Reinventing love How the patriarchy sabotages heterosexual relations

In this invigorating study, feminist scholar Chollet (In Defense of Witches) explores the "internal conflict between my feminist convictions and my mystical and absolutist view of love." She pushes back against recent attempts by other feminist thinkers to defend erotic love as a sacred space beyond critique; instead, Chollet makes a bold case that love itself is warped by patriarchy and in need of correction. She refreshingly does not eschew monogamy or long-term commitment (though she doesn't knock open relationships either: "I admire the people who manage it"), arguing that holding another person in a place of privilege in one's life is where love's true fruits lie, both erotically and in terms of personal and spiritual growth. Instead, she critiques the capitalist conditions (such as the gender pay gap and long workdays that keep couples apart) and contemporary value systems ("the bourgeois straightjacket of the obligatory trajectory of romance" and "the destructive view of passion") that prevent heterosexual love from generating harmonious, communal bonds between couples. In Emanuel's fluid translation, Chollet's prose is both easygoing and erudite, maintaining an effortless flow as she seamlessly folds new thinkers and examples (from bell hooks and Simone de Beauvoir to Sally Rooney and Princess Leia) into her ever-expanding analysis. It's a must-read. (July)

An examination of how to make heterosexual love equitable. In a spirited social critique, French feminist Chollet draws on movies, TV, novels, advertisements, psychoanalysis, and feminist theory to examine impediments to fulfilling experiences of heterosexual love. Real, reciprocal love, she believes, feels like a gift, "an intoxicating bond, an immediate and crazily benevolent intimacy with someone who could have been totally unknown to us." Yet depictions of love in popular culture have undermined that benevolent intimacy by presenting women as weak, vulnerable, and intellectually inferior and fueling male fantasies of women as compliant bodies, silent and docile. "By deluging girls and women with romances," Chollet writes, "by vaunting the charms and importance of the presence of a man in their lives, they are encouraged to accept their traditional role as caregivers." Patriarchy, colonialism, racism, and imperialism have validated the image of the domineering man who takes "sexual appropriation of the female body." The author shows how this depiction helps to explain women's attraction to male killers and even to the exploitative figure of the male artist or writer, "whose creative process justifies the worst actions against those close to him." Chollet suggests ways for women to revise the romance narrative by reexamining their own sexual desires, perhaps by subverting the idea of domination. In underscoring women's need for independence, the author suggests non-cohabitation, which, among other benefits, eliminates the problem of sharing domestic tasks. For Chollet, a happily loved woman, financially independent and childless by choice, non-cohabitation may fit her life more than it would others'. Nevertheless, she is an impassioned advocate of love, urging readers "to breathe life back into it, by pulverizing both the bourgeois straightjacket of the obligatory trajectory of romance, as well as the equally conventional (and limiting) view of destructive passion." A vital celebration of loving. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.