After Witches: the undefeated power of women (Zones, 2018), an ode to female independence through the centuries which has passed to more than 200,000 copies, the journalist and essayist Mona Chollet publishes Reinvent love. How the patriarchy sabotages heterosexual relationships. Is love above all a woman’s business? How do you get men to become real heterosexuals, so that they start to love women for who they are and what they can become?
“It was questions related to my personal life, mixed with everything I saw in my entourage, discussions with friends, explains Mona Chollet, attached to Paris. And more broadly also to all that I could see by observing society, the question of domestic violence or feminicides, which very often begin with love stories or with what looks like it, ”says the author. born in 1973 in Geneva, who did not particularly want to look into the subject at first.
“For everyone, love is always a bit of a secret garden. We don’t necessarily want to question the representations we have. We want to believe that everything is spontaneous, that it escapes social laws, power struggles. And it’s always hard to realize that it isn’t. It’s a reality that we don’t necessarily want to watch, ”she adds, stressing that she herself has never experienced a toxic romantic relationship.
But the theme ended up imposing itself on the essayist, after having explored subjects such as injunctions to the beauty of the fashion and cosmetics industry or the domestic space. Drawing above all from the sources of a certain feminism of the 1970s and 1980s, stuffed with readings and references, without fear either to resort to personal experience, Reinventing love thus examines the “cultural background” on which love unfolds, most often marked by “reluctance and lack of imagination”.
To put an end to Tristan and Iseut
Shedding light on the workings of patriarchy (“a system of social organization where men exercise power and hold authority in all fields”), she recalls how our romantic representations are built on the sublimation of the inferiority of women. , examines the mechanisms of domestic violence as well as the very different values that men and women place on love.
Mona Chollet deplores the fact that, in our societies, love is too often seen (and experienced) as a women’s affair. Whereas, conversely, passion – like Tristan and Iseut – would be the great business of men. Which in his eyes testifies to “a kind of conditioning in contempt of love”.
About Belle of the Lord, by Albert Cohen – a writer whose personal misogyny was beyond doubt -, often considered one of the great novels of passionate love in the twentiethe century, she thus points out that idealized passion allows the male protagonist of this long-running novel to remain locked in his immature vision of women. It was by rereading it, years later, that she was able to measure all that feminism makes her gain in lucidity …
Summoning novels and essays as well as comics and television series, the essayist, also editor of the Diplomatic world since 2016, firing on all cylinders. “It’s a bit like the current place of daring. This is where we see innovative characters appear, it upsets the stereotypes we are used to. It is an inexhaustible reservoir of stimulating representations, new and modern, more in phase with the society ”, she will say, speaking of the television series, of Normal People To Sex Education, Passing by Mad Men.
In a disturbing chapter on women who fall in love with serial killers, evoking the Saint-Bernard syndrome, she recalls that “the world turns too much thanks to female dedication, and too many people abuse it”.
How to get out of it? “Simply by being attentive to it. What is often valued in women is the gift of oneself, gentleness, understanding, the fact of being a kind of recourse for all the people around them. I think it is very destructive, because we are being taken away from a kind of red flag, which should invite us to take care of ourselves too and above all. Girls should be taught that they have the right to think about themselves, the right to protect themselves and to do whatever it takes to defend their own interests. “
Necessary interior revolution
Certainly, in today’s feminist nebula, she knows well that there is more radical. And the critics of patriarchy and gender relations that compromise the least often come from gay essayists (think Alice Coffin’s book, Lesbian genius).
Without invalidating, on the merits, certain extreme observations, the essayist felt the need to add a more nuanced grain of salt to this lucid reflection. If she does not think, like some, “that heterosexual love exists simply to serve the patriarchy as a Trojan horse in the hearts of women”, Mona Chollet believes in “a way out of the stubbornly patriarchal world in which we live” .
Because she does not hide it, love “is worth it, it deserves that we devote space, time, attention”. “Love gives me,” she wrote, “the feeling of greatly increasing the flame under the cauldron of life, to the point of expanding it, of densifying it, a bit like writing does. But it also seems to him that this is a more prevalent disposition among women than among men.
Will the young people know how to bend the old unequal relationships in male-female relations? Mona Chollet allows herself moderate optimism. “It seems difficult to me to judge as a whole, but what seems clear to me is that the younger generations, just like the older ones, today have many tools at their disposal to reflect on the relationship between men and women. . There is an extraordinary editorial production, Instagram or Twitter accounts. For those who want to question themselves, take an iconoclastic look at what we have learned and integrated in childhood, all the means are there, it is enough to seize it. “
An urgent call for an interior revolution, which concerns both women and men.