TONTS. - Motherhood, Midwifery & Witchcraft with Clementine Ford Part Two

Episode Date: March 31, 2024

This is Part Two of my conversation with writer, feminist thinker and broadcaster Clementine Ford.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 in-depth 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, artists, thinkers, and deeply feeling humans about their stories. Now, if you haven't gone and listened to last

week's episode, I really recommend you heading back over and listening to that one first, because this is the second half of my interview with the writer, speaker, and feminist thinker, Clementine Ford. In this episode, we look deeper into the power of friendship and what the love of her friends really means to Clementine. We talk more about her mum and what she meant to her and what the love of her friends really means to Clementine. We talk more about her mum and what she meant to her and what she taught her about witches and witchcraft, the arguments against marriage and what's next for her, including her podcast, Untethered.

We also talk about the power of singing. So here she is for part two of my interview with Clementine Ford. I wanted to ask you about your love for your friends. I know that's a really important part of the love that you have in the world. I have, I was just describing to someone this morning, one of my closest friends, Libby, who I do a show with. I was sort of saying like, you know, we have the kind of closeness where our love is completely non-sexual.

I also really hate how people confuse like they think that the greater your love is or the more like intimate and like passionate your love is, it necessarily has to be sexual. Like I know that with Libby and I, people think, oh, they must be having sex or they must be in love with each other or why aren't they or whatever it is. It's like I actually think that sex oftentimes diminishes the capacity that people have to love each other. I don't think that we're meant to do everything with the people that we love the most.

I don't think that, and again, to mention Stephanie Koontz, one of the things that she said was really sort of damaging for marriage because yes, we can say that women historically didn't have many rights within it, but marriage as a business partnership kind of made more sense in lots of ways than marriage as we construct it now, which is love is too flimsy. Sexual love is too flimsy a foundation to kind of try and build a family and to build a home on. And that's why a lot of people get really despondent when it doesn't work out and they feel like they failed in some way. They feel like it's some inherent problem with them. And also because we've been sold all of these lies about like what

real love looks like. Every woman I know though, if they have the great privilege of having deep, close emotional bonds with women, would hands down say the women are the ones, the women in their lives are the ones that they love truly the most. And we honor that kind of friendship even through pop culture, but it's never seen as being the same as like sexual love. Sexual love is still the peak. And I just think that that's really wrong. And so Libby and I have this very deep emotional bond that as I described to this this person today, I said it was like a tweet I saw recently where they said lovers but not as in sexual lovers and not as in siblings but as in two cats that have bonded and need to be adopted out together.

You know, it's that kind of like it's an imprinting on each other's souls. You know, people talk about twin flames or whatever it might be, soulmates. I think that our soulmates, I think we can be lucky to have lots of soulmates in our life, not lots, but like a few. And it's people who really speak to you on that sort of deep blueprint of a level where you feel like you are just twin flames kind of there together. And I think that a lot of my friendships have that energy to them to varying degrees and I'm very fiercely protective of them. So to me, my friendships are the most important loves outside of my love for my son that I have. And I don't put them second to anything. Most of my deepest friendships, if they're partnered, they don't

view their partner as like their primary, but actually most of them are not partnered because it just doesn't work if you're sort of having to compete with other people. And I really feel like, you know, I was saying to a different friend today that I'm not interested in like posting a lot of content about my private life in general online. I think that people post way too much private stuff. I really hate seeing particularly people with large public platforms posting about their children. I think that it's a huge violation of privacy. I don't think that the children can, you know,

really give knowing informed consent to it, particularly when you're talking about people with like platforms of like 400,000 people and upwards. There's a lot of people who are being given really intimate insight into a child that cannot possibly know what that means. And I think about some of the meltdowns that I had as a kid, you know, particularly now knowing that I'm neurodivergent, some of the meltdowns that I had where I felt completely outside myself in a ball of rage in really embarrassing ways for my mother, I'm sure. If that was filmed and put online and used as some kind of like way for my parent to connect

with their audience or to like build content or to build a profile, we're starting to see now the first generation of YouTube kids coming out and talking about how damaging their childhoods were for them. And I think we're only going to see an increase in that. And the flip side of that as well is that when you make your children, your content, your children then learn that that is what, that is how they relate to you for a start. And I'm not saying that like, obviously everyone who uses their kids for content, I'm not saying that they all only use their kids for content. Of course there'll be private moments, but there is an aspect that like if you're helping mummy and daddy make money, then that's our relationship

and you don't have any labour laws to protect you. We don't even necessarily need to give you the money, but like you're just part of this family business now. And I think it also skews the way that kids understand that kind of Lacanian principle of looking at themselves in a mirror. You know, the first time a child looks in the mirror and recognizes that that is them, as opposed to them being, you know, just an extension of their mother or like a sort of an entity that's kind of floating in time and space. Like they go, wow, that mirror, that is me.

