Latest news with #AllFours
Yahoo
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Perspective: Why are we telling women that motherhood will make them miserable?
'Her tired mind surveyed her luck — a home, the children, Adam. In so many ways it was her dream.' But Coralie was not happy. 'Something was wrong,' thinks the protagonist in the new acclaimed novel 'Consider Yourself Kissed.' 'Mother, writer, worker, sister, friend, citizen, daughter, (sort of) wife. If she could be one, perhaps she could manage. Trying to be all, she found that she was none.' Thus begins yet another installment in the litany of recent fiction and nonfiction devoted to modern women's grievances. (A most tiresome, albeit more explicit version of this story, called 'All Fours,' came out a few months earlier.) Coralie begins as a single woman sad about being alone. Then she becomes a woman living with a man she loves and his daughter. But then she is sad they do not have a child of their own. And then she is sad they do not have a second child. And then she is sad because with three children, she doesn't have enough time to pursue her writing career. And her husband doesn't pitch in enough. And he works too much, but also she wants to spend more time with her kids, so he needs to work more. And she needs to spend time away from him in order to rediscover her true self. 'How could the world … be made fair,' she wonders, 'when two people who loved each other couldn't even manage a life?' Maybe the world isn't 'fair,' but Coralie's life is hardly evidence of that. And is this really the question that upper-middle-class educated women with husbands and children and nice houses need to be asking about themselves? But all of these complaints about husbands and children and work are not restricted to individual grievances, because, well, that might seem petty. Instead, they are complaints about the system, about the institution of marriage, capitalism, the patriarchy … you name it. If you want to read the nonfiction version of these complaints, look no further than two recent features in The New York Times. The first, from a couple of months ago, was a video series called 'Motherhood Should Come With a Warning Label.' More than 2,000 women responded to a request from the paper to 'tell us about your journey to motherhood.' The women in these videos are angry. They are angry that they had less successful careers as a result of time spent with their children. They are angry that they have less money in their retirement accounts, that their partners didn't suffer similar consequences. It is excruciating to listen to all these women talk about how the system is stacked against them, despite the fact that many of them have good jobs and loving families. And one can only imagine how young women at the start of their adult lives must feel about hearing all this. Which brings us to the second New York Times feature, published last week, 'The Trouble With Wanting Men.' Unlike the earlier piece, this one was focused less on the career frustrations and more on the men they are stuck with. 'Men are what is rotten in the state of straightness,' Jean Garnett writes. 'And why shouldn't we have an all-inclusive byword for our various pessimisms about them? Domestic pessimism (they still do less of the housework and child care); partner-violence pessimism (femicide is still gruesomely routine); erotic pessimism …' etc. etc. Even the 'good, sweet men,' Garnett notes, are really not very helpful. She laments: 'Most of us can neither renounce our heterosexuality nor realize a significant renegotiation of its terms.' How is a 20-year-old woman supposed to take this? You might assume that the solution is just to forgo finding a partner or having children. It's not just that it's heartache, because even the most naïve young woman 20 or 50 or 100 years ago would be aware of the potential for unhappiness or even tragedy when she decided to put down roots. It's that the whole system is out to get you. Sure, it may seem as if women have made progress, but these novelists and journalists are here to tell you that you are destined for misery. The result is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Instead of finding someone you love earlier and trying to build a family together, you will put your career first, rejecting multiple decent, loving men because it's too early to settle down. If and when you finally do enter a partnership and have kids, you will walk around with a chip on your shoulder wondering why you have to cut back on work to be with your kids — even though chances are you actually do want to be with your kids more. You will blame this all on your partner or your boss or the world. Rinse and repeat. Part of growing up is realizing that we have autonomy, that our life outcomes are not just a product of structural forces acting on us. In reality, women have a lot of choices open to them, but there are only a few that will genuinely make them happy. Instead of giving them the message that they are destined to be miserable and it's someone else's fault, maybe we could find a fictional or nonfictional portrait of a woman who manages to find fulfillment in an imperfect world. Solve the daily Crossword
Washington Post
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Women of a certain age are finding themselves with Phoebe Philo
