Transcription
I'm Leslie Elliot Boyce, and this is the Radical Center, a recording project I began in 2022 as a way to describe and discuss the social and ideological currents that are rapidly altering our culture. In a time when political polarization seems to be the norm, I'm seeking to understand rather than react. I'm grateful to all the thoughtful men and women who share their stories and insights with me in this conversation series. If you would like to contribute to this project financially, there are links in the description. Thank you, and thank you all for listening and being part of this exploration. Hello.
Today I'm speaking with Darlene Lev. And Darlene, you're a writer who reached out to me recently after listening to a couple of conversations that we've had on this channel. I think for specifically some of the solid ground conversations. And if you don't mind, I'll just read real quickly the paragraph that you sent me because I think it really, um, sets up an interesting discussion. So you said, "I was so taken by 'Our Childless Women Ruining the World' that I plan to incorporate the dialogue into a chapter/essay for the book, the book that you're working on. I heard a lot of the co, uh, of of the cause of the problem put on men. I agree and have experienced this, but would like to explore how feminism destroyed the courtship that much more directly led to marriage and family formation. Born in 1961, I experienced firsthand the revolution from moms at home to moms at work, from courting commitment to courting instability. I've toyed with writing a memoir called 'My Dumb Feminist Life,' which would examine the choices I made in fealty to feminist narratives and how sabotaging, self-sabotaging so much of it was." So, I, yeah, I'm so interested to explore your perspectives on this, and, uh, I'll let you just open it up. What, what's kind of, um, do you want to say a little bit about yourself first and kind of lay out a, a sort of the arc of how you've evolved in your thinking?
Well, one of the things that struck me about that particular conversation was, I mean, it resonates because I wound up childless myself, and it wasn't necessarily intentional. But I also noticed, and I'm thinking you're all a little younger than I am, right? When, when were you all born on the panel? About, um, I, I was born in the mid-70s, and then, uh, another one of the girls is the same age as me, and two of them are a little bit older, but still probably Gen X. Yeah. So, I, I, I was struck by how the dialogue was, "I couldn't find a good man. I couldn't find a man who would commit." And this is how I wound up like this. And then, um, you know, I think one, one person, forgive me if I can't remember everyone's names right now, but I, I watch every, every episode, and the discussions are all so interesting. Um, but I, I was thinking, you know, I know what happened because I lived through that change. And it's sort of like, you know, if you look at the French Revolution, the people who were coming of age right as the Reign of Terror starts would would know something more than the people who are living in the aftermath and grappling with that. So my trajectory, my coming of age completely coincides with the sexual revolution when things really changed. And I like to say, you know, and I have said to my students, probably, uh, at my own risk, that TV in the '60s was very family-oriented, very much about being a good civic citizen. Uh, the morals were all, I would say, fairly universal, how to be a good person, you know, the how to handle the town bully. Um, you know, Mayberry, Mayberry R.F.D., um, you know, family. And then, uh, then we start getting into the relaxing the codes, and now there's murder and single policewomen, you know, Charlie's Angels, which was a huge influence on me. Um, and it just completely changed. And by the time I reach my adolescence, now there is abortion. And I even remember I was sitting on the toilet when I heard on a talk show in the next room that my mother was listening to that now, you know, Roe v. Wade has been passed. And I remember thinking, "Oh, good. I can do whatever I want." Wow. And we also had the pill. And so, you know, this just, it's brand new. And when something is brand new, people tend to react to it, you know, overreact to it. It really completely liberated me and my friends as teenagers into basically having a lot of casual sex. Mhm. And it even seemed that you were supposed to, like, the arbiters of correct opinions were imposing this on us because I remember asking myself, and I know other women have said the same thing, "Why am I doing this? I don't really like it. It makes me feel bad. I'm also, regardless, sort of garnering a kind of a dubious reputation." But then I'm wired like that, and I can't seem to extricate myself from this habit. And, um, you know, it, all of the advertising, much of what I was reading in teen magazines was sort of promoting this, you know, "You don't have to live like your mother, and you can live like a man." And another anecdotal, um, evidence story, with anecdotal stories. Anyway, um, little, little lack of sleep last night. Um, my, I had five friends that I hung out with in the, in high school. We called ourselves the Coyotes, and our motto was, "We can do what men do, and we can do it even better." And, uh, we would drive down the main street hooting and whistling at, at, at guys, and, you know, drinking a lot, and, uh, getting ourselves in all kinds of sexual trouble. And, uh, recently, we, we, you know, a few of us got together, and we were reflecting on that, and we, we realized that this was a very short window of time because AIDS comes along in 1983 and changes everything. So I would say that people born between, say, 1958 and 1965 are the people who, whose life story sort of goes along with, with, goes alongside this change. And, uh, in the essay, "A Requiem for the Patriarchy," that I sent to, um, in the '60s, it really was like there was a dad in every house. There was only one household where there was no father. That mother was divorced and had a daughter named Tammy, and they lived with her grandparents.
