On Empowerment

This is a term we hear a lot, whether in jest, mockery or sincerity, always in terms of its applicability to certain acts for women. We do not hear that certain acts empower men, for example, because men are presumed not to require empowerment. In a general sense this is true; men have social, sexual and economic control of women as a class, and thus as a class they are not in need of this extra boost. (Obviously not all individual men are ‘empowered’ to the same extent, in the same way women are not all individually equally ‘disempowered’; this observation is not to deny the differences).

Empowerment = the gaining of power. A powerful human being can effect change in the world, can know that their actions will have some consequence that they intended, can determine the path of their own life, cannot be forced to do what they do not wish, cannot be condemned to have to act according to the dictates of another. The use of the word ‘empowerment’ in the senses in which we often hear it — Act X is empowering to women — seems to suggest the production of some inner power or strength. That to undertake Act X is to discover this power- with the underlying threat that if one does Act X and does not become ‘empowered’, that therefore one is not doing Act X properly/ is incapable of becoming an (em)powerful woman. To name an act as necessarily empowering is to mock or condemn those who do not wish to undertake the act, or those who having undertaken the act, did not enjoy it.  We are used to hearing the phrase ‘empowering’ in regard to sexualised acts that many women are otherwise suspicious of and thus do not wish to undertake. The message here is frequently that to consider oneself as being sexually attractive is to be ‘empowered’, and that sexual attractiveness takes the form of display before others.

I have remarked before that the power to please is no power at all. ‘Empowering’ acts are offered to those who have least power in the world, in lieu of the power that the dominant class already possesses. ‘Empowering’ acts are offered to enable women to fit themselves into the world created for them, this world in which one’s biological sex is deemed to describe the whole of one’s life, in which biological sex is deemed to somehow magically affect one’s mind (in the nineteenth century, women were intellectually stunted by their reproductive capacity; today ‘hormones’ are the culprits blamed for supposed sex differences).

Nothing is intrinsically ‘empowering’, and ‘empowerment’ is a poor substitute for the ability to control one’s life, without the threat of rape or other sexual violence, to have enough to live on, to not have to compromise in order to live. Power will not come from a set of dance moves, or the approval of others.

It is that inner determination that things can be different, that the world can be different, the refusal to accept a hierarchical social order as ‘natural’ and therefore inevitable, the refusal to believe that just because the world is described and presented one way that it is the only way it is or can be. This is where power begins. It may not be much, and it may be less than others have, but it is where we start.