A year of mad women

And wanting

This year, as our community grew to well over 10,000 subscribers and 21,000 people following the newsletter, the number of mad women—and women likely to be written off as madwomen—also grew around the world.

I began this year with some thoughts on the cultural banality of white men’s rage, and this fall, we saw that play out in familiar ways during the election season. Now we’re closing out the year with a heavy cloud of increasingly institutionalized misogyny— which I wrote about minutes after the presidential election result was called.

Over the past few weeks, we have witnessed the rise of a national political agenda of fascist and plutocratic control, ideologically focused on maintaining access to women’s unpaid work in the home at all costs and to weaponizing a stark and deepening gender divide.

But we had fun this year, despite how dark this all seems— with Taylor Swift’s tortured poetry, women’s revenge fantasies, and the odd marriage plots maintained by reality TV.

Looking back on everything we’ve thought through together here over the past year—and what this year has been like for me personally—I’m struck, as ever, by how our intimate lives are shaped by seemingly external cultural and political shifts.

When I spoke with author Soraya Chemaly a few weeks ago, she discussed the distinct periods of feminist awakening in her own life. This year has certainly been one of my own— a midlife reckoning.

My last awakening probably coincided with the 2016 election, when I was becoming a mother while unraveling my own early education about my body, which I wrote about, of course, in Touched Out. Before that, as I intimate in the book, I probably also had one during the flurry of campus sexual assaults in the early 2010s, while teaching that very subject on a college campus in upstate New York, and while immersed in feminist and queer theory.

But since Touched Out was first published in September of last year, I have spoken to literally hundreds of women—after they read the book, and for the projects that landed in my lap after the book came out. Their stories have taught me more than academic theory ever could about the conversations we have yet to have about marital obligation, sex, and desire.

As I navigated the thorny process of writing about one’s children, being attacked online by far-right figureheads, and the precarious economics of being a writer, I found myself immersed in the lives of everyday women who were trying to navigate their own personal and political awakenings.

Those in heterosexual marriages were all asking big questions about what it means to be in close proximity to men who always seem to want more of them; to attempt to say no, when the culture told them they should be scheduling opportunities to say yes. They were unlearning their distrust of themselves, and reintroducing themselves to their own bodies, while consuming online advice that told them they needed to compromise more, work harder and better, and swallow all feelings of resistance.

And they too often felt hopelessly alone and unsupported— though clear-headed on what they were going through— while hearing from therapists and doctors that they had emotional and psychological and even physical pathologies— rather than that the sicknesses were in the world around them.

Earlier this year, I also ended my marriage, not quite because I saw too much, but because seeing what I saw threw the details of my own life into relief. In the process, my eyes have been opened more widely to the cultural primacy of marriage and how it facilitates— yes, even still today, because we are far from living in a post-feminist world!— the continued control and subordination of women.

I have found that with divorce comes a kind of social death, but also relief. Growing up in two homes that were shrouded in divorce-bitterness, I resolved early on to have a different sort of relationship with the change, with my children and family, and with the rest of my life. My own marriage was also riven by the close proximity of violence and therefore grief. And there’s something simply human, if inhumane, about witnessing and reeling from both death and lost love.

Even so, I’ve been troubled by the expectation that comes with divorce (similar to sobriety) that women perform their own deprivation whenever they withdraw from men or heterosexuality— lest we endanger the dogged, bipartisan belief that one lifelong marriage is some kind of personal and cultural boon.

All this has taught me a lot about the distances we still have to go—and about the incredible volume of work and time most women spend not only sparing and caring for the men in their lives, but rationalizing that work, and demanding that both others and themselves do more of it.

And yet, I have also been surprised to experience the visceral calm that comes from simply dropping that rope, surrendering, and say, no longer.

I have moved out of the period of my life I describe in Touched Out— a time of confusion, itch, fuzzy feeling and thinking. This coming year, I’ll finalize my divorce and turn 40. Naturally, I have been thinking much more about midlife, and about older women as sages and guides. I have been thinking, too, about the kinds of desires and pleasures and stories women are allowed to have, and what it means to reclaim our lives from a culture that doesn’t want us to have autonomy, or our own narratives.

It didn’t surprise me at all when young women poured out expressions of refusal online after the election, particularly given that such refusal among heterosexual women had been building long before the election. What did surprise me, however, was how quickly those young women were reprimanded across the political spectrum. In the weeks since, sex and relationships with men have been reduced to political sport—or worse, a kind of electoral strategy—or totally cut off from their political and intimate realities.

Less than a decade out from MeToo, most of the US has grown tired of discomfort and accountability, even as rape, assault, harassment, forced pregnancy, and the denial of gender-affirming healthcare (and most people’s basic humanity) are all becoming increasingly normalized and codified.

And that’s where we find ourselves at the end of this year— not inside a “culture war” or even “gender war,” but in a moment during which it feels more comfortable to cast off those seeking any corner of their own humanity, rather than place blame where it belongs— on the people doing actual violence.

In the coming year, I am sure we will continue to discuss the paradoxes of femininity and of feminism, domestic inequality, and the always multifaceted experience of motherhood.

But I hope we can also remember that the real threat to our pleasure isn’t women doing feminism imperfectly, or women being too “negative”, or women who own cats, or women who are angry about their own abuse and subjugation, or queer and trans people—but rather the terribly limited scripts we have for pleasure and connection.

I’ll be thinking about both pleasure and refusal—how both are waged on the level of the individual as attempts to recover the self from the pain of the collective.

I’ll be thinking, too, about how our desires and fantasies—and the autonomous spaces we create that transcend what we call “family,” to tap the pleasure of being with others—bring us relief, but also help us imagine a world not like this one.

I’ll be thinking about the kitchens and living rooms and friends that held me during the dark parts of this year, of all of you. About how letting go of all that caring and sparing and scheduling and performing can actually be a form of love and growth— and deepened and new connections. And about how women running full force into their own desires can sometimes be a healing act not only for themselves, but for everyone around them.

Tracey Emin, It— didn’t stop— I didn’t stop, 2020.