TONTS. - For Love, Against Marriage with Clementine Ford Part One

Episode Date: March 27, 2024

Clementine Ford is a Melbourne based writer, speaker and feminist thinker. She is the author of four books, Fight Like A Girl, Boys will be Boys, How We Love and het latest book I Don’t the case against marriage. She has been a columnist for Fairfax’s Daily Life and a regular contributor to The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald.Clementine's writing explores issues of gender inequality and pop culture. Her ability to use both humour and distilled fury to lay bare ongoing issues affecting women has earned her a huge and loyal readership amongst both women and men. Clementine’s work has radically challenged the issues of men’s violence against women, rape culture and gender warfare in Australia, while her comedic take on casual sexism and entertainment has earned her a reputation as an accomplished satirist.Clementine’s work has also appeared in the Guardian, Cosmopolitan, Girlfriend, CLEO, Sunday Life and The Big Issue. Clementine has been a guest on ABC’s Q and A, Channel Nine Mornings and is a frequent contributor to Channel Ten’s The Project. As a speaker and presenter, Clementine has appeared at Melbourne’s Wheeler Centre, ACMI, the Sydney Opera House, Adelaide Writers Week, the Brisbane Writers Festival, the Ubud Readers and Writers Festival, the Newcastle Writers Festival, the National Young Writers Festival, the Reality Bites Literary Festival, Women of Letters, Cherchez La Femme and the City of Melbourne’s Conversations series. Additionally, she is regularly invited to speak at schools and universities. Clementine has been a guest on ABC’s Q and A, Channel Nine’s Mornings and is a frequent contributor to Network Ten’s The Project.Clementine’s number one mission is to speak openly and honestly about the state of the world as we live in it. She hopes to give other women the language and confidence to articulate their own feelings of frustration and anger.For more from Clementine Ford head to her instagram or find her work on SubstackTo find out more about me and the work I am doing please head to https://www.clairetonti.com or https://www.instagram.com/clairetonti/And if you or someone you know needs support COPE has a brilliant directory where you can find resources in your area.http://www.cope.org.auYou can also contact the show at [e-mail]: RAW CollingsSocial Media: Maisie JG Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which I create, speak and write today. They're a wondery people of the Kulin Nation, and pay my respect to their elders past, present and emerging. Acknowledging the generations who have given birth on this land, raised children on this land, connected to both country and spirit, always was, always will be Aboriginal land. Hello, welcome to Tons, a series of interviews about emotions and the way they shape our lives. I'm your host, Claire Tonti, and I'm so glad you are here. Each week, I speak to writers, activists, experts, thinkers, artists, and deeply feeling humans about their stories. And this week, I have a household name in Australia. Clementine Ford is a Melbourne-based writer, speaker, and feminist thinker. She is, in her

own words, a chaos witch, a lover of skincare, a lover of women and friendship, an ally to men who are helping to dismantle the patriarchyarchy and an enemy to those who are not. She is also an author of four books, Fight Like a Girl and Boys Will Be Boys, How We Love, which happens to be one of my favorite books, and her latest book, I Don't, The Case Against Marriage. She's been a columnist for Fairfax's Daily Life and a regular contributor to The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald. Clem writes with clarity and fierceness about gender inequality and pop culture. Her ability to use both humour and distilled fury to lay bare ongoing issues affecting women has earned her a huge and loyal readership amongst both men and women.

Her work has radically challenged the issues of men's violence against women, rape culture and gender warfare in Australia, while her comedic take on casual sexism and entertainment has earned her a reputation as an accomplished satirist. Her work has appeared everywhere from The Guardian to Cosmopolitan to Girlfriend to The Big Issue. She's appeared just about everywhere in Australia, I'd say, at the Melbourne Wheelers Centre, to the Sydney Opera House, to Adelaide Writers Week, and the Brisbane Writers Festival. I've admired Clementine's work and her as a person for a really long time. And I was so thrilled to be able to sit down and have this conversation. We've ended up

splitting it into two parts because it was just so juicy and she has so much to share. Particularly, we look at her book, I Don't, The Case Against Marriage and also her work, How We Love, but also as a person, as a woman, as a mother who has lived through a huge amount in her life, including the loss of her own mother. And so I really can't wait to share her wisdom with you. I think it might surprise you as well. In this interview, Clem cries about four times, which is very much me. This is a very safe space, taunts to cry a lot. But I think you'll see when you listen to her talking that Clementine has a huge depth and warmth to her. So I cannot wait for you to meet her. Here she is, Clementine Ford. We're so classic.

