Dr. Julia Long And The Politics Of Saying No (Part 2)

A Separatist Discussion (PART 2)

PART 2: Dr. Julia Long, Separatism, and the Politics of Saying No

This is Part 2 of my extended conversation with Dr. Julia Long, a radical feminist, lesbian activist, and scholar known for her outspoken advocacy of women-only spaces and her critical stance on liberal feminism.

In this second half, we go even deeper—exploring how feminist separatism functions not just as a political stance, but as a lived strategy of survival, joy, and self-respect. We talk about the backlash against women who choose to separate, how trauma reshapes community dynamics, and the power of women-centered living.

If you haven’t read Part 1 yet, we recommend starting there.

DR. JULIA LONG:

So I guess it’s because—unlike other—this is nothing very original I’m saying. It’s all been said, you know, plenty of times before. But I suppose because heterosexuality is so enforced and so given so much social approval for young women, and it’s—you know, there’s all the kind of culture around it that really makes it pretty, uh—well, as Adrienne Rich said, you know, pretty, um, compulsory.

I think that happens at such a kind of, you know, a young and formative stage in a woman’s development, that that really is a huge, huge obstacle to—to women, you know, in terms of the potential to separate.

And obviously, even for, you know, young women who grow up with a—you know, a very sure knowledge that they’re lesbian, there’s still, like, huge pressure on them now in, you know, in terms of the whole LGBTQ-da-da—you know, not to just have, you know, communities with other young women.

Or not even just to—you know, as often it’s not—not even to call themselves lesbians, but to use terms like “queer,” or—you know—whatever, LGBT, etc.

THE STEPPING RAZOR:

So many lesbians don’t even feel comfortable calling themselves women as well. They have been bullied in their spaces as well.

They’re more comfortable calling a trans-identified male a woman than they are calling themselves one. This is what I am seeing from the younger women online. And they would call themsel—I guess what is it? “cis.”

They’re doing everything that they can for men to kind of pat them on the head and say, “Good job. Good job. Keep it up.” Can you talk about the famous Tweet that got you in trouble with other feminist women? You know, when they put you on the cross for saying that being with a man is not inevitable. (laughs)

DR. JULIA LONG:

Of course, so yeah. Well, I suppose that—I mean, that really is the sort of internalized oppression, isn’t it?

Just, like, endlessly wanting to please your oppressor.

It’s, um—yeah—it’s—I mean, it’s a very known phenomenon in terms of the kind of psychology of oppression, but it’s pretty—it’s pretty grim.

But, um—just to go back to, you know, that specific example, that—you know—that you mentioned from the, um, from that tweet—Do you want to bring—yeah, well, yes. I don’t want to overdo—I don’t want to overdo the image. I wasn’t—I wasn’t actually crucified. (laughs)

But, um, they really wanted to make it known that they weren’t happy. I had to be—I’d certainly maybe put in the stocks—you know, the medieval stocks—was probably a bit more what that was about.

But that again—I think that’s kind of—it is an interesting, um, example, isn’t it, of just like how taboo it is to say these things. So I think there were a couple of things. One—like, I’ll just say again—I did tweet about it afterward, but from my perspective, because over the past number of years—I suppose, I don’t know, maybe about eight years, something like that—maybe not quite as long as that, six years maybe, I’ve worked very specifically in the whole field or area of male violence against women.

Even prior to that, but in particular over the last six years, I was particularly, for a while, working on the Femicide Census.

So I was reading reports of men killing women—like, day after day after day. You know, we’d be reading a lot of reports every day.

So I was quite—what’s the word? I can’t even think of a word that sums it up—but I was absolutely immersed in these horrors of men killing women.

And the work that I’m doing at the moment—it’s not on femicide, but it’s on male violence against women in terms of the sort of—I don’t really like this term—but, like, the domestic abuse, you know, the intimate partner or family relationship male violence against women.

I read, or come across, or see a lot of these reports every day.

