Clementine Ford pivots to love: For how long can you be the provocative feminist voice? – The Guardian

When I mentioned to a friend that I was going to be interviewing Clementine Ford, she said she was curious to read Fords new book, How We Love: I want to hear about love from someone who has known so much hate.

I tell Ford this when we connect over Zoom late one Friday afternoon, Ford sat on her sofa in the plant-filled Melbourne home she shares with her young son. Her face lights up with the writers appreciation of a neat turn of phrase and the long-time self-promoters awareness of something she can use. Thats a great line! I might borrow that. I love that.

It is no wonder that Ford writer, podcaster, self-described sassy social media bigmouth, Hardline Feminist per the Daily Mail and HYSTERICAL FEMALE per her T-shirt today is attuned to ways to describe herself. She has spent nearly a decade embroiled in highly public controversies, most of them attempts to silence her no-holds-barred brand of popular feminism and some, she allows, of her own making.

As the feminist academic Anita Brady recently wrote: In Australian media culture, it is difficult to imagine a figure more visible as a vector of popular misogyny than Clementine Ford. Ford seems to have a particular ability to provoke, flushing out sexism where it might otherwise go unstated but also dividing progressives with her attention-grabbing approach and occasional misfires.

Out-and-proud anti-feminists, meanwhile, Ford whips into a frenzy. In 2017, having cemented her position in the public sphere with her first book, Fight Like a Girl, Milo Yiannopoulos performed his disgust of Ford to live audiences throughout Australia, and millions more online.

All of it, praising or scathing, amounts to make Ford arguably the most famous feminist in Australia, whose celebrity, Brady argues, is indistinguishable from the work of her feminism and often in response to misogynistic attacks.

Julia Baird described the bestselling Fight Like A Girl as having been shaped in combat; after spending almost her entire 30s what might be termed feministing in public, the same could be said of Ford herself.

People always assume that Im coming from a place of anger and hate, says Ford, now 40. How We Love represents Fords attempt to change that narrative or at least enlarge it.

As much as I am quite impervious, now, to peoples opinions of me, I also feel the same human instinct and need to be understood, which is what so much of the book is about: to be loved, to be known, to be seen, she says. For much of my career, I have felt very misunderstood and wilfully, in many cases.

Now Ford is making a gentle request for understanding: Im not asking you to go easy on me. Im just asking you not to reduce me to a stereotype.

The memoir is in the style of the British writer Dolly Aldertons hugely successful Everything I Know About Love, focusing on the most meaningful relationships of Fords life, starting with her family.

Born in Queensland, Ford grew up between Oman, rural England, Brisbane and Adelaide and uncool in each of these places, she writes. She describes herself as a theatre kid at heart, chronically performative as only the youngest of three can be.

Fords father, an Australian, met her Guyanese mother while she was working in an English pub. How We Love opens with her mothers harrowing death from cancer at age 58, having refused further treatment, and concludes with Ford becoming a mother herself.

Compared with the manifesto Fight Like a Girl (which has been optioned for TV) and the 2018 follow-up Boys Will Be Boys (a takedown of the patriarchy and toxic masculinity), How We Love is strikingly devoid of politics and reveals a surprisingly softer, more self-doubting side to Ford.

That was the point, she says to ground her activism in a place of love for men, of wanting them and the world to be better. (I see this in the boundless patience she shows her son in his frequent interjections through our interview; and in her respectful exchange with her father when he stood for One Nation in 2017.)

Far from a departure from her political work, Ford sees How We Love as a natural companion. But she had a personal motivation for writing it, too.

After her challenging pregnancy and childbirth, the furore over the man-hating Boys Will Be Boys, and the breakdown of her relationship with her sons father, Ford says she was on track for a mental health crisis if she continued on her highly public, combative path. It is quite bruising, being in a space all the time where you feel like youre constantly primed against attack.

Where once Ford spoiled for the fight (I really did get off on it a little bit ... that provocative youthful energy), motherhood changed her. It exposed a soft underbelly that I didnt necessarily realise was there and part of becoming a softer person is being willing to be more vulnerable in front of people.

Pitching the idea for How We Love in mid-2019, Ford told her publisher she wanted her next book to be one requiring no research, that would be really nice to write. It was also somewhat strategic.