Just an absolute comedy of errors. You know what I did? I went upstairs to look for my headphones and I actually was like, oh, just make the bed quickly. You know, you're like, if I don't make that doona straight right now, then something bad's going to happen. I just have to do it, you know? Yeah, I know, completely. I know. Anyway, it's all right. I was saying I've been through six pairs of headphones, of AirPods so far, which is so expensive. I just cannot for the life of me,

they're so hard and I can't remember to put them in a little container. Anyway, but yeah, what a comedy of errors and it's really nice to feel seen. Well, it's very interesting when we're, about motherhood as well, because I mean, there's so much about motherhood that is very new in terms of how we pathologize it, how we construct it, how we even understand its role. But something that I think that I was going to say all mothers, but it's certainly also a very privileged position to take. And a privileged oppression is maybe too strong a word for what I privileged position to take. And a privileged oppression is maybe too strong a word for what I'm trying to say, but a privileged criticism to make of mothers as well

is this idea that we're always kind of playing catch up with our task list. And I feel very strongly about that for obvious reasons in that firstly, it's true. And I'm a single mom with lots of privilege. So I don't suffer the same kinds of impacts that a lot of single mothers suffer. And I think when you can kind of move in and out of very privileged spheres and milieus, then that also diminishes whatever you feel. But the fact remains that I still am very time poor and I still have to, you know, do all the things. And it's really a crazy function of capitalism and of Western privilege and of white supremacy as well, I think, to firstly construct motherhood as this moral imperative, as the kind of angel of the house that, you know, the sort of very Victorian era ideal that was created in the 19th century, the 18th and 19th centuries. Very privileged and capitalist to do that and then blame women for responding to it but also absorb as part of that whole narrative the intractability of the time poor mother,

that this is just what motherhood is. It's just being time poor because what kind of is really like underpinning all of that is that as mothers and as white middle-class mothers, again, in particular, we are supposed to devote our life to our children. And the reason I make that racial distinction is because it is a function of racism, capitalism and white supremacy, and even like very traditional conservative ideals about women and motherhood and, you know, what we've lost and what women need to get back to doing. And we hear people saying that like women need to get back to raising their kids and being stay-at-home mothers and we're missing out. They don't mean women of

colour. They don't mean poor women. They don't mean single mothers. They don't mean the women who have traditionally always worked and traditionally always worked in what is considered to be menial tasks and menial labour, domestic care work. They don't mean those women because capitalism and white supremacy relies on the drastically underpaid and disrespected work and exploitation of women of colour in particular in order to function and survive. But in order to conceal everything that's going on there and to maintain white supremacy at the top levels and to maintain male power at the top levels, they need

to enlist white middle-class and upper middle-class women to perform that role of the domestic angel of the house, the loving woman who's waiting at home for, you know, the successful banker or whoever he is to come home and fix him his slippers and his drink and give him a kiss and have the children all perfectly washed and put to bed. I mean, it's a myth, like that never existed. Stephanie Kuntz, who wrote Marriage and History, and she's one of the foremost sort of anthropologists in the world on the history of marriage. She calls it the long decade between around 1950 and 1964, where in this post-war boom period in America, this very white middle-class ideal of like the woman staying at home and the man going out to work was required by the system to essentially like recodify roles, men coming home from the war and feeling

like, well, we've been sort of usurped. So you need to reinstate their egos and you need to reinstate their purpose. And also that women were gaining more and more independence after, and again, women of a particular milieu because poor women have always worked and always organised but always had much more kind of impacted and limited movement throughout society, obviously, for obvious reasons.

And so all these women who were, you know, they'd won the right to go to university, they were essentially like women in the 1920s were experiencing this feminist awakening. And women in the 1920s were, it was the post-World War I period. And every era post-war has some kind of social upheaval and social change and social progress or what is perceived to be social progress. And post-World War I, people were like out to party. And women, you know, they cut their hair short, they started exposing more skin, very scandalous. Obviously, it was post-suffragette era, they were their hair short, they started exposing more skin, very scandalous.

