The Curbside Prophet

liberalsarecool:

Virtually everything we have heard in the week since the War on the War on Women was waged has been another mindnumbing meditation on “women” and “choice.” Whether it’s Ann Romney’s “choice” to stay home and care for her five sons, or working women and their “choice” to be in the workplace, or the “choice” to marry a rich guy, or the choice not to marry at all. Why is it that women are the sum of their “choices” and men get to just live their lives?

A few precatory observations on this language of choice: For one thing, it has become so bound up with the fight over reproductive rights in this country that it never really means just “choice” anymore. You can almost hear the silent “unfortunate” that precedes it every time it’s mentioned in political discourse. For another, not all women have all the choices they are alleged to be pondering. Most of us simply don’t have the luxury of a “choice” to stay home, or a choice to work part-time. Most women, like most men, do what they have to do. “Choice” is usually a misnomer, especially during a recession, for women as much as it is for men.

But talking about women in the language of choice is also a political trap. Because it suggests that while men are free to optimize their lifestyle decisions, women are always forced to “choose.” Men may design their lives. Women’s lives are a sequence of impossible trade-offs, made even more complex when they must mesh with the custom designs of the men with whom they marry and co-parent.

Dahlia Lithwick & Jan Rodak,  “The Faux Mommy Wars” [Slate]

(via thefistofartemis)