And so—and I feel, because it’s an area that I work in, you have to do your job, you have to—there are certain responses to that that you’re allowed to have within the employment field, and others that are taboo.

But obviously, when I’m just, you know, in my own living room, or I’m just on my phone, I’m not bound by—I’m not employed by anyone there. So I can have a more honest reaction.

And I think women, increasingly, we find it very hard to find spaces where we actually can give voice to our honest reactions.

And so when I saw—you know, I’d seen some reports of that—you know, again, you kind of get lost for words, because they’re all so horrific. But anyway, that horrific case, all the multiple, multiple ongoing rapes of, um, of Giselle—Pelicot.

I’ll say as well: it is really significant. It’s not insignificant that we can only mention her name by using the name of her rapist. That we can’t refer to her without using the name of the rapist.

And that’s because—that’s because she married him and took his name.

That’s not—like, this isn’t blaming her—but it’s saying this is a really significant thing. This is what marriage does.

Women—I don’t know the exact stats on it—but from what I see, women are still largely, certainly in this country, still largely taking the man’s name when they get married.

And so that—you know, there’s all of the politics around that. And then, like, when a woman doesn’t marry the man, you know, the father of the children, the children still get his name. They don’t get hers, even though she’s given birth to them and she’s doing everything to rear them and all the rest of it.

So these things are really, really significant.

But I don’t often—I mean, maybe it sounds like with the group that you have, maybe you talk about these things far more—but I don’t really see much attention drawn to or kind of political analysis of exactly what’s going on with the institution of marriage. You know, that it—it means now that when we talk about Giselle Pelicot, we—we have to use the rapist’s name.

That, you know—that’s—that’s a terrible thing.

But anyway, so when I saw that, and when I read the article—because basically what I did was retweet the article—and the article was, you know, quite a good article, where she was quoted extensively as saying—I think she was addressing him directly.

She was saying, you know, “I thought—I believed you were a good husband. You know, we laughed together. We had lots of happy memories together,”—you know, all of this.

And—and now what you’ve done has destroyed my life.

And it was just such a—you know, everything she was saying was so important. It was so important.

And so absolutely devastating to realize that, you know, she had come to understand what he’d done to her over these years.

So I read it—obviously in absolute horror and despair—having had the whole day of reading through all these other cases of, you know, men stalking women, men strangling women, you know, all of these things.

And so I suppose what I wanted to do was just actually let out a massive—I don’t know, like a roar or something—of just, like: women, look at this.

This is what—this is what marriage can do. This is like the—you know—maybe the worst extreme. But for every one woman like Giselle Pelicot, there are—you know, how many more?

Where the abuse, the just sheer sort of disrespect, you know, all these things that women are putting up with, the sheer inequality of the relationship, is happening all the time.

And it just seems to me that we’re—we’re allowed to make all kinds of comments about this, like, “Oh, we need more women’s refuges,” or “Oh, the police…” I mean, the police are pretty bad—obviously very bad—and often they’re the perpetrators as well.

But it’s like acceptable to make these kinds of comments. But to me, the most glaringly obvious one is: other options are available.

You do not have to do this. You—you know—and let’s open a conversation about how we might want to live our lives differently, without this.

Get away from them.

That, to me, is the most crucial thing.

But—and again, maybe it’s different for you—but I really, I just never see that. And even when I’ve suggested things like that within a working environment—even within a women’s organization—it was met with kind of, um, just like disbelief that I could even suggest that.

So that shows how taboo it is.

And, you know, I’m on X the same as everyone else is. I believe it’s there for us to say what we think.

So that’s what I wanted to say. And I couched it in very, very tempered language, as I remember. Just, you know, to say: Reminder—other options are available. And generally better.

I think it was something like that. I wasn’t telling anyone to do anything. I wasn’t—you know, I didn’t even use any words like lesbianism or separatism or—you know, I just said: other options are available.

