Women Were Told to Cover Up. Now We’re Told to Take It Off.

Camille Roe S.
2 days ago
6 min read

There seems to be a very specific kind of woman we have decided is liberated. Forgive me if I’m wrong, but she is sexually confident. She doesn’t need a man. She dates freely, talks openly about sex, shows her body without apology, and refuses to feel ashamed for wanting pleasure. She is independent, unattached and, most importantly, completely in control.

And to be clear, she should be allowed to be all of those things. But between giving women the freedom to live this way and celebrating that freedom, something crazy happened. We started treating the performance of sexual freedom as evidence of empowerment itself.

I started thinking about this after a video by Rochel Leah made its way into our editors’ group chat at Roe. Naturally, we all started watching it, dissecting it and debating it, and before long, it had turned into a much bigger conversation about what we now consider female empowerment. In the video, Leah discusses the strikingly different cultural responses to Emily Ratajkowski and Hannah Neeleman, contrasting the way Ratajkowski’s sexual freedom has been framed through feminism with the suspicion often directed at Neeleman’s decision to build a life centred around marriage and nine children.

The comparison is deliberately provocative, but underneath it is a question I cannot stop thinking about:

"When did female freedom become another thing women have to perform correctly?"

For generations, women were told what a respectable life looked like. Do not sleep around. Do not show too much skin. Find a husband. Become a mother. Be desirable, but never too sexual. Be feminine, agreeable and devoted. Women fought against those limitations, and rightly so. Sexual liberation gave women something enormously important: the right to own our bodies and make decisions about them without requiring permission from men, religion, family or society.

But freedom to do something and empowerment through doing it are not the same thing. I think we have increasingly confused the two. I have felt this contradiction in my own life. There have been periods when I was much more sexually liberated. I could have sex because I wanted to. I could have more sexual encounters, explore, date and decide what happened to my body because it was mine. There is something undeniably freeing about knowing that nobody else gets to make those decisions for you. But I do not think the sex itself made me empowered. And if I decide tomorrow that I do not want to have sex at all, that does not suddenly make me less liberated.

I could sleep with ten people. I could sleep with one. I could choose celibacy. None of those decisions should require applause, shame or a political explanation. They are simply decisions about my own life.

That distinction matters. Because sometimes it feels as though women escaped one set of expectations only to quietly inherit another.

Once, the "respectable woman" was expected to be modest, sexually restrained, married and maternal. Now, in certain corners of modern culture, the empowered woman is expected to be sexually confident, independent, experimental and visibly comfortable with her body.

The aesthetic changed. The expectation yet again remained.

There is almost a strange pressure to demonstrate to society that you are not oppressed. You should be comfortable showing skin because you are doing it “for yourself.” You should be able to have casual sex without attachment because men have always been able to. You should not care too much about marriage. You should not need anyone. You should be able to separate sex from love. You should be sexually adventurous because being ashamed of sex belongs to some outdated version of womanhood we have supposedly left behind.

But what if I do not want to? If I am genuinely free, shouldn't that be just as acceptable? I strongly think that one of the problems is that we started defining liberation by opposition.

Men could sleep around without destroying their reputations, so women sleeping around became rebellious. Women were told to cover their bodies, so showing them became liberating. Women were expected to marry, so rejecting marriage became independence. Women were expected to become mothers, so choosing not to have children became an assertion of autonomy.

All of those movements made sense, in hindsight they expanded what women were permitted to do. But doing the opposite of what patriarchy once demanded is not automatically freedom. Sometimes it is simply allowing patriarchy to remain the reference point.

If my choices are still being measured against what men historically wanted women to be, then men are strangely still sitting at the centre of the conversation, and that to me is the fucked up thing.

This is also what makes the discourse surrounding women like Ratajkowski and Neeleman so revealing. One woman's sexuality becomes evidence in a debate about whether she is truly empowered. Another woman's marriage and motherhood become evidence in a debate about whether she is secretly oppressed. In both cases, strangers dissect the woman's choices until her private life becomes a referendum on feminism. Meanwhile, the men involved somehow become supporting characters.

Truly for me, still to this day, it's remarkable how often conversations supposedly about female liberation eventually arrive at the same destination: women being examined.

What is she wearing?

Who is she sleeping with?

How many people has she slept with?

Why did she marry him?

Why does she have so many children?

Is she really happy?

Is she really empowered?

Is she doing it for herself?

Is she doing it for men?

We have become so obsessed with determining whether women are making the correct choices that we sometimes recreate the very surveillance feminism was supposed to free us from. This is where I disagree with another part of Leah's argument. In the video, she argues that women sleeping around often comes from “brokenness,” from searching for love or validation. Sometimes it probably does.

Sometimes celibacy comes from brokenness too. So can marriage. So can promiscuity. So can modesty. So can constantly showing your body. So can desperately wanting a relationship, and so can insisting that you never need one. Human beings are annoyingly complicated like that. We make choices from confidence, insecurity, desire, fear, curiosity, pain, love, and usually some impossible-to-separate mixture of all of them. It is part of what makes us distinctly human, and, equally, what makes us so beautiful at the same time.

A woman can make almost any choice from confidence, insecurity, desire, fear, curiosity, trauma, love or some messy combination of all of them. That is precisely why I do not think we should replace “good women don't sleep around” with “empowered women do.”

Neither gives women much room to simply exist. The more interesting question is not whether a particular choice is feminist. It is whether the woman genuinely has the freedom to make it. Because the right to have casual sex is empowering. Casual sex itself is not inherently empowering. The right to show your body is empowering. Showing your body is not inherently empowering. The right to reject marriage is empowering. Being single is not inherently empowering. And the right to marry, have children, cover your body or remain celibate belongs to exactly the same freedom.

That can sound painfully obvious. Yet our culture still seems determined to assign moral and political meaning to virtually everything women do with their bodies. Apparently giving women autonomy wasn't enough. We also needed a panel of strangers on the internet to score how correctly they use it.

There is also an uncomfortable question underneath all of this:

Who benefits from the version of empowerment we are being sold?

We live in a culture where women's bodies remain extraordinarily valuable commodities. Beauty sells. Sex sells. Attention sells. Platforms profit from visibility, industries profit from insecurity and women are simultaneously encouraged to display themselves while being told that doing so is an expression of personal power. That does not mean a woman showing her body is secretly oppressed. It means we should be intellectually capable of holding two thoughts at once.

A woman can freely choose something while living inside a culture that influences what she wants.

The same applies to the woman who dreams of marriage and children. Her desire does not automatically prove patriarchal conditioning either. None of us make choices in a vacuum.

That is why I am increasingly uncomfortable with calling particular lifestyles “empowering” at all. Empowerment was never supposed to describe the choice, it was supposed to describe our ability to choose.

I don't need someone to applaud me when I am having more sex and worry about me when I am having none. I don't need either version of myself turned into evidence for somebody else's ideology.

If I choose to have more sexual encounters, that is my decision. If I choose celibacy, that is my decision too. Neither makes me more or less of a woman. Neither makes me more or less feminist. Neither needs to become a statement.

And maybe that is where female liberation should ultimately lead us. Not toward another ideal woman, just with fewer clothes and more sexual partners. Not backwards toward the respectable wife whose goodness is measured by her restraint. Not toward Hannah Neeleman or Emily Ratajkowski as competing models of how women should live. But toward a world in which there does not need to be a model at all.

Women do not need another set of rules telling us what freedom is supposed to look like. We have had enough of those already. Let women exist in their own lane, make their own choices, change their minds, contradict themselves, and live without having every decision measured against some ever-changing standard of what an “empowered woman” should be.