Zoe Lewis is a well-regarded English playwright whose Touched: the Play opens this week in London. I can’t speak for the play, but can speak about her risible op-ed in yesterday’s Times of London: Madonna syndrome: I should have ditched feminism for love, children and baking.
The title of the piece isn’t promising, and neither is the rant that follows. Lewis, 36 and single, devotes hundreds and hundreds of words to decrying the feminism she embraced in her youth, which she blames for her current unmarried and childless state.
I want love and children but they are nowhere to be seen. I feel like a UN inspector sent in to Iraq only to find that there never were any weapons of mass destruction. I was led to believe that women could “have it all†and, more to the point, that we wanted it all. To that end I have spent 20 years ruthlessly pursuing my dreams – to be a successful playwright. I have sacrificed all my womanly duties and laid it all at the altar of a career. And was it worth it? The answer has to be a resounding no.
If she writes plays like she writes op-ed, I fear for those who have invested in the show. She can’t even get singular/plural agreement in her prose. And the rest of the piece isn’t much better, as it includes staggering gems of long-since discredited pop psychology like this:
I thought that men would love independent, strong women, but (in general) they don’t appear to. Men are programmed to like their women soft and feminine. It’s not their fault – it’s in the genes. Holly Kendrick, 34, who holds a high-status job in the theatre, agrees: “Men tend to be freaked out if you work as hard as them.†This is why many of my girlfriends are still alone. The truth, though, is not that men haven’t accepted women’s modernity – the alpha woman who never questions her entitlement to the same jobs, fun and sexual gratification as them – but that women haven’t either.
(My wife, an athlete and a successful business woman and a first-time mother at Lewis’ age, rolled her eyes when I read that passage to her. “My love”, she said to me just now, “is there something wrong with your genes?”)
I’ve long since given up fisking anti-feminist screeds of the sort that Zoe Lewis has put up. But what I do want to mention is a tactic Lewis uses that is too-little remarked upon by feminists, particularly those of us who are — or who work with — young women. At one point in her piece, Lewis writes, lamenting the progressive values with which she was raised, “I wish I’d had the advice that I am giving to my 21-year-old sister.” She’s taking on a role which we train women (feminists or not) to take on, that of the wise older sister giving advice about the world to a young and impressionable woman. There’s nothing wrong, of course, with mentoring the young — I do it both for a living and avocationally. But there is something wrong with the dynamic at work in Lewis’ piece, and in so many other places in traditional culture: the emphasis on teaching younger women to avoid older women’s mistakes.
I often ask my female mentees and my women’s studies students how often they’ve been on the receiving end of a “Don’t make the same mistakes I did” lecture from an older woman. At least three-quarters of the class invariably raise hands or nod. I follow up: “How often was this advice centered around relationships?” Almost all keep their hands up. Most girls learned what Lynn Phillips calls the “Love Hurts” discourse from older women by the time they hit puberty. A great many young women, particularly those with aunts and older sisters, were told time and again “Don’t believe anything a man says”; “Get an education before you settle down so you don’t have to rely on a man”; “Don’t do what I did and waste your heart and your time on a fool”. And so on, and so on, and so on. Much of the advice given is wise, at least in part: it is good, surely, to encourage our daughters to pursue education and to at least be somewhat leery of what teenage boys promise. Even Lewis offers some sensible points, noting that love and relationships ought not to be entirely neglected by the young and the ambitious.
The “Don’t do as I did, do as I say” discourse is an old one. And Lewis is firmly within that tradition, writing like nothing so much as a spinster aunt out of a nineteenth-century novel (only in that world is 36 “old” for a woman). She wants her younger sister to not let a good opportunity pass by, and not allow the “good ones” to slip away. Lewis is following firmly in the footsteps of Lori Gottlieb, who wrote a ridiculous paean in favor of “settling” a year or so ago, but she belongs to a much older tradition, even older than the era of Dickens and Austen: that of the not-so-old, not-as-insightful-as-she-thinks-she-is aunt or sister figure who dispenses warnings to young women who are, she imagines, just like she was not so long ago. What’s so toxic about this discourse is that it purports to offer assistance to the young, but ends up teaching another lesson altogether: women are invariably architects of their own unhappiness. To be a woman is to suffer, and the only satisfaction that comes as a result of all of that suffering (whether that suffering came from cheating husbands — or, as in Lewis’ case, the absence of a husband) is the chance to issue dire warnings to a new generation of impressionable and idealistic young women. Call it the “Love Hurts” discourse, or the “Feminism turned out to be a crock” discourse if you like, but it’s really part of something else: the “Women don’t know what’s good for them” discourse.
I don’t doubt that Zoe Lewis is well-intentioned. The young women I work with who “mentor” their even younger-sisters by offering cautionary tales from their own “mistakes” are, I’m quite sure, also well-meaning. But they ought to know better; as humans, we learn far more effectively from what our elders actually did than from what they didn’t do. The purpose of telling the young about one’s fuck-ups, in other words, is not to discourage them from making the same mistake, but to show them positive steps for overcoming the most painful consequences of what they did. My stories about my drug addiction, for example, are useless in terms of teaching a young person not to try drugs. My story of recovery, on the other hand, has the potential to be genuinely helpful. That’s true for all of us, men and women alike, and it’s true whether the subject is addiction or sex or career or marriage. Contrary to what our culture claims, we learn very little from the errors of others. We only learn from the way in which they dealt with those errors. This is a message missing from the stories told by Lewis or Gottlieb or any of the current generation of thirty- and forty-something women getting book deals and stage plays based upon their desire to lament both their own mistakes and the larger “failure” of feminism itself. Continue reading →
