💋 Clementine Ford On Why Being Single 😘 Is Better For You 💋

marry their best friend. And yes, we sort of know that women in history didn't really have any options or rights, but we kind of don't really know maybe exactly how deep that round or what that really looked like enough to the point where we are able to now in twenty twenty three, gloss over the incredible depth of oppressive history, specifically in regards to women where marriage is concerned, and just see it as being this culmination of some kind

of life goal where you luckily find the person you're meant to spend the rest of your life with and have a great, big party together. I think what I really want people to understand about that is that that's not by accident. That is very much deliberate design. And it's not like there's big marriage that's out there sitting in a boardroom saying, well, how can we get people to keep buying into marriage? Marriage, like anything in the system that we live in, is a function of propping

up oppressive systems like capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy. And when I say the latter part about white supremacy, obviously I'm not saying it's only white people who get married that there aren't cultural differences. This book is very much looking at a Western cultural history of marriage. There are lots of historical aspects that still continue today that appeal to,

in particular middle class white women's conformity to the system. Basically, so you get status, you get class status, you get social status, and you get economic status from marrying. What do all of those things inherently in the world that we live in, as we understand, what do they all

prop up. It's capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy. So if you're a white middle class woman who is closer to being at the top of the pile of those things than the more marginalized people in the world, and you are being appealed to to do the one thing that kind of co signs all of that, it's a function of white supremacy to provide like a little enclave for

you to kind of be superior to everybody else. And now I want to be really clear to your listeners, particularly the married ones who maybe are white middle class women, that I'm not saying you're a cross burning white supremacist because went and got married. We all have to become a lot better, I think at being aware that our complicity and systems is very often unconscious and insidiously demanded

of us. Marriage is a historical premise. For many thousands of years, was a system in which women had no choice and no rights. We just married who we were told because it wasn't about love. We can think of marriage now as being about this thing where you know, again, like we find our soulmate and get married and it's all very romantic. But for most of human history marriage was about and really marriage was just like a community

kind of bringing together of two groups of people. It was about kinship building, it was about empire building, and it was about economics and safety of the group. How we still get women to buy into it now, to continue to support, essentially like systems that aren't good for us, is to make us believe that without it we are not maybe not nothing that might be like too big a step for some people, but that we were just kind of It's like living our lives in muted color.

You know that until we find the one, we'll never really know what it's like to be picked, you know, to be truly happy. In the same way that women are often told unless you have a baby, you'll never know what it's like to feel real love. It's like all of those things and all that perpetuation of women's role as being just peripheral to other people's role. Like

we play the wives, we play the mothers. Everything that is required of us is some kind of sacrifice of our own adventure, our own autonomy, our own subjectivity, all of that is codified by this idea that unless we find the person to get married to and are able to stand up in front of our friends and family and say I do, that we've missed out on something integral.

And I'll just close that off by saying that, you know, I quote Adrienne Rich in the book, who was a nineteen seventies feminist, lesbian poet and liberationist, who said that heterosexual romance has been presented as women's great adventure, and if nothing else, I would ask your listeners to think about that and how true that maybe in their own, in their own experience of growing up that boys and men, as I said in Fight Like a Girl, they're taught to like unfurl into the world and to go out

and take over the world and conquer the world because it's all colonial as well, and to discover things, to explore, things to go to space, to like be pirates and mountain climbers, et cetera, et cetera. And women are the ones who are expected to be happy with standing on the cliff top or in the tower or on the turret, waiting to see their ship on the horizon for them to come home. That's our great adventure. And I just want women to have a better and bigger dream for themselves.

You then concluded, and this is a quote from the book, romance propaganda can impact us all, it seems, even those of us who've sworn off marriage. And I want to know, in your research into romance propaganda, what did you find the most bizarre.

we did, separately to this sort of marriage question. We had a really beautiful love affair for people in their twenties. It was tumultuous, it was passionate. It was the deepest love that anyone had ever felt in their entire lives, you know. And we hurt each other and we got back together and it was I mean, it was wonderful. It was like a great movie that would star Joseph Gordon Levitt and Zoey Deschanel or something like that, you know, but not quite as bad as Five Hundred Days of Summer.

