The only people who are allowed to own sexuality are cis, straight men. That’s it. Everyone else is relegated to the public arena of indecency when we describe what gives us pleasure in thought or action, what we would like to experience and with whom, when we express the truth that sexuality is not indecent or unprofessional and marking it so creates a condition of hostility, repression, and fear. That sexuality is inherently tied to our sense and expression of self, an inherent part of our bodies and experience that belong to us and us only, and the subjugation of its expression is a subjugation of freedom. That those who seek to define sexuality through the prism of the gender binary, misogyny, and the hatred of queer people define sex purely as an act of reproduction. In doing so, they separate sex from pleasure, morph an expression of self into solely an act for others, and define any divergence from that oppressive narrow-mindedness as a deviation. This is a key reason why misogynists despise abortion and reproductive rights—they are repulsed by the separation of sex from motherhood and so they seek to force it upon people who give birth.

Elena Ferrante reflects a great deal on motherhood and often delves deeply into what mothers are not allowed to feel, let alone express. Motherhood is often sold as an idea that arrives with pain but unfolds only with joy. It’s the greatest experience one could have. It’s the greatest gift one could receive. It’s the greatest contribution one could make with their life. But the complexities of motherhood and the people who experience it get routinely erased. In her seminal work The Lost Daughter and here, Ferrante allows her mothers and those who might be in the future to feel a range of emotions that break that pattern of erasure. The feelings of anger, exhaustion, envy, hatred, that maybe your life would have been easier if your children weren’t in it.

When Immacolata (Anna Rita Vitolo) tells Elena (Margherita Mazzucco) the plain truths many mothers have felt towards their child, she is committing an act of indecency against the very social norms she tragically uses in punishing Elena. It is appalling behaviour but it is a truthful one and one whose obfuscation Ferrante’s story is dedicated to uncovering. The opportunities provided to Elena and not her, they rankle Immacolata and kindle an envy she can no longer attempt to hide. She doesn’t know if her life would have been easier, more manageable, happier even, if she had the opportunities that Elena does, but the lack of knowing in this case only enflames her envy and despair. There’s another dissection of social norms where Immacolata and Elena admit to one another that they can’t stand the other. It’s a deeply sad and devastating moment, but the story is committed to the truth of its characters and not the expectations of what such characters ought to do as per societal conventions.

That Elena and her mother have a devastating relationship is only a fraction of what she is dealing with in this particular moment. Even after the publication of her debut novel, Elena is wracked with a lack of confidence and anxiety about her sense of self, where she stands in relation to others and the society around her, and if what she accomplished by publishing her novel was enough. It’s a devastatingly relatable maelstrom of emotions and you can see that a lifetime of being conditioned to respect others’ view of her more than her view of herself has robbed her of the confidence she should have in herself. It’s a victory that doesn’t feel victorious and as I spend countless hours typing away at my own novel, it’s a feeling I fear and seeing it on Elena’s face broke my heart.

It’s not as if society makes it easy for Elena to truly feel her incredible achievement. If people don’t scathe at Elena’s novel as being raunchy, loose, and degrading, they chastise it as small, lacking substance, and a waste of time. The man who says this fancies himself as a great revolutionary, an anti-capitalist who screams about not bowing down to the systems that sustain capitalism but is misogyny not one of those systems? Is it not the misogyny in capitalism that demands that people who give birth be forced to have children so they can be a source for labor? Is it not the misogyny in capitalism that pretends that housework is not labor that has value and deserves monetary compensation? Is it not misogyny that is a critical pillar of capitalism, which demands that people who give birth shoulder additional burdens throughout their entire lives and never stop to pause and actually live. It’s rhetoric from him, just rhetoric. And a woman writing about sexual pleasure, even in the slightest of terms, is more valuable to breaking capitalism’s stronghold on our society than a man who reads that pleasure and finds it to be trivial.

It is no mistake that when Juan (Eduardo Rejón) makes aggressive sexual advances on Elena, he does so partially because of the specific reaction by some that describe her novel as being sexually loose and immoral. Like so many others, when he hears that Elena’s novel has some expression of sexuality within it, he immediately jumps to the conclusion that Elena herself must be sexually available at all times. But an important point here isn’t how often Elena has sex—she should have as much sex as she wants to—but rather that by lambasting her expression of sexuality, Juan and so many others actively remove Elena’s agency from her own sexuality. If she is expressing her sexuality, she is shaming womanhood. If she is expressing her sexuality, she is issuing an open invitation to any man who wants to creepily crawl into her bed. If she is expressing her sexuality by centring herself, her desires, her needs, then somehow she’s a hypocrite to revolutionary politics because she dares to draw boundaries. No one seems to ask Elena what she wants, what she thinks, who she is. She’s a canvas to so many people in her life, a canvas they can throw whatever paint they want on and remove a piece of her without looking back and thinking that maybe, just maybe, that canvas is a human being who deserves to be loved for who she is and not who others want her to be.

Additional Notes:

– Maggie Gyllenhaal’s exquisite adaptation of The Lost Daughter, an Oscar contender this season, is currently available to stream on Netflix.
– In this maelstrom of revolutionary rhetoric, it is incredibly infuriating and poignant to see how much labor continues to fall on the shoulders of everyone who isn’t a cis man. It’s easy to make speeches about labor when the microphone is easily handed to you – it’s difficult to pass that microphone onto others and do the labor yourself (cough… Nino … cough).
– The way Nino (Francesco Serpico) talks about Lila (Gaia Girace)… guillotine!
– When Elena uttered “maybe I’m not a writer” – my heart broke. What a relatable moment.
– Nothing in this episode gave me more pleasure than the women in the Naples shop basically spitting with disgust at that self-proclaimed fascist.
– No Lila in this episode, but more of her to come soon.
– The sequence of Elena moving through a crowd of waving Communist flags was stunning.
– There was such a depth of sadness in Silvia (Maria Vittoria Dallasta) and I can’t blame her for feeling so hopeless. What does it do to you, to live in a society where the people around you loudly champion the collective but always seem to leave you behind?