And if you're teaching kids that the mirror is actually the phone, that the mirror is watching how they perform and how they present themselves to the world, and that's what's important. How can a child with such like, you know, elastic neuroplasticity, how can a child possibly be given any opportunity to really figure out who they are when everything they're learning about who they should be is coming from this endless feedback loop of likes and praise and content creation. So to circle back there, I don't put my kid online. The rare times that he appears, you'll never see his face. I've never mentioned his name. Some very like scurrilous people who think that they know what his name will deliberately use it online.

And I find that really disgraceful. You know, if you're making a point of not sharing a private detail about a child, and then you go in order to like get back at that child's parent because you hate them, you decide to put that child at risk or to expose that child. That just makes you a fucking shitty person and you have no moral high ground. But even with friends, it's like, I'm increasingly of the view, and maybe this is also from being middle-aged, that I don't want people to know I have my work and my work is public and that's fine. And sometimes people who I'm friends with who are also public figures will be part of that space. But I don't

want to expose my friends who are not public people to anyone associating their hatred of me with them, to anyone possibly throwing them in the line of abuse, or even just to suggest to people that my life and every aspect of it belongs to you or is somehow observable to you in this way that gives me a weird bit of power too. Like the same friend I was talking to about friendships and the importance of not putting all of your private life online. She's, she's a public figure and she's sort of the same is that hate even that term public figure, you know, it's just so fucking wank. Like we were saying that we can't complain about parasocial relationships and this, and parasocial relationships are real and they can be very damaging where, you know, like yesterday I woke up and someone sent me a message, someone who I don't know,

I've never really like interacted beyond the five times that they've messaged me asking me to like have a crack at someone, you know, or whatever, or saying like, you helped me with this. And they, they form this parasocial relationship with you in their mind. And then obviously I've done or said something recently that they don't like. And they're like, I used to respect you and your views, but you have really been what you're doing lately. Ain't it? And you're better than this. And I was like, who are you? I don't know you. I don't work for you. I don't belong to you. Who are you to come? Who are you whose face I can't even see to come and say to me that you're disappointed in me because of all the things that you used to love that I did, now I've done something

that you don't like. And so I must change to go back to the person that made you feel good all the time. And I think that's really dangerous. And we often hear from public figures about this sort of like toxicity of the parasocial relationships. But people have to own their own part in that. And they have to say, okay, well, if I want to like tell you off for saying that you're disappointed in me or whatever, for having that parasocial relationship or for globbing

onto me, whatever it might be, conversations I've heard people in these spheres, these public people sort of like complain about these parasocial relationships. Why are you inviting everyone into your life at all times? Why are you sharing photographs of your first, like fucking hard launching relationships and then sharing breakup videos, explaining to your followers why, you know, yeah, you haven't seen them on online a bit. It's because, well, this is the statement. Why are you sharing photographs of your birthday party

with all of your mates? You're like, your wedding anniversary, your wedding day, like all of these intimate, personal, private moments that we have in our life that exist whether or not we're there to like capture them on camera and share them with the world. They still exist. They still happened. How can you complain about a parasocial relationship

when every other facet of your existence online invites the viewer to believe for a moment that they are part of your life, to believe that they're your friend? Look, you're not here. You weren't invited to the party, but it's as if you were here. It's as if you're here partying with us. We're going to give you a little glimpse. It's like you can come and touch the skirts of the rich people, but you can't like, don't touch them too much and don't like get grubby with it. Like, but we will be, we'll, my mum always used to say like, practice noblesse oblige and sort of means like rise above basically, like be, be more understanding of people, like try and put yourself in their shoes and don't

be quick to judge, just, be obliging essentially. But I think on the other hand, like, there is this sort of performance of the noblesse oblige, like literally the obligation of the nobility. Like we will allow the poors to come and watch the party but they can't be a part of the party. But if they get to watch the party then they will defend the system that exists to give them the entertainment in which they can watch the party. So don't complain about people like feeling like they own you if you're offering

every single part of your life to them, including your children. Yeah, I completely agree with you. We deliberately, my partner is a YouTuber with quite a big reach and we deliberately don't use our kids' names online and limit what we share for that very reason. And people make all different choices, but that's definitely been something that as primary school teachers we've really been from the very beginning and particularly him, he's been particularly careful about that because I'm much more of an oversharer and he's very private. So that's been something that I completely agree with.

I wanted to say you brought up your mum and I just wanted to say her name's Luciana. Is that right? Is that how you say it? I'm so sorry. I lost my dad 10 years ago this year. Oh, my God. I'm so sorry. Oh, thank you, Clem.