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Um, I am not going to say that those marriages were all happy marriages. I mean, even in my own household, it wasn't a love match by any stretch of the imagination, but absolutely it was a home. And I, you know, I was a very observant kid. Spent a lot of time alone watching everybody. And, um, I would say that in, in most cases, that was the, the, the sense that every one of those houses was a home. And for the most part, the mothers were all in those homes. Mhm. And then the no-fault divorce thing comes along. And it's like everybody sort of jumps on that bandwagon. And by the time I get into high school, there were the kids whose parents were divorced. And those were the cool kids who could do whatever they wanted because nobody was around to watch them. Uh, we were going into those houses and smoking pot and drinking their parent, you know, drinking their mother's alcohol. And, uh, you know, I would say that those are the kids, when I look back, who, who didn't really fare off very well. So, you know, I'm grossly generalizing, but, you know, on the other hand, I think I'm observing a, a trend, you know, the breakdown of the family, um, the sort of permitting, uh, getting out of commitments and not seeing things through. And I think where we are today is, uh, in a habit of not trusting that you can get through a bad period with a spouse or a partner, you know, and see it through to the end. We, we are now wired to get out. And I've done that myself many times. And when I look back, I say, you know, the, the one marriage that I got out of, I really think I shouldn't have done that. Uh, I never really did any better. And, uh, you know, and I made these choices by rote because I was listening to this other, you know, the sort of voices up there who are telling you what you're supposed to feel, what you're supposed to want. And now we have social media doing that. Mhm. Um, and, you know, some of the things I did were really incredibly callous and very much anti-family formation, anti-life. And, uh, you know, that was the theme of, of the, the essay. It just seems that we are being guided in that, in that direction to move away from all of the kind of social mores that encouraged us and facilitated family formations and producing life. Mhm.
Wow. That's quite a retrospective. And I, your perspective is really fascinating. And I, it kind of seems like everybody has to want to change that all together in a way because you do have these cases of, I'm men who have trouble finding a, a good partner but want that more traditional life, and women who want to find a good partner but have trouble finding someone like the women on that, that panel discussion you were describing. A couple of them, their story was, "Yeah, I've been married, but my partner never wanted kids and wanted me to work." And, you know, it wasn't something I could just do, or I couldn't find a stable relationship where it felt like it would be safe to bring a kid into the world and not end up a single mom supporting my child. I didn't want that picture for myself. And so, you know, where do we go from this point? Or maybe this is too soon in the conversation to ask next questions, but rather, it's interesting. It's interesting because that is how it was, though. Okay, people got married and had children. That is the world that I grew up in. And so how did we get to a world where, and those were the same questions I asked myself, "I don't want to get stuck. I'm worried that he'll run off," which is what happened to, you know, both, both of my marriages. That's exactly what happened to me. Is you do have children with someone, and then you're left alone to to raise your kids by yourself. You have to, uh, figure that out because the other person did not maintain a commitment. I mean, in one case, it was drugs and alcohol, pornography, and strippers. In another case, it was sex addiction and, and again, that same kind of spiral down and out of the relationship. And so when you, when you see evidence all around you of that, that marriage is falling apart, despite, you know, one person can want to maintain, but if the other person doesn't, you know, how do we come back to something more stable when both parties, both men and women, and, and it's so broadly general when you say that because that's not, those trends are there, but you can't distill the trend down to the individual. The individual stories are going to be different. But, um, how do you get back to something where people value that connection if so many people don't, so many people are disillusioned and demoralized?
I think that it was, I'm going to suggest it was women who created this problem. Uh, I'm not going to say that there haven't been, you know, n'er-do-well men. You know, in, in my own family, my grandfather's father ran off and created another family in Seattle, um, you know, and left his mother with nine children. Mhm. Um, but most of the men in my ancestry, Mhm. were family, you know, fathers, family stayed intact, not necessarily happy, um, but very much attached to their families. So how did this change? I would say it was feminism that gave men even more permission to take off. Um, and I would say it's up to women to bring it back. I think it was women, and this is the, the issue that I take with this whole patriarchy assertion. I think that women really always have been the ones who controlled men, and the, all of the inventions and things that we have today were, you know, "Some woman, you know, I'm sick of going down to the river to wash my clothes," you know, and then he invents a, a washing machine. Um, you know, "I'm tired of getting pregnant every year." Now we have the birth control pill, and, uh, you know, all of these things actually serve to liberate women from the enormous amount of work that they used to have that tethered them to the home and gave them, you know, more freedom to go and out and work. But I would, I would say that by sort of moving away from religious communities, questioning that, and then questioning the whole marriage and having children project, gave men more license to behave badly and put women in this much more precarious position. They used to control men by, you're living in a town where everybody knows if you're the male who's treating his wife poorly. You know, that's also part of it. We're more atomized. We're, we're, we're less community-oriented, and you can get by with a lot more. I mean, even, you know, where I live in Brooklyn, I'm so convinced that I'm invisible that I'm not always aware of my behavior. I'm not always aware that actually people might know who I am. I really do feel like I'm walking around in a vacuum. Um, and that might lend itself to behaving in, you know, rude ways that I wouldn't normally if I were living in a community where I knew that everybody knew me. So, you know, we've sort of broken apart these communities that women actually held together. So, where I grew up, you know, my mother wasn't friends with everybody, but we knew everyone. I knew everyone in the subdivision, which family lived in what house, how many kids they had, and, you know, some sense of what the parents were like. Um, where I live now, I don't know. I don't have a clue. And the only time I, I did in Brooklyn was when I was not working and I was home all day, and I wound up becoming friends with someone who had a kid. And then she and I were roaming around the neighborhood together, and I got to know everybody because she was more connected to the neighborhood because she had a child. And then my association with her connected me more, and, and that, we, we look back on and say that was one of the best periods of time in both our lives when we got, also after work, people were coming home from work, and they would stop by our stoop to talk, and I knew the kids. Um, you know, and then, uh, the building got sold, and we were all dispersed, and that was the end of that community and that golden period of time. So, you know, in my neighborhood, my mother had a few friends, and they became lifelong friends, and they connected over needlework and watching each other's children, and, um, they were also all around the same age, which is another issue we can talk about. If everybody is dating toward marriage, which in my experience, that was thrown away. Now you don't know what you're doing. Mhm. But everybody was dating toward marriage and family formation. And so everybody's around the same age when they're having their children. And this creates a sort of, you know, a, a community. Um, if I could quote myself from one of my own comments, "Nothing marginalizes a woman more than going childless." You, you, you want to avoid getting stuck holding the bag, but then again, you know, if you end up with nothing, you, you're even more endangered. Yeah.
