Olivia Rodrigo, Freedom Means Letting Women Choose
By Ashley Hayek
via @oliviarodrigo on Instagram
According to the teenage girls in my life, Olivia Rodrigo releasing a new song qualifies as a major cultural event. Rodrigo is one of the most influential artists for Gen Z women and girls, starting on the Disney Channel and basing her debut album around typical teenage girl problems: boys, peer pressure, and insecurity.
Interestingly, this new song, “Serena Joy,” borrows its central character from The Handmaid’s Tale: a woman who helps construct an oppressive social order only to discover that the machinery of oppression eventually reaches her, too.
“If they do it to them, they’ll do it to you,” Rodrigo warns.
It’s a clever, memorable lyric that carries far more cultural and political weight than the average pop song. That matters because culture shapes what we believe long before politics catches up. And Rodrigo is tapping into something most Americans already understand: When someone else loses her freedom, ours might not be far behind. That’s why women fought for equality in the first place - not so someone else could tell us how to live, but so we could decide for ourselves.
An American woman today can go to Harvard, start a business, serve in the military, or become a surgeon. She can get married or stay single, have children or not, build a career or stay home with her kids. She can live out her faith or walk away from it.
Most of our grandmothers never had that many choices.
Somehow, we’ve started calling American women oppressed for making choices millions of women around the world don’t have. And the choices that seem to bother people most are marriage, motherhood, faith, saving sex for one person, and putting family first.
That should puzzle anyone who takes liberalism seriously. Today, there is a new type of paternalism embedded in some versions of contemporary liberation.
When a woman puts her career first, stays single, or rejects religion, everyone applauds her for living life on her own terms. When she chooses a more traditional life, suddenly she must’ve been brainwashed into wanting it. She has internalized patriarchy. She does not understand the structures constraining her. Her apparent choice is not really a choice at all. It’s oppression.
The old paternalism told women they were incapable of choosing for themselves. The new paternalism sometimes tells women that their choices count only when they make the right ones.
Different vocabulary. Same temptation: someone more enlightened knows what kind of life a woman ought to want.
That is not liberation. It is simply a different authority claiming jurisdiction over the female conscience. And nowhere is the conceptual confusion clearer than when the imagery of dystopian female subjugation is applied to traditional life in modern America.
There is an enormous moral difference between a government telling a woman how she must live and a free woman deciding how she wants to live. The difference is coercion or choice. Freedom doesn’t mean picking the life Hollywood or social media approves of. If women are truly free to choose, that includes choosing faith, marriage, and family.
It is remarkable that a culture so fluent in the vocabulary of autonomy can struggle to tell the difference between coercion and choice. If an American woman freely chooses a traditional life and we nevertheless describe her as oppressed because we disapprove of her choice, we have turned the language of liberation on its head.
The deeper irony of “Serena Joy” is that American achievement was never supposed to be that women would end up making the same choices. It was so women would finally be trusted to make their own.
There are women in the world today fighting governments for the right to enter a classroom, walk freely through their cities, choose what they wear, practice their faith, and determine the basic architecture of their own lives.
American women have something millions of women around the world are still fighting for: the freedom to forge a path for ourselves.
We should be extraordinarily careful about teaching the next generation of girls that exercising that freedom in the “wrong” direction somehow makes them less free. The old world prescribed the life a woman was permitted to live. Calling it empowerment doesn’t make it any better if we’re still telling women how to live.
So perhaps the warning worth passing along to the teenage girls listening to Olivia Rodrigo is not so different from Rodrigo’s own: Be suspicious of anyone who believes freedom belongs only to women who make the choices they approve of.
If women have to live a certain way to be considered free, what exactly have we been liberated from?
Ashley Hayek is the Catholic wife of a U.S. Marine, mother of 5 children, President of America First Works, and former National Coalitions Director for the Trump 2020 campaign.