Look, I think our culture doesn't do a very good job of talking about grief, really, or death in general, just like in birth, and that's a whole other topic. But I just wanted to thank you for what you wrote and how we love about her. And what has she taught you about being human? It's interesting. Cause I'm just looking at my video on top of yours in this squad cast window that we've got open and more and more, I see my mom staring back at me and it's, Oh, I just got chills got chills I got goosebumps I've got goosebumps so much it's like running up my the back of my neck it's so special to see I always when I grew up because I've got you know my dad's kind of Celtic colouring I've bleached my hair now but I've

naturally got red hair and I've got freckles. And I always thought growing up, I don't look anything like my mum. And I sort of didn't really look like my mum growing up. And I loved her so much. She was a very complicated woman. And I sort of craved her really because there was a distance, not a distance between us, but just because of her own, the facts of her own life. You know, I've talked about it a little bit. I write about it in the book in How We Love.

You know, her mother was a Lithuanian concentration camp survivor who lost her whole family in the war. That really impacted, obviously, as it would, the terrible atrocities that were inflicted on everyone, you know, who was imprisoned but who, you know, obviously, like people just individually internalise it themselves. So that really impacted how my grandmother was able to mother but who, you know, obviously like people just individually internalize it themselves. So that really impacted how my grandmother was able to mother. And if she even really wanted to be a mother or if just her options were just very limited. I mean, she had four children

by the age of 22 and made some choices about those children that, you know, we couldn't even go into in this podcast because it would take too long, but one day perhaps I'll write about it. Because I've also become a lot more forgiving of those choices as I've gotten older and I've realized again, like not everything's so binary. There was this sort of emotional distance often with my mom where she would just go to a place inside that you couldn't get to her. And a lot of, I mean, it was also like the 80s and the 90s, women's mental health has never really been adequately addressed, but we are in a much better position now than we probably have been for most of at least the recent years of history.

And so she was like very chronically depressed. What we would understand now to be, you know, CPTSD. And it was just untreated. And so you can't really parent or mother, especially under those conditions. And I felt this sort of like craving for her because I just, you just want your mother to like, I found out a few years ago that, and I'm saying this not in any way to like invite people to judge my mother. It just is what it is that I'm the youngest of three children. I'm very certainly an accident.

And my mum was, my mum and my dad met in England and he brought her back to Australia with two kids when she was pregnant with me. She didn't realise she was pregnant with me. And she had a child here in Australia when he went back to the Middle East to work. He was a rigger. And so she was on this farm out in western Queensland with my grandparents who were very authoritarian and sort of quite cold. And she was this sort of passionate like South American.

She was born in Guyana and moved to England when she was 10, this passionate like South American woman. And she just didn't fit in into society. And so she was also depressed. And I heard from my aunt that when I was a baby, like probably standing in crib age, I would just cry and cry and cry in my cot waiting for her to come and pick me up. And she would just be asleep and just sleeping.

It's depression. It's like coma slumber, you know? And probably also now that I'm a mom, I think like, yeah, she was probably just lying there thinking I fucking hate my life. I do not want this. Can't raise these kids. And then feeling guilt because I remember she also said to me that when she became a mother, I was like, how did you know

how to be a mom? And she said, I didn't. And I don't, but I knew when I became a mother, I could either be the mother that I had, or I could try to be the mother that I wanted. And I tried to be the mother that I wanted. Now she definitely didn't succeed in that at all times, but I also wish that I could go back and be the kind of daughter that she deserved, you know? And I, and I feel like that you get so much more understanding of your mothers when you've got some age under your belt. And also when you've got, when you've been through the loss and you understand how like ephemeral that relationship is and how transient and how, like, mortal we all are. I know when she died, she died of cancer when I was 26.

And I know when she died, she had a lot of regrets about, you know, I did Marek Hardy's new podcast recently about death and dying. And I sort of observed that it wasn't that she had regrets about dying necessarily. It was that she, I think, had regrets about all the ways that she failed to live because her own, and, you know, there may be a lot of self-blame in there that's very undeserved, but like the lack of support that she received, the lack of opportunities, you know, she was brilliantly intelligent

but was forced to leave school at 13 to go out lack of opportunities. You know, she was brilliantly intelligent but was forced to leave school at 13 to go out to work and, you know, just had just one of those women basically whose lives were completely severed at the knees because of circumstances beyond her control. And I think now when I sort of like say that thing about looking in the video and seeing her face staring back at me it's like i'm becoming more and more an embodiment of who maybe she could have been and that's like a very

powerful thing to feel you know i think like oh god virgo full moon i'm starting to get emotional again i really honestly i never cry and i've cried three times today on this podcast. This is crying for me like a gentle weep out of the eyelids. Oh, God, I just broke down. But I think about. It's a safe space. I think about how, you know, so much can change between two generations that my mother was like prevented in so many ways from being the full capacity of person that she could have been and she really was like very brilliant, like brilliantly smart,

