What's your yes?
No is good, but it's not enough
Happy International Women’s Day! AKA every day of my life!
You know what you can do to best celebrate women? Pay them adequately for their labor.
I’ve been thinking about no recently, and all the ways we engage in critique and refusal.
I’m a super fan, if there can be such a thing, of boundaries, which is the first thing I think of when I contemplate refusal. I’ve rarely met a no I didn’t like offering, honestly.
Sometimes issuing a no can feel like the sweetest music I’ve ever sung. It trips off my tongue and lilts in my ears.
No.
Absolutely not.
Nope.
NO!
When it comes to critique, well…having a well-reasoned analysis of how and why not is a mark, for me, of both intellect and integrity. Going along to get along, passively submitting to oppressive systems, and participating mindlessly in the status quo—personally, professionally, publicly— are all, to my mind, whatever the opposite of practicing integrity is. Cowardice? Dishonesty? Faithlessness?
This has been a lifelong belief for me, informed in large part by growing up in a faith community that stands in (peaceful) opposition to most of the central tenets of society. “Non-hierarchical, mystical pacifists who believe simplicity is the only way to stay close to God” is pretty much the definitional antonym of modern American capitalism and cis-hetero-patriarchal white supremacy. (Also, try saying that last bit five times fast. What a mouthful.) Quakers have been getting thrown in jail for standing up in opposition to society since they first cast themselves off from the Church of England, so it could be argued it’s practically the whole point of us.
I think it was in my twenties, though— up to my eyeballs in radical leftist activist communities— that I started to get overwhelmingly tired of the constant critique and refusal. Not because the analysis was bad or the refusal unjust, but because it was beginning to have a distinctly Sisyphean emotional quality to it. Unlike many of my compatriots, who stumbled into activism in their teens and twenties, I got carted to my first protest when I was still in a snuggly. I grew up around activists and war tax resistors and the many people, both Quaker and not, endlessly fighting the good fight. And maybe it was just the naivete and lack of perspective that is so endemic of youth, but by my late-twenties it all began to feel like wheel-spinning.
It’s not that I expected more winning on the grand scale of culture. I was clear that could take generations. But I needed to be surrounded by people proposing concrete, potentially viable alternatives to head towards rather than solely standing in opposition to what already existed. I needed to focus on a yes, rather than just shouting no all the damn time.
Which is how I ended up married with two small children on a 25-acre, organic farm in Upstate New York, and working for a cooperative grocery store committed to the expansion of a vibrant regional foodshed. None of that ended up being my yes in the end. (Except the kids. They are the biggest, most vital yes of my entire life.) But it was, at the very least, a heartfelt, earnest attempt to balance critique with a commitment to creating viable alternative systems and institutions.
I also thought, somehow, that I was committing to a different kind of relationship, though looking back now it’s painful to contemplate how far I missed the mark on that part. Are there people who manage to commit to legal, heterosexual marriages and have children together who live radically egalitarian lives that are also happy, healthy, and stable? I can think of less than a handful, and none of whom I know intimately, so my rosy picture of their lives and relationships might be a fiction. Still… unicorns? Why not?
I’ve been thinking about all of this for a couple of reasons. One, because I regularly read a ton of social critique. As I said, good analysis is like what a good cocktail used to be for me— heady and tasty, a source of true delight. At the same time, I’ve been witnessing that same tiredness rising up in response to it that overtook me in my late twenties. If all there is in the critique being offered is a no, and there’s never any viable yes being envisioned to accompany that no, then I’m left feeling a little strung out and hung over.
At the very least, I like to think I’m offering tools to formulate your own yes here, which good social critique is as well. The challenge with social critique is that it can feel like an end unto itself, and it’s not. No is great (necessary, radical, cathartic), but it’s not enough. Practicing integrity forces us to make things happen in response to the no. It’s the next step, the tool you pick up to build something new once you realize the boxes you’re living in are too small and full of holes, besides.
I’ve also been thinking about critique and envisioning because I finished a new book, This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage And Started My Life by Lyz Lenz. I’ve written about Lyz here before. She writes one of my favorite Substack newsletters, Men Yell At Me. This American Ex-Wife is her latest book, a memoir of her divorce and an exquisite analysis of the cultural, economic, and political role of marriage within society.
Lyz understands the power of refusal. “True freedom and power,” she writes, “begin with refusal.” So, after years of submission to religion, marriage, and patriarchy she states an unequivocal no. She ends her marriage, embraces sex and single parenthood, prioritizes her career, builds community, takes up stand-up comedy, and writes like a motherfucker.