And from that, it was—I think what happened was, it was clearly read by, I don’t know, a couple of women, you know, with large followings—obviously, J.K. Rowling’s got a huge following—and they, I don’t know if they really misinterpreted it or if they willfully misinterpreted it.

Because I don’t know what was going through their minds—although they seem to be very confident about what was going through my mind. I don’t know.

But they—to me, the idea that I was addressing that to Giselle Pelicot is just ludicrous.

Like, it’s ludicrous.

It clearly wasn’t addressed to her.

It was a reminder to any woman reading it. And I know—um, you know, because now we’ve—we’ve now met...because of that.

And I know from some of the other responses and tweets that, you know, there were some women who actually appreciated me saying that.

And I hope that, um, it’s a contribution to the kind of thing that you’re doing, which is opening up a conversation and making—making different ways of living, ways that actually mean we can live our lives with the kind of respect and dignity and love and valuing of our own selves that we deserve—I hope it makes that more possible.

So that’s—I think that’s so much what separatism is about.

It’s about actually creating communities for ourselves where we’re—we’re actually—we see each other, and we appreciate each other, and we value each other.

And that’s a completely different scenario than being stuck in this male-dominated sphere, where you’re pretty much seen as a body.

You’re pretty much seen as this objectified, sort of sexualized body.

Um, and that’s it.

So that—so quite why it got that degree of hostility, I think—I think there were those who, directed probably by J.K. Rowling, and maybe some others as well—thought that I was being disrespectful.

Just—yeah—blaming Giselle Pelicot.

So I think there was that. There were those who reacted in that way.

But then, from what I saw—and there were, there just seemed to be so many different threads and things, I couldn’t keep up with it all—because like yourself, you know, I work quite long days, you know, you just haven’t got time to be looking at all this stuff.

From what I saw, it did lead into some other conversations.

And I think that’s where I saw more of the kinds of responses that you’re talking about—of just the hostility to the idea of separatism in the first place.

THE STEPPING RAZOR:

I think women who are still in relationships with men—after they see what men are capable of—don’t like the discussion surrounding separating from men because it makes their brain itch. No matter what a woman goes through, separating and leaving is seen as an abnormal response by other women. The goal they want is for you to suffer. I was so badly beaten up when I was pregnant and it was a Black woman who made fun of that and posted it on her Reddit page and another Black woman who claimed that I had to be a scammer for not showing my face as much as she did online. I have 12-stiches in my face right here and I never show that and it was women who made fun of that. Black women. Other Black women like myself you know? You see me here, but I never go on camera and even that a woman made fun of. Trying to move away from trauma is seen as "suspect" by Black women and means that they can't trust you. Separation is seen as "abnormal," even for victims of abuse. 

And I think it makes their brain itches because there’s always that lingering possibility that, if you do not act in form—if you do not perform the way you’re supposed to when you’re in this relationship with a man—things can go haywire.

This is why you see so many women, in my opinion, when their lives are disrupted by men, it’s the minute they stop doing what men want them to do.

It’s the minute they file for divorce. It’s the minute they look to get out from under a abuse. It’s the minute they decide, “I don’t want to deal with violence anymore. I want to leave. I want to get out. I want to separate.”

Marilyn Frye spoke about this, right? Women are confronted—when separatism is mentioned—women are confronted with that question of “What now?”

Because if you’ve been finessed your whole life to center men, and men are supposed to be your hero, end-all-be-all, the minute there are no more men, I think women look at themselves and say, “Okay, so what am I? What do I do next?”

Because in the States anyway, you can have a woman who’s an astronaut—she’s an astronaut, she’s a brain surgeon, she’s a dentist on the weekend—and she’s still nothing if she doesn’t have a man.

And that’s the message a lot of women get: that you’re nothing until you have the guy, the house, the baby, everything that says you followed the order of patriarchy.

And I think with women—when there are no men, or when they’re separated from men—and this is really weird to me too, because I know women who are in relationships with men right now, and one: they’re not happy.

And all of their emotional, um—all of the emotional sauce that they get comes from women. It doesn’t come from the man they’re with.