Obviously, it was post-suffragette era, they were now able to go to university, some of them. And that's really scary. Any kind of oppressed or marginalized group of people gaining power and mobility in the world is very scary, obviously, for the powers that be. So this mythology about what the family was like and what the family should look like and what mothers in particular, the caring, nurturing woman, what she should be really doubled down in that conservative era in post-World War II. And it drew on really historically recent ideas about what motherhood was, which prior to, you know, the late, prior to like the 17th and 18th centuries when science was beginning to move away from this sort of, obviously societies were still very religious, but science was becoming less seen as like a quack field of exploration and more men of science, men of science understanding the world. And one of the things that, as I found in my book, one of the things that became sort of essential to that project was in order to quell this uprising of, again, I'm going to say it again, middle to upper class white women who

will, and I would say that it's the audience of my book, but also I'm intentionally using, I'm intentionally bringing to the book the reality that marriage is sold to a particular group of women, that group of women, white middle class women, in order to uphold oppressive systems. Because we need to believe that somehow we exist outside of the system. And we need to believe that we also need the system in order to be safe. And that's what I found so fascinating about your book. I have to say as well, congratulations on I Don't because it's brilliant. Thank you. And what I found so interesting was I read How We Love again before this interview, and I just love that book. And I found it so

fascinating that you moved from that book to this book. I wanted to ask you why you decided to write I Don't moving from How We Love in that way. And I wrote How We Love because I was very burnt out after writing my second book, Boys Will Be Boys, which had a lot of really distressing content to kind of wade through. You know, it's sort of a book that I almost had like a, I won't say a nervous breakdown, but I had a real mental collapse afterwards. And partly that was because I was also realizing that I wanted to leave my relationship, the relationship that I had with my son's father, which I will say actually that relationship didn't end, it changed. And so there is for anyone listening as well, I think one of the things that I tried to do with I Don't and also

with How We Love was to really articulate that if you're a woman, you have one chance to live this life. Now, without getting too much into people's personal faith or spiritual beliefs, I personally think that we have, that there's a much higher kind of power or a much higher kind of creation. And I like to think that we may be here multiple times to learn different lessons, but that's by the by. We have one chance to learn what we need to learn in this life and to do what we need to do in this life. And so often women are taught to live their lives for everybody else. And so many women stay in relationships that are unhappy. And I'm not going to discredit the fact

that for a lot of reasons, that's financial, because again, the system has specifically designed itself to make women have fewer options and in some cases have no other options than this one financial pathway that allows them and their children to, you know, not be living on the streets. And the fact of the matter is that we should be, all of us, rallying against any kind of circumstances in which women have to choose between poverty or disrespect at best or abuse at worst, particularly for their children. So I was kind of in this position where I was like I had a real mental collapse. I've got now I know ADHD, which makes things difficult, but I also have OCD, which I knew at the time. So I've got patterns of intrusive thinking and so my thoughts were kind of the mental collapse for me

is like just months essentially of thinking the same torturous things over and over and over. And in my case, it was this repeat image that I had of committing a certain kind of self-harm against myself, which when that happens, you're like, something is wrong in my life. And I am fixating my intrusive thinking on this one thing that I will never do because I can't focus on what it is that I need to do. When I realized what I needed to do, which was to leave this situation that was really suffocating me in many ways, things got a lot better. And so I wrote How We Love because I needed a little bit of respite from hard topics. And also because I think you can get, it's so easy to be put into boxes, especially when you do work like this.

And I know from experience that people think, and sometimes it benefits them to think this and to not look too much deeper that I'm just an angry man, hating, unhappy, perpetually humorless shrew who really just needs to lighten up and, you know, find a boyfriend. Not that any of them will have you, which is obviously like completely reductive. And people say those things because they can't handle listening to what you have to say. So I also know that despite people thinking that, I do have this very soft, deep side to me. You know, I'm a Cancerian. I have like water energy. I don't cry a lot because I've also got a lot of earth and air energy in me, but

I think a lot about human connection and I think a lot about why we make the choices that we do. And I try to really understand, certainly in my personal relationships, I try to really understand why people behave the way that they do and why certain things, you know, it's all that self-work. Like if you spend a lot of time with your past selves, with who you were as like a three-year-old, a five-year-old, a 10-year-old, whatever, so many of those versions of ourselves, particularly as women, we spend our lives trying to outrun. We're like, I don't want to be my teenage self because I hated myself then. And she reminds me of how uncool I was, or I think I thought I was ugly or whatever.

But actually like a really helpful thing for people to do is do a lot of that inner child work and spend some time with yourselves and listen to what they're saying to you, but what kind of life they want to have and how much they love and champion you. It's very hard to hate yourself when you can hear yourself telling your other self saying, we love you, please look after us. And that's what I loved about the epilogue of How We Love. And I want to read a tiny little passage I know is awful sometimes when someone else reads your words back to you, but I want to do this. Oh, no, I love that.

