Let’s State the Obvious: On Mona Chollet and the Limits of Comparative Feminism

Two years since becoming that much-elegized category of expat—the American in Paris—I’m starting to come off an early obsession: the near-constant comparison of my new cultural environment to my former one. It started benignly enough, as in my manic hunt for a Paris coffee shop channeling Brooklyn circa 2013, but soon my comparative mindset had alighted on an arena that involves much more risk for gross generalization and even grosser misinterpretation. But then again, perhaps you too have attempted to compare the state of feminism in one country versus another.

The more I indulged in what I came to think of as “comparative feminism,” the more I came to see the limitations of comparison itself, which slips so readily into hierarchical thinking. Which feminism is more “advanced”? is the clumsy logic I’d been swinging this way and that, carrying with it an illusion of chronological progressivism, as though a specific culture’s feminism can be plotted along a universal timeline that stretches from “patriarchal stone age” to “feminist liberation.”

It was in my recent, corrective effort to understand the feminist conversation in France on its own terms that I picked up Mona Chollet’s Reinventing Love: How the Patriarchy Sabotages Heterosexual Relations, a book that broaches the “how” of its subtitle with an expansive scope. Translated by Susan Emanuel, the book’s breadth-over-depth approach to its subject—which is to say, its accessibility to a broad audience—at first triggered a critical instinct born of my academic training. Because no matter how much I aspire to the wisdom of Eve Sedgwick, I am a deeply paranoid reader. On page 2, I was demanding queer theory (it arrives on page 20); on page 3, Black feminism (it arrives on page 18). It took several chapters before I could let my guard down enough to abandon my desire to dismiss Chollet’s book, and perhaps all of French feminism with it, as “behind” where it should be on that imagined chronological line, from stone age to liberation, from simplicity to erudition. And with that abandon I was able to appreciate what Chollet was actually doing.

Swiss by origin and a journalist by training, Chollet is among the most recognizable and widely read feminists in France. Along with her previous book, In Defense of Witches: Why Women Are Still on Trial, Reinventing Love has, through its translation, reached an American audience, though with more modest success. Reinventing Love is not an argument, though it is brimming with ideas. And though written in Chollet’s own voice, the book operates like an anthology, gathering many other thinkers in conversation, from major feminists like bell hooks to gender theorists like Jane Ward, but also sociologists, historians, and psychologists. Chollet also trots out many primary texts to serve as case studies: accounts of celebrity relationships (Marlon Brando and Jane Birkin both make disturbing appearances), films like The Empire Strikes Back, and literature from E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey to Anne Desclos’s Story of O to the memoirs of Annie Ernaux. She also looks at the patriarchal logic of  the media itself, taking aim in particular at how heterosexuality is reported in the news.

I take Chollet’s accumulation of material to be a strategy designed to spark as many small fires as possible under a reader’s ass. Not every point will resonate, especially with more reluctant readers, but eventually something will hit home.  And yet, while the book presents itself as a generalist primer to feminism’s power to radically improve, even liberate, gender relations in heteroromantic love—the presumption that such a project is possible belongs to the book’s overall optimism—Chollet also offers, often with biting specificity, a darker analysis of why they remain so constrained in the first place.

Among the first clues I was given that feminism in France engages a different discourse from the one I’m used to came through the work of the activist collective Les Colleuses, who have been wheat-pasting vigilante posters across France since 2019. Using the street as its newsprint, Les Colleuses bring us the headlines in the daily news of patriarchal violence, and, from its inception, their focus has been to raise awareness of femicide. I was first confused, then humbled, to learn this word which is so little used in the English-speaking world—so much so that it’s still unclear whether it should be written “femicide” or “feminicide,” as it is in Romance languages—and to come to realize that the killing of women is top of mind for contemporary French feminists.

Though it’s not presented as such in her introduction or conclusion, femicide, as the ne plus ultra of patriarchal logic, is at the core of Chollet’s analysis in Reinventing Love. In a chapter entitled “Real Men,” Chollet argues that intimate partner violence should be thought of not as an aberration but rather as the most logical outcome of gender norms. She quotes feminist therapist Elisende Coladan in suggesting that, instead of calling abusive partners “narcissists,” such men should more readily be called the “healthy children of patriarchy.” Taking this logic further, Chollet spends a large chunk of this chapter analyzing with great curiosity what’s going on with the women who fall in love with known serial killers, from Shirlee Book, who married the 1970s serial rapist, torturer, and strangler Kenneth Bianchi, to the dozens of young women who came out in support of Ted Bundy during his trial. While it may be tempting to dismiss these women as lunatics, she writes, “we may also wonder if the killers and their groupies are simply pushing to the limit the usual gender roles that in smaller doses constitute our everyday reality. If virility is linked to strength, to domination, to the exercise of violence, then what could be more virile than an assassin?”

In Chollet’s generous role conducting the expansive field of patriarchal critique—as evidenced above, I have a hard time quoting from the book without quoting her quoting someone else—the author inevitably downplays both her own analytical originality and her personal experience: Part of her accessible rhetoric is to keep her own voice at a slight remove. But there are a few key exceptions to this tendency. Two personal anecdotes invoked in the introduction, for instance, struck me as strange, because they are at once very personal and very self-effacing. Just as Chollet starts to engage the question of domestic violence, she interrupts herself in order to clarify that she has never herself been subjected to male violence and has had a relatively “serene” experience with the men in her life. She then goes on to detail two striking scenes of “near-misses” in her youth, both instances where a man, a stranger, physically chased her down—in the street walking home at dark, and during a drunken home invasion.

