To have and to hold

Louise Perry, author of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, is not a popular feminist. Liberals are not hailing Perry as the next great prescient voice whose advice we should be heeding. Rather, her views on what empowers women are often derided as conservative and sex-negative. This has everything to do with what Perry espouses in sexual relationships — restraint, prudence, commitment, monogamy — the sort of things my mother would approve of. Indeed, one of her chapters is titled ‘Listen to your Mother.’

If you are picturing Perry to be a pearl-clutching prude, you would be wrong. She’s an attractive, articulate, young woman writing about other young women, the type of lost and searching souls who inhabit my novels. Perry and I agree — the lives of women are compromised. While Perry has arrived at her conclusions with meticulous research and statistics, I’ve arrived at mine meandering through a constellation of mothers, daughters, sisters and women friends.

In my first book Sisterhood of Swans, the utterly flawed protagonist Anna-Marie is single, frantically searching for fulfilment, flitting from one fruitless relationship to another. In my recently released novel, Notes on a Marriage, Anju has been married for 20 years, a relationship she refuses to give up on despite being unhappy. I’d like to think these are not different women, they are the same woman, a composite of our conflicted selves, looking to find the one thing that makes us truly vulnerable, truly intimate, truly human — love. Ironically, or perhaps unfortunately, the chances of that happening straightforwardly are even less today than in previous generations.

Outdated co-dependency?

My mother fell in love and married my father in her twenties. They shared the next 60 years of their life together, raising three children. This was not a fairytale come true, it was commonplace for women of her generation to expect commitment, companionship and life-long faithfulness. By no means do I wish to downplay the many thwarted marriages of that era, but everything we held to be good and true has collapsed. If I look to my daughter, a young woman, she cannot in good faith assume any of these things will happen to her and if she were to demand them from men, then she would be labelled as clingy, needy, dull, desperate and hysterical.

One could argue that this sort of co-dependency is ugly, unnecessary and outdated. Do modern women really look to men for fulfilment? Women want to have careers, smash glass ceilings, travel to exotic places, enjoy sex with strangers, and put off having children as long as possible. Except the mask slips ever so often.

Are women wired differently?

In 1996, when Helen Fielding introduced us to the fictional Bridget Jones, we cheered on Bridget’s pursuit of the elusive Mr Darcy. A near-decade later when the last episode of Sex and the City aired, we were still cheering the uber-feminist icon of our times, Carrie Bradshaw blissfully walking down a Parisian bridge arm-in-arm with the love of her life, Mr Big. The only thing Carrie wanted to hear from Mr Big throughout a turbulent, six-year off-again, on-again romance was ‘Carrie, You’re the One.’

Novelists and filmmakers may be unreliable zeitgeists, but observable evidence and statistics don’t lie. Women’s mental and emotional well-being is greatly improved in committed, stable, long-term relationships.

Women are incapable of enjoying casual sex as easily as men, divorced women are not as likely to find subsequent partners as men, women as single parents experience a steep fall into poverty, and children without fathers find life quite traumatic. So why, half a century after the sexual revolution, the birth control pill, body autonomy and equal pay, are we less in control? Why are women finding it so hard to get men to commit to them?

Willing participants in a charade

Let’s be honest. Our hard-fought liberation has been carelessly eroded by men. The pill set women free from the fear of pregnancy, but that freedom has been turned on its head. Men now feel entitled to sex from a buffet menu of hook-ups, friends-with-benefits, mistresses, prostitutes, polyamorous partners, or Tinder dates to while away a rainy afternoon. Men have convinced us our sexual liberation is best served by making their lives better and women have become willing participants in this charade.

It is men who keep pushing the boundaries of risqué behaviour, introducing kink, fetish, and violence into the sex act and it is women who believe that if we don’t comply, we are somehow lacking.

It is men who are the biggest consumers of prostitution and pornography, and it is women, often impoverished and vulnerable, who are supplied to these industries. It is men who project onto us their fantasies of how our bodies should look and it is women who willingly inject their breasts with silicon, their lips with dermal, their brows with Botox, until what remains of us is a parody of womanhood.

All this compliance benefits men, not women. Sex and its fundamental purpose —bonding, intimacy, family — have lost all meaning. The easy and endless accessibility men have to sex in the 21st century, particularly through online encounters, has coarsened intimacy, and made commitment elusive and marriages boring.

Sex is increasingly transactional, exchanged for a few hours of pleasure, and nothing else. But only men can afford to have sex like that, widely, indiscriminately, with as many partners as possible, without the fear of repercussions.

The anatomy of women’s desire is entirely different. Evolution has taught us to be cautious, hesitant, and discerning because biology does not favour us. Sex can have real consequences for us — it can produce children.

What’s being progressive?

If all of this seems hopeless, a civilisation hurtling towards certain collapse, take heart. The women in my fiction are almost always saved by their children. This is old-fashioned nonsense, I hear you say, but if I’m writing by instinct alone, Louise Perry is not. Perry assures us both women and men are biologically programmed to care a great deal about children, creating them, protecting them, and preserving their futures.

In this, societal norms have played a cruel trick on men, forcing them to curb their natural instinct for wanton sex, and they know instinctively that the greatest chance their offspring has for survival and success is if they stick around.

I believe Perry when she tells us, ‘monogamous marriage is by far the most stable and reliable foundation on which to build a family.’

I’m often troubled by portrayals, particularly in films, of hard-drinking, hard-smoking, gun-toting, bed-hopping women as somehow being progressive.

These are not indicators of female progress; they are indicators of male dysfunction. We are not marching ahead by becoming more like men, we are marching towards liberation by cultivating and celebrating the things that make us women — empathy, compassion, nurturing, leadership, creativity, rational thinking, endurance, resilience, and faithfulness.

Beyond the ordinary

We need partners who truly care for us, men who show up, men willing to put in the hard work, willing to see us soiled and sullied, willing to put balm on our bruises and hold us while we heal. It is so difficult to be genuine in a world of Facebook faux and Instagram picture-perfect.

And everything real, everything we took for granted—nations, neighbourhoods, community, extended family — has evaporated. But the path to composing something meaningful of our desultory lives remains the same — love and friendship. The fibre of our character is still defined by intelligence, good-naturedness, honesty, humour, loyalty, and gratitude.

What makes marriage a profoundly moving affair is the chance to intimately know another human being, to put down roots, and to write family histories that pass down the generations. It is in the crucible of emotional grist that love is forged, the sort that gives meaning to our otherwise lonely and solitary lives, the sort capable of rescuing us from our worst selves.

Our best chance for survival as a species rests in becoming better human beings, and reaching for a higher purpose. It is not going to come by coarsening ourselves, by reducing relationships to the rubble of Tinder and TikTok.

If there is an app we should be looking for, it should be called Tender, not Tinder. When have we ever stopped looking for the tenderness of love? Never. In this faceless, anonymous world we live in, we need it more than ever. We yearn instinctively for our souls to be nourished, for our journey to transcend the ordinary, and for us to experience what resides within our deepest selves when ignited by the love of another human being.

The writer is a British-Asian author whose work explores themes of migration, memory and belonging. Her work has been shortlisted for several literary prizes, notably, the London Short Story Prize, the Dinesh Allirajah Prize and the New Asian Writing Prize. Her latest novel, Notes On A Marriage, was published recently by Speaking Tiger.