“Raise your hand if you’ve been in love,” Clementine Ford asked her audience in “Love Sermon” — a 75-minute celebration of life that every woman needs to hear.
A sea of women, non-binary folks and others lifted their elbows towards the dark ceiling of the Vanguard in Newtown, Sydney.
“Raise your hand if you thought that question was about romantic, sexual love,” she said. The same arms go up in the air.
On other kinds of love (esp. self-love):
I knew before the show that Ford’s MO was going to be the extollation of female friendship, of other kinds of love. And yet I still fell for it. That line — “being in love” — is inextricable from the notion of a certain kind of love — the sexual kind, the kind we call “romantic”.
We are taught to value romantic love above all other loves. Including above the love between a parent and their child, above the love between brothers, sisters — and of course, friends.
We’re not taught to value these other kinds of love, Ford declares. As women, we are told such forms of love do not compare to a male partner, or the romantic, sexual love.
Patriarchy has made sure to place romantic and sexual love at the top of the hierarchy, Ford explains. That includes by devaluing women who are not involved in a romantic, sexual form of love.
Patriarchy is what has made us feel unworthy without a male companion, without male validation, without male attention.
Think about it, how are women really valued? Their status, their beauty, their ability to tend to others — these are all traits that we have been taught to prize, above all else.
I can’t tell you the number of weddings I have been to where the bride is praised for her kindness and warmth and the groom is praised for his intellect and humour. (Even when everyone in the room knows the bride is much, much funnier than the groom).
If Feminist Church scripture was run by Reverend Ford, I’d sign up in a heartbeat. Her sermon elevated a sense of both collective and individual womanhood —I came away feeling a searingly new yet familiar flush of empowerment and emotional high.
What Ford shared wasn’t entirely new, but many may have been hearing it for the first time. Adrienne Rich was espousing women’s acquiescence into institutions founded on male interests more than forty years ago. Deborah Levy spectacularly addresses women’s talent for enduring and suffering in so many of her books: behind every Family Home, Levy writes in “The Cost of Living” — there is an “unthanked, unloved, neglected, exhausted woman.”
There is something transformative about listening to someone speak on stage — of hearing something genuinely from the heart — even though there were at least a hundred people in the crowd that night, I felt as if Ford was speaking directly to me.
I felt she was speaking directly about me, when she described the thrill and shame of discovering the pleasures of her own body.
For Ford, masturbation was a discovery like no other — an embarrassing secret, because we are taught by society (ie. patriarchy) that female pleasure is a shameful, dirty thing. So young Ford swore it off. Until the next day, promising God she’d not do it again. But she did, again and again, and again.
Hearing Ford declare such an account felt world-shifting. She was re-telling my own girlhood, and the exact thought process I went through when I first discovered masturbation.
On Marriage:
No sermon can be complete without warnings of the devil. In Ford’s bible, it’s marriage — the ultimate patriarchal construction.
Ford is working on a book about the evils of marriage — I Don’t: An Explosive and Inarguable Case Against Marriage which will be published in October 2023 by Allen & Unwin.
I cannot wait to read it. It might serve as a useful point of departure from Jia Tolentino’s 2019 essay I Thee Dread, which wholly fortified my own anti-wedding/anti-marriage sentiments — that is, until Jia Tolentino went and got herself married.
The issue of marriage had plagued Tolentino for many years — “the whole thing is just transparently ridiculous,” she explained. “[the woman] is supposed to be lying in wait for the moment he decides he’s ready to commit to a situation where he statistically benefits and she statistically becomes less happy than she would be if she was single.”
I love the essay. I love everything Tolentino writes. Yet the essay, where she writes about her anxieties of making herself ‘useful through sex and dinner’, and describes the ugly reality that for many women — “becoming a bride still means being flattered into submission …for a future in which your identity will be systematically framed as secondary to the identity of your husband and kids,” — feels less powerful today than when I read it three years ago.
Its intensity feels diluted, only because its adherent went and adhered to marriage after all. (Which I don’t hold any resentment towards her for; I mean, she explained herself in a long and gorgeous IG post: “Andrew and I finally came up against a health insurance policy that required it!!! I was so resentful and so irritated!”)
Why was I so bothered by Tolentino getting married? Who cares if she does? I think I am just always desperately seeking alternative models of a life I could follow. I am always looking for a better way of seeing a future for myself that is full, happy and filled with love that doesn’t necessarily have to involve marriage, children, or real estate.
I am always seeking better models of living as a woman. Or just, other models.
Which brings me back to Ford. Throughout her show, she repeats — why would anyone get married? Before adding: “Why would you want to do a man’s laundry?” To which I reacted by asking— Can’t one be a wife and not do her husband’s laundry?
And yet later, after some reflection, I could not think of a single wife I knew who didn’t do their husband’s laundry!
On her Mother:
The most emotional and heart-quivering parts of Ford’s sermon were the stories of her mother. Again, Ford’s analysis of her mother felt like mine. She was horrible to her mother as teenager. She looked down on her, thinking her life was small.
When Ford was twenty-five, her mother was diagnosed with cancer. Lying in the hospital, she called her daughter to her beside. It’s an episode Ford recalls through glassy eyes on stage, the shame still vibrating through her body.
On Motherhood:
When I interviewed author Lisa Taddeo two years ago, I asked her what being a mother was like as a writer — whether it changed her fundamentally.
“It’s much like being a daughter” she told me. This is perhaps why Ford folded thoughts about her mother with her experience of mothering her six-year old son.
With her candid humour and insight, Ford described the birthing trauma she experienced. Only a few weeks after giving birth does she learn from a midwife that one in three women will suffer urinary incontinence after having a vaginal birth. It’s a problem that the midwife solves by passing Ford a pamphlet.
If only the government would spend as much money printing pamphlets as on maternal care — Ford said.
For Ford, motherhood is not all glowing sunshine and rainbows. She doesn’t enjoy kid-play or building bricks with her infant. A chorus of women in the audience screamed “hallelujah!”
In the bathroom after the show, I overhear a woman tell her friend: “I also hate playing with my kids. It’s so boring!”
Ford also firmly rejects the notion that a woman needs to be a mother to know ‘the true and full and wide spectrum of love”. “Many women can’t be mothers, it’s not by their own choice,” she declared. “How dare anyone make that judgement.”
To this — I shouted the loudest “hallelujah!”
Ford’s feminist discourse is a tender, loud, soulful weep-fest, mesmerisingly candid and frank. In my three decades on this planet, I have never felt so seen, so utterly mirrored and verified as a woman.
Clementine Ford. You are the preacher every woman needs to hear.