It's my choice, not yours!

In “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off,” Sandra Tsing Loh not only calls off her marriage, but also her willingness to have both a career and a family life. After all of those you-can-have-both! inspirational stories, we finally learn that Ms. Tsing Loh was always more interested in her career than in anything else. This is completely fine, of course, because she is, after all, only following her feminist mantra of “choosing her choice”, something that is possibly the most feminist thing you can do. In her new article, however, she does not only choose her choice, but asks you to choose it as well.

While I could talk about her stance on marriage (she thinks you should avoid it for utilitarian purposes), I’m more interested in her understanding of the new modern woman who, according to her, “embod[ies] what Tocqueville described as America’s “restless temper,” or l’inquiétude du caractère” and her presumption that this woman would, ideally, like to “let those nurturing superdads be the custodial parents” so that she could, in turn, “obsessively work, write checks, and forget to feed the dog.” What Ms. Tsing Loh seems to miss in her self-indulgent narrative is that not everyone is like her, that not every woman is a successful, Type A breadwinner who places her work before her personal life. While many women may fall into this camp, let it be known that nurturing, goddess-worshipping Earth mothers still abound.

While some may argue that Ms. Tsing Loh is everything that feminism strives to be personified—a successful career woman who doesn’t play nice and chooses her choice (dammit!)—under her laissez-faire ramblings lies a dogmatic, traditional, if not somewhat conservative, take on feminism. If feminism is about choice, then why is she convinced that there is only one type of woman and that, even further, this woman is a go-getter who rather play with the boys than with her own kids? Sandra Tsing Loh isn’t the third-waver she tries to be, but more of a traditional old-schooler who thinks that the only way a woman can be equal to men is if she wears the pants—all the time.

Now, mark my words, I am whole-heartedly a feminist. But along with being a feminist comes a need for some self-reflection (consciousness raising anyone?) and a degree of skepticism. After I finished reading Ms. Tsing Loh’s article, I couldn’t help but feel a lack of self-reflection on her part and intense skepticism on mine. Granted, she never officially comes out as a feminist, but if feminism, in its most basic form, is about leaving the private sphere for the public and working shoulder-to-shoulder with men, then Sandra Tsing Loh is the ur-feminist, complete with successful career, domestic ex-husband, and all. And that’s precisely the problem: she’s become a kind of feminist lab-experiment gone wrong. It’s not enough for her to be an independent, newly divorced, highly successful career woman; she needs to dislike men (“I don’t generally even enjoy men”), reject traditional gender norms by refusing to cook (“My own girls are strictly mac-and-cheese-centric”), lament the supposed loss of “real men” (“In our parents’ era, the guy hit 45, got the toupee, drove the red Porsche, and left his family for the young, hot secretary. We are unable to imagine any of the husbands driving anything with fewer than five seat belts.”), choose pragmatism over love (because love is, after all, “demonstrably fleeting”), and do a variety of other macho things to prove to you just how butch she is. Sandra Tsing Loh is, in other words, convinced that the modern woman is one who not only strives to be like men, but additionally rejects all traditionally “female” roles in exchange for those traditionally “male”, becoming a kind of female misogynist. In her ideal world, then, both men and women are yuppie frat-boy beer-guzzling types, not a bunch of wine-sipping, risotto-cooking sissies who talk about love and think about marriage.

While this certainly may be a choice for some women, it’s just not a choice for me. Sorry, but I still believe in choosing my own choice—even if it means spending hours in the kitchen, watching Lifetime original movies, and crying myself to sleep.