There's so many things you just said that are that are interesting threads to pull on. Like the, the sense of anonymity that you describe, being out of touch with a, with a community, feeling like you're just one of a bunch of people but not part of a, any kind of meaningful collective. That is just like the internet. And, and you see all this terrible, I just, it's like a, like a hate machine. The whole, you, you know, people are like this, and this condescending, self-righteous behavior that you see all over the place. Um, yeah, the anonymity, I, I think it's hard to even fathom how much that's changed us as people. The sense that we aren't being, that we aren't responsible and accountable to the people around us because those relationships are so fleeting or or unimportant or insignificant. And it's replaced religion, right? I mean, that's in, that's inside of us. And so we threw away organized religion, which is where we used to meet our spouses, which was community. You know, my parents were a sort of a mixed marriage. My dad was Jewish, and my mother not. And they sent us to Sunday school in the morning so they could have some time alone. But I still remember, you know, that that was a community. I remember the characters at the church, and, um, you know, the, the feeling that we all belonged to this place. Mhm. Um, and then people, you know, then, then the, the wisdom is to get away from that because they're, they're trying to control you, and they're trying to curtail your freedom. But that is where you would have organically met someone to marry that you might have grown up alongside and formed some kind of, you know, friendship that precedes marriage. Whereas, you know, you throw that away. What were my options for meeting a man, a man in 1978, '79, '80, which is, you know, you, the, the time period when, you know, I would have been like 18 to 21, married, marriageable age back in the day? Bars, bars, and concerts. Uh, you know, where I'm high, and I'm drunk, and, uh, you know, the, the wisdom is to try this person out right away on the first night, and then try to cobble some kind of relationship out of it. I was almost never able to do that. And I was also never really able to advocate for myself and say, "Well, this is what I want." Mhm. You know, you know, no matter what the arbiters, this is how I refer to them in my novel, the arbiters of correct opinions were telling me, I didn't agree with it, but I continued to act upon it. Mhm.
From, you know, probably from the moment of, I, I hit puberty, all I could think about was having babies. That was my instinct. That was what I wanted to do. I had a mother who was telling me that I didn't want to do this. And that's also part of my story, but I'm sure, you know, other mothers were not saying that. Mine just so happened to be that way. Um, you know, "You are not going to grow up and have, you, you are not going to have children. You're going to do this, and you're going to do this, and you're going to do this." In other words, "I'm going to fulfill what she didn't get to do because she had children." Mhm. Um, but, you know, the message inside the house was the message that was outside the house, too. And so here I am with a guy that I've slept with but don't know. You know, I don't know how to say, "I really want a committed relationship." There was something shameful and humiliating about that. M. Um, then some years down the line, I have a friend saying, "Well, why, why can't you just tell him that you want to see him again?" And, well, I, I don't know how to do that. And then, interestingly enough, whenever I did say that, they would say, "Well, that's not what I want." You know, whereas in my mother's day, that's just what people did. So you didn't, there was no shame in saying that's what you wanted. That's just what people did. And if it didn't look like the relationship was going to, uh, be compatible for marriage, they would get out and go to the next one. But in my experience, it was, "Well, I want this deep down inside. I'm afraid to say. So which guy is going to be the one that I can do this with? How do I even have that conversation?" [Music] Um, yeah, it was incredibly confusing. And whenever I have brought up feminism is sort of confusing things and creating chaos, people will inevitably say, "But you have choices now." Well, I don't agree. I think women always had choices. And there were plenty of people in my, you know, universe, older generations. There was actually my grandmother's cousin was a lesbian, lived with her partner, never, you know, bought a house with her and lived like they were married. Um, and my, my grandmother would never admit that they were gay, but they were. Um, another friend of my mother's was a career woman who never worked and traveled the world. You never married and traveled the world. Mhm. So, you know, and if you look honestly at history, you could see women doing all kinds of interesting things. And, but what everyone was doing was getting married and having a family, and then, you know, and then she would do something else when the kids were in school. Um, but, you know, in my generation, we were fumbling around, not knowing how to get what we deep inside really wanted. And the men were like, "Well, you know, now that I don't have to do this anymore, I'm not going to do it anymore." So, I'm going to go back to suggesting that it was women who gave men permission to be irresponsible. And the lack of community oversight also lends itself to that. You are alone in the middle of nowhere, and no one's really watching you. And I'm not going to say that that's great either. But, uh, if we have to, if we have to decide what really is better for everyone, perhaps it would be more connection around community and not politics. Mhm. That we are all families that live in this place, and we, we collectively want to create a really nice place for us to thrive in. And, and in, in essence, that is the kind of place that I grew up in.