The man that they’re with doesn’t even talk to them—other than, you know, the two grunts—and he’s gone again. 

You know what I mean? So I don’t know why—I don’t know. I just think it’s conditioning. And I think it’s really, really deep.

I would like to say brain programming.

I feel sometimes repetition—especially the male voice—repetition is so dangerous to women. Because after a while, women start to digest the nonsense that men say.

Like for example: “I’m a woman. I have a period.” And, you know, he’s born with—you know—testicles.

Like this is—women, you kind of hear this all the time, and women just start to believe it. When I got ran off of TikTok, there were women who were claiming that men are biological women as well. 

And I think women just believe that they’re nothing without men, or that there’s nothing else for them to do to show that they’ve “made it,” if that makes sense.

Because the women who I speak to—there was one point in time when they did have a man, and that man they could use to kind of lord in front of other women and say, “Look what I have. I have a man.”

Never mind the fact that he hates her guts. It’s just that she can go and brag to other single women that she has this relationship. She has this man.

But when you really sit with her, she’s not even happy. And that’s what I see.

DR. JULIA LONG:

I kind of have a few thoughts about that.

So yeah, when you’re talking about that, um—that hostility, or maybe women whose lives are very kind of centered around men, or very enmeshed with men, or, you know, married or living with men, or, you know, whatever—that kind of hostility or feeling threatened by separatism, it’s, um, it’s interesting.

Because yeah, I think probably for all of those women, like you were saying, their emotional sustenance comes from other women.

And in fact, I don’t—I can’t think of any women, even, like, you know, the most heterosexual or—you know, whatever—um, women who don’t actually really, absolutely love and value women-only spaces.

It’s just they wouldn’t put it in the political frame, you know, that we’re kind of talking about it in—more in terms of, like, feminism and politics.

But, you know, things like just having—or using quite the sort of language, you know, infantilizing language—but like a “girls’ night out,” or, I don’t know, like a weekend away, maybe.

You know, things like these, like book groups, and, you know, all these different kind of things. Or spa days—I don’t know. But these—uh—you know, women always create women-only spaces.

And usually have—I don’t know, I can just think of some of my—some of these holidays and things that I would have had, you know, before my sort of teens, before I was, you know, really very politicized around feminism.

But certainly, you know, we just—we love those times together.

And, uh, you know, the way that women laugh when we’re—you know, when we’re together.

And so I think for all those women who might be quite hostile to the ideas of separatism, on some level, they absolutely need it and value it and experience it themselves as well.

But they just don’t put it into that kind of political frame.

And they don’t take it to a logical conclusion.

In a way, I think it then—it almost functions more like a kind of, like, a valve on a pressure cooker.

Where you—you know, the rest of the time the pressure is building up, and then you just have your friendships to let off—literally kind of let off steam.

So yeah, so there’s that.

And also, I remember in, um—I think—is it in Unpacking Queer Politics by Sheila Jeffreys? She talks about—um, is it—she talks at the beginning of it, she talks about, like, the fundamental tenets of lesbian feminism.

It’s been a while since I’ve—been a long time, actually, since I read that book. But she talks about separatism.

That at the very least—like, you know, if we think back to the, I don’t know, like the suffragist/suffragette movement, and then, like, the Women’s Liberation Movement—like, at the very least, in order to kind of gain a bit of distance and understanding of your situation, you have to create some kind of separatism.

Even if it’s just in your head.

You have to separate from men so that you can actually view your situation and make the links between that—the personal is political—with the links with other women and the wider kind of male-dominated social structures and political…

THE STEPPING RAZOR:

So, you know, everyone—everyone actually does, you know, women do draw on separatism, in all kinds of ways.

But there’s something about the term—probably a bit like, you know, for similar reasons as the term lesbianism—that seems to get quite a reaction.

I also think, like, when women separate from men, it’s an opportunity to take notes.

It’s an opportunity to compare notes as well.

And I don’t think men like that.

