An Ex-Feminist Perspective on Relationships and Childless Women, with Darleen Lev

Born in 1961 at the tail end of the baby boom, Darleen Lev experienced firsthand the seismic shifts from the so-called “patriarchy” as a child in the 60s, to the sanctioned hedonism encouraged by the sexual revolution as a teenager in the 70s, to the sexual panic wrought by the AIDS epidemic in the 80s and early 90s. After completing an MFA in fiction writing at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1994, Lev traveled to South Korea to teach English. Korea’s “patriarchal” culture filled Lev with nostalgia, and she began to question the feminist “choices” that had come to seem self-sabotaging. The concept of “choices” is a theme in Lev's recently completed novel, Sexodus, which explores the sexual politics that have pitted women against men. In May, her Substack, “Notes from the Under Dog L.’ will serialize an emerging non-fiction book of essays that reflect on what ‘patriarchy’ truly means, and how and why it’s up to women to bring our society “back to life.” The first essay, “A Requiem for the Patriarchy,” was published on Jotting in Purple (Substack) on January 5th, in addition to Lev’s own Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/jotpurple/p/5-january-2025?r=eo3qf&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email_____________________________________________________________________If you would like to contact me, my website is: https://theradicalcenterconsulting.com/ and I am on twitter @JLeslieElliott And if you appreciate this ongoing project and would like to support my continued work in this area you can chip in at any of the following (thank you very much!): https://www.paypal.me/jleslieelliott https://www.buymeacoffee.com/radicalcenterhttps://www.patreon.com/theradicalcenter