Well, I'm, I'm certainly no feminist scholar, and I don't know, I, I don't know that much about feminist history, honestly. I, when I was younger, uh, it was more in vogue to be a feminist, and now it's not. And when it was, it was, um, I was kind of turned off by the harshness of what I perceived in it. It. This is coming. One of the things I, I think like when we're talking about the, the post-industrial revolution timeline, we're talking about these radical social changes that are happening along sort of a moving river, lots of currents moving in and out. And so I try to resist the thought that it used to be like this, instead of just thinking like, at this time it was like this, and then at this time it was like this. And so there's all these emergent qualities that are shaping the way people experience their societies, their families, themselves, their identity throughout this sort of modern era. And I have a sense that at some point, there were good things that were done in the name of feminism in order to give women certain legal statuses and rights as people. And that I, and I'm not, I'm not really sure of of a solid opinion on something like no-fault divorce. To some extent, I think that it's a, it's a useful thing because I've been in a relationship where I was being physically abused as well as being cheated on. And in this case, a lot of the things that happen in a, in a relationship where there's domestic abuse are sort of subtle. It's kind of hard to build a case, and nobody's witnessing these things. It's he said, she said. And by the time you're in a relationship that's really contentious, both people are not being their best self. Both people are, are, um, at times saying and doing things that somebody outside of the relationship would go, "You guys are a mess." You know, "You're so." So there can be a lot of difficulty in, even if you were to bring all of this before, say, an impartial third party, getting them to say, "Okay, this is clearly out of line. You've got denial of, of charges. You've got whatever." So, it becomes very messy if you were to have to prove that. And people in really bad relationships having the opportunity to say, "I don't have to justify my reasons for leaving this. I want, I want a chance at something better where maybe even being alone is better than what I'm experiencing here." So, I'm, I'm going to just take that chance. I'm not ready to throw that, that ideal away. But what's interesting to me, sort of this thread that's running through, uh, my thoughts as I'm reflecting on the things that you're saying, is this kind of the freedom that people have gained throughout this modern era has left us sort of seeking and expecting that we can perfect things, that we can reach something better. So, like thinking about your mother and her saying to you, "Don't have kids. Don't do what I did." She's, she's wanting something for you that's better than her perception of what her life was like. And then, although she did tell me, so she did tell me that she realized that my life was actually much harder than hers. Oh, wow. That's interesting. So she actually did have it better. So I want to hear about that. That. But I, I also want to, you know, reflect like these men who aren't interested in seeing a young woman again after one physical encounter. They're thinking, what are they thinking? Is it quantity? Is it quality? Is it like, maybe I would find someone who's a better mate for me? I, I met this woman. No, she's not quite what I'm looking for. So I'm not interested in more. But if I meet somebody who really knocks my socks off, I might. But as long as you have the sense that there's something better out there, and then you keep striving for it, it's like, and then a lot of the, um, I, I guess I haven't, shouldn't say a lot, but several of the women that I've spoken with in the course of these dialogues over the past, I guess, year or so, uh, who have talked about their experience of of not ever becoming mothers have said, "I didn't want to do to someone what I felt was done to me. I felt like I was going to perpetuate something, something that I, I think was undesirable in my own family or my own behavioral patterns, or I didn't think that I was good enough to be somebody's mother." And so I thought that I should just stop this process with myself, like, "I will just not go on to to do this to another generation." And so there's that always that thought that there's some perfect way to be a person, a family, a, a parent, a partner, and that we shouldn't try if we can't be perfect. So I, I don't know. I'll let you pick up from there. Tell me what you're thinking.
Yeah, that's really interesting. It's also like the, um, I wasn't ready, or I wouldn't have been ready to have children. And you have to ask yourself, what does that even mean? When would you ever be? Yeah. Yeah. I, I believe that, um, the hyper-hormonal craziness of adolescence is designed exactly to get us into that situation and launch us into adulthood. It's jumping into, you know, jumping into having children, and it makes you ready. Um, and I think we have certainly, and we can look to the pill for that, left the idea that life is actually something that happens to you. You don't really have complete control over it. But we have been given that illusion. Mhm. And then also we have been given or been sort of convinced into thinking that, um, the, the domestic abuser or the marriage that isn't working, and, and, and how do we even define that? That's the other thing. I think that the definition has just gotten too close to cutting and running and not even trying anymore to make it work or see your way through something. Mhm. Um, you know, and even just recently in my own life, uh, going through a really, really hard, hard time, and I'm trying to figure out how I, how I can get out of this. And, uh, you know, and then we went, we somehow made our way through it. Um, you know, and everyone around me is saying, "Oh, yeah, he's, he's like this. He's like this. You need to get out of there." Um, you know, so that's the other thing. More encouragement on behalf of friends to get out. Uh, another anecdote I can provide just, uh, of this idea of what things are supposed to be like versus the way they really truly are. Uh, years and years ago, a friend, uh, coworker had a baby. Husband is launching a restaurant. He's working day and night. And she says to me, "I'm like a single mother. He's never here." But he was working so that she could stay home with the kid, and he was working very hard, and he was faithful to her. And I said, I, I said, you know, he, he's, he, he's a man. He doesn't feel exactly the same way you do about the baby. Mhm. He's actually doing a lot to give you the time with the baby. And, you know, and to me, this is also kind of like a fantasy. She's going to the park, pushing the stroller up and down. You know, she knows everybody in the neighborhood, and I'm trailing along, and nobody's paying any attention to me. I don't matter to these women because I don't have a baby. Mhm. And, uh, she told me later that I, for all intents and purposes, saved her marriage. That every one of her friends was telling her to get out of this situation. If you think about it, here's a man working very