Sex, Power & Progress
Friday, the US Supreme Court reversed Roe v Wade. The same night I watched Emma Thompson in Good Luck to You Leo Grande. This morning I’m still digesting both. Both made me cry – at the damage done to so many. At the cost of tortuous taboos and discomfort with basic human urges. At the shock of this still being a thing in 2022.
Superficially, film and vote are flips sides of the same, sex coin. Roe is all about limiting women’s ability to manage the aftermath of sex. Leo Grande is about women’s ongoing challenges with the act itself. But really, in both we are witnessing the trauma caused by humans to other humans. Roe flips a half-century trend of empowering women to make choices of all kinds – personal, professional, sexual and financial. Emma Thompson offers an achingly believable portrait of what disempowered women look and sound like – and how they pass their problems on to the next generation.
I happened to be on a call Friday organised by Eve Rodsky, the author of Fairplay (soon a documentary) and an activist for reforming parental and elder care in the US. A couple of hundred powerful women are in her Careforce network – and many were in tears. And fighting mad. They shared stories of their own abortions, of daughters or friends of children who’d needed them, of the terrors and the guilt and the criminalisation and politicisation of the problem in so many parts of the country. They shared tools and tactics and resources that I published in my FORBES blog. Having been born in Canada and lived in France for most of my adult life, I was aghast. Canada legalised abortion in 1969 when I was 8, Simone Weill pushed abortion legislation through in France in 1975, when I was 14. (Russia was first, in 1920!) Roe v Wade was voted in the US in 1973. Today, almost all the OECD’s 38 countries allow abortions. It is strange and scary, at 60, to watch a country like the US go backwards on female freedom of choice. It is unbelievable, until you watch it happen before your eyes.
In the movie, Thompson plays Nancy, a retired school teacher (of religion, of course) who has never had an orgasm (something which is, thankfully, not that common), hates her body, and isn’t too fond of her children either. Nor does she miss the husband who died two years earlier after 31 years of formulaic humping. She is determined to experience pleasure before it’s too late, and hires the almost impossibly sensitive and intuitive Leo, a sex worker played by Daryl McCormack. Their two-hander tenderly explores what it takes to break through Nancy’s carapace of anxieties. Typically, she wants to build a relationship with her young paramour before sex. Get to know him, and his mom, and his back story. He wants to hide his hurt and his vulnerabilities from her discerning maturity. In the end, they unlock each other, in a therapeutic series of taut, beautifully paced scenes. The film closes with Nancy gazing at her naked self in the mirror in loving acceptance of herself (the hardest thing Thompson said she ever had to do, admitting her own hang-ups about her body). It reminded me of the wonderful poem by Derek Alcott, Love After Love:
The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other's welcome
Both have been deeply wounded by the other sex. Both have lived lives diminished by others’ hang-ups and ignorance about sex. It’s an optimistic, healing end, to a story of trauma around sex and self-acceptance. But sadly, most of us won’t have Nancy’s courage, or find men like the mythical Leo. Too many, especially among those most vulnerable, will find sex and its consequences traumatic and life altering.
There will be many more such stories now playing out across America.
“Just don’t make it a fight between men and women. It has always been, and will always be, a fight between progressives and the rest.”
To end on a more upbeat note, and get a bit of perspective, I met with Claudia Goldin, one of my personal references in all things re. research on women. She’s a prominent Harvard economist who’s latest book, Career & Family, traces women’s “century-long journey towards equity.” She tracks cohorts of college-educated women, born from 1900 to 2000, and segments them into five different groups. The segmentation is based on the family and work choices they made, influenced by a series of cultural, technological or educational factors. And the news is good. Each generation has learned from the last, and grown to claim a more complete and balanced life. Her groupings:
Group 1: born 1900s and 1910s were forced to choose between family or career
Group 2: born 1920s and 1930s chose job then family
Group 3: born post-war and into the 1960s, did family then job
Group 4: born 1970s, opted for career then family
Group 5: born in the 1980s and 90s finally managed career and family
She also challenges the ideas of the she-cession and generally gives a much more encouraging picture of the extraordinary progress women have made. I’ll do a more in-depth summary over the coming weeks, but I thought we all needed a little big picture framing to get us through this latest news cycle. Women are now more educated, more organised and more powerful than they have ever been in all of human history. Our daughters and sons will build on the slow and sometimes disputed progress we’ve made, no matter how many reactionary forces try and reverse it along the way.
Just don’t make it a fight between men and women. It has always been, and will always be, a fight between progressives and the rest.
Thanks for your thoughts and I share your grave sadness about the direction America is heading. I'm fifty eight and it suddenly feels like so much is unraveling. And now I need to go find that new Emma Thompson movie!