At any given moment, fashion has a main character. For the past few years, it's been the bookish but seductive, slightly frazzled woman of Miu Miu, with trends such as chipped nails, bag charms and miniskirts emanating from the brand's runways to TikTok and the streets. It felt right to have that young, intelligent but not quite together young woman as a guiding light in a moment when pop culture became dominated by 20-something female pop stars pushing the boundaries of freedom and music, and festooning everything with bows felt like a somehow silly feminist statement. Well, move over, girlies! There's a new woman in town: She's in her 50s, at least. She's busy — very, very busy. She does not look perfect — but she looks amazing. Not overdone, but strange, special, elegant. She is the focus of novels such as last summer's must-read novel, Miranda July's 'All Fours,' and age-gap fantasy films such as 'Babygirl' and 'Last Summer.' And in fashion, she is the brainchild of the British designer Phoebe Philo, who on Tuesday released the images of her fourth collection from her eponymous brand — called in the brand's parlance Collection D, a seasonless, trend-less slate of pieces that will be available in six months' time. The fashion world's Instagram feeds snapped into a frenzy, sharing pictures of her sandals with a series of rib-cage-like extra-long buckles and a fluffy but sharply shaped shearling bomber. Substackers joined in: 'Natural hair. Embracing age. Skin texture. Perfectly undone styling. And big aura. The Phoebe Philo woman!' wrote Zoë Yasemin Akihary. 'Something off in an otherwise perfect look: that's when chic happens,' wrote Edward Kanarecki. For this woman, putting on clothes, no matter how little time she has to do it, is a personal ritual. 'When I get dressed in the morning, I have my 15 minutes, and it's an act of self-care,' said Samira Nasr, the editor of Harper's Bazaar. 'And [Philo's] clothes allow me to feel cared for when I get dressed.' Philo invokes a mania more akin to a cult leader than a fashion designer. And it is safe to say that wherever Philo's eye goes, the world follows. It's almost impossible to overstate her influence — especially when few of the ideas of luxury designers are accessible, pragmatic or novel enough to permeate throughout the rest of culture. (The old cerulean sweater trickle-down paradigm of 'The Devil Wears Prada' is ancient history.) Women who call themselves the Philophiles still seek out the pieces she made during her time at Celine, from 2008 to 2017, on resale platforms. The language that Philo created at that brand, of oversize tailoring and fluid dresses with a boxy or blousy top, all done with a subdued sense of mischief, remains everywhere today. Its understated appeal was the building block of 'quiet luxury,' and this is still the predominant way that working women younger than 40 dress, as a look at Instagram or TikTok, or a walk around a white-collar office, will show you. Brands such as Frankie Shop, Favorite Daughter and Zara have iterated relentlessly on her Celine designs, making it accessible to a wide array of women even if they are unaware they're wearing a Philo-inspired garment. (And, as some of these knockoffs demonstrate, it is easier to make an oversize blazer than one that fits perfectly.) Perhaps that's because, although she speaks rarely publicly and lives quite privately, Philo designs autobiographically. The little pleasures and obsessions and annoyances and inconveniences of a woman's life are her lived experiences and the meat of her creativity. Few designers offer this mix of pragmatism and oddness (perhaps because there are so few female designers these days). Philo, who is now 51, is making clothes for her peers, making the 50-something woman, with all her eccentricities and anxieties and well-earned confidence, fashion's trendsetter, or even soothsayer. 'I'm a grown-ass woman, and her clothes make me feel like a grown-up,' said Nasr. Actress Tracee Ellis Ross, one of the most fashion-fluent women on the planet, let alone in Hollywood, has a ravenous dedication to Philo's clothes. 'I was online, waiting,' said Ross, who is 52, of the moment the brand launched in fall of 2023. While she often wears borrowed clothes for the red carpet, as many actresses do, 'everything [by Philo] that I've worn is stuff that I purchased.' She has brown trousers and an asymmetrical jacketlike top, fringy footwear she calls her 'horseshoes.' 'I have a rule about social media,' Ross said. 'I don't do anything for social media — it's what I'm already doing and what I am wearing. So I don't put on outfits to take a picture for social media. And Phoebe's clothes work for my sensibility and also how I live my life.' 'I can't wear certain things anymore,' said Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, the founder of the New York gallery Salon 94, who is in her mid-50s. 'And I don't mind. I had a great time in them, but they are just not for me anymore. They're not for my age. And I feel my age in her clothes, and I feel good in my age. And that is something that distinguishes her clothes from many other designers.' While the brand launched less than two years ago, retailers are already seeing other designers taking notes from her work. 'She seems to have no intention to set trends and yet the impact of her work is immediate,' said Yumi Shin, chief merchandising officer at Bergdorf Goodman. 