I was raised in the Bible Belt in the 1990s on a steady diet of James Dobson, the moral majority, and "I Kissed Dating Goodbye." My highest calling was to get married, preferably young, have babies and raise them to love Jesus (and America, too).
This just came across my feed, but I’m so glad I found it. I got into an argument with a fairly well known feminist writer who asserted that you could be a feminist and still get Botox because women should have “free choice,” and she attacked me for disagreeing with her. And I’m like, but how do you not see that that’s contributing to unhealthy beauty standards and literally encouraging women to waste their own money on upholding toxic beauty culture…left that convo feeling so gaslit
I really feel this — and I’m sorry you were met with that kind of response. That “free choice” argument often gets used in a way that quietly erases power, context, and consequence.
What tends to get lost is that choices don’t exist outside of conditioning. When a culture relentlessly rewards youth, thinness, and compliance — and punishes deviation — then “choice” becomes something the nervous system navigates under pressure, not freedom. Feeling gaslit makes sense when structural critique is reframed as personal attack.
From a nervous system lens, these conversations aren’t abstract: they land in the body. Many of us learn that safety, belonging, and approval are tied to how we look. Naming that isn’t anti-women — it’s actually taking women’s lived reality seriously.
This is exactly the kind of tension I write about: where feminism, embodiment, and power collide in everyday decisions. You’re not wrong for questioning it. That discomfort is often where clarity starts.
Thank you for speaking up, it matters more than it’s made to seem.
Thank you for this, it was really clear and honest. I think what hit me most is how choice can feel empowering on the surface, but still live inside a structure that shapes what choices even look like in the first place.
The body doesn’t experience “choice” in a vacuum: it reacts to the conditions that make some options feel safe and others feel impossible. 
Growing up with the idea that freedom is “just choose what you want” is almost somatically soothing… until the nervous system quietly braces itself every time a “choice” shows up with real consequences. That’s not agency — that’s survival strategy under power. And as the piece points out, some of us get to play that game with fewer risks and more social safety nets than others. 
Reframing this through a lens that accounts for who gets to feel safe enough to choose is essential. Because if we ignore context — historical, material, bodily, racial — we end up celebrating the illusion of agency while the systems that limit real agency stay intact.
Thanks for naming that complexity with nuance, it’s exactly the kind of reading that makes the nervous system go “ohhh, that’s why I’ve felt this way.”
1 / Why is “there no ethical consumption under Capitalism?” Are you paying attention to only the unhealthy masculine’s version of it?
2 / Race is irrelevant. Wymin of all races in America have the same options, depending on their class.
~~
Some of what you wrote sounds like you listen a lot to male-controlled media. In post-2008 America, it sounds like the male-controlled media has convinced you of all sorts of things which may not be true.
I’m sad to see the feminist teaching sink so deeply into your psyche. Young women should still put their search for their life mate first, and young men too. Ahead of career.
Men must be the providers, however, so their focus on career is still critically important to their life goals and supporting their family. An army of young women today are being led astray by their feminist mothers who tell them to seek a career, “just in case they ever get divorced” so they aren’t “vulnerable.” And so they seek a career first and treat their family and partner for life as an afterthought. That’s planning to fail. And letting fear of failure lead directly to the path of failure.
The patriarchy is a fiction of modern feminist teachings. Men and women both struggled together, as a couple, as a team. It’s always been the few oligarchs oppressing men and women alike. Not a patriarchy. When your grandfather went down into the coal mines, he wasn’t whistling happily at the thought of “oppressing women.“ He was killing himself for them.
Worse, colleges have become an institution of such degeneracy and depravity, the parents should be very alarmed sending their children there. Young women today feel entitled to embrace their hoe phase. Sometimes their degenerate mothers even encourage it. “Go ahead! Get with the bad boys, you’re young!“
And so from ages 15 to 30 they dive into a decade and a half of sex, drugs, alcohol, giving away their purity, alpha widowing themselves. Then when they are broken, they remember their long lost plan to find a good man. Their most fertile years are gone. A third of couples age 30 struggled with fertility due to one or both of them. And these modern women are broken. They are divorcing their husbands because TikTok made it a trend. They say it’s to “pursue their happiness“… But that always just means to return to the streets and relive their college degeneracy again. It’s broken.
I do hope a new young generation will embrace the revival and put their family first. And value working for their family above working for corporate master who doesn’t give a damn about them.
It's not just "in case they get divorced" that women pursue paid careers (or occupations).
It's also in case their husbands die, become ill or disabled and unable to work, and in case their husbands--despite their best efforts--just plain can't make enough money to support a whole family well forever, and cover every possible contingency (including medical issues and late-life expenses for both spouses).
Those are good reasons. I put the “in case they get divorced“ in quotations because that’s exactly what several women have said when they justify why they are pursuing work. Considering how high the divorce rate is with women filing 70% of the time, I guess that’s on their mind.
The career can come after the kids are older though.
But not establishing a career or livelihood BEFORE having kids--just in case you have to go back to work to support or help support them, which could happen at any time--is a mistake.
Getting a high-paying family wage job, or creating a successful business, is not something that can be done instantly or in a short time just because it has suddenly becomes necessary! To some extent, even rebooting a career that has been completely abandoned for several years is near-impossible, especially (though not only) in the current workplace climate.
Women have learned from earlier generations' mistakes that it's best to build a livelihood first, THEN (if desired) start a family, and maybe pull back from paid work for a while (with details to be arranged based on family finances and preferences)--but not completely abandon it for years at a stretch.
Otherwise, if Mom suddenly has to go "back to work", she may not be able to get more than a minimum wage service job--if even that.
Your writing, once again, is strong, coherent and makes your case. Thank you for this, Emily.
