Trust Clementine Ford to draw a crowd of hundreds together on a Thursday night at the Seymour Centre.
The famed author, speaker, activist, and feminist launched her latest book “I Don’t: The Case Against Marriage” with fellow revolutionary Yumi Stynes, untangling the myths of the fairy-tale wedding and happily ever afters that young women are taught to pursue with hungry teeth.
Ford’s searing and insightful conversation with Stynes was met with a theatre-hall full of nodding heads.
Attacking the system of the marriage requires one to look into history — something Ford read deeply into to uncover the toxic provider and protector myth at its foundation.
“All throughout history, leading right up to today, the thing that has infuriated men who rely on patriarchy to give them value and power, that men rely on — is women never looking up and realising that they might have power of their own,” she said.
“It’s that protector and provider myth. So many of you will have heard men say— “Well you need us to protect you, and provide for you…”
And you’re like, “Who are you protecting us from?” It’s not sharks.
“The protection thing is a bit wishy washy for you right now. You’re not doing a very good job of it, lads. And also, what are you providing?”
“So many women historically were unable to care for and provide for themselves because legally, we weren’t allowed to have any fucking money.”
Ford noted that in Australia, women weren’t allowed to have bank accounts until 1975.
“There are women in this room, who were adult women in 1975, who could not get a bank account by themselves without the signature of their father or their brother or their husband.”
She reminded audiences that she is not anti-married people. She is anti-marriage.
“I want to say as well to the people who are married in the room. This is not an attack on you at all. I say that in the introduction, it’s not an attack on individuals. It’s about systems. And it’s about cultural conditioning, and about questioning how and why we come to the choices that we come to.”
“What is different about a marriage that you can’t get in a long term relationship? It is about questioning why we do these things.”
Ford has written about the harmful stereotypes the patriarchy enforces on both men and women in her previous books, including “Fight Like a Girl” and “Boys will be Boys”. In “I Don’t”, she criticises the way women are made to believe true love is our only reason for being.
“We can say probably pretty factually, that whether or not you buy into marriage yourself, as a young person in the world, and particularly as a young woman, you have been subjected to an onslaught of romantic fairytales and fantasies and myth-making, that largely targets you.”
“It doesn’t really target men, it doesn’t target men in the same way.”
“There is an assumption in the world that men will end up married, because when they decide that they’re ready to settle down, of course, there’s a woman there who’s just been waiting for the last 15 years to be picked,” she joked.
Yet for women — we are taught to pursue a wedding ring like nothing else — a goal that Ford believes is harmful.
“The biggest predator that risks women’s lives is men,” she said. “That is the statistical reality of it — look at the number of women just in the last week who’ve been murdered by men in this country.”
“If we create a cultural impetus for women where we say the only way that you can do this thing we say to you is your biological inevitability, your biological responsibility, and also the only thing that you will ever truly be happy in having and in doing…without it, you will always be bereft of emotional satisfaction…then they end up stuck in scenarios where the only way that they can do that thing is to put themselves in a situation where they living with the most dangerous predator, and that is all to serve as patriarchy, and to serve as men living for patriarchy.”
Beyond that, there’s limited lifestyle choices available to women who don’t necessarily want the things we are told to want, ie. marriage, children.
“If you’re a woman in your 30s, and you feel in any way, shape, or form that you might want to have a child…what do you do when it starts to feel like time’s running out?”
“My friend says that it’s like women playing a big game of musical chairs. And then the music stops. They’re 35. And they’re like, ‘Well, I guess you’re the father of my baby.’
“This is the chair that I’m sitting on. And it’s a bit rickety, but there’s no other chair.”
“If you don’t want to get married and you are determined to live by yourself for the rest of your life, it doesn’t mean you don’t want to date, it doesn’t mean that you don’t want sex, it doesn’t mean that you don’t wanna fall in love. [A friend] says that the options are so bereft at the moment, especially for women.”
“Not everyone who can have a baby wants to have a baby. Women are made to feel like somehow [motherhood] is our only purpose in our life…only then will we become a fully realised human being, if we pass another human into the world. We’re like a subway station.”
Ford laments the contradictory messages about relationships women are told everyday — “We’re told that we’ve got to find the soulmate, The One, the best friend…to be with him for the rest of my life.
“The idea of The One is such a dangerous idea. But then if your relationship breaks up, we’re then told — ‘you’ll find someone else soon’. So…which is it?
“Is it really, really hard to find a decent person to spend the rest of your life with…or is it just like…get on the apps? It has to be one or the other.”
Ford told audiences that she co-parents her son with her ex — something she feels “very grateful” for.
But she doesn’t want women to use the word “lucky” when we’re describing male partners.
“I don’t want to say ‘fortunately’, because that’s often how women talk about their relationships— I’m really lucky, I’ve been really lucky. I’ve got a good one. It’s like, it’s just we should just not be saying that we’re lucky to have men who treat women like human.”
Despite the horrors behind marriage and its systemic inequalities, Stynes reminded audiences that Ford’s book is one of clear optimism and hope.
Hope for a better future for all women.
She mentioned Alexandra Collier’s book, “Inconceivable”, as a “really brilliant” story.
“If you’re thinking that you want to have a child, but it doesn’t seem possible for you right now — you can,” Ford said. “It’s not easy, but it’s possible, you can do it by yourself.”
“There are ways to build community and family with other people.”
“I Don’t: The Case Against Marriage” is out now, from Allen & Unwin.