I love to hear what people, you know, found resonant. One of the things I found resonant was the way you describe home to you, which I thought was just so beautiful. But this little passage I'll read first and then I'll ask you a question. There is love in this place, just like there is love everywhere we care to look for it. There is beauty and there is hope and there is a boy and there is a mother and there is the past and there is the future. But most importantly, there is now and everything that exists between them that has got them from one moment to the next. The now is where we find the golden glow, where for the briefest of moments, the sky rips open and we see

what it is we are made of. Tell me a story, he asked me. And so I begin. Oh my God, you just made me cry with my own words. Because they're stunning. They're absolutely stunning. Well, I think it takes you back to that moment as well, doesn't it? Where you remember that chapter in particular. I love that you chose that for an excerpt because it was kind of a bit more experimental than some of the other chapters because I write it in both the first person and the third person. And to me, some people didn't get that when they read the book. They were like, it's not, that chapter wasn't very funny or it was sort of like a bit esoteric or whatever.

But I feel like that to me was exactly the experience of, oh, sorry. It's just like, you've just taken me right back there. Not in a bad way. It's just like, it's good to feel these feelings. So Virgo full moon on Saturday. So we're all about like feeling our feelings and healing past wounds. I feel like that's so much of what early motherhood is, particularly when you become a single mom and you're sort of trying to figure out who you are and how you can create this new space, not just for you and your child, but for you and hopefully the other parent, if there is one who you want to maintain a good relationship with for the benefit of the child. And because you still, no matter what, have a family. It doesn't matter if you're still

sleeping in the same bed, your family will always be there. And it's so confusing becoming a mother, becoming a mother under the systems that expect us to be all things to our children. You know, as I said that I'm sort of aware that some women don't have the luxury of spending a lot of time navel gazing about what it means to be a mother. But I also feel that every woman or every person who becomes a mother, a birth parent in particular, should have the luxury of being able to navel-gaze about what that means because you're creating a human life through your body. And the love that you feel for it, maybe not immediately. I didn't really know what it meant to love my child when he first came out of me. In fact, I've only really in the last couple of years been able to even connect him with being the same, like very often still I'll say the baby

because to me it was like this very traumatic event and you become a completely different person after you give birth and physically you've been torn asunder. Emotionally, there is no coming back from where it is. It's like you've gone through some kind of, you know, multicolored interdimensional space hole. There's no coming back through the other side. Like you just can't. And I think a lot of women, I write about this in I Don't as well, a lot of women who have children with men where those relationships end up not working out or where the men sort of like really reveal themselves to be unwilling to change and unwilling to follow her through that multicolored hole and see what kind of incredible universe she's created with her body and with her emotional landscape to like really be in awe of that. I think that they expect that, you know, well, I'm just adding a baby and then the woman and the baby will just revolve around me. And then I'll still feel like very honored and kind of celebrated by this family that I've constructed around myself so that I can continue to be the

star in my own galaxy. But the women before they have their first baby are often like this baby will make our family complete or the second baby will make our family complete, whatever it might be. But they have this idea, when he becomes a father, I will look at him with like such like love and reverence and I'll feel protected and it will just like deepen our love. And I think a lot of women think, and he will look at me with the same evolution of love. He will see that I'm like, I'm the one he had the baby with, you know, and I'm, there's all these patriarchal ideas about becoming special to men. And sometimes, you know, some relationships have evolved men who can do that. And then a lot of women in other circumstances are really disappointed. And I

don't think that there's a lot of space in the theoretical idea of what it means to have a child. And there can't be this because you're not through the portal yet. You have no entry there. You can only go through the portal once you've given birth to another human being. And that's not to say, by the way, that somehow that makes people special. I don't think it makes people special. I think it's just a different experience that you theoretically imagine that this baby will create this life. And you think, I'll love the baby. It'll be perfect and amazing. There's actually no accounting for the primality of what that feeling is and how once the baby arrives, even if you don't like the baby, even if you don't feel sort of,

even if you're very scared of the baby and the responsibility that the baby poses, in most circumstances, unless you need intervention and help, which all women should be provided with if they need it, and certainly like be much more closely monitored for, mostly you're going to feel this primal need to protect this tiny creature because you know that the creature cannot protect itself. And if the man that you've had the baby with is there suddenly not fulfilling what you now see to be his end of the bargain, which is that he not only treat you with reverence for having done this incredible thing, but that also he fucking help.

You do this monumental task now of keeping the baby alive. You just have no space for him in your life. You're like you either come through the portal with me or you don't because I cannot keep pretending that I am like able to come back to get you. Because it says in your book you say, well, you are a human who went to the mystery to bring back the child that was hers. And, I mean, God, Clint, that is a hit. I can't claim credit for that line though.