Chollet is clearly interested in these scenes, enough to describe them vividly in her book, but just as soon as they capture the reader’s interest, she quickly retreats to more sociological territory. I couldn’t help suspecting that the defining quality of these two scenes—the prototypical violence, fable-like, in the chase of the faceless man and the just-in-time escape of the woman—illustrates a core idea in Chollet’s book. Because though her book, in the interest of accessibility and appeal, touches on many topics, from feminine beauty imperatives to racism in online dating, it is violence that turns out to be the key concept through which any analysis of heterosexuality must pass.

A similar image of a woman fleeing a violent man is central to two novels by the no-longer-quite-so-young wunderkind of French autofiction, Edouard Louis. First in A Woman’s Battles and Transformations, published by FSG in 2022,  and then in this year’s Monique S’évade (or Monique Escapes, not yet out in English), Louis traces his mother’s entrapment into the role of impoverished mother and wife of three successively drunk, abusive partners, and then her gradual escape from both the material confines of her daily life and the attendant limits to her selfhood. Indeed, perhaps Louis’s best insight about his mother’s transformation is that a woman’s fight for liberation is also the fight to exist as fully human. As he puts it: “I started this book wanting to tell the story of a woman, but I’ve realized that yours is the story of a human being who fought for the right to exist as a woman, as opposed to the nonexistence imposed upon you by your life, and by life with my father.”

Chollet expresses a similar idea throughout her book: that one of the most recalcitrant and widespread manifestations of patriarchal logic is the denial of the reality of woman-as-woman (as an end in herself, to invoke a good-old Kantian idea) and an ideology of domination that constructs womanhood, instrumentally, as for-men. These, then, are the existential stakes of Chollet’s feminism: that in its fullest iteration, patriarchal logic wishes—demands, even—the annihilation of women’s existence, from the subtler forms of gaslighting all the way to the overt, sometimes programmatic (see: witch trials; transfemicide) killing of women because they are women.

But one of the conclusions of Louis’s two-book narrative of his mother’s escapes from male violence is that no change of perspective, no book, no feminist awakening, could have gotten her out of her very material reality: As he writes in A Woman’s Battles, she was “a mother to five children, with no money and no prospects, she was a prisoner of the domestic sphere.” Revisiting this question more explicitly in Monique S’évade, Louis invokes Virginia Woolf’s argument for material independence: “A room, a space, four walls, a key, some money: this too was what, 100 years later, my mother would need, not to become a writer but to become a freer, happier woman. Woolf had understood, 100 years earlier, that freedom is not first an aesthetic or symbolic concern, but rather a material and practical one. That freedom has a price.” (Translation mine.) It’s a troubling conclusion, especially if we wish to imagine that it is precisely a woman like Monique who would be most helped by Chollet’s book. Shouldn’t feminist writing for a general audience, of which Chollet’s is a prime example, aim above all to reach those people who are most beaten down under the yoke of patriarchy? But herein lies the limit of words.

If I spot the fleeing woman, in both Chollet’s and Louis’s writing, as figuring the most common and perhaps only strategy available to women in the face of literal patriarchal violence, I also recognize in it a figuration of my own metaphorical flight—out of repulsion, out of fear—from confronting and thinking through the meaning of that patriarchal violence, as a necessary dimension of my own feminism. Maybe I am too quick in wanting to include all of American feminism in my own self-critique.

But if you’d allow me to generalize, if just to explore the outer limits afforded by the clumsy practice of comparative feminism, I’d say that I have seen French feminism working through the hows and whys of patriarchal violence with a directness and thoroughness I haven’t yet encountered in the mainstream American feminist discourse. (French feminist rhetoric abandoned any remaining egg-shell-walking this fall when faced with the nightmare Gisèle Pelicot case.). I don’t mean of course that there aren’t American feminists thinking through and writing about patriarchal violence, even femicide (Silvia Federici comes to mind). But if the examination of patriarchal violence is to reach those who most urgently need it, then it needs to enter the mainstream conversation, at the risk of stating what may at first seem obvious: that violence in the name of virility, that violence directed at women’s very existence, is an existential threat to any hope of something like liberation, for anyone.

Thinking back on my initial resistance to Chollet’s book—as well as my quickness to dismiss French feminism as “behind” its American counterpart—I see in it an old battle. Because I know I am guilty: of always seeking the newest, smartest, most complex, feminist theory on the block. Might you be too? Out of embarrassment, out of the fear that if we keep repeating the most basic, scariest, truths—that women occupy a submissive role in society, that society is run as a patriarchy, that violence is at the heart of heterosexuality—that if we keep on saying these things over and over, we will be treated not just as kill-joys, but as stupid killjoys, killjoys who generalize instead of examining the particulars, behind-the-times killjoys who missed the memo that this, that, or the other aspect of life as women has actually improved,  instead of just women who know that if something continues to be true then it must continue to be spoken.

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