Who needs a unifying theme anyway?

A little while ago, over a few drinks, a friend of mine opened up to me about a strange issue. She and her boyfriend have what I guess would be called an open relationship – they each sleep with other people apart from one another. You know, an ‘arrangement’.

Her issue was a strange one. She lamented a double-standard, but one that I’d never heard anybody bring up before. See, the idea to have this type of relationship was hers – she was brought up with hippy parents, and there’s a latent free love streak in her DNA. And when she tells people about her lifestyle, their response is almost overwhelmingly positive - they describe her as some kind of free spirit, an adventuress, a libertine in the classic sense.

And then the same people almost always label her boyfriend a cheating pervert, or accuse him of talking her into the life that was her idea in the first place. It makes her angry because it hurts her boyfriend to be labeled in this way, but also because to think that this was somehow somebody else’s idea is to deny her agency of her own life. Because wasn’t agency-of-the-self basically the entire point of feminism?