There is no abuse in Lenz’s marriage, no infidelity or dramatic villain. It is just, like so many marriages, a relationship replete with “commonplace horror”— drastically unequal division of labor and consistent dismissal of the importance of Lenz’s needs, dreams, and capabilities. It’s not, ultimately, her husband’s entitlement and assumption that she should allow herself to be subsumed by the demands of marriage and family that is so enraging to witness, it’s recognizing how banal it is. Boys will be boys becomes men will be men and no one notices anymore. Women drown and men just swim past their bodies, occasionally gripping one close enough to pull themselves along through the current and calling that love.
But it is Lenz and all the women like her who look around and realize their lives are worth more than being relegated to the role of stepping stone, of being the happy helpmeet, who are demonized. Who are depicted as bringing on the downfall of our society. There is an epidemic of male loneliness! Our social fabric is crumbling! And the answer is never teaching men emotional intelligence or competency, enshrining equal pay, or expanding the social safety net. It is women. Women are the social safety net, the emotional labor force, the problem and the solution.
“Our television shows and movies are filled with grizzled men, heroes, choosing their careers over their families, because these careers, these professions, will save the world,” Lenz observes. “How rare is it to see women doing this and still being allowed to be the heroes of the story? I am not saying that the work I have done and will do is so incredible that it justifies everything, but I am saying it doesn’t have to. I don’t have to win a Nobel Prize or be a heart surgeon for my life, my ambition, and my happiness to be worth fighting for.”
Though Lenz’s social analysis of marriage and divorce is comprehensive and undeniable, it’s the model of her life in the wake of it all that makes her book so important. She is happy. She is creatively vital. She is successful and self-supporting. She is embedded in a web of relationships that feed and support her. She is unapologetic, unashamed, and free. Is there anything more delicious than a woman who is free?
She is offering everyone, but particularly women, a real, concrete, viable alternative. Not by inventing something previously unimaginable, some life based on new technologies, but simply by flipping the script. By insisting that what is already possible for some of us— autonomy, self-fulfillment, and satisfaction— should be possible for all of us. If existing systems and institutions aren’t built for that then we can refuse to participate and build new lives for ourselves that are. We can have lives that center us and meet our needs. Not someday, but right now.
Here’s the thing that was so powerful for me about Lyz’s book. In outlining the life she had crafted for herself in the wake of her divorce she wasn’t describing a life I could aspire to or envisioning some new alternative I’d never considered. She was describing the life I already have. Our culture tells me that I am less, that my life is somehow inadequate or incomplete because I’m not married, yet I am happy, loved, adequately resourced, housed, fed, and creatively engaged. I am free.
Not unencumbered or free from heartbreak or frustration. Yet and still, free.
Not all writers of social critique have to envision alternatives to the systems and institutions they analyze. It is safer, certainly, (which is not to say it’s safe) to simply be the one continually insisting that the Emperor has no clothes. It is much more dangerous to insist that the Emperor is just another dude and we should all be allowed to walk around naked and unafraid if we want to. See, look at me!, they insist. Doing it right now.
We need those who imagine how it could all be different and who are willing to take the risks necessary to manifest their yes. I need them. Even if their yes isn’t mine, I can follow that ribbon of possibility out of the labyrinth and into a life that is mine, that belongs to me. Is there something else we’re all hoping for?
What’s your yes?
This video has nothing to do with anything, really. It just brought me incredible joy. Now it can do the same for you. You’re welcome.
my (first) therapist always said in order to say a true yes, one must also be able to say a true no… thank you for the reminder 💛
Asha Sanaker: Your words ring very true to a man who has loved Nancy, The-Love-of-My-Life, for 53-years, married 51, with two daughters, and one 16-year-old granddaughter, and, let's not forget, the two cats in my granddaughter's life.
I retired from the Air Force (Reserves, Lt Col, Judge Advocate) and from the Navy (Civil-Service, GS-905-15, Navy Office of the General Counsel), and have met many professional women in my 41 years of service.
I have hear many men, like me, happy in their marriages.
During my many years, from the women, I rarely met a woman happy with men, even in her marriage. One woman -- one in 41 years -- described her husband to me as "The Love of Her Life."
Far more good women were disillusioned through three mad marriages.
I do really have a feeling that long-term relationships with women-loving-women work out far, far better, because of the depth of spiritual union, the depth of love and commitment, the depth of intuitive understanding of another, the depth of sensitivity, and the unsentimental ability to speak truth to each other.
As much as I LOVE my relationship with Nancy, I think households with two women may be the happiest.