hard. Mhm. To pay for everything so that she has the time with their child, and she's got it into her head that he's not doing enough because he's not doing what she can see in her own domestic sphere, but he's out there doing a lot. Mhm. Uh, you know, so I think that we, we have also been sort of, and I don't know, it's indoctrinated into thinking or expecting things that are just totally unrealistic. And, you know, I, I think we also use the, you know, the domestic abuse thing. You know, yes, some relationships, you, you absolutely have to get out of them. That's true. But I think we're using that as a basis for why at the slightest provocation, you, you, you get out of there. And, you know, my own household was by no means perfect. Some not so good things went on there. And even with those things, if I think about growing up with just my mother, I, I can't even begin to imagine it. My father died when, um, I was 20, and he was sick with cancer throughout my late teens. And after he was gone, I saw just how weak and vulnerable my mother really was without him. Uh, I saw just how much my father really did contribute to a balanced household. Again, absolutely not perfect. She, she probably even had reasons to leave him. Um, but I, I, if he had lived, you know, I, I, you know, I wonder, you know, whether they would have stayed married. They probably would have. Um, and hopefully we would have seen ourselves, our family through, you know, this, um, some of these things that went on. So, you know, and I, I was the person who experienced the brunt of it. Um, but I still wouldn't have wanted my parents to get divorced, and I wouldn't have wanted to break up my family. Yeah. Um, well, it's interesting. And actually, since he died, we, we weren't a family anymore. It really dissolved. It, it really, you know, it really dissolved the family, and all like strangers to one another.
What was your mother's statement to you about your life being harder than hers? When was that revelation or that thought? Yeah. I mean, why would women give this up? So, you know what my mother did most of the day? She was not a stellar housekeeper. And actually, my interest in interior design, my, um, obsession with cleanliness is because I couldn't stand how unkempt our house was. And I was always, you know, cleaning and moving things around to try to, you know, create a sense of order there. But she was very creative. She was always making things. She sewed my clothes, all of our clothes, made quilts for us. And in most of the households on our block, the women did needlework, did wonderfully creative things. And, uh, you know, if I think about the atmosphere on the block during the day, you know, they were making things, socializing, uh, creating a sense of community. And, uh, then you drive down that street, you know, 40 years later, and all the windows are closed, and the doors are locked, and it's a ghost town. And maybe you have a few random children coming home and unlocking the door alone. I mean, just think about the identity crisis with kids today. I would say it also can be traced back to this. Who am I? You know, I'm living marooned in this place. Who are my neighbors? You, maybe I don't know. Um, you know, I have friends who have everybody has a different last name in the family. You know, that's the other thing, right? Like the girls have the mother's last name, and the boys have the father's last name. Like, just not even the whole family having the same last name, right? Uh, so yeah, it's like, just the expectations are way too high. Mhm. The idea of being ready is, um, and also we have been told or made to believe that we have to get out if he's bad. Never mind how bad she is. Mhm. Mhm. Um, you know, some of the mothers on the block were absolute terrors, and you could hear them shrieking at, at, at the hus, you know, back then there was air conditioning, right? You can hear, you know, which house had a shrew in it and a, um, henpecked husband, you know. Um, we don't really also talk about that. So, you end up alone with the kids to get away from the bad man. But what about the mom who's overwhelmed, overworked? And this, I think, is where if we're telling this story, and it has an arc where we might get people a few generations removed from mine who say, "I don't want to do that to someone else because I grew up with a single mother who was completely overworked and miserable." Yeah. And my dad was absent or I saw him only. So why would I do that to someone? Mhm. And yet this freedom to get out of something that is bad is supposed to be a solution, but it actually created a much bigger problem. Yeah.
I, I really admire that you're discussing these things the way, you know, with this openness. I think that, uh, I hope that people who listen to this conversation will be, um, will be kind in their responses because I, these things are so touchy to talk about. These things are so hard for people to discuss. You, you can't start discussing women and men without without tripping over lots of people's feelings and legitimate, uh, caveats and, you know, their own life experiences. So I find it to be such a sensitive area to wade into on any level of public discussion. And so what you usually end up seeing are these really big, sweeping stereotypes and inflammatory statements, but what you're describing, I mean, it's your, these are, these are trends that you've noticed over the course of your life and how they've shaped your perception of, of your world, you know, the world that we live in and what's been going on. And I think that there's so many, uh, I, I don't know, I, I hesitate to lay any blame on women or on men for some of these things. I think that it's emergent between us. I think we're so interconnected that, like, take one area that a lot of people would agree is dysfunctional, and that's prostitution. That, you know, sex work in general, pornography, prostitution, there's a lot of dysfunction around this, a lot of disagreement, a lot of controversy, but at heart, it's an exploitation of men's sexuality, at using women's sexuality, and it's also an exploitation of women's sexuality, using men's sexuality. It's, there's sort of a complimentary loop that's happening where people are exploiting one another. And, um, I think that a lot of these interactions that you're describing, you know, being able to leave more easily, what that does to him, what that does to her, and how it impacts him, and how it impacts her. There's a, there's kind of an, an, a balancing of the, the impact and the, the fault ultimately, because one couldn't fall apart if they weren't vulnerable to falling apart, but they also couldn't fall apart if the other hadn't fallen apart. So, there's such a, it's such a precarious and, and delicate thing, this relationship between the sexes. I, yeah, I, I think, um, in one of the essays in the book, I just recently watched *Love Story*. You know that movie? I, I don't know, with Ali MacGraw and Ryan O'Neal. It was one of the most famous movies of the '60s. It's really interesting. Um, a whole, uh, if you watch movies from the '70s, just when there's this whole way of thinking is starting to turn. He is so madly in love with her, and frankly, her dialogue is a little abusive, and he finds it