The ‘Soft Life’ and the ‘Wild Woman’

After decades convincing women that they will find fulfilment in work, there is now a new trend, encouraging women to seek a ‘soft life’ — a life free of stress and exertion — all in the name of ‘natural’, ‘divine’ feminine energy. The problem is: this natural feminine energy is based on a misconception (popularised by Rousseau) about what natural life looks like. There is nothing soft about the state of nature. It is, as Hobbes says, ‘nasty, brutish and short’.

There is, however, a feminine instinct to seek out comfort — but this is usually when a woman is nesting, pregnant or nursing. It is a temporary state, not a way of life.

The view of women as passive, languid individuals is based on a very short span of human history and a very specific social caste. What people think of as natural femininity is actually civilised femininity — a femininity that has been tamed; or, in the words of Germaine Greer, ‘castrated’.

In her book, The Female Eunuch, Greer argues that female sexuality is denied and misrepresented as passivity: ‘The characteristics that are praised and rewarded are those of the castrate — timidity, plumpness, languor, delicacy and preciosity’. ‘Men’, she says, ‘have commandeered all the energy and streamlined it into an aggressive conquistatorial power’. Meanwhile, women are confined by the stereotype of the ‘Eternal…