And it was meant to stay in our twenties. And I'm so glad that I didn't foolishly go off and marry him thinking that it would be romantic because of the subjection that I, along with everyone else, has to this romance propaganda by way of Disney movies like Growing Up with fairy Tale Princess narratives, which in the book

I sort of point out. My theory is that Disney released their first three Princess movies in the late thirties and then the two in the fifties, and I feel like they were very deliberate societal responses to women's suffrage and the advancement at least for a certain class of

women of political freedom. And the fact of course that after World War Two, a lot of returning soldiers came home to find out that women were doing jobs without them, like pretty well, you know, so they needed to kind of convince women of a particular class again to get back into the home.

at the pub, who believes that deeply. It's really important to know that not only was that not true for the women who were in that circumstance, like, for example, valium very quickly became the most prescribed drug in America in the nineteen sixties, but that also older married women were the fastest growing group of employed people in the nineteen fifties because they were doing all of the jobs that men thought were beneath them, like the sort of

middle class like clerical work, secretarial work, etc. But for a whole swathe of women on the bottom levels of society and on the margins, the ones who people didn't advocate for to stay at home and be quote unquote kept women. There was no such thing as the traditional marriage where they stayed at home, and they propped up this very conservative, again white supremacist idea of the middle class white family in suburbia because they were out doing all of the grunt work as they always had done.

Women have always worked, and marginalized women, women of color, single mothers, they have always worked, and no one has advocated for their freedom to stay at home and raise children in economically secure environments, because without them doing all of that unappreciated class based labor, how would the world actually run and function. It was a conservative failed project that lasted for about fifteen years because the economic reality is that the system that we live in does not

want people not working. And the same people now who are calling for us to return to that, you know, like the Fox News pundits, they're the same people who don't want to tax billionaires, So where's the money coming from. It's actually just all an illusion to try and keep women suppressed. The romantic fictions and mythologies that we're presented with.

I liken them to like going to the casino. You know that the house always wins, right, the house is designed to win, it's designed the casino to benefit and profit itself. But there are just enough successful stories around the place to make you think that maybe you could be one of them. You saw that person putting in two dollar coins into the pokey machine and whoa lo and behold they got twenty thousand dollars spout right out

to them. So what if that were you? And so you start putting it in, and you're like, I'll just keep going on another date. I'll just keep looking. Finally you're like fifty dollars into the pokey machine, and you're like, well, I can't give up now, because put fifty bucks in. Like, I've got to keep putting my money in the hopes that somehow I am the lucky winner.

all this propaganda? Would it need everyone to be like giving you all this additional messaging from every angle to make you bypass the party of your says, Oh, I don't know if this is quite right to do it anyway.

me that maybe I hadn't really like fully reconciled. I guess, as much as I intellectually know that that is like a hyped up, unfair version of events for a woman who's in their thirties, how do you kind of reconcile the feeling that you're going to be forever alone?

Even the men are the ones who really suffer the dread loneliness of being old and alone because they don't have the same encouragement under patriarchal sism to go out and develop those friendships with each other. I do think it's changing with younger generations of men, and I think that's really As the mother of a boy, I find

that really encouraging to see. But you know, if you look at men of our father's generation, your father's generation, my father's generation, women fulfill the roles of taking care of men's emotional spectrums, and within that that can feel incredibly lonely. It's a useful exercise, I think, to flip not only that, the idea of having a romantic relationship, which is not always a partnership. You know, people use the word partners and they're describing people who treat them

like unpaid servants. You know, when people say things like, oh, oh, I need a wife. I think I make this joke in the book, I need a wife, that's what I need. Even when women say this I need a wife, what they mean is I need an unpaid servant. And that kind of tells you everything that we need to know about how people perceive of a wife. When they say I need a husband, they don't mean I need someone who's going to do all of my laundry for me. They mean a woman to do all of that for them.

So the loneliness that women can feel within that relationship archetype and within that structure is deeply profound, and actually for most women as they age, I think they find their deepest connections outside of that. So you're not going to be alone. But it's interesting that you mentioned Bridget Jones as well, because Bridget Jones, you may or may not know, this is a modern day retelling of pride

and prejudice. And Pride and Prejudice was written in the Elizabethan era Regency England, and it coincided with a period of time which I write about in the book, where the term spinster began to be used as a pejorative term for the first time in the history of Spencer's like Spinster's as a job had existed for three or four hundred years, you know, the culture that they lived

and decided that spinster was an insult. And the reason that Spinster became an insult was the exact same backlash that women today experience when men and the dominant structures that they live in decide that women are not doing their duty, decide that women are not performing their role as we are supposed to, which was that at this point of time and history in the UK, in particular, the Industrial Revolution established a middle class, an economic middle

class of people, and what that meant was that some women had money, and they had they didn't have a lot of money necessarily, but if they inherited money from there, say they had intergeneral, intergenerational wealth, and they inherited it.

