“Western women have been brought up in a culture that emphasizes individualism and personal choices and ignores the coercive social and cultural structures and hierarchies within which those choices are made.”
Exactly! We as individuals are understandably biased toward believing that the choices we make are made entirely freely, without being influenced by societal pressures. However, that’s just not true. Every choice we make is profoundly influenced by the set of values and priorities we were brought up with and by the society in which we live. Every action we take is either taken to stay within that framework or in deliberate rejection of it. Either way, those societal values are always involved in our decision-making, however unconsciously.
In an ideal world, yes, a woman would be able to decide what she wanted to wear, whether she wanted to shave her legs, how much makeup she wanted to put on, etc. as an individual making a free choice based on her own comfort and her aesthetic preferences. But that is not the world we live in! These sorts of choices are influenced by societal pressures both consciously – women, at least in the US, are told that we must shave our legs in order not just to be attractive, but not to be actively gross – and unconsciously, in that our personal aesthetic preferences are themselves very much influenced by the norms and values of the societies in which we live.
tl;dr: it’s not actually possible to make decisions like whether or not to wear heels without being influenced by societal norms, whether that decision is made in accordance with or rejection of those norms.