like a total autodidact, you know, libraries, a library full of books. Like when she died we were like what are we going to do with all these books? And because you can only, one of the things I also learnt from my mother was that you can't hold on to things. They just follow you around and it just becomes stuff then. And so she had all these opportunities that she couldn't fulfill. Her mother obviously had incredible trauma opportunities

she couldn't fulfill. Her mother before her. You look back at these line of women and you think, what is possible for me now and what has been made possible through circumstance and yes, through privilege and through just cosmic timing is pretty remarkable that you carry this legacy of women with you all the way back through your maternal line and you're living a life and you should strive to live a life that was not possible for many, if not all of them. You know, and I'm not saying like we'll go out and do things that you don't want to do just because they didn't get to do them. But every time we sit there in our kind of insecurity

or our lack of courage, and people have a lack of courage for so many reasons. I'm not saying that to blame them, but like a lack of courage that's been inflicted on us. Every time we kind of like allow the bits that we have control over, we don't have control over everything in our life, but the bits that we do have control over, every time we allow them to be kind of like tamped down or taken from us or like just sort of like put aside for like, I'll do that another day. We are missing out on this opportunity to propel our maternal line forward and to propel

the experiences and that kind of, you know, people, we understand intergenerational trauma, but what about intergenerational success? What about intergenerational pride, intergenerational opportunities like power, ferocity, courage, bravery? Like I actually think that for all of the trauma that a lot of my maternal ancestors inevitably had and my grandmother in particular for a lot of that trauma and a lot of that like pain and lack of opportunity people said to me oh where do you get your courage from and i think well i think i fucking got it from them you know i that like, I know I carry the wounds of certain, you know, traumas again, particularly between my grandmother and my mother and me, but I also carry like a lot

of the bravery and a lot of the resilience. And I can't like claim to, to like have created that or manufactured that myself that's come from my come from the women. And it's probably also come from the women on my dad's side too. So I feel like that's been so amazing in terms of working through grief as well, to have this opportunity to kind of observe my mother as a text almost. If she hadn't died when I was 26, I would be a completely different person today. I don't think that I would be as philosophical about love and about life and about mortality and about our purpose. I don't think that I would have been as courageous if people want to, if people want to say that I am, you know, I don't, I don't think I would have had that kind of like level of courage, but if you lose your mother, no matter what like complicated

relationship you might have with her, if you have one, which is still fundamentally like built on like the fiery flame of love, then if you lose her early, you just have to figure out how to survive. And yeah, like I don't have to survive in the way that my grandmother had to survive, but I have to figure out how to be a person in the world who suddenly doesn't have like a home. And when I mean a home, I mean like the first place that you, like where you were created. There's a writer and I'm going to forget his name, but he talks about like our mothers being our first firmament, you know, the universe in which our creation first swirled and you can't like account for what that means to suddenly have lost that physical connection to your roots so I think my relationship to her and how you know the

reason that I talk about her and the reason that like how I write about her and I do this show about that where she is a huge part of it is this constant trying to understand who she was in a way that like isn't childlike but is actually a wise older woman way to try and keep her alive to me you know I talk about it to my son all the time as well and to sort of you know in my show Love Sermon with Libby I talk about like testifying to people's existences and how we need to have witnesses and they can be your friends or whoever they are, but essentially we need witnesses in our life who will pledge their love and their commitment to us, not to like go to bed with us every night or to marry us till death do us part, because so often that means nothing. But they will actually

pledge their commitment to witness us throughout our lives so that if the time comes when we die, if they outlive us, that they can say, I have created this archive of your memories of everything that you are. And I will tell, fourth time, fucking hell, Tons. And I will take you out into the world and I will tell about you. I will tell who you were. And so I feel like, you know, what I can do for my mother to make up for being, you know, such a terrible teenager and for really for not understanding her while she was here and for just getting to the point where I was starting to figure out that maybe there was a person to understand and to know is to try to spend not all my life, but like a big part of my life, making sure that other people know who she was because she did have all this potential and all this capacity. And I think she probably died feeling quite unknown and misunderstood. And it feels like a gift that we can give to our mothers to say, I will be your

witness. I will be the person who you gave birth to. And in your death, I will give birth to you, to other people. And I suppose as well, the last thing I'll say about that is that I really hope that in doing that, like in seeking to do that work and to understand the mistakes that mothers make because we're human, it helps me to be a better mother to my son. And it helps me to model to him that I am a person in the world. I'm your mother, but I'm also a person. And I don't know, like just thinking about that, the line of mothers, something that really helped me after my mom died was realizing that, and you almost certainly know this, and I'm sure a lot of your listeners do too, but if you're a person with eggs in your body and you become pregnant with a fetus that has eggs in their body, then by around the 28-week mark, that fetus has all the eggs they will ever have in their lifetime which means that when i was or when i was in my mom's uterus from for like probably 14 weeks my mother had