That comes from there's a birth educator called Janice Jadelska. And she talks about actually for the benefit of your audience, I really want to read her whole quote because it's, it's so beautiful. It's such a beautiful way to really honor the birth experience, no matter how you have it. It's from an article that she wrote called the last days of pregnancy. And it's about that liminal space between, you know, you're 38 weeks pregnant and the baby could come any second or it could be four weeks away. And so you're in that strange like waiting room of between life and not life. And it's so odd and bizarre to think that, you know, every second kind of stretches out into hours. She says to give birth, whether at home in a birth tub with candles and family or in a surgical suite with machines and a neonatal team.

She writes a woman, but I'm going to say a person, obviously, in acknowledgement that not all people who give birth are women. A person must go to the place between this world and the next, to that thin membrane between here and there, to the place where life comes from, to the mystery, in order to reach over to bring forth the child that is theirs. I'm going to cry again. The heroic tales of Odysseus are with us each ordinary day. This round person is not going into battle, but they are going to the edge of their being where every resource they have will be called on to assist in this journey. We need time and space to prepare for that journey. And somewhere deep inside us at a primal level, our cells and hormones and mind and soul know this and begin the work with or without our awareness. And I feel like when I read that, someone sent it to me when I was in that weird waiting room. And I thought

that is exactly what we need to hear about this majestic thing that we're doing. And I think that the flip side, why it's so important, you know, the work that you're doing as well, the flip side of this kind of pretense of reverence and honoring that we have of motherhood, oh, it's the most important thing that a woman can do. If you don't do it, then you won't understand what love is, which is honestly bullshit. It's just a different kind of love. It's one that has been incredibly important and empowering to my life, but not all people who do it would honestly be able to say the same thing. But so there's this like pretense of reverence. But the reality is, oh, don't go on about it.

It's not that fucking special. People do it all the time. Like get over it. My taxes should pay for you to have a baby. Exactly. My taxes should pay for your body to be repaired afterwards. Because it's actually so bloody and violent and has the darkness that also is existent in nature.

And so this idea of natural birth is best or natural this or natural that, nature is dark and brutal and it is going to war as well as light and joyful. Exactly. And, you know, in the same way that in nature, this is a very dark thing I'm about to say, in the same way that in nature, this is a very dark thing I'm about to say, in the same way that in nature some mothers reject certain babies for whatever reason. We don't know what's going on

in the sort of cellular makeup there. Whatever it is, there's something that causes children to be abandoned. Not every mother of the human variety feels necessarily connected to their baby or ever will. And I think that that's a really difficult, it's obviously made incredibly difficult for women to admit and, you know, an awful thing as well because no child would ever want to hear that. But the impossibility of being able to have really true and frank, honest conversations outside of podcasts like this that are often between women

who have become mothers, the impossibility of that even being an allowed conversation because of conservative backlash and this insistence that, no, motherhood is this and if you slam motherhood then you're a broken woman and you're actually an aberration and there's something wrong with you. It's deliberate because women aren't supposed to talk about how hard it is. Women aren't supposed to talk about how transformative it is. And also women aren't allowed to be proud of anything. The only thing we're allowed to be proud of is being the most sacrificial woman we can be. The one who gives

up everything for her children. The one who loves her husband more than anything, the one who never complains, the angelic, the woman on the pedestal who doesn't have any emotions or feelings of herself, only what patriarchy projects onto her and who willingly plays that role because she just loves it so much. Any kind of step away from that is a threat to the system. And if you have women in particular talking honestly about what motherhood means and about how challenging it can be and about how, you know, just emotionally undoing. Yeah, completely. More women might choose not to do it. And that's very dangerous for the system. Completely. I totally agree. And that's part of my work, working with that word

matrescence, which is equivalent to adolescence in its size and scope. It kind of came originally from Dana Raphael in the 1970s, but then Aurelie Aethon re-vibed it in 2016 because she was working with women, new mothers as a clinical psychologist, and they didn't have a word to kind of explain just how seismic the shift was. And so she kind of discovered this word and gave it to them. And it puts a word, you know, words are powerful and it put a word around their experience that it's not just a six month postpartum thing. It's a lifelong thing. It's at least seven to eight years. What was it like for you to transform into this new role while integrating yourself as a writer, as an activist, as a feminist? How did you go with that? I had a very privileged transition in many ways because I was able to financially care for myself.

