Is there another word for oppression ?

"influenced by" maybe. It is a fairly neutral term and while not accurate it is not as loaded and not as scary for many people.

People get really mad if you suggest shaving etc has anything to do with oppression because they very much want to believe that they have free choice.

Personally I find it quite odd that anyone thinks they have anything like free choice.

Of course intersectionality has merit. It's just that very often it is used to minimalise the fact that women as a group are discriminated against for their very femaleness.

Most discussions that focus on intersectionality put women at the bottom of their concerns. Which is concerning.

Nobody outside of Arcane Feminism knows WTF Patriarchy is, and "Oppression" may have been correct in the 1960s but is out of date now, the methods of manipulation are more subtle and it just sounds OTT, like "Nazi" or "Stalin" etc.

Fair enough, I guess it depends on your perspective. I personally think intersectionality has merit.

Whenever I've had discussions about kyriarchy, any analysis of male-domination was discouraged. It seemed to me yet another derail. A bit like trans-activism.

Not to say that there are not interlocking oppressions. But often women get pushed to the back of the queue again.

I don't think it's the term "oppression" that gets people's backs up. I think it's the term "patriarchy" sometimes. I prefer kyriarchy.

Not a word, but a beautiful description, from which you might find a word or phrase. Perhaps 'every choice has a negative consequence' or similar.

From Marylin Frye's 'The politics of reality':

"The experience of oppressed people is that the living of one?s life is confined and shaped by forces and barriers which are not accidental or occasional and hence avoidable, but are systematically related to each other in such a way as to catch one between and among them and restrict or penalize motion in any direction. It is the experience of being caged in: all avenues, in every direction, are blocked or booby trapped.

Cages. Consider a birdcage. If you look very closely at just one wire in the cage, you cannot see the other wires. If your conception of what is before you is determined by this myopic focus, you could look at that one wire, up and down the length of it, and be unable to see why a bird would not just fly around the wire any time it wanted to go somewhere. Furthermore, even if, one day at a time, you myopically inspected each wire, you still could not see why a bird would gave trouble going past the wires to get anywhere. There is no physical property of any one wire, nothing that the closest scrutiny could discover, that will reveal how a bird could be inhibited or harmed by it except in the most accidental way. It is only when you step back, stop looking at the wires one by one, microscopically, and take a macroscopic view of the whole cage, that you can see why the bird does not go anywhere; and then you will see it in a moment. It will require no great subtlety of mental powers. It is perfectly obvious that the bird is surrounded by a network of systematically related barriers, no one of which would be the least hindrance to its flight, but which, by their relations to each other, are as confining as the solid walls of a dungeon."

From here: www.terry.uga.edu/~dawndba/4500Oppression.html

Constrain? Limit?

Subjugate, maybe.