with the removal of boundaries, that society is inflicting on women, but in this instance, “society” isn’t the patriarchal voice, it’s feminism. Ironically enough, perhaps one could make the case that women refusing to set up boundaries to deny men the cheap sex men would prefer under the rubric of empowerment, is, if men were that sneaky… exactly the kind of thing a patriarchy would want IF it were to infiltrate feminism and flip the message on its head.
But the way she spoke about this really made me think.