'When we launched Collection A as the brand's first physical retail experience, we saw the industry quickly embrace the crop bomber jacket, the slouch jeans, high-neck collar detail, leather jackets and trenches with detachable scarves. In Collection B, the overdyed T-shirts and denim also inspired others to follow suit and continues to do so.' While Philophile brands (and their cousin, the Rowdents) have diluted Philo's Celine concepts into something partly tasteful, the designer has adapted a naughtier attitude: one that embodies how women think about aging today. These are extraordinary but wearable clothes for adult women, and Philo is letting her freak flag fly with clothes that are not obviously flattering or cloying — a slightly radical act in an industry that lionizes youth. Philo's colors are not brown or pink or white but 'sludge,' 'floss pink,' 'apricot shearling' 'chewing gum,' 'salt.' Shirts have tails; jackets appear to have spines. These are not simply meant to be kooky ideas but real clothes to wear. Several of her customers described Philo's clothes as 'solving problems.' 'She's grounded in a very real world: I've got to actually wear these clothes and get from point A to point B, and things can be designed and can be beautiful, but they have to serve a function,' said Nasr, who has worn Philo's garments since the designer's days at Chloé in the early 2000s. 'And they're not necessarily here for male gaze. They're here for me to feel great and empowered in.' 'What's so remarkable about her thinking is that these are clothes that are meant to be worn every day,' said Shin. A T-shirt dress, or long ball skirt made of tiers of silk, might at once seem like an overly casual or overly formal idea — but her way of building clothes makes them wearable in a multitude of ways. And notably, they are different from a common but sometimes condescending romanticism of aging, that celebrates the graying woman in big jewelry and patchy fur. Philo's heroine is powerful and extraordinarily confident, and most of all, cool. The ferocious independence with which Philo operates her label has helped it maintain a cult status. While some in the industry have groaned that she mostly sells her clothing online and has not done a traditional runway show, that has kept her work from getting sucked into the social media pipeline that overexposes much of fashion. 'There is an element to the way Phoebe is dropping her clothes that allows for an allure that I love because it's not a thing that everybody has touched and grabbed and commented on,' said Ross. 'It's something that's like you either know or you don't.' Younger woman are now taking up the look. Lotta Volkova, who helped invent the Miu Miu girl as the brand's runway stylist, recently shared a picture of herself in a gorgeously odd skirt with a sculpted crest of jersey at the waist. The girl is all grown up.
BBC News
03-07-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
'Some loved it and some tore it apart': How the erotic novel All Fours captured the zeitgeist
"Life-changing" for some, hateable to others, Miranda July's wildly successful erotic novel All Fours about the female midlife experience has dominated the conversation. Every year brings its share of buzzy books: the tomes that top TBR piles, pop up all over social media and are mentioned in countless best-of lists. But it's a rare novel that not only transcends the literary world to dominate the wider cultural conversation, but is still making waves a year after it was first published. That's the case with Miranda July's All Fours, a strange, sexy and surprising book about a woman tearing up her life in her mid-40s. When it came out last spring, it swiftly became a word-of-mouth sensation, and since then the buzz has only become louder. July has appeared on the cover of weekend supplements and been interviewed on national news programmes. TIME magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people of 2025. Meanwhile the book has been optioned for a TV series and nominated for several prizes, including the National Book Awards and the Women's Prize for Fiction. Yet arguably the novel's biggest impact has been the conversations it has started. Women, especially, have pressed the book eagerly into the hands of friends, sisters, mothers, strangers, urging them to read it. Many have called it life-changing. Some have hated it. But everyone who reads this book has something to say about it. In the novel, an unnamed narrator – a 45-year-old semi-famous artist (like July herself) and married mother of one – sets off on a cross-country road trip from Los Angeles to New York, a gift to herself after a whiskey company pays $20,000 to use one of her phrases in an advert. She hopes the trip will turn her into "the sort of chill, grounded woman I'd always wanted to be". Except she doesn't make it to Manhattan. She barely makes it out of LA, pulling off the motorway for petrol in a town called Monrovia. There, an encounter with a younger man, Davey, leads her to check into a motel for the night, where she winds up spending the next three weeks (and blows her entire windfall on renovating the motel room in the style of a Parisian hotel). Her geographical journey is swapped for an emotional one. An all-consuming desire for Davey kickstarts not just a sexual reawakening but a complete reassessment of her life at its midway point. Back home, her doctor tells her she's in perimenopause, the transitional phase before menopause where fluctuating hormone levels can cause a host of physical and emotional changes. When she learns that, according to biology, her libido is about to "fall off a cliff", it propels her to ferociously pursue her desires, realising she must choose between "a life spent longing vs a life that was continually surprising". Besides desire, the narrator and the book consider subjects like ageing, ambition, creativity, mortality, motherhood and marriage, all the time questioning the expected path for women in the second half of their lives. If it sounds serious, it is - but it's funny, too. Tackling female experiences with honesty On its release, All