I'm not rich by any stretch of the imagination, despite what some people might think. I rent, I'll never be able to own a house probably. But I was able to sort of make enough of a living and also in a field where I could continue to work after the baby was born. There you go, the baby. After the baby was born, because I didn't have to worry about, you know, whether or not I was going to be phased out of my job or whether or not the organization that I worked for had like good sort of maternity leave policies. Now, on the other hand, I also didn't have any maternity leave policies at all as a freelancer. And the editors that I was working for at the time at

Daily Life did provide me with six weeks pay as a sort of discretion, a discretionary kind of thing, which was great. But I don't have any super, I don't have sick leave, I don't have paid leave or any of that, but I could keep working. And I also worked, when I say privilege as well, my book came out seven weeks after the baby was born. And so I went on a book tour with my first book, Fight Like a Girl, when he was like seven, eight weeks old, seven and a half weeks old, I think. And in a way, firstly, I didn't really stop working after he was born, which potentially now I would look back on and think, well, maybe I should have taken some time, but I just simply didn't have that option. And you know what? Much more privileged position to be in to be like,

well, I had to tour a book. Then, well, I work in a factory and I didn't have any options to take any time off. Like a lot of women around the world just do not have an option to take time off after having a baby, which isn't to say that women shouldn't advocate for that. It's just that we need to advocate that for all of us. There needs to be this time and space for all women to recover from birth. But I went on a book tour and I, because I hadn't stopped working, I sort of hadn't lost momentum either. And I think that that's another kind of thing that I feel like if I'd stopped producing ideas, even in myself, if I stopped producing the work that I'd already been doing, even without a baby, if you take a break for a few weeks, even it can be hard

to get back into the swing of things. You know, you have to kind of like all creativity, all work as a muscle. So the fact that I just kept the muscle flexed meant that it was easier to kind of keep doing it, even though I also had this baby to look after. But I also worked in a field where, I mean, who's going to say to the feminist author touring her first book about, you know, fighting back against the system, who's going to say, well, you can't bring your baby on stage with you, you know? And that's, when I say that that's a privilege, that's what I mean is that I could take him everywhere. And I knew that no one would dare to say it's not appropriate for him to be at this work event because of the risk, maybe they might. Maybe they might have wanted to say it and they might have otherwise said it

to other women. But in a small way it was like being able to say, see, this is possible. Like women can actually bring their babies to work with them within, you know, obviously you don't want a baby in an industrial kitchen, but why can't babies be on the floor of Parliament House? Why can't babies be in the Senate? Why can't babies be on stages? Why can't babies be on the floor of parliament house why can't babies be in the senate why can't babies be on stages why can't babies be at the library like there's and that is a very western white mentality as well that we need to segregate babies and therefore mothers from society because

we just hate children oh god children are so annoying we need to have children free flights and children free cafes it's like there are a lot of places in society that are actually kid-free. And I'm okay with that. I don't want to have kids at nightclubs. I don't want to have kids at the casino. I think it's okay if a hotel wants to be like, we're a kid-free hotel. I'm fine with that. But this sort of ease that so many people have to feel free to joke about and sneer at like children being present just in ordinary environments and circumstances like firstly fuck you because that's an attack on mothers and i get it i've been there before i became a mother i thought that was funny too you know i thought that that made me cool and edgy and interesting because we don't, like our society in particular, really hates mothers and really hates being

forced to spend time with the reality of motherhood. It's very comfortable with, and it loves pushing women into becoming mothers because it needs obviously women to do that labor in order to create the next generation of taxpayers, in order to create the next generation of workers. But it doesn't want to be reminded of what that looks like. And it doesn't want to actually have to think, well, if we allow women into our spheres who are doing that work, but who also potentially might have the capacity to change some of these spheres and to make them more family friendly. Again, that changes everything that we know about how do we shuttle women out of the workplace to make sure that we keep concentrating the bulk of financial earning

capacity to a particular kind of man and therefore keep women in service to doing this job and this role. So that, you know, as I say, and I don't, and this is something that I heard from Elizabeth Gilbert first, if you have a woman at home who has a partner and let's say a husband in particular who's working for the system and she also has two, three children maybe, sometimes four, there's a unit of people then that she can be relied upon to take care of for free. She makes sure that they're fed. She makes sure that they're washed.