the egg that made my son in her as well so she carried us both and so that's how you like that's how you you know it makes scientific sense about the sort of passing on of particular traumas and also pride and bravery and stuff. But that's how we can also remember that nothing ever dies. Nothing ever dies. That as long as that line exists, you know, I guess it's like dead with me and my sister, actually, because neither of us had girls. But, but, you know, it's, it it's it's this beautiful sort of sense that nothing ever dies in that the energy that creates humans the energy that exists inside humans and the reason why we strive to do the things that we do and why we want things for

ourselves we want like no human is fully good or fully bad and we want things because we we want things because we exist and we do on some level feel like even if we disappear to dust after we're dead, we want to leave something of us behind. No one wants to die and be forgotten. So what is it that we're being remembered for? I agree. and your mother is the choices that they had were so much more limited than, and we're both very privileged, obviously, in that we have a lot of choices as women, where we live and our, you know, economic status, all those things. But overall, the choices that my grandmothers had versus what I have now, and that idea that we then have a responsibility to have courage and step into the

unknown and develop that voice. I wanted to quickly talk a little more. I know we've talked for quite a while now. Well, I've talked for quite a while. I've hardly let you get a word in. But that's the whole point, right? Two things I wanted to quickly touch on. One was that I went on tour to the UK last year and as part of that tour,

I sing about this album called Matrescence, and as part of that tour, I went to Scotland and I became fascinated I'm very much interested in the history of witches and witchcraft and particularly about the history of witches in Scotland and the thousands and thousands of women who lost their lives and lost their voices and as a part of my work, I've looked at how midwifery and obstetrics were kind of taken from the women and healers and put solely in the hands of men in a lot of respects and the damage that that had done. In all respects. Well, there you go. Exactly. And I really am so grateful for that part of the research in your book. I mean, for all of it. But I think that that's at the heart to me anyway, of what I

don't speak into, that there are so many other stories and narratives that we can write for ourselves as women that we weren't necessarily, or that our grandmothers and mothers maybe weren't aware that they could write for themselves. You know, that sort of let's get married and that'll be the pinnacle of everything everything of my story. My story is based around when I get chosen and when I find the right man and have my children. And that's not to say that's not a legitimate pathway, but there's just so many other stories. I wanted to ask you about what you've learned about the history of witchcraft from researching this book. And particularly, I love the story about beer and cats.

Gosh, you'll have to like really curb me because I could talk on this alone for like an hour straight. I mean, the witch stuff is amazing. It's fascinating. I tried to write that whole chapter in a way that was humorous and in a way that kind of leaned in a little bit to the sort of the demonisation of particular women as witches, you know, this sort of dread fear that patriarchy has of women who kind of march to the beat of their own drum. But it's also really horrific, violent, awful time in history. And something I

as well try and translate in that chapter is that my theory is that for European women in particular, you know, and I'm sure like, you know, women of color, particularly women from the African diaspora would speak much more articulately about this than I can. But one of the things, one of the ways that white women exert our racism against black women in particular, I think, but also women of different cultural, you know, women of color from different cultural backgrounds all over the world is through this cultural appropriation. And there's so many, look, there's so many racist kind of undertones to why we do that and why we feel entitled to do that. But I think a big part of what we're sort of trying to appropriate in a way is community sisterhood. And I'm not, I'm also to be very clear when I say this, I'm not saying,

well, it's understandable because we don't have it and that's why we do it. Like it's disgraceful. We should work on building those bonds with ourselves rather than appropriating from people who we also exert racism against, you know. But the reason I say all that is because I think that, particularly you see it like with Aboriginal women, that an Aboriginal leadership and Aboriginal collaboration is so different to the way that white people work together. Of course it is because white people are wreckers and a lot of other people are builders, you know? And yeah, there's sort of like this idea of collaborative working together is something that white women and white people are bad at, but white women are also bad

at because we're constantly fucking placed in competition with each other. And we lean into that. We love to be pick me's. We love to be picked by the boys. And we occupy this space where it's like, if you pledge allegiance to white supremacy and to capitalism and to patriarchy, you will be spared. You will be chosen by a man. You marry a man. You can be part of the system and you'll be protected. There's this promise of protection that co-ops us. And a lot of women choose this as well. Like I'm not saying, well, white women otherwise outside of the system would be amazing. Like we're all imperfect people. And a lot of us can be fucking awful. We choose to be racist because we choose to like not interrogate our racism as white women because

it's uncomfortable for us. And also because we have this get out of jail free card that we've provided ourselves, which is no, but patriarchy, no, but patriarchy. We're women, we're women. And therefore we're all oppressed. And so you see white women, you know, a lot of us will respond to black women calling us out by saying, well, you're fighting the wrong fight. We should all be working together. It's like, that's very convenient for us, isn't it? That we get to play it both ways. Now, one of the reasons that I think that that has been made so much more possible and why we have this kind of like bereftness of collaborative solidarity amongst white women is not just because of the allure of racism and patriarchy and capitalism and our desire to exceptionalize