This just came across my feed, but I’m so glad I found it. I got into an argument with a fairly well known feminist writer who asserted that you could be a feminist and still get Botox because women should have “free choice,” and she attacked me for disagreeing with her. And I’m like, but how do you not see that that’s contributing to unhealthy beauty standards and literally encouraging women to waste their own money on upholding toxic beauty culture…left that convo feeling so gaslit
I really feel this — and I’m sorry you were met with that kind of response. That “free choice” argument often gets used in a way that quietly erases power, context, and consequence.
What tends to get lost is that choices don’t exist outside of conditioning. When a culture relentlessly rewards youth, thinness, and compliance — and punishes deviation — then “choice” becomes something the nervous system navigates under pressure, not freedom. Feeling gaslit makes sense when structural critique is reframed as personal attack.
From a nervous system lens, these conversations aren’t abstract: they land in the body. Many of us learn that safety, belonging, and approval are tied to how we look. Naming that isn’t anti-women — it’s actually taking women’s lived reality seriously.
This is exactly the kind of tension I write about: where feminism, embodiment, and power collide in everyday decisions. You’re not wrong for questioning it. That discomfort is often where clarity starts.
Thank you for speaking up, it matters more than it’s made to seem.
Thank you for this, it was really clear and honest. I think what hit me most is how choice can feel empowering on the surface, but still live inside a structure that shapes what choices even look like in the first place.
The body doesn’t experience “choice” in a vacuum: it reacts to the conditions that make some options feel safe and others feel impossible. 
Growing up with the idea that freedom is “just choose what you want” is almost somatically soothing… until the nervous system quietly braces itself every time a “choice” shows up with real consequences. That’s not agency — that’s survival strategy under power. And as the piece points out, some of us get to play that game with fewer risks and more social safety nets than others. 
Reframing this through a lens that accounts for who gets to feel safe enough to choose is essential. Because if we ignore context — historical, material, bodily, racial — we end up celebrating the illusion of agency while the systems that limit real agency stay intact.
Thanks for naming that complexity with nuance, it’s exactly the kind of reading that makes the nervous system go “ohhh, that’s why I’ve felt this way.”
How compelling, thank you! Some thoughts:
1 / Why is “there no ethical consumption under Capitalism?” Are you paying attention to only the unhealthy masculine’s version of it?
2 / Race is irrelevant. Wymin of all races in America have the same options, depending on their class.
~~
Some of what you wrote sounds like you listen a lot to male-controlled media. In post-2008 America, it sounds like the male-controlled media has convinced you of all sorts of things which may not be true.
I’m sad to see the feminist teaching sink so deeply into your psyche. Young women should still put their search for their life mate first, and young men too. Ahead of career.
Men must be the providers, however, so their focus on career is still critically important to their life goals and supporting their family. An army of young women today are being led astray by their feminist mothers who tell them to seek a career, “just in case they ever get divorced” so they aren’t “vulnerable.” And so they seek a career first and treat their family and partner for life as an afterthought. That’s planning to fail. And letting fear of failure lead directly to the path of failure.
The patriarchy is a fiction of modern feminist teachings. Men and women both struggled together, as a couple, as a team. It’s always been the few oligarchs oppressing men and women alike. Not a patriarchy. When your grandfather went down into the coal mines, he wasn’t whistling happily at the thought of “oppressing women.“ He was killing himself for them.
Worse, colleges have become an institution of such degeneracy and depravity, the parents should be very alarmed sending their children there. Young women today feel entitled to embrace their hoe phase. Sometimes their degenerate mothers even encourage it. “Go ahead! Get with the bad boys, you’re young!“
And so from ages 15 to 30 they dive into a decade and a half of sex, drugs, alcohol, giving away their purity, alpha widowing themselves. Then when they are broken, they remember their long lost plan to find a good man. Their most fertile years are gone. A third of couples age 30 struggled with fertility due to one or both of them. And these modern women are broken. They are divorcing their husbands because TikTok made it a trend. They say it’s to “pursue their happiness“… But that always just means to return to the streets and relive their college degeneracy again. It’s broken.
I do hope a new young generation will embrace the revival and put their family first. And value working for their family above working for corporate master who doesn’t give a damn about them.
It's not just "in case they get divorced" that women pursue paid careers (or occupations).
It's also in case their husbands die, become ill or disabled and unable to work, and in case their husbands--despite their best efforts--just plain can't make enough money to support a whole family well forever, and cover every possible contingency (including medical issues and late-life expenses for both spouses).
Those are good reasons. I put the “in case they get divorced“ in quotations because that’s exactly what several women have said when they justify why they are pursuing work. Considering how high the divorce rate is with women filing 70% of the time, I guess that’s on their mind.
The career can come after the kids are older though.
But not establishing a career or livelihood BEFORE having kids--just in case you have to go back to work to support or help support them, which could happen at any time--is a mistake.
Getting a high-paying family wage job, or creating a successful business, is not something that can be done instantly or in a short time just because it has suddenly becomes necessary! To some extent, even rebooting a career that has been completely abandoned for several years is near-impossible, especially (though not only) in the current workplace climate.
Women have learned from earlier generations' mistakes that it's best to build a livelihood first, THEN (if desired) start a family, and maybe pull back from paid work for a while (with details to be arranged based on family finances and preferences)--but not completely abandon it for years at a stretch.
Otherwise, if Mom suddenly has to go "back to work", she may not be able to get more than a minimum wage service job--if even that.
It's not that men have no struggle in choice, it's that men's choices are not scrutinized in the same way as women's choices.
Freedom on an individual level isn't what we are talking about, though. It's about collective liberation. And machismo is absolutely patriarchy.