The timidity in mainstream feminism to admit that women’s choices—not just our problems—are, in the end, political has led to a vision of “women’s empowerment” that often feels brutally disempowering in the end. The root of this trouble is the fact that mainstream feminism has had to conform to patriarchy and capitalism to become mainstream in the first place. Old requirements, instead of being overthrown, are rebranded. Beauty work is labeled “self-care” to make it sound progressive.

These days, it is perhaps even more psychologically seamless than ever for an ordinary woman to spend her life walking toward the idealized mirage of her own self-image. She can believe – reasonably enough, and with the full encouragement of feminism – that she herself is the architect of the exquisite, constant and often pleasurable type of power that this image holds over her time, her money, her decisions, her selfhood and her soul.

Has anyone ever written a great novel about a woman who is happy in her marriage? Of course, most protagonists are unhappy. But heroes are mostly unhappy for existential reasons; heroines suffer for social reasons, because of male power, because of men.

Resistance to a system is almost always presented on the terms of the system. It’s so much easier, when we gain agency, to use it to adapt rather than to oppose.

A woman is unruly if anyone has incorrectly decided that she’s too much of something, and if she, in turn, has chosen to believe that she’s just fine.