On being left alone, finally

Posted on by Emma Reeves

By Ezio Di Nucci

Imagine being a woman living under the patriarchy for 45 to 50 years. Then, slowly but surely, men finally begin to leave you alone. Wouldn’t that be liberating?  

Reclaiming menopause as the long-awaited (genotypically and phenotypically) women’s liberation has been in high fashion of late, so I was surprised when one of my favourite colleagues, a medical anthropologist in her 40s, dismissed reclaiming menopause as privileged and reductive. 

The idea of the menopause as taking back control comes from the notion that the patriarchy wears women down, sexually, emotionally, and reproductively, and when men no longer have use for you, they drop you (sometimes literally, as in this interview with Isabella Rossellini).  

Then you are, allegedly, free from reproductive duties, sexual duties, caring duties, emotional support duties… the list of unpaid labour performed by women under the patriarchy goes on. Mental load is one of the more recent additions.  

For most women however, caring duties never end; they merely develop. From caring for husbands and children to caring for elderly parents and grandchildren. Outside the home, women in service jobs won’t always be able to afford to step away from these duties – which speaks to my colleague’s point about privilege. My argument, though, isn’t about how prevalent or realistic it is to be left alone, but whether such solitude should be celebrated.

And it’s not just what you are expected to do and feel; it’s also being constantly subjected to the toxic gaze of male attention. The menopause must feel as if, in Orwell’s 1984, all the telescreens went offline. That exhilarating feeling when, for the first time in your life, nobody is watching you.  

This perspective has implications beyond just reclaiming menopause: oppression, after all, is also a form of attention. It would already go some way towards a revolution, if men were to just to leave women alone.

It’s not just patriarchy. Think of international development and foreign aid: maybe the answer is not more and better help, but finally leaving people alone (have you heard of extractivism?) The idea that care and help are oppressive isn’t new, just think of the church.

But isn’t there a fundamental lack of ambition in celebrating being left alone? Shouldn’t we aim for the right kind of (non-oppressive) attention from the right kind of (non-masculine, or at least non-toxic) men, as another colleague suggested? For a species that hasn’t even made it to Mars yet, conceptualising non-toxic men might be a bit of a stretch, but are we being too down on ourselves by not even aiming beyond being left in peace?   

Or is this just retreat and cutting our losses, when the 21st was finally going to be the century of women? Tell that to Kamala. No, but for real: the last US election results are relevant here, because MAGA’s isolationism is one of the harder-to-dismiss doctrines for a left that unsuccessfully tried to ride the pacifist movement at least since ‘nam and ended up… please don’t picture it… being ridden by a draft dodger?   

Trump’s isolationism is arguably also an example of our idea of ‘being left alone’, and this is not just Ukraine in the face of Putin – think also of cuts to international aid, health research, and now tariffs. Isn’t Trump proving, as we write, that being left alone sucks – and so women shouldn’t reclaim it? In a slogan: Trump is the world’s menopause, and it ain’t pretty.

There are other arguments against reclaiming menopause. For one, we shouldn’t reduce oppression to reproductive pressure (attention), and also – despite #MeToo – we shouldn’t give up on the sexual revolution just yet.  

Some of the recent reclaiming has taken the form of rediscovering one’s sexual freedom after managing to put decades of reproductive and caring duties behind, thereby emancipating sexual health from reproductive health, and conversely starting to finally use men after half a century (or 315,000 years, depending on whether you count phenotypically or genotypically) of being used.  

This brings us back to being left alone, finally. Not just by men, obviously (let’s not forget, for example, children’s endless needs and other women’s thankless judgement1). 

If we wanted to get philosophical, we could invoke Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between negative and positive freedoms, but really, it’s just about carving out some breathing space. In societies that are increasingly pathologising loneliness, this idea won’t be an easy sell. Still, it’s a far better alternative than domestic violence, even when it’s disguised as love.  

1. My aforementioned anthropology colleague did not like this bit. She writes: “…sounds like the opening line of a 70s commercial for a new vacuum or IKEA kitchen. It could be misunderstood that women should seek liberation laterally, e.g., from children and other women, but these fraught relationships emerge from existing forms of oppression; it is the patriarchy that knots nooses from children’s little limbs. Women’s judgement is only dangerous to other women when the dagger at its back is that whole weighty structure of violence and exploitation, as is often the case. Actually, it is men who find women’s judgement intolerable. If they didn’t murder you sometimes, it would be funny how undone men are by women who dare dislike them. We don’t want to escape from each other–just men!”

About the Author

Ezio Di Nucci is a philosophy professor at the University of Copenhagen. 

Competing interests: None declared 

(Visited 5 times, 1 visits today)