Sexual Politics is out of print. The Dialectic of Sex is out of print. What women have to do is come to terms with the fact that we live in a society that simply censors better than state censorship. People have got to come to terms with the power of the publishing industry and the media in controlling thought and expression. They have to understand that it is an issue of power and money and people have to be less passive in relation to books. People have to take their money which they don't have much of and they have to buy books by feminist writers. They have to develop a much more sophisticated understanding of how the book industry works. A hard-cover book like Letters from a War Zone was virtually published dead. If it's still in bookstores in two months it will be a miracle. They have to understand that everything that they hear all the time about how everything can be published in this country is a lie and that part of the social function of the publishing industry is to buy up the rights to and then obliterate certain books so that nobody can get them. They have to stop thinking that they live in the liberal dreamworld of equality where fairness has already been achieved. It hasn't been achieved. You can be equal in your heart but it doesn't make you equal in the world. I think that the refusal to understand what happens to books by women goes along with this liberal refusal to acknowledge that power is a reality and we're not the ones who have it. What I'm saying is that women have got to start facing reality. You cannot build any kind of movement for change on wishful thinking. The wishful thinking is that we already have what it is we want and what it is we need. We don't have it. Women who want to write and communicate, which in a big country is hard to do—it's getting harder for them, not easier. There isn't more access, there is less access. People have got to take the economics of the publishing industry seriously and understand that very few writers will survive who do not write according to the demands of the marketplace, by which I mean essentially the demands of turning out books that you can consume as passively as a television show. That's sort of the standard.

To achieve a single standard of human freedom and one absolute standard of human dignity, the sex-class system has to be dismembered. The reason is pragmatic, not philosophical: nothing less will work. However much everyone wants to do less, less will not free women. Liberal men and women ask, Why can't we just be ourselves, all human beings, begin now and not dwell in past injustices, wouldn't that subvert the sex-class system, change it from the inside out? The answer is no. The sex-class system has a structure; it has deep roots in religion and culture; it is fundamental to the economy; sexuality is its creature; to be "just human beings" in it, women have to hide what happens to them as women because they are women—happenings like forced sex and forced reproduction, happenings that continue as long as the sex-class system operates. The liberation of women requires facing the real condition of women in order to change it. "We're all just people" is a stance that prohibits recognition of the systematic cruelties visited on women because of sex oppression.

My analysis is also situated within the logics and practices of neoliberalism. This is a much-contested, much-discussed (and some might say over-used) term: nevertheless, it refers to a socio-economic-political framework which, although not the root of all contemporary evils, is an important shaping structure. This ‘market-political’ rationality (Brown, 2006: 291) has cascaded economic principles into the social realm as part of the assumption that societies function best with a minimum of state intervention (Harvey, 2005). Political and social problems are converted into market terms, becoming individual issues with consumption-based solutions (Brown, 2006: 704). As Brown contends, this privatisation and commodification of social life has structured subjectivities (2006: 693). The rationalities of neoliberalism atomise, interiorise and neutralise: the neoliberal self is an individualised one (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002), constructed around the principles of agency and self-governance. Neoliberal reflexive projects of the self are characterised by introspection and narratives of self-actualisation (Giddens, 1991), often with economic metaphors (see for example Johnson, 2014; Rousmaniere, 2015). As part of this, experience and emotion have accrued value as forms of intelligence which can serve life and career goals for those in advantaged social positions (Hochschild, 1983; Ahmed, 2012 [2004]). Within this framework the personal has simultaneously grown and shrunk as difference has flattened out into ‘diversity’ alongside a ‘tabloidisation’ (Glynn, 2000) and ‘testimonialism’ (Ahmed and Stacey, 2001) in which, perhaps in place of politics, popular culture and debate have been saturated with feeling. The phrase ‘disaster porn’ has been coined to describe the contemporary fascination with the troubles of others, which provides a repository for guilt or schadenfreude (Molotch, 2014). In this narcissistic and therapeutic neoliberal moment, as Ahmed (2012 [2004]) argues, personal pain can be depoliticised, or co-opted as it accumulates and stagnates in what Brown (1995) calls ‘wounded identities’ which both legitimate and depend upon state power. For example, Carolyn Pedwell (2014) has highlighted how personal tragedies can be appropriated and mobilised by politicians and privileged ‘experts’, who use empathy as a technology of access to disadvantaged lives. In a marketplace of experience, the privileged inevitably have more platforms from which to narrate (see also Ahmed (2012 [2004]: 33), and the marginalised are often spoken for within agendas which are not their own. I will show in this paper that these characteristics of the neoliberal context are also evident within feminist politics.

« Choice feminism » advocates for the idea that feminism is an individual thing to each woman, but we cannot build a political movement based on the idea that it is what it is for every individual person. It renders feminism meaningless. It is not possible to bring down a system of oppression through so called personal empowerment. It is internalized neo-liberalism to let individualism replace what was once a collective struggle. And this is where “choice feminism” really lies, a lack of analysis of structural inequality, of systems of oppression and the division of women as a class. It carries on a liberal idea of freedom, that you could easily twist into thatcherism « There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. »  (Margaret Thatcher). By supporting « choice feminism » we are making it easier for liberals to sell us anything, from make up to pornography, as empowering and thus as feminist. We are making it harder for us to challenge any oppressive industry or practice, since some women choose to take part in these practices or industries. So what do we do with this? We start by acknowledging that there can be misogyny in our choices, even if these choices make us feel better. By choosing to wear make up, I’m supporting a concept of femininity that has been oppressing women for centuries, but I also am creating a demand benefiting an industry making profit from the insecurities of women, and I need to own that.

God and Conservatism