Fours received largely rave reviews. The New York Times called it "the first great perimenopause novel". New York Magazine said it was "a spectacularly horny story about pursuing sexual and creative freedom". The Washington Post's review was prophetic, saying: "something about All Fours – its outrageous sexuality, its quirky humour, its earnest search for change – could, who knows, rally a generation of women." On her motivation for writing for book, July talked about the lack of art dedicated to this phase of life. "If men had this huge change, it would be considered monumental! There would be rituals. There'd be holidays. There'd be rights and religions," she told the Guardian. Treena Orchard, author and associate professor at the School of Health Studies at Canada's Western University recently presented a paper on All Fours at the Contemporary Women's Writing Association conference in the UK. She thinks July's novel is groundbreaking in its approach. "She's pushing back against the heteronormative frames that seem to seep into every aspect of our lives and tell us how we should and should not behave," Orchard tells the BBC. "She's helping create mythology and meaning by designating this phase of life as a culturally important rite of passage. That is political, and that is radical to me." To write the book, July interviewed gynaecologists, naturopaths and friends. Hers is not the first novel to explore perimenopause. Recent years have seen more fiction probing this period of life, including Catherine Newman's Sandwich, Fran Littlewood's Amazing Grace Adams and Joanne Harris's Broken Light. Nor is she the first to tackle female experiences with unflinching honesty — France's Annie Ernaux has been breaking taboos for decades, writing frankly about subjects including illegal abortion, sex with younger men and breast cancer. Yet none of these have captured the zeitgeist quite like All Fours, which has been likened to Erica Jong's Fear of Flying in terms of its impact. Jong's 1973 novel, about a frustrated married woman who pursues her sexual fantasies, caused a sensation on its release for its portrayal of female desire, and more than 50 years on is viewed as a classic of feminist fiction. "The timing couldn't have been more perfect," says Orchard. "She brings together multiple tendrils of things that are happening that are hot ticket items in the larger culture." That includes menopause, age-gap relationships (see last year's Babygirl and the upcoming I Want Your Sex) and polyamory. "Then you've got this juicy, wild sex," says Orchard. Ah yes, the sex. There's a lot of it in All Fours: not only having it, but wanting it, thinking about it, anticipating it. It's an intensely erotic book, and a graphic one, with one tampon-related scene particularly notorious. July doesn't shy away from the uncomfortable, whether it's an awkward sexual encounter or a thorny conversation. She has spoken of her wish in writing the book to turn the intimate exchanges she was having with friends into a public dialogue. "I was writing with the sense that I was in conversation with a lot of other women, if not all women," she said. By that measure, All Fours has been an unequivocal success. On July's Substack page, a community of women have gathered to share not just their love for the book, but how it has changed their lives. They talk of feeling seen, understood and liberated after reading it; that it's made them feel less alone, less crazy, braver. For some it's prompted them to end relationships, leave jobs or confront loved ones. Groups have splintered off and arranged real-life meet-ups. In Paris, Los Angeles, London, Texas, Seattle and more, women have gathered for conversations sparked by the book. And it's not just those in July's age bracket that have connected with it - plenty of young women have, too. Mia Morongell, who is 24, read All Fours late last year. "The whole book is a meditation on womanhood that I think transcends age," she tells the BBC. What does she think makes it so radical? "Its shamelessness, its refusal to keep quiet about the things women don't often speak about, like the lives we dream of living or the freedom we crave or our deepest fears." For Morongell the book came at exactly the right time. "It made me rethink my relationship both with my boyfriend and with sex itself, realising it was possible to claim agency over the type of intimacy I desire without shame." One line in particular, a quote from Simone de Beauvoir referenced in the book, has stayed with her: "You can't have everything you want but you can want everything you want." Why some can't stomach All Fours But while for many the book has been transformational, for others it's been a turn-off, leading to some fiery book club debates over its merits. "In my network of feminist friends, authors, writers, it was divisive," says Orchard. Some critics think the book is trying a little too hard to be edgy. That was the case for Katie Krug, whose book club – a diverse mix of 15 women in New Jersey - was split down the middle on it. "Some really loved it and some tore it apart," she says. "There was little to no middle ground." Krug herself felt that July was being "provocative for provocation's sake. Maybe she felt she had to get people's attention, but it came across to me as phoney and inauthentic." On Goodreads – where the book has an average score of 3.5 stars - the one-star reviews call it "icky", "cringey", "unrelatable" and even "a nightmarish read". One reader says: "I've had hot flashes that were better than this book." There's been a healthy dose of outrage over the narrator's moral choices – from