Like, if the younger lesbians today were around older lesbians—alone, without the trans-identified male “lesbian” in the space—then the older lesbian could put her on to the drop, on: you’re being finessed to believe that this is a woman, and it’s not a woman.

But the reason why I think that men invade the spaces of women is to kind of intercept that—that knowledge base—that the older generation can give the younger generation.

I don’t think they like the knowledge that women share.

I don’t think they like that sharpening of iron between women.

To kind of say, “Oh, I’m going through this too. I’m going through th—”

And this is another thing with TikTok, which I find to be wonderful—the entire weaponized incompetence videos that came out of TikTok.

That married women started to make to show their husbands just being [__]—like, they would purposely bleach all of the clothing, they would purposely break something so they wouldn’t have to do it.

If women didn’t speak, they wouldn’t know what was happening.

But men, on the other side, are speaking and saying, “If you want to get out of doing something at home, mess it up.”

DR. JULIA LONG:

It’s—it’s ancient, isn’t it?

That whole thing of that, um—Oh, I didn’t even know. So that’s been on TikTok, has it?

THE STEPPING RAZOR

Where women are sharing, like, husbands deliberately—like a woman who—she went on vacation or to her funeral—something happened where she left the husband with the children, and then when she came home, it looked like, you know, a hurricane hit the house.

And he deliberately did that to punish her for going away and leaving him with responsibilities.

And other wives then said, “Oh, the same thing happened to me. The same thing happened to me.”

So women have to speak to one another to kind of get what they need to tackle what they’re going through, because no one is giving us any help.

Men are definitely not giving us any help.

But on the other side, the back end, men instruct men on how to behave.

And we see that—we see the behavior of the trans-identified male.

You know, kick down the door, tell them that, you know, “This is what I am, and they have to accept it.”

So—but women don’t get the coaching.

DR. JULIA LONG

That example that you gave there from TikTok—I mean, that’s basically a form of consciousness-raising, isn’t it, for the social media age?

Because that was exactly the kind of thing that, you know, women would talk about.

I came a bit after the whole kind of, you know, consciousness-raising groups of the second wave, but certainly, my understanding is they would have particular topics and then go around and talk about their experience of it.

And that’s how they could identify the commonalities and become politicized.

You know, see that these were actually political experiences—not just personal.

So that example of, you know, housework and the deliberate kind of sabotage or incompetence or whatever—that’s, you know, it’s been going—it’s probably been going on forever.

And this is a kind of interesting use of social media to do that.

But I was going to say as well, I think, you know, obviously all these things are a process.

And so maybe this is a bit of a difference as well—probably in terms of where you’re at in terms of, like, a particular stage or experience or something.

That maybe with these, like, West 4B and these—you know—taking up a 4B identity, it does seem to me still very kind of focused on men.

Because maybe the women in these spaces that they’re creating are then using those spaces to really kind of let off steam about the men that they had in their lives.

Or, you know, there’s something about that—or the way they’ve been treated by men.

And all of that, I think, is, you know, obviously really important.

But, you know, I’ve been in—well, I won’t make it too personal about me—but I’m sure we’ve all been in situations where you’ve been out with a group of women, and there’s, like, one woman who just keeps talking about her ex, or her husband, or her boyfriend, or something.

I mean, I haven’t had this experience for a long time, because I’m quite old now.

But I just remember in the past.

And so I think—what I’d be really wary of, and what I think is really quite unhelpful—is that if you create a women-only space, women can bring men into it just by talking about them all the time.

So even though they’re physically not there, that’s what happened when I—with that Lesbiana screening—when I said, “Can we have a women-only space?”

Well, in the end, it was a women-only space, but the men were still there because the women kept talking about them and saying they should be there.

So the men were still very much in their heads.

And I think, you know, for me, what I really enjoy and really value about—I suppose, you know, my friendship groups now, the political groups, the lesbian groups, the women—sort of friendship groups that I have—is that, like, we talk about anything and everything.

