The Myth of Choice_ Personal Responsibility in a World of Limits - Kent Greenfield [41]
We have undoubtedly come a long way since my mother received The Pastor’s Wife as an engagement gift. But we have a long way yet to go before we come close to genuine equality, even in our portrayals of our own culture. And these portrayals have an impact. Most women still mechanically adopt their husband’s name when they marry, and those who do not are seen to be making some kind of statement. Meanwhile, when my wife and I were married not a single person asked me if I was going to change my name. Women are encouraged to develop their own careers, but they also have to make sure they keep the home in good condition (or hire other women to do so for them). If children come along, it is assumed that it will be the mother who presses the “pause” button at work to bring up baby. (When my son was born, a senior colleague boasted to me that he had never missed teaching a class after the birth of his children.)
Of course, people should be able to choose how they organize their family lives. The risk is that the culture of sex and gender roles is so pervasive that most people make automatic choices without considering the many possibilities.
Sexuality. The struggle for sexual autonomy and independence has been a part of the fight for women’s equality for decades if not centuries. One of the touchstones of inequality is the lack of power to decide for yourself with whom you share your sexuality. This lack of sexual empowerment is a badge of inferiority.
My worry is that we have replaced a culture of sexual inhibition and inequality with one of sexual exploitation and inequality. Fast forward from the old days to 2009, when seventeen-year-old Miley Cyrus performs a stripper-like pole dance while singing her song “Party in the USA” on the nationally televised Teen Choice Awards in Los Angeles. In the words of author Ariel Levy, “An interest in [strippers and porn stars] used to seem like a way of resisting the status quo. Now it feels like a way of conforming.” Levy answers Erica Jong’s 1970s paean to female sexual freedom, Fear of Flying, by admitting that she “would be happier if my daughter and her friends were crashing through the glass ceiling instead of the sexual ceiling . . . Sexual freedom can be a smoke screen for how far we haven’t come.”37
Sexual freedom has to be a good idea, if by freedom we mean the ability to choose for ourselves how to display and enjoy our sexuality. But sexiness by itself may not be freedom. It depends whether it is done mindfully or mechanically. As Levy argues, “The proposition that having the most simplistic, plastic stereotypes of female sexuality constantly reiterated throughout our culture somehow proves that we are sexually liberated and personally empowered has been offered to us, and we have accepted it. But if we think about it, we know this just doesn’t make any sense.”38 Choices need to be made available: “If we are really going to be sexually liberated, we need to make room for a range of options as wide as the variety of human desire. We need to allow ourselves the freedom to figure out what we internally want from sex instead of mimicking whatever popular culture holds up to us as sexy. That would be sexual liberation.”
This chapter, like the last, ends with questions. Do all of our biases, assumptions, and influences constrain us so much that we have no genuine choice in the way we organize our family life, decide the guilt or innocence of a criminal defendant, or elect whether to stand to recite the Pledge of Allegiance? Sometimes I feel the presence of culture around me, but usually I do not. Sometimes I feel my own choices being constrained or coerced, but usually I do not. Yet culture is so powerful that my feelings about my own decisions may not be the best indicator of whether my choices are truly my own.
Once we acknowledge that we are subject not only to the cognitive defects and biases outlined in the previous chapter but also to pervasive cultural influences, we have to acknowledge that we are less autonomous than we would like to believe. We are