She makes sure that their clothes are clean. She makes sure that they go to school, she makes sure that they go to work. She especially takes care of the itemized needs of the man who needs to go to work and work for the capitalist system. She makes sure that his clothes are clean, that he's fed, that he's taking care of himself. She makes sure that he lives longer. Statistically speaking, married men live longer than unmarried men. And if that work can all be done for free, it's work that the state doesn't have to pay for. The state can avoid having to fulfill its financial obligations to its citizens by saying, well, every single person in this country, regardless of family background, will have access to a good education, will have access to healthcare, will have access to clean food,

to clean water, to a roof over their head. That's very expensive. And that's a lot of bombs that you don't get to buy and send to other places to drop on other people's families. I want to say this now. Thank you so much for the fierceness with which you exist in the world as a person who is also a cancer, who has that big soft heart that walks around feeling and noticing everything. I just am in awe of your ability to articulate things so fast and in such a succinct way, but to also feel everything deeply and still be so fierce in your ability to defend and be constantly in that space. How do you look after yourself when you're doing that constantly? Well, thank you for saying that. I should also, you know, for anyone who's tuning out because of the constant references to astrology, like it's another surprising thing about me that I'm very into astrology. I read tarot cards,

crystals, you know, spiritual alignment, like my energy centers. I'm all about that work because firstly, I feel like it's had a huge benefit to my life to try and be grounded and centered and to learn how to meditate. And secondly, because I enjoy and it's important to me to think not just about how we may all have connections between us as humans, even if it's so easy to get angry and even if there's so much violence and hatred and bigotry and there are systems that I fight against, I want to be governed always by the ways in which we can be connected rather than the ways in which we can be connected rather than the ways in which we can be torn apart. And also I want to believe that there's something more purposeful to all of this. Now, other people may not believe that at all, but like, I want to believe that there is,

there are reasons that we are driven to be better beyond just, well, we should just be better because we should just be better. Now we should just be better because we should just be better. We should just be better for a moral imperative to take care of all living things. But I don't know, I feel like it's helpful for me when I'm really angry and I'm really like in my impulsive temper to try and think like, what is going on here? Why has this person said this? Why is this person behaving in this way? What is this? You know, I don't want to be that kind of lean into that wellness speak where they're like, that's your trauma talking. That's so overused. And it's often misused by people who really don't know what they're doing and who can be very dangerous to people. But I do think that we

probably mostly lash out in personal ways, like in interpersonal fights because of some like trauma or wounds that we have that kind of speaks to that, you know? I mean, that sort of seems to be obviously why so many people get angry at each other on social media, why I get angry at people on social media. So that's sort of like covers the astro stuff. As a Cancerian, I actually have very little cancer in my chart. I've got sun in Cancer and Venus is just on the very cusp of my next house. A lot of my energy, I'm a Gemini moon and rising, and it's very air-based. And so I feel like in a lot of ways, I do have a very big kind of like emotional capacity, but I feel like because

there's so much sort of like air energy too, Like I spent a lot of time thinking and I'm, I don't really, when people say things like, oh, I'm an empath, sometimes I think like, are you, or are you just self-involved? Because I don't know, a lot of times people say they're an empath and I don't see them behaving particularly empathetically. So I don't feel like I absorb people's emotions in that way. I feel like I, I can kind of do that work because I'm protected from really like taking on the emotional weight that people are feeling, which in some ways is very helpful, particularly if you're doing a lot of work about, you know, violence against women. It's not that you intellectualize it, but there is a barrier between me and the personal experience of it because I'm not absorbing the feeling. And I,

and again, in a very privileged way, I don't have direct personal experience of some of the worst things that I hear about. So I can kind of do it without being in it, you know? And I also think that the more important point there is that so often any activist, and I don't know that I necessarily class myself as an activist because I think there are a lot of people who are much better equipped and trained and more knowledgeable about how to do activism than I am. I'm just someone who speaks loudly, I think. I mean, who tries to work collaboratively with people and has this idea of what I think a better world can look like for all people. And who's also

trying to learn all the time. I think that one of the things that's been so helpful for me personally and should be helpful for all people is getting to your middle years. I find it so interesting when I refer to myself as middle-aged and people are like, what are you talking about? Because I'm turning 43 this year. And a lot of women will be like, middle-aged? How can you be middle-aged? If you're middle-aged, then what does that make me?

And it's like, I don't know, probably middle-aged because guess what? Like I'm not 25 anymore. I'm, I'm 42. And if we, if our adult years, if our adolescence, our youth and our adolescence is one to 20, and then our young adult years are 20 to 40, and then our middle years are 40 to 60. And then our older years, our elderly years are 60 to 80. That to me is like a pretty good run, you know? And I'm very comfortable with the idea that I'm in my middle age now, that I'm in my middle years, because with middle age comes wisdom, with middle age comes a sort of a softening of certain aspects of yourself and a more resilient aspect of others. And also, I'm not as hungry for particular fights anymore.