ourselves and want to benefit at the expense of other people. But also because for a period of around 500 years in our European history, we were demonized as witches. And within that 500 year period, for about 150 years, we were executed as witches. And the witch trials and the witch hunts went across Europe. Scotland obviously had extreme, you know, Scotland and Germany were the worst places to essentially be women at the time. 150 years is hard for us to conceptualize when we think back and look at history. And so, yeah, I can write that chapter with a bit of humor, but we also have to place ourselves in the context of it. If we were living in a period of time where,

and this is the example I use, if COVID in its, I mean, COVID still is around, I'm not diminishing that at all, but if COVID and lockdowns and our inability to kind of fight this virus had lasted for 150 years, we would fundamentally come out of the other side of it completely changed as a people. The concept of touch would be anathema. There would be ways in which we had absorbed the lessons of that terror that fundamentally changed how we interacted as humans. And I think that the same can be said about women who for 150 years, like three, four generations of women who just grew up that being the background, that being the air in which they breathe, the entire like fabric of their society was if you are seen collaborating with other women, if you are seen messing with like herbs and healthcare and midwifery and witchcraft, if you're seen drinking and, you know, getting

drunk or like you have a drink with a man or like a man, whatever, if you're seen as a threat to the system, and you have to remember as well that at the time, women as the healers were community healers too. So they weren't, people like, they serviced poor people and the nobility in the aristocracy was very afraid of this sort of like communist or they wouldn't have used that word at the time, but this communist uprising of the peasantry and women who not only healed sick people, but also codified this idea that the peasantry deserved care and deserved and could like be the kind of the core of a community were really dangerous so it's all part of this sort of like demonization of women was not just the church coming out and saying well we need to like really tackle this problem of women channeling satan which some of them did believe but also we need to control women we need to control birth we don't like the fact that women we we have assumed this position of now we,

as men, we are the authorities where God is concerned. Like we're the conduits. God speaks to us directly. He doesn't speak to the poor guy, you know, living in the pile of mud down by the swamp next to the witch. He speaks to me, the king. He speaks to the pope. He speaks to these very privileged men who control capital and control labor and control privilege. He speaks to the Pope. He speaks to these very privileged men who control capital and control

labor and control privilege. He speaks to us. But these women who are delivering babies, they have some knowledge of life and death that we don't have. And we don't like that. So midwifery was wrestled away from women, handed over to men or handed over to doctors. The only people who could be doctors were privileged white men who went to university to study to be doctors, who were not, like, practising anything that we would remotely call medicine now and who didn't have any knowledge because they didn't have the thousands of years' worth

of, like, maternal knowledge passed down from healer to healer, was taken from women, was criminalised to the point where if you were found to be practising midwifery, then you could be arrested. And that even continued after the witch trials were over. Women were just like cut out of the birthing process completely. I mean, it should strike everyone as completely nuts that we live in a society still that in 2024, on some level, assumes that the experts when it comes to birth are male obstetricians, that that would even be possible, that men as a rule, as a formalized industrial medical system, that men as a rule, cis men as a rule, would have some kind of superior knowledge about what

childbirth really means. Where did that come from? It's the same legacy of like, well, this is just the way that things always are. So going back to this idea of the witch is one of the things that keeps women apart from each other is this knowledge on some like cellular soul level that if we are seen to prioritize relationships with women, to collaborate with women, to have private meetings with other women, to laugh at men together, to have anything that even remotely suggests that as women together, we might have power that men cannot control and that men don't get to be a part of. Men have learned they might not burn us at the stake anymore, but there are various ways that it's socially acceptable to punish women for that behaviour in our Western context. And I think that that is so much a part of why we strive

so ferociously to prove to men that we are not a threat to them. No, I'm not a bad, yes, I believe in women's rights, but I'm not that kind of feminist. I'm not a man hater. You know, this impulse that makes no logical sense to make sure that men are constantly assured that we are not working against them is not rational and it's not logical and it's certainly not reflective of anything that we're struggling against collectively as women it's because we

don't want men to metaphorically point the finger at us and say well she stole my penis and put it in a tree which is something that they accused witches of doing. And now she needs to die. What is the argument against marriage, Glyn? I think when people hear that I'm anti-marriage because of how we have made marriage indistinguishable from relationships or the purpose of relationships indistinguishable from inevitable marriage. I think that what they mistakenly hear is don't fall in love, don't have a family, don't aspire to, oh, Clementine thinks that that's basic or whatever. And that's actually not at all what I believe. I'm, you know, as I hope is clear now at the end of this episode, a very strong believer in love and a very strong believer in building human connections.

I don't think that people's spouse should be the only connection that they have. I think that, you know, as Stephanie Kuntz said, one of the worst things that we did was make our spouse our best friend. Like you can't have one person be all things. I'm against marriage as a formal institution because I think that the romanticisation of marriage as a goal is harmful I think that the romanticization of marriage as a goal is harmful in particular to women.