pursuing an affair with a younger man to (later in the book) opting for an open marriage. Her privileged domestic situation is a sticking point for some – after all, not many have the time, money or childcare to take off for a three-week road trip. And some readers just can't stomach her as a character, calling her narcissistic, immature and obnoxious. "I don't mind unlikeable characters, but I found the narrator to be exhausting to spend time with," says Krug. "I didn't understand her, I didn't like her, and I just wanted her to stop already." More like this:• The 12 best books of 2025 so far• Clinton: 'I was more a storyline than a story'• The lost 1934 novel warning of Nazi horrors For some, the book is just too weird. There's plenty of absurdity in both the writing and the character's choices - not least blowing $20,000 on lavishly redecorating a motel room she doesn't own. Room 321 at the Excelsior becomes the narrator's "Room of One's Own", to use Virginia Woolf's phrase: a place away from the domestic in which she experiments with her sexual and creative impulses. Later, it's a parlour, too, when she invites friends over to quiz them about the menopause and libidos. "The motel room is a symbol," says Orchard. "The room is about her enjoying and spending her money however she pleases, and spending that money on beauty. It's a place to play. It's also a place to burn down ideas. Though Krug didn't personally like All Fours, she appreciates the discussions it's sparked, in her book club and beyond. "So many novels deal with men at midlife, it's refreshing to see one from a female perspective receive so much attention." Orchard resists the idea that All Fours is a midlife crisis novel, though, at least in the traditional sense. "She's actively engaging with this change. She's questioning it, she's talking to her doctor and her friends about it, she's trying to advocate for herself. In my mind, that's quite different to how we think about the midlife crisis." Crisis or not, July has shown that there's a hunger for art which truly lays bare the transformative, messy and sometimes magical female midlife experience. One of the author's favourite quotes comes from Albert Camus: "Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth."With her novel she's opened the door for more radical emotional honesty, and with the paperback recently released, the conversations about All Fours - and the arguments - look set to continue for some time yet. All Fours by Miranda July is out in paperback now. -- For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
Toronto Star
01-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Toronto Star
Perimenopause, polyamory and ‘tampon sex': Inside the novel that has Toronto women talking about blowing up their lives
'I feel like I've actually been in that room. I can picture it.' It's a Sunday afternoon in Parkdale and Laura Dawe, a painter in her early 40s, is talking to her still life class about a fictional motel room in a cult novel. Dawe, who is in the process of repainting her studio, hasn't been able to get the image of a lavishly decorated rose-hued space out of her mind since reading 'All Fours,' Miranda July's sexually explicit roman à clef, last year. Dawe has her own distinctive aesthetic. But something about July's description — vivid and borderline surrealist — has stuck in her mind. Painting a room is no longer simply painting a room; for Dawe, it's become a minor act of All Fours-ing. I first encountered All Fours-ing — as a verb — in conversation with Laura Shaw, a software researcher and divorced mother of a 7-year-old, who lives in Corso Italia. Shaw read July's novel last summer and has been discussing its central themes — motherhood, perimenopause, open relationships, aging, art, and sex — with friends ever since. Like hundreds of other Toronto readers — and thousands more around the world — Shaw felt 'All Fours' captured something singular about the experience of contemporary womanhood. To 'all fours' is, as Shaw explains it, 'to blow up your life.' Opinion articles are based on the author's interpretations and judgments of facts, data and events. More details
Toronto Star
31-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Toronto Star
Parenting, perimenopause and ‘tampon sex': Why so many Toronto women are obsessed with a novel about blowing up their lives
'I feel like I've actually been in that room. I can picture it.' It's a Sunday afternoon in Parkdale and Laura Dawe, a painter in her early 40s, is talking to her still life class about a fictional motel room in a cult novel. Dawe, who is in the process of repainting her studio, hasn't been able to get the image of a lavishly decorated rose-hued space out of her mind since reading 'All Fours,' Miranda July's sexually explicit roman à clef, last year. Dawe has her own distinctive aesthetic. But something about July's description — vivid and borderline surrealist — has stuck in her mind. Painting a room is no longer simply painting a room; for Dawe, it's become a minor act of All Fours-ing. I first encountered All Fours-ing — as a verb — in conversation with Laura Shaw, a software researcher and divorced mother of a 7-year-old, who lives in Corso Italia. Shaw read July's novel last summer and has been discussing its central themes — motherhood, perimenopause, open relationships, aging, art, and sex — with friends ever since. Like hundreds of other Toronto readers — and thousands more around the world — Shaw felt 'All Fours' captured something singular about the experience of contemporary womanhood. To 'all fours' is, as Shaw explains it, 'to blow up your life.'
