Women did not struggle for generations to gain the right to choose only to discover that we are still expected to choose whatever keeps everybody else
Women did not struggle for generations to gain the right to choose only to discover that we are still expected to choose whatever keeps everybody else comfortable.
Our piece on Star Jones appears on SurvivorAffirmations.com. But upon reflection, there is more to be untangled.
There is something worth sitting with when we talk about Star Jones, relationships, sexuality, and all the people who believed they had the right to tell a grown woman what she should have known.
I support the freedom of consenting adults to love, date, marry, build families, and live according to their own sexual identities. That freedom is precious. AND freedom has to travel both ways.
Even within communities that have fought hard against sexual prejudice, there is room to examine the ways misogyny can slip through the door. Women can still be treated as though our bodies, relationships, sympathy, acceptance, and romantic availability belong partly to the community. As though a woman making a deeply personal choice must first consider whether everybody else feels sufficiently affirmed by it.
She does not. A woman is not a community resource. Her private choices do not belong to the public simply because someone else expresses interest in having access to them. And somehow, when it comes to men, we collectively understand this. But then when it comes to women, we stumble.
One of the great struggles of women throughout history has been for the authority to make decisions about our own lives. Who we marry. Whether we marry. Whether we leave. Whether we have children. Whether we earn our own money. Whether we can own property, pursue an education, live independently, or say no without somebody else overruling us.
Women fought for the right to choose, not merely for the right to make choices everyone else approves.
Across the world today, women and girls are still bravely fighting restrictions on their education, movement, clothing, marriage, sexuality, work, and independence.
That history should make us very careful about rebuilding old expectations in modern language. Surrender. Sacrifice. Submit. Ignore yourself.
Supporting freedom in sexuality must include a woman’s freedom of sexual selection. She gets to decide whom she dates, marries, sleeps with, or does not sleep with. Her reasons may be thoughtful, complicated, deeply personal, or none of our business. She does not owe anybody a relationship to prove that she is accepting, sophisticated, enlightened, or sufficiently free of prejudice.
And she certainly should not have to issue a press release explaining herself.
This becomes especially important when we consider the way women are treated when relationships go wrong.
People can spend years telling women that certain questions are inappropriate, that certain concerns are unfair, or that noticing particular patterns reflects badly on them. Yet if the relationship later reveals something she did not anticipate, suddenly the crowd changes its tune.
How could she not know? Followed by laughter, smirks, and eye rolls.
Then comes the ‘gotcha.’ She was “foolish.” She was “desperate.” She ignored the “signs.”
In Star’s case, people even dragged her body into the discussion, as though her size explained what she deserved, what she should have suspected, or why a man might choose her.
We cannot have it both ways.
We cannot discourage women from considering information that matters to them when choosing intimate partners and later ridicule them for supposedly failing to consider that very information.
A woman should not have to date against her own instincts to prove she is a good person, then be called stupid if the very thing she was afraid of happens.
There is a lesson here for Survivors, too. Many of us learned to explain our boundaries until we were exhausted. We learned to anticipate everybody else’s feelings before trusting our own discomfort. Sometimes we were encouraged to give another chance, overlook one more thing, be understanding, or prove that we were not judgmental.
You are still allowed to choose what serves your life.
Kindness does not require romantic availability. Respecting another person’s humanity does not create an obligation to date them. Supporting another person’s freedom does not require surrendering your own.
Respecting another adult’s freedom does not require surrendering your own.
Sometimes liberation looks wonderfully communal. People march together, organize together, change laws together, and hold doors open for the people coming behind them.
And sometimes liberation is wonderfully ordinary.
It is one woman quietly deciding, No, that isn’t what I want. The right to say “yes” means very little without an equally protected right to say “no.”
She does not need a committee vote. She does not need to make everybody understand. She does not need a statement approved by the community.
She gets to live her own life. A boundary does not become prejudice simply because someone is disappointed by it.
That was part of the freedom women fought for in the first place.
Affirmations
My boundaries do not require unanimous approval.
I am allowed to consider what I have learned from experience.
I do not have to override discomfort to prove that I am kind.
I can listen to advice without surrendering the final decision.
I am allowed to choose relationships that feel right for my life.
Someone else’s disappointment does not automatically mean I have done something wrong.
I do not owe endless explanations for a deeply personal no.
I can change my mind when new information changes what I understand.
I am not foolish because I trusted someone. I am not cruel because I became more careful afterward.
My compassion belongs to me, and so does my discernment.
I can support freedom for other adults while protecting freedom for myself.
I am allowed to make some decisions simply because they are better for me.
When “Just Give Him a Chance” Stops Being Advice and Starts Becoming Pressure – WE Survive Abuse
Consent Is Freedom: A Woman’s Right to Belong to Herself – WE Survive Abuse
When Women Say No: Why Men Mocking Our Boundaries Is a New Low – WE Survive Abuse
Misogyny Is Not a Virtue: When Harmful Attitudes Are Framed as “Values” – WE Survive Abuse