And I think that women who quote-unquote miss out on marriage often feel bereft in some way if they care about marriage. You know, a lot of women don't care about marriage and that's great. But the ones who do, you shouldn't feel like if you miss out on getting married, if you miss out on finding your soulmate, that you've missed out on some integral experience. Because guess what? Most women in history did not marry someone they loved.

Most marriages or partnerships throughout history were not built on love. They may have ended up having companionship and they may have fell in love in some way, but they weren't these great big love stories that people have always fallen in love, of course, but they weren't people you married. They were love affairs that you had that like burnt bright and then fizzled out because it's an ephemeral thing. And I'm also against the government suggesting that somehow this is a relationship worthy of defense and protection more than any other relationship. And that part of that protection is tax breaks, that if you are married that somehow you get financial reward for that.

Now, why is that? Why would a government that doesn't care about giving us financial reward for anything unless it benefits them, why would they desperately need people to feel like they should get married and women in particular? Well, in part it's because of that building blocks thing thing before that if you get women married off then they take care of however many people in society and that alleviates the government from having to pay for that but it also codifies conservative values even if you're a progressive person who lives in the inner

north of melbourne and you think that you're you know oh no, we vote Labor. You might vote Labor, but you still inherently represent some conservative values or you are prime to be like targeted by conservative values because now you have a family to protect. Now you have this unit. And yeah, you could have the family without the formal marriage, but it's more about the idea of what that represents. I think that marriage has been a very useful way for, and look, the Labor government is deeply conservative too. So like let's not fool ourselves that if you vote Labor that you're like some radical. Marriage has been a way to ensure that individuals are siphoned

off into small enough blocks and told that they need to protect those blocks, they need to protect their property. They need to like put a barrier up around everything they've worked for and all those people who are trying to get their fingers into the pie and stop us from collectively acting together as a community, as a group of people who I don't need to know someone who lives three hours away from me to care about whether or not they are able to put food on the table for their kids you know I should care about that and the more we separate ourselves from the collective need and do what the government tells us or or conform to what the government needs us to do in order to make sure that we as individuals are protected

from the worst of I mean it's just the same thing as white people protecting white women, protecting themselves from the worst of patriarchy's violence by making sure that men know that they're safe, protecting themselves from capitalism by, like, aligning with white supremacy. Like, if we align ourselves with the oppressive, like, structure at the top in order to make sure that we are not harmed as badly as other people, we're just not going to ever move forward as a society. And we need to become, you know,

we are facing like imminent climate collapse. We all need to be thinking about that as far as our children are concerned. We need to start getting real, I was going to say real, real, we need to start getting very real about what matters and what doesn't. And I don't think that someone's $20,000 wedding, look, and people will be like, well, it's my choice. Isn't feminism about choice? It's like, no, feminism is about liberation and we should all be about liberation. And I don't think that you're a bad person. Anyone is a bad person for getting married. I don't think that they're a dummy. I don't think that their marriage is stupid. And I don't think that their relationship is

wrong. But I think we could have a relationship without being married. And I think if we had communities without single families, we would actually progress so much more as a society and we would feel a deeper level of love for ourselves and for one another. And ironically, going back to the topic of our conversation, mothers would be far more supported if we had widespread communities that actually cared deeply about one another rather than protecting the little pile of money that we like bury in the garden. Yeah, I completely agree. I think so much fundamentally changes when you re-centre mothers in a real way, not in a sort of like, yeah,

put them on a pedestal kind of thing completely. Thank you so much for this conversation. We've covered so much and I deeply, deeply want to say thank you because I know what it takes to share your heart, share your intellect in this way. So thank you so much and I know the it takes to share your heart, share your intellect in this way. So thank you so much. And I know the listeners will have gotten so much out of this. Is there anything you want to share with the community about what you're doing next, any events? I know you have a new podcast, Untethered. Is that with Yumi?

My first episode was me interviewing Yumi, but I have a new podcast out called Untethered with Clementine Ford. And it's, it's really, it's a conversational podcast that is looking at the ways in which people, you know, some, some of them public figures and some of them quote unquote ordinary folk have untethered from an idea in their life to liberate themselves and live a better life. So for example, you know, a middle-aged woman may be divorcing or choosing not to get married or, you know, untethering from this idea of what a woman should be and what does that mean for her happiness? Or a future episode I'm doing shortly is like, how do we untether from the exertion that white supremacy inflicts on us? How do we have really uncomfortable, hard conversations with ourselves, especially if

we're white, about how we untether ourselves from harmful things? And what does that mean for the kind of life that we can live? How do we untether from gender binaries? Like all of these sorts of liberatory stories about getting to a point in your life where you look around and you go, you know what? I think that maybe things are a bit fucked or I think that the tagline that I had for it originally was for women, although I'm going to be interviewing all people, but for people who are changing the world or maybe just their world. I love that. And yes, I've got that. I've got, sorry, just quickly. I've got, so I've got that coming out and then I've got, you know, events here and there. I'm trying really to move into

like hosting events because I'm much more interested these days in bringing people together in rooms that are love-based and that are community-oriented. And I feel like I've very much come to the end of my solitary period of work, which isn't to say I'll never write books again, but I don't want to be an island. I don't want to work by myself fielding like anger or getting angry or whatever. Like I just want to spend the next, hopefully rest of my life, just feeling really deep love for my fellow humans.