But men don’t figure in that—other than maybe if it’s to do with work, because some of us still work in a particular field.

But actually—or maybe about politics, widely—but it’s…

And I think—to me—that’s so important to get to that point, where you’re not still bringing men into the subject all the time.

Because ultimately, I think lesbian feminism, separatism—whatever we want to call these isms—it’s really…

It’s so much—I don’t know what you think—it’s so much about valuing yourself.

Valuing yourself as a really worthwhile individual woman.

And then seeing that in other women.

And then that’s your kind of starting point. Like, what do we want to do?

You know, we’re all so—you know, I look at my friends and just think: we’re all so, I don’t know, talented and funny and capable and adventurous—whatever.

And we really want to celebrate that.

And you can—you know, when you celebrate that in each other, that’s when you build community.

And you build something that’s really so rich.

THE STEPPING RAZOR

Yeah. When I hear—you know, the kind of examples that you were giving there about just these horrible men and how badly they treat the women in their lives, and then the women needing a space to talk about that. 

But ultimately, we don’t want to be—this is how I’ve been feeling for, you know, well, for longer than I care to remember.

I got a bit fed up with some of the feminist activism because it just feels like it’s always in response.

It’s always in response to get men to behave a certain way and that is exhausting. I’m much more interested in doing what we want to do. Not just acting in reaction to men. 

DR. JULIA LONG

Yeah, that—that’s it. That’s it.

Like I was saying, you know, a little while ago—like, men don’t even figure.

Don’t even think about them.

Do you know what I mean?

Have you kind of felt any sort of movement or tension between those things in your group? 

THE STEPPING RAZOR

There’s still a little.

I think if the wound is fresh, then yes—you can tell. Because they come into the group, and they want to rehash the years they guess they wasted with the man.

And if the wound is fresh, then they kind of—but the older women are, you know, I think they’re over it. And they’re happier.

And you can tell the difference.

Because in the chat space, they’ll upload—or, I can’t cook to save my life, but there are some women who can cook—and they’ll put a recipe, they’ll post about gardening, or that they bought a bird or got a cat. I don’t know.

Whereas the girls who are still with the open wound—she comes in with the trauma, the stories—and that kind of brings everyone back to their own trauma with men.

And then it starts this snowball.

And this is why in the group, I don’t really have a lot of women in relationships with men—for that reason.

Because it’s never-ending.

It sets the whole vibe off.

Like, I have movie nights on Saturday, and we just watch full movies on Zoom.

A bunch of women watching movies.

And you know there’s always the one girl: “Oh, my ex-boyfriend did that.”

You know?

And it just—it just messes up the whole vibe.

You know?

Because it does. It brings—it kind of undermines what you’re doing.

Because it brings a man into it.

You don’t want him to be there, you just want to watch a movie and then pass out. (laughs)

DR. JULIA LONG

But obviously for women who’ve had, you know, horrendous experiences with men—I’m not suggesting that they don’t need, you know…

Obviously, it’s really important for them to be able to talk about it, get it out, and see it for what it is.

And then, you know, with other women who’ve had similar—you know, that’s a really, really important process.

But I think what is exciting to me about, you know, having this conversation with you and hearing about, you know, some of the kind of flowering of this movement, is that it kind of gives me a sense that we can…

We can create these communities.

And this sort of—be visible in a way that can actually shift things.

You know? Because I think the whole kind of—like you were saying—the brain programming or the conditioning around heterosexuality is so much a sort of triumph of illusion over reality.

Because it kind of—you know, you’ve got all of these Cinderella-type myths, and then you’ve got the reality of it.

And I think for women to—you know, there’s that saying, “If you can’t see it, you can’t be it.”

That’s obviously proved so true in all the kinds of fields of work that women have now gone into.

So that, like you were saying, we can see women surgeons, women astronauts, you know, women doing all these different kinds of professions and careers and things.

But in terms of the sort of social transformations, and different kinds of communities and living arrangements and all of that—I think there’s—yeah, there’s so much we can do.