very charming. And I noticed in a lot of movies from around this period of time, there is so much love still shown between the men and the women as they're grappling with this new society. But as we have, uh, evolved, it really is like there's just more separation. Um, so, you know, some years ago, in a literature course that I taught, I, I did it on the theme of love, and I thought that they would be really interested in this. I certainly would have been myself. But they were incredibly cynical. And I gave them free license to, I, I gave them the feminist lens, even though I really don't want to deal with that. But I, I made very clear that they didn't have to agree with it. Mhm. And I paired some Baudelaire poems with *Black Venus* by, um, Angela, I was going to say Angela Carter. And this is considered a, you know, a very feminist story. And, uh, *Black Venus*, Jean Duval was, um, Baudelaire's mistress, and she was from the West Indies. And so there's all of this critical lens applied to his exotification of her and blah, blah, blah. But if you do a little research, you actually find out that he had a trust fund, and she introduced him to laudanum, and basically became an addict, and she had been a prostitute, and somebody gave somebody syphilis, and they both died of it. Ugh. So, yes, there's certainly some reciprocal exploitation going on. But I said, "Who would you rather have a beer with?" In, in *Black Venus*, it's, he's not doing enough for her. He's this, he's that. It's just bitching about him, and he's writing about how beautiful she is, and if she would only take him seriously. And, you know, if she would only love him as much as he loves her. And in my sort of world, many of the men in my community love their wives, couldn't live without them. And so when we talk about believing, I think actually the men really are wounded by this. And I fell into the manosphere for a while. And just like, you know, what Benjamin with all the drifters and the, um, men whose wives just turned on a dime on them, you know, and then they end up having to pay child support. And that's another reason why, you know, men are hesitant to have children now and get married. This also happened to a relative of mine. He got married, and after she had a baby, she said, she came from a wealthy family. She said, "Now that I have my baby, I don't need you anymore." He was absolutely devastated by this. So, uh, you know, that's the other thing I would like to, a narrative got us here, let's say, and a narrative will get us out. I think men do love women. We have forgotten that. If I could quote one of my comments from my, my essay, uh, "One of the greatest tragedies of the feminist project is denying how much men have loved and cherished women and their work. It's women who decided that our work was not valuable anymore. It's, it's women who actually decided that being a mother was a form of drudgery." But, you know, any kind of hard work is a form of drudgery. I've been a professor for years, and nothing is more drudgery than grading essays, you know? I mean, I would much rather be washing dishes, and frankly, changing diapers.
That's interesting. Yeah. I, I can't help but think that there's truth in all of those perspectives. Both. I mean, I've been, I've been a young mother, stay-at-home mom, and I can remember the absolute anguish, the loneliness of that. Just the complete loneliness. I, I can remember having two little kids, putting them in the stroller, and walking around the neighborhood just aching for someone to see, and just going to the store just so that I could talk for a moment at the cashier stand to someone who would, who would, you know, be another face and voice in my life, show me that I was worth a smile. You know, when you work long hours, day in day out, 24 hours a day with little kids as your only companions, and they're difficult and, and needy, and lovely, and they bring a lot of joy, but they also bring a lot of, a lot of work, and there's little human connection outside of that service that you're, you're doing for your kids. Didn't have that where you were living, like where there were other mothers and? No, no, no. Uh, I, I, I struggled to find that. It took me a long time to find that. And even then, when I found, this is my own story, so I know other people will have a different story, but I became a mom really young. I was 19 when I had my first, and 21 when I had my second. And I tried to join a playgroup, and it was really, uh, I was just treated like I was kind of a teen mom by all these women who were in their 30s having children, and not, you know, I wasn't an equal, really, in that group. Um, people's lives are just so individual, you know, so these things are true. I can see that the, there's, there's something that you lose in not getting to experience that. But there's something also that I understand the desire that that women and mothers would have to have something more outside of the motherhood experience and the home. So, but it's interesting because everybody's doing that at a different time in their lives, and that's what put you in, you know, as made you an outlier, right? Which kind of brings me back to my beef about education. I, I went when I was in, uh, college, so this would have been in like maybe 2005 or '06. I went to a lecture by a guy, I can't remember the guy's name. He was an author. He wrote a book called *The World Without Us*. And this was, did you, are you familiar with this? James Howard Kunstler. Yeah. Okay. And I, I went to this lecture, and I was, uh, really steeped in the idea that we've overpopulated, humans are destroying the planet. Um, and one of the things that he put forth in that lecture, one of his big pieces of hope was that we can turn overpopulation around, and we know how to do it. We just have to focus on educating women because if you educate women, they will put off childbearing. And so there was this big, big push that this is the way we're going to do it. We're going to engineer a better world by making sure that women are attaining post-graduate degrees in greater numbers, that they're going, uh, at least through university, so that we can get them to stop having children so young. By the time they start having children, some of them won't be able to anymore by the time they want to, and others won't be able to have as many. So we'll really curtail the birth rate. And, you know, if, if you are dealing with overpopulation, I, maybe that's, uh, that's a better way to do it than the one-child policy or some other ways that people have socially engineered. But the, the thing is, with social engineering, there's always going to be unintended effects. There's, whenever you're trying to decide for someone else, that I'm going to look into your life, which is very intricate and complex, and I'm just going to nudge one variable because I see that as the variable that I should be manipulating. You don't know how many other systems are connected to that one variable. And when you do that across a population, uh, you create all kinds of interesting and, and, and unforeseen.
downstream effects of your one manipulation. Well, it's interesting that you mentioned the one child policy, but also and I I had another thought. Um, God, I lost it.