The law of curviture, which was the legal doctrine at the time, that said that they were under the banner of authority of their father until they got married, in which point they became under the banner of authority of their husband and he would get access to everything that she had. So if you were a wealthy woman in seventeen fifty and you inherited, you know, the equivalent of like a fifty thousand dollars a year kind of stipend, and you married John, who you thought was cute or whatever.

John suddenly owned or fifty thousand dollars, You don't own it and he can do anything he likes with it because everything you have belongs to him. So naturally, being like women of the world, we can understand that there are a lot of women in that time period who

were like that noise. I'm not doing that. I'm not going to give up my identity and I'm not going to give up my money, and I'm not going to do it so that I also have to give up my bodily rights, because conjugal rights as well dictated that husbands had access to their wives bodies, and that that's

the law that didn't. The last place in Australia that overturned conjugal rights, which meant that you couldn't prosecute your husband for raping you in marriage was the Northern Territory in nineteen ninety one, which is as old as ed Cheran. That's crazy to think about that, you know, and to

use another Hollywood person as an example. Women in this country weren't able to get a bank account by themselves without a male signatory until nineteen seventy five, which is twice that's two of Leonardo DiCaprio's girlfriends, you know, that is he was born in nineteen seventy four, Like that is still it's not that old. So all of these women who were you know back in the seventeen hundreds who were like, I'm not doing this. I'm going to

stay single and I'm going to manage my own money. Basically, there were two risks to that, and the first was that they you know, women weren't counted on the civilister registers, but if they were taxpayers, they could be counted on the civil registers. So the people who kind of controlled society were like, well, we don't want that to happen because that will pave the way for women to get more rights and that is not in our best interest.

The other thing was that Britain was expanding its colonialist like imperialist campaigns across the globe. You know, it was sending armies out to oppress and dominate, you know, the global South. And what they needed for that was women to have babies. For Britain to be able to expand its colonialist empire. They needed bodies. They needed bodies to be working in the factories, and they needed bodies to be manning the military. And women who were abstaining marriage

weren't doing their duty to king and country. And so how do you make women who have their own money, who don't rely on men for financial support, how do you make them feel bad about their choices? How do you compel them to sign up to this institution that is against their best interests in exactly the same way that the descendants of those men are doing it now

through memes. I mean they were cartoon memes. They weren't shed on the Internet, but they were ridiculing, mocking, disrespectful, you know, really like disparaging representations of women that signified some kind of moral depravity and also esthetic depravity and valuelessness in the women who abstained from marriage. It wasn't that they were independent women taking care of themselves. It was that they were ugly. It was that they were depraved.

It was that they, you know, they had too many cats, like the cat lady trope is pretty old. So to look at all of that history and to say to women now when you sit there and you say I'm

worried about being alone forever. Again, you're not going to be alone forever, but also understand that you have been made to fear being alone forever by a system that wants you to not see the value in your own independence and in your own agency and autonomy, and that doesn't want you to have your own money, doesn't want you to look after yourself. If women are all out there, if more and more women start looking after themselves, who's

going to look after the men? And that's not just kind of like a critique of men's inability to care for themselves or like a laziness, although that is true, but to kind of again look at systems. How does capitalism support itself without the labor of the working class, And how are men oppressed within that system because they've also been conditioned and brought into this lie that's somehow like there's a nobility in being what they like to think of as as the builders of the world. We

built the world, so you have to do everything. Even if we assume that you're correct and you did build the world literally with your own bare hands, you didn't build it for me. You didn't build it. They didn't build it for you, They didn't build it for anyone listening to this. They built it for men who were more powerful than them, and you had more money than them, and they built it for aristocracies and kings and states. So how do you make them keep signing up to

them up to it? You tell them that you are the masters of the universe, and you have all of these women and children to own for your own pleasure. And that's what proves it, because if you weren't the masters of the universe, then you wouldn't have them. And so when women withdraw themselves from that system and say no, I'm not going to be a part of that, they're like, well, I was promised that, and if you won't do it, then I have to confront some really uncomfortable truths about

the system that I live in. And that's too hard for me because the thing I'm maybe afraid of most is a man is making other men mad at me.