And I think it’s—it really has got the power to—to transform lives for a lot of women. Maybe for all women.

THE STEPPING RAZOR

What would you like to see happen in regards to separation with women?

Like, what would—if you could have a dream, what would it be for women?

Maybe this is a good question to finish on, because we’ve been talking for a long time, haven’t we?

DR. JULIA LONG

I just have little kind of glimpses of it.

I mean, this conversation has been, like, really, really enjoyable for me.

So I suppose this kind of conversation—or like, I’m just thinking in terms of some of the really fantastic times that I have, like, with lesbian friends, or with other women friends—where we really share something really important and honest that we want to talk about.

And then hearing another woman’s thoughts around that, and kind of sharing laughter and things like that—I suppose I’d just really like to see that expanded.

And the way that that gets expanded is through more women-only spaces.

And not just women-only spaces to kind of—I used to be, I think, more in this mindset of, like, political organizing and all that.

But I just think—just kind of being, and enjoying each other’s company.

So I think, yeah—maybe taking those kinds of experiences of community and personal relationships, and then doing what we can to expand them in terms of living arrangements.

You know, like—the situation over here, I imagine it’s very similar over there—so many women are just in terrible living situations at the moment.

You know, the rents are really high, the house prices are way out of reach—not just a bit, but way out of reach for most women.

It can make them very sort of dependent on staying with a man.

And so I think we could maybe get a bit more creative about women-only living—you know, living setups.

And, you know, lots of different things like that.

And, um, I love just what you were saying there about the cooking and the gardening.

I absolutely—I’m not a particularly successful gardener—but I absolutely love, um, you know, sowing seeds and, you know, trying to help things grow.

And so I think, you know, lots of us are interested in these kinds of things—maybe creating more spaces like that.

And—but certainly, opening a dialogue. Opening conversation.

I think there’s—you know, everything to me seems like it got stalled because we’ve spent the last 10 years or so trying to just defend that the word woman actually means woman.

But I’d like to really move on from that and get back to, yeah—having women kind of front and center of our own lives and seeing what we can create from there.

How about you? What kind of ideas do you have on that?

THE STEPPING RAZOR

I would like to see the same thing—like a commune, or like a space where women could just have the space to live with one another.

But I think I’m a little jaded sometimes, so now I just try to make content for the girl who may look for it in the future.

But I—I have that dream in the future as well.

DR. JULIA LONG

But I’ve absolutely loved having this conversation.

And I also just want to say that, for anyone who’s listening who’s interested—I mean, it seems like there are plenty of women out there who are already very knowledgeable—but you know, there have been all these different exciting separatist communities and women-only spaces, women-only holiday homes, and women’s lands that have been set up.

And maybe, um, women’s festivals and things like that.

And so maybe this is going to spark—help spark—another round of interest in that.

And I—I do understand when you say that, you know, you sometimes feel a bit jaded.

I really don’t think these things—my experience of these things has not been easy at all.

Like, I wouldn’t want to over-romanticize it.

And I kind of—I feel that we all—apart from this, I’m just speaking for myself here—but apart from needing to feel in community with other women, I think we also—I’ve certainly got quite a strong sense of the need for my own private space as well.

And I think sometimes the boundaries can get quite eroded, where everyone’s lives become so intertwined with each other’s that it can actually—if things go wrong—it can be quite destructive.

So I feel there needs to be a bit of a balance.

But yeah, certainly, I hope—I hope this conversation that we’ve had, um…

Maybe it sparks more conversation. Maybe some more of a ripple effect.

But it’s—yeah—it’s thank you so much.

I’ve absolutely loved talking to you.

And thank you so much for taking the time to arrange it.

I really appreciate it.

And I really—yeah—I hope it’s going to be useful for other women as well.

THE STEPPING RAZOR

Thank you so much for speaking with me Dr. Long. I really appreciate it. 

DR. JULIA LONG

Thank you as well.