The one the one child policy, uh, I mainly was teaching Chinese nationals and it came up in class. You know, this student was saying something about the one child policy. I said, "Well, what's interesting is that it was forced on you, but propaganda convinced us to do the same thing." Yeah. And also just, you know, this whole idea that your life isn't very fulfilled, you know, unless you're doing more than creating a family. And what you were saying about being alone and isolated, I have to say, in my experience, and if I do write my dumb post-feminist life, I I started writing a section of it so we could take me to the age of 23. Mhm. Those that period was so lonely and so upsetting, actually, when I look back on it. And I see myself walking around, you know, working in restaurants and uh, meeting people in bars when they're not at their best. So my main socializing is with drunk, high, mean people, you know, and sleeping off a night of, you know, sleeping the day after a graveyard shift, waiting on drunk people, you know, walking to and from work, uh, not really connected to a community apart from the friends that I left back home in the suburbs who I was still seeing and who were getting married and doing all those things while I'm living in this apartment, going to a restaurant job. Um, and really, honestly, the only socializing I'm doing is in the restaurant or in a bar, you know.
So, uh, if I have to choose between say, the loneliness of raising kids, but then again, if we were all doing it at the same time, there would be more cohesion there, but we're alone now. You know, you were doing something that other people weren't doing. Yeah. Um, and we kind of have to live from where we actually are, not from this ideal. So, I can see the need. I can see one is not one is too much, one is too little. There there's an imbalance in both of those scenarios that you paint. But there's, you know, maybe it's that ever striving for something better, which is what we do when we have these conversations, too. I mean, we're talking about people striving for something better and then tipping that too far and falling into a new kind of of chaos. And so then we strive for something better and we talk about how could we how could we fix that and move it back towards something that's more of a balance point.
But, you know, in in my life, I've been that that stay-at-home mom that was achingly lonely. And I've been the single mom who worked and went to school full-time and took her kids to all the sports and the choir and the this and the that and felt completely uh frazzled and exhausted at the end of the day. And I've also had the opportunity to be the mom of young babies who had a part-time job. And so, you know, that was for me, that's just my own anecdote, but that was a really nice balance getting out, being able to have intellectual discussions or talking about things that are beyond the little. When you have a a brain that wants discovery, but it has very little new input and new stimulation, that can be torturous for some people. So getting out and being able to have discussions that go beyond just the diapers and the what's a what's for dinner and the house decorating and the plants and the husband and, you know, having these bigger, more worldly discussions, being in school. I I see why people want that, men and women, why we want that kind of connection. And I don't think it's impossible to have both. I just, I really don't think it's impossible to have both. It's impossible to have one if you fully go into the other, actually, and abandon the path of the other. I'm actually wondering whether the best way to get both is to go back to forming families earlier. Mhm. And and everybody's doing it around the same age. Yeah.
I think that there's something to that and and in order to do that, we really need we need uh educational standards that allow people to have meaningful work young. So, we need high school to really mean something. We need people to be able to get good work and do good work at age 20, not wait till they're 25 or 30 before they're considered an adult who can take responsibility. We need to actually have people assuming places of responsibility younger. Yeah, absolutely. And I think we also need to go back to treating teenagers like they are um emerging adults and not children. Yeah. Which is another thing that I've noticed. And I'm working in a very female-dominated area and the infantilization is just off the charts. Yeah. And I have even been mocked for treating our students like adults. Wow. Um, yeah. And they are all childless. So, you know, you you were touching on Jordan Peterson's. Yeah. The child concerns about childless women. Well, I am seeing that in action. So, I actually wanted to say, you know, I absolutely see that and what and then you yourself are a counterpoint to that. Yeah.
Well, and they h they they peck at me, you know, like us. And so you're the black I'm the black sheep of the department because I'm like, you know, Jessica, why are you buying their books for them? Just tell them where the bookstore is and what the title of the book is, you know. Um, and there's a lot of push to send them to health services and to mother them and I'm and there was this great I think this anecdote is is really telling. Um, I don't do journals. I teach writing and I will not do journals. I don't want to know what their personal lives are. It's none of my business. So, I'm very old school in that regard. And when when at the end of the semester, I had this Turkish student. She was all decked out in furs and jewelry and um she failed and she came to me in the listing. She said, "I just want you to know I learned a lot in this class, but I failed on purpose uh because I need to keep my visa and um you know, I'm a high-priced call girl and uh this is how I'm making money and my parents won't my parents have disowned me and this is how I'm saving up to go to Parsons." And I said, "Okay." And uh then the next semester I'm at the co-copy machine and the coordinator comes up to me all in a panic and she says, you know, now the students in the other teacher section and she said, you know, I don't remember the student's name, but did you know that she's a you know, that she's a prostitute and you know an escort? And I said, "Yeah." And then she said, "And and you didn't tell us." I said, "No, why should I tell you? It's it's it's she's an adult, you know, she's 22 years old. It's it's her business. It's none of my business." But there really was this campaign to rescue this student from from this. And while, you know, maybe it wasn't such a great choice on her part. M um I don't really think my job as a professor is to get involved in a student's personal business. And I'm seeing this time and time again and also just, you know, celebrating weakness. Also, there was a suicide at the school where I was teaching before and one of my students had seen this person jump out the window. Oh my gosh. This APB goes out all across the school that this happened and anybody who has been touched by it, you should give them more time to do their work. And I I just, I'm sorry, I don't agree with this.