Yeah. I wanted to say also singing, I hope, because I saw you sing. I do love to sing. Yeah. Oh my gosh gosh that song you wrote for your son right yeah it was just utterly Olivia Donovan I saw you performing at Fed Square there wasn't a dry eye in that 500 seat of you I think people feel the same way about your music Claire you know it's like your voice is like like I said at the start, magical. Yeah, I mean, that sort of stuff is so, it's so joyful to, I think that we can believe, we need big, big people doing big things to create big change, but we shouldn't underestimate the power of doing little things like writing a song or a poem or, you know, a story to, again,

like I said, remind us of why we do the big things. We do the big things to make sure that the world keeps spinning so we can enjoy the small everyday moments of bliss. Yeah, absolutely. Well, keep chasing the bliss, I think, and bringing people together in Love Sermon and in Divorce Party. I feel that looks so much fun at Rods at Grow and I can't wait to come to more of your events.

So thank you so much, Clem. You might have to sing at one of them. Oh, my God, I would love that. I do think there's something really special about using your voice in that way. I know that the vocal cords look very similar to the uterus and to your the floor muscles. Yeah. So as a singer, I'm really fascinated by that because during my birth, I was told to stop

singing, which is part of the story I tell because I was humming when I started contracting. And I now know that that's a really important part of opening, particularly if you're a singer. And so when I was told to stop making any noise and get back on the bed that is what I think led me to a lot of the trauma um okay that makes me want to hurt a person um I'm really sorry that that was your experience that is so fucked up it's so wrong oh look thank you I think um like anything in life there's so many things that are fucked by people but they also in the end, if you have the privilege of having enough time and space to be able to move through them,

they teach you so much. I think you really deeply know when you've met someone who's been through some serious shit and has let it teach them and I think meditation is part of that but I think it's also weirdly spending a lot of time with trees. Yeah. And yourself, people need to get very comfortable with knowing who they are. And I find it, you're not too like deviant. I know we're saying goodbye, but I always think it's really interesting when, and I get that there would be lots of reasons why people wouldn't want

to do this. But when people say, I don't want to, I don't want to go and spend time with my 16-year-old self. I don't want to. It's just too much. Like too much happened. I don't want to face it. And I get that. You know, I think therapy is amazing. I think meditation is amazing.

But I feel like being willing to know yourself and all parts of yourself and to try and find that space through meditation and through, you know, slow movement and through spending time with nature, all that grounding stuff that I probably would have sneered at in my twenties. All of that stuff is a way to get to real peace with the longest relationship you'll ever have in your life. You know, if we're talking about marriage, the longest marriage you will ever have is with yourself. A marriage without the government contracts, a marriage of people.

Well, there's you and then there's the inner you. You do feel yourself to be two different people and you have to be comfortable with the fact that you will never get away from yourself, so you may as well make friends with them. I love how you finish that in How We Love with Dear Little Clementine, that whole letter for that reason. Thank you so much, Clem. Claire, it's been an absolute pleasure. And, you know, thank you for the opportunity to talk about stuff that is, it's painful sometimes, but it's really necessary that we talk about it. And I think it's amazing that you give

so many mothers that space to talk about it, but also to listen and hear about it and to understand that what we do is important and it's real and it deserves, I don't mean celebration like a parade, although we should have that, but it deserves honoring in a very real way and not in this pretend way that we claim to. Thank you so much, Clem. Thanks, babe. You've been listening to a podcast with me, Claire Tonti, and this week, part two of my conversation with Clementine Ford. For more from Clementine, you can head to her Instagram account at Clementine underscore Ford. You can also head over to her sub stack as well and her podcasts

Untethered and Dear Clementine are available in all good podcast apps. I would totally recommend going and listening to both all of those, reading her books, all of the things you can find out more from me at Claire Tonti on Instagram or on my website, ClaireTonti.com where information for all my upcoming shows. I'm a musician and you can hear my album Matressence on Spotify. I also have a brand new song coming out on April 7th.

It's an ambient track and I'd love you to take a listen. So have a look out for that. You can actually pre-save at the link below for my new song. So that's it from me. Thank you as always to Roar Collings for editing this week's episode and to Maisie for running our socials.