REINVENTING LOVE

An examination of how to make heterosexual love equitable.

In a spirited social critique, French feminist Chollet draws on movies, TV, novels, advertisements, psychoanalysis, and feminist theory to examine impediments to fulfilling experiences of heterosexual love. Real, reciprocal love, she believes, feels like a gift, “an intoxicating bond, an immediate and crazily benevolent intimacy with someone who could have been totally unknown to us.” Yet depictions of love in popular culture have undermined that benevolent intimacy by presenting women as weak, vulnerable, and intellectually inferior and fueling male fantasies of women as compliant bodies, silent and docile. “By deluging girls and women with romances,” Chollet writes, “by vaunting the charms and importance of the presence of a man in their lives, they are encouraged to accept their traditional role as caregivers.” Patriarchy, colonialism, racism, and imperialism have validated the image of the domineering man who takes “sexual appropriation of the female body.” The author shows how this depiction helps to explain women’s attraction to male killers and even to the exploitative figure of the male artist or writer, “whose creative process justifies the worst actions against those close to him.” Chollet suggests ways for women to revise the romance narrative by reexamining their own sexual desires, perhaps by subverting the idea of domination. In underscoring women’s need for independence, the author suggests non-cohabitation, which, among other benefits, eliminates the problem of sharing domestic tasks. For Chollet, a happily loved woman, financially independent and childless by choice, non-cohabitation may fit her life more than it would others’. Nevertheless, she is an impassioned advocate of love, urging readers “to breathe life back into it, by pulverizing both the bourgeois straightjacket of the obligatory trajectory of romance, as well as the equally conventional (and limiting) view of destructive passion.”

A vital celebration of loving.