I will fight them if I think that they're important, but I don't feel like stimulated by them anymore the way that I did when I was 25 when everything is so much more kind of like clear to you, so much more clear and like binary. Yeah, and I think that that energy is really helpful in lots of ways. Like I respect so much of that, energy is really helpful in lots of ways. Like I respect so much of that, the activism and the work of Gen Z and, and how they remind me of how I was at that age, even though this we've evolved so much in terms of how we understand, you know, equal rights

and, and liberation as we always should, we should always be looking to the next generation to help us evolve to the next space. But as a middle-aged woman now, I'm like, I just sometimes also want to spend some time in, you know, in the park, just like sitting against a tree and thinking about what is the meaning of life? And, you know, what does it mean to me to be a mother? Like, how can I be a better mother? How can I be not the best mother? No one's going to be the best mother. What does it mean to me to be a good mother? How can I parent my child in a way that I needed to be parented but wasn't?

How can I always create space for him to say exactly what he thinks and to not be judged negatively? How can I make him feel like he can always trust me even if what he has to tell me is hard? How can I always challenge myself to, you know, really like unequivocally say sorry, not just to him, but to maybe to other people as well, like the practice of like, of sitting in your wrongness or sitting in your mistakes. So I think that all of that comes actually from a place of, you know, increasing wisdom that I'm

not saying that I'm like an enormously wise person, but I'm, I think I'm wiser than I was when I was younger, just through experience. And I'm, and I'm open to more, I'm like not as defensive or not as like determined to prove myself to people, which is again, actually for anyone listening, who's considering meditation, something meditation has been very helpful with. It's kind of been really good to sort of sit there and go, well, what is the point of having this conversation? What is the point of having this fight? Do I need to like go in and if someone doesn't like me,

they might not like me for very good reasons and it's okay. Like it's okay to not be liked. It's okay to be hated actually. It's fine. It's fine. It's not going to change my, my like right to breathe air in the world. And it's not going to change their right to breathe air. And it's not going to change the fact that ultimately if it came down to it, I would still wade in to protect them from something I thought was, was harming them. And I would hope that we would all have that capacity to do that to each other. And I think

actually that comes from a place of love. So that's a long-winded way of saying that when I think people look at this work that I do and the way that I do it and they say, well, she's just a hater. She's so angry all the time. If I were angry all the time, I would be doing very different work. If I were angry all the time, I would probably be in a state of mental collapse right now because you couldn't hold that much anger with you all the time and see so little progress or be constantly met with other people's anger and come out of it truly unscathed. I think that the desire to fight for a better world and to fight for liberation for, from like harmful ideas and

from harmful systems inextricably comes from a place of love because you do it for love. You do it knowing that it will bring harm to you, knowing that it will bring criticism and knowing that it will bring, you know, in my cases and in the case of many other people, death threats, like highly graphic descriptions of things people want to do to you and even just really personal insults. Like you don't do that because you're like, I just hate everything. You do that because you're like, I am doing it in spite of that because I love people and I love this world and I love life

and I love the idea of helping to create a better world for my son and showing him what like looking to create a better world for my son and showing him what like looking to create a better world looks like for him as well. You know, it's, it's, I really feel like we've sanitized this idea of love to this point where we think that it is just kind of, that it's not fierce. There's no ferocity to love. But when you think as a mother about the way that you would protect your child or your children, and people talk about like the lioness energy or whatever. Like I would kill a man if they hurt my child or I would like rip someone to pieces. I'd lift a car off of my child.

That ferocity is love. Like that's pure love. And it's not sweet. It's not nice. It's not calm. It's not gentle. And it's certainly not weak. That was so beautiful.

I haven't heard love described in that way. You've been listening to a podcast with me, Claire Twente, and this week with the wonderful Clementine Ford. For more from Clementine, you can head to her Instagram account, Clementine underscore Ford. And for more from me, you can go to at Claire Twente on Instagram or on my website, clairetwente.com. I'm actually a musician and I'm touring around at the moment singing songs and I love to come and visit communities. So if you have a community of women that might be interested in me coming to sing some songs and have some tea and talk about matrescence, I would love to hear from you. You can email

Shana at hello at Claire20.com. I'm also heading to the UK for the Matressence Festival and some other gigs as well in June. And so if you're over in the UK, I would love to see you at one of those events. For all of that information, you can sign up to my newsletter in the link below and also head over to my website, claire20 underscore events slash events or something like that. Anyway, it's over there at claire20.com with all the info. And as always, thank you to Raw Collings for editing this week's episode and to Maisie for running our socials. Alrighty, talk to you soon. Bye.