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Sex and relationships: not just silly “women’s business”

Image thanks to lepiaf.geo.

Yesterday, I participated in a forum for International Women’s Day, following the awesome Australian play, Bombshells. It’s playing in Paddington until March 14 and features some very talented young actress, so I encourage you to head on over if you’re at all interested in checking it out.

In the meantime, here’s what I had to say…

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I write about sex and relationships.

I also write about lots of other things, which I’ll happily rattle off to reassure you - and myself - that I’m a respectable, “serious” writer, but over the past year or so, I’ve found myself writing more and more about sex and relationships.

I find there’s an assumption that people who write about these issues - particularly women who write about them - are somewhat… lightweight. That they’re not “real” journalists. That they’re attention seekers wanting to play off the popularity of Sex & The City to boost their public profiles. That they’re peddlers of fictitious snake oil designed to play on insecurities and increase magazine sales and website click-throughs.

And you know what? There’s definitely some truth to that.

If you’re anything like me, consuming media about relationships - whether it’s in the form of a women’s magazine article, a dating columnist, or a current affairs show reporting demographer Bernard Salt’s latest research on “the man drought” - probably leaves you feeling frustrated. Maybe even a little insecure.

It makes me feel frustrated because I know what I’m reading is, as I said before, fiction. It’s not true. I know that men aren’t all driven by the chase, that there’s a lot more to women than a lust for Mr Right and Manolos, and that there isn’t an expiration date on being loveable or desirable.

It makes me feel angry because I know they’re just trying to make me feel insecure so that I’ll go out and buy something - whether that’s a new dress, some botox injections or just a copy of their latest book.

And it makes me feel a little insecure because even as I know all this, I can’t help but worry that, well, they might be right. It doesn’t help that these very limited, very gender-normative ideas have such a stranglehold not only the media debate, but on the way we talk about these issues with the people in our own lives. It’s really hard to avoid them.

As I wrote in a recent opinion piece for The Age, I think there are strong parallels between the ways we talk about relationships and the way we monitor women’s bodies and weight.

The difference lies in the way we approach them.

A few weeks ago, I got my nails done at the local beauty salon, as a reward for meeting a big thesis deadline. While I was there, the beauty therapist asked me if I got my eyebrows waxed. I told her I didn’t. She asked me why I didn’t and I responded, “Because I don’t think I need to.” “Oh no, you do!” she told me. “I’ll show you in the mirror later, if you like.”

She was trying to make me feel bad about myself so I’d buy something, but because I knew that was what she was doing, it didn’t work. I’m not sure I’d be so confident if someone spent half an hour trying to convince me if that my boyfriend didn’t really like me, because I asked him out first, all those years ago. On a political level, I’d know it wasn’t true, but on a personal level, it would bite more.

That might be my insecurities talking, but I think it’s also because while feminists have created strong, sustained alternative narratives around body image that have cut through to the mainstream, we’re yet to do the same with relationships.

Which is why I started writing about these issues. Because when I kept coming across things that drove me crazy, I felt compelled to rebut it. To put something out there that reassured the other women who, like me, sensed that there was something not right about the dominant media narratives, that we weren’t just deluded. And something that would give women who were in that fabled rush to trap a man before their boobs started sagging another, more critical - in the sense of critical thinking rather than criticising - way of looking at relationships.

This isn’t to say that I think sex and relationships are the biggest issues facing the world, or even the biggest issues facing women. Obviously they’re not. But they are issues that affect us all, women and men alike.

As the old feminist adage says, and the play you’ve just watched shows, “the personal is political” - and I think that’s true in three ways. The personal is political because the way we choose to care for others and ourselves is political in and of itself. As one of my favourite young feminist writers, Courtney Martin, wrote a couple of years ago, “the moment we choose the shape our love is the first, most critical step in shaping the whole God damn world”.

It’s also political because, as I’ve demonstrated, our personal experiences are shaped by cultural and political factors. And it’s political because freeing ourselves from the unnecessary anxieties created by the dominant narratives frees us to devote our attention to other, bigger things.

# gender# life# relationships# sex# best
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