The Good Fight

Clementine Ford's New Book Is a Damning Look at Toxic Masculinity. Its the Most Important Thing Youll Read This Year.

- Lauren Sams

In the margins of a proof of her new book, Clementine Ford’s editor has handwritten a note. “So beautiful, Clem!” is scribbled next to a paragraph about Ford’s anxieties for her young son. “I’m prepared (I think),” she writes, “for the moment you might come home from kindy or school and tell me something like, ‘Pink isn’t for boys’ or that ‘girls can’t do X, Y and Z’, but it still breaks my heart to know how little time you and your friends have before that lesson will be forced on you.”

Ford gave birth to her son a little over two years ago. In the book, she says she “didn’t know how to have a boy”. The world can be cruel to girls, she explains, but in a more subversive way, this cruelty also works to shut down boys who don’t conform to narrow gender stereotypes. The love letter to her son that closes Ford’s second book is testament to the ways she is trying to raise him free of the constraints of gender. She worries, she says, about how to protect him from a toxic, destructive patriarchy, and she worries that he may someday be “an agent of it”. I ask her how her feminist parenting journey is going, two years on. “Look,” she says with a small sigh. “It’s an ongoing project.”