Sublime

it became clear, quickly, that a lot of the problems feminists continue to take on are rooted in a deep hostility toward and suspicion of unfettered female pleasure, happiness, and independence.

Often, you’ll see this billed as “choice” or as women pursuing personal happiness because the language of feminism has been neatly co-opted by a strain of peculiarly American individualism.

“Because I can” is spectacularly freeing.

What could topple the most stubborn roadblocks is a feminism and a politics that reorient themselves away from simple equality and toward happiness and pleasure.

Our identities are too often defined by our relationships to other people—wife, mother, daughter—and prominent politicians defend women’s rights by describing us relationally to men.

If we focus on what makes women’s lives happier, healthier, better, more fulfilling, and more pleasurable, many other progressive goals will naturally follow, and we will have a new language with which to frame and advocate for issues of fundamental fairness and egalitarianism.

Across the board, women are on a gerbil wheel, running to catch up—to their own expectations, to outside ideals, to men—and never quite making it.

It is instead about all of the ways in which Americans carry, and our institutions reflect, a profound and abiding antipathy toward women’s day-to-day enjoyment and our broader fulfillment.