Men Fear Me, Society Shames Me, and I Love My Life
I was once told that the challenge of making successful feminist porn is that the thing women desire most is freedom.
If that is the case, one might consider my life over the past few years to be extremely pornographic — even without all the actual sex that occurred. It definitely has the makings of a fantasy, if we allowed for fantasies starring single, childless women on the brink of turning 50.
It is not just in enjoying my age that I am defying expectations. It is that I have exempted myself from the central things we are told give a woman’s life meaning — partnership and parenting. I have discovered that despite all the warnings, I regret none of those choices.
Indeed, I am enjoying them immensely. Instead of my prospects diminishing, as nearly every message that gets sent my way promises they will — fewer relationships, less excitement, less sex, less visibility — I find them widening. The world is more available to me than it has ever been.
Saying so should not be radical in 2024, and yet, somehow it feels that way. We live in a world whose power structures continue to benefit from women staying in place. We are currently experiencing the latest backlash against the meager feminist gains of the past half-century. My story shows that there are other, fulfilling ways to live.
Last year was the 50th anniversary of Roe versus Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court decision protecting abortion rights (it was overturned in 2022). This year is the 50th anniversary of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, which allowed U.S. women for the first time to have bank accounts and credit cards in their own name, not needing a male signature.
That my birth date landed between the passing of these two landmark laws makes it easier for me to see that the life I am living is a result of women having authority over both their bodies and their finances. I represent a cohort of women who lead lives that do not require us to ask permission or seek approval.
The timing of my birthday also helps me see the violent rollback of women’s rights happening in the United States now as a response to the independence these legal rights afforded women. Forget about the horror of being alone and middle-aged — there is nothing more terrifying to a patriarchal society than a woman who is free. That she might be having a better time without permission or supervision is downright insufferable.
Like many, I spent the early months of the pandemic by myself. It was the type of solitary confinement that popular science, and certain men with platforms, enjoy reminding us will be the terrible future that awaits a woman who remains single for too long.
By August 2021, I was desperate — not for partnership but for connection. I flew to Paris, where I had a group of friends.
I dove in. Cheese, wine, friendships, sex — and repeat.
At first it was shocking. I was ill prepared to get what I wanted, what it seemed I had summoned. There were moments when I wondered whether I should be ashamed. I had also never felt so free and so fully myself. I felt no shame or guilt, only the thrill that came with the knowledge I was exercising my freedom.
These days, generally speaking, there is little in cinema or literature, let alone the online world, to suggest that when you are a woman alone (forget about a middle-aged woman), things will go your way, as I have often experienced.
I suspect that a lot of the backlash is connected to the terror that men experienced at discovering that they are less necessary to women’s fulfillment than centuries of laws and stories have allowed them to believe. That terror is abundantly apparent today: From the professional football player Harrison Butker’s commencement speech suggesting that women may find more fulfillment in marriage and children than in a career, to the Supreme Court again debating access to abortion to a push to roll back no-fault divorce laws: All are efforts to return women to a place where others can manage their access to … well, just about everything.
It is in this light that my enjoyment begins to feel radical. Come fly with me. There is no fear here.
Patriarchal cultures are terrified by a woman who is free.