Um, it's so interesting because the the outside-in view of somebody else's life and trends and habits is both kind of the standpoint that we're we're there's this there's a I guess a bit of a paradox here because on the individual level, um, I think that we tend to respect choices, let people do and and we we're not going to look too hard at what they're doing. Go ahead. And then on the zoom-out social level, it's the aggregate of these kinds of choices that end up creating exactly the trends that we're sitting here describing today. So, like this prostitute, you know, she's both the epitome of this this uh feminism gone wrong sort of thing that you're talking about because she she exemplifies this woman who's prioritizing sexual freedom and and actually benefiting off of it, profiting off of it financially. She's also a lure to men who might want to do better, but because, you know, there's the there's the supply and demand question, right? Like what which is creating which? But she's she's definitely a part of that paradigm that's undermining both men and women. And yet when you stand really close to it, you know, how do you how do you tell another person? How do you butt into another person's life? And we end up actually, if we advocate for individualism, we would advocate against the very people who want to intervene and change that trend both for her and for the ripple-out effect that it will have on other people. So there seems like there's a little bit of a social paradox there.
Well, also, and I'm sort of going back on what I was saying about community and how community watches over you, right? Oh gosh. How I think isn't that fascinating? Yeah. But I find but but that's the thing in this sort of matriarchal university system we're in now, the women want to do for the students what they would have done in their own in a community. So they are a bit of that. Yeah. And I'm saying that in the in these institutions, I'm not necessarily convinced that this is the right application for it. This is what Jordan Peterson is um calling out. Yeah. That women are taking their unmet maternal instincts and applying them in places where, you know, applying that in places where it doesn't belong. Um, and I also have seen on social media, it's the unmarried, childless woman who's the loudest, posting the most and insisting that people think a certain way, is deciding what's offensive and what isn't. Mhm. It's not necessarily the guys, although I have seen guys go along with it. Um, you know, and and it was say about 10 years ago, we were also told that we were not to cause harm in any way to the students. And I'm just sitting there and I'm like, how would I even know what that means? And I tried even asking like, how do you even define that? You know, and that's the other thing that these words that used to actually mean something, they become so watered down. Posts have been moved to create like these so-called safe spaces.
So, in other words, the women I'm going to say, you know, if I define patriarchy and matriarchy, or what what we used to live in and what I would like to see us sort of navigate our way back to, is we actually weren't in a patriarchy. There was a patriarchy and there was a matriarchy. And the women were matriarchally running this domain and the men were patriarchally running the this other domain. And the men returned home to the matriarchal domain. And they might have had some say and, you know, some say and they might have made final decisions about some things. Although I'm not sure because when I look back anecdotally on what was going on in the houses in my neighborhood, those the women were running the show and the men the men were doggedly going out to work and bringing home the paycheck. You know, I actually think in the so-called patriarchy, the men got the the probably the raw end of the stick in a lot of ways. Uh, you know, when my father was dying of cancer, he still had to go to work and support our family and my mother was doing some work at home, but my father was the primary breadwinner all along, even when he was sick. And to see him, you know, after going through chemo, get up on a 20-degree below zero day and hack the car out of the snow and go to work, uh, while my mother's sitting curled up in the warm living room reading a book. I mean, I just, you know, don't see how um it really was as unequal, really, you know? Yes and no, paradoxically, right? Yeah.
Well, Darlene, I think that's that's your your perspective is really interesting to me and I've learned a lot through this discussion. I I I think we are planning to have you join us for a solid ground discussion. So everybody can talk about these these perspectives and share what they think. And I I think that this is a great discussion. I'm so glad that you wrote to me and reached out to me to talk about this. And thanks for having me. This is my first time. Oh, well, I I do hope you know again, whenever people hear these kinds of dialogues, there's lots of places that it hits people very personally and they feel like somebody's talking about them. And I would encourage people who feel frustrated with aspects of what they've heard or or agree with it to write, comment, talk about it, talk about it. But remember, you're talking to human beings and uh share what you think and what your own experiences are, how they differ, how they're similar, and add something. But uh please be be human about it because I know that these are sensitive topics. It's so hard to talk about them and it takes a lot of vulnerability to be the one to stand up and talk about it and and share your own thoughts. So, thank you so much, Darlene. And tell us where where can people find your work if they want to follow or read your your books or your essays?
Well, I have been underco on subst. Uh, so I would be outing myself, notes from the underdog l. And the first essay in the emerging book is called a requiem for the patriarchy. And I've also just finished a novel called Sexodus, which is a fictional um, you know, he said, she said, uh story that takes a couple of characters with a rather dubious sexual experience, somehow pits them together into a place where they have to rely on one another to survive. Oh, interesting. Well, it sounds fascinating and I hope people will go and check those out. I'll put links in the description of this video so people can go and find you. And thank you so much, Darlene, for talking to me. Thank you, Leslie. It's a real pleasure. Thank you.