For some time, Ford has been conscious of a ceiling to her potential progression as a mainstream feminist voice because I never gave an out to the men who run the show, she says.

In 2019, Ford quit her long-running column for the Sydney Morning Herald and the Melbourne Age, claiming that she had previously been disciplined for tweeting that prime minister Scott Morrison was a fucking disgrace. Television producers have told her that she has been knocked back for various projects for being too aggressive, she says.

Ford paints a picture of having been backed into an increasingly tight corner: expected to always write something angry, but not so angry as to actually threaten the status quo.

But even people who agree with Fords politics may disagree with her tactics: always straight-shooting, often oppositional, occasionally artless and even arguably counterproductive.

In May 2020 Ford shared vile abuse sent to her by a teenage boy alongside his name and photo with her tens of thousands of Instagram followers (she removed the post in response to pleas from the boys mother). That same month, she tweeted that the coronavirus wasnt killing men fast enough: a misjudged mic-drop concluding comments about the increased domestic burden on women through the pandemic.

Ironic misandry is par for the course on Twitter what Ford now regards as completely toxic and not a healthy place for me to be but predictably inflammatory beyond it. After tweeting on Saturday afternoon, Ford doubled down on Saturday evening, apologised Sunday morning, and now rarely tweets.

It was an own goal, she says. Im frustrated for having written it, in part because now anyone who wants to disagree with anything just sends that tweet right back to me. In among the genuine distress, she says, there were some notably News Corp columnists simply gleeful for the chance to lambast her.

She only felt moved to apologise after a Black woman in the US told her that, there, Black and brown men were overrepresented among Covid-19 death rate: I was still operating in a theoretical space in which men were in a position of power.

It was not the first time that Ford has been criticised for perpetuating feminism as a concern of middle-class, cis white women. She volunteers now that she has historically perpetuated racist rhetoric, as a white person who lives with white privilege.

She likens this to the ways men benefit from structural sexism simply by being men. I dont want them to say Well, Im not the enemy, Im not a misogynist. You may not be actively doing these things, but you benefit from a system that privileges you.

In recent times Ford has made an obvious effort to share her platforms with those who are not so readily afforded them. One of the problems is weve always siloed voices, she says of feminism.

Not only has that denied other people the right and the privilege of being heard, but it also places an enormous amount of pressure on the one voice who, for whatever reasons, gets to be chosen.

How We Love, Ford agrees, is at least in part a strategic attempt to become more well-rounded and diversify her offering. There must have been a part of me that thought: for how long can you be the provocative feminist voice? And if thats the only thing that you do at what point does that begin to actually be the performance that everyone says that it is?

I never want to be palatable. But professionally and pragmatically, Im trying to improve my options.

If Ford had been feeling unsure about her future direction, the pandemic forced her to act. She started a podcast called Big Sister Hotline, a weekly gas bag on Instagram Live, and influencing for a sex toy company (use CLEMFORD for 20% off). Ford also receives donations through her Patreon page, supporting her feminist critique, comedy and unassailable truths lately, rallying against anti-vaxxers.

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The pivot makes explicit the argument of Brady, the academic: that Fords celebrity is both the product and the site of her feminist work, presenting visibility of feminism as an end, not a means, on platforms that are safely affirmative.

If she was once considered a radical feminist voice if only by virtue of being foulmouthed (to quote from her Twitter bio) in well-mannered spaces Ford may now more closely resemble a girlboss: a woman making feminism work for her, through the neoliberal logic of self-empowerment.

Its a charge Ford engages with admirably. Obviously theres massive problems with the way that feminism has jumped into bed with capitalism, and Im certainly guilty of being part of that, she says. I think [that critique] is important. But once again, it seems to be directed away from the richest, most privileged people in the world: largely, white men.

When people fighting for social justice feel unable to influence those in power, Ford suggests, it can feel more effective to throw your tomatoes at the people theyre going to hit. Some of those lobbed at her have been very fairly thrown, and landed as they should, she says. But now Ford wants to get out of the firing line.

It is not that she is reinventing herself, or running away, Ford says. I just want the opportunities to tell stories that make people feel things not just angry.

How We Love by Clementine Ford is out 2 November through Allen & Unwin (RRP$29.99)

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Clementine Ford pivots to love: For how long can you be the provocative feminist voice? - The Guardian