When Listening to Your Intuition Becomes a Political Act of Feminism

I've been watching Isabella Ducrot's interview on the Louisiana Channel and was intrigued by this woman.

It was only in her fifties that she felt the need to express the experiences of her life and travels in a creative form. Now she is in her nineties and celebrates a success with her art and writing that she could never have imagined.

"I think life, for women, begins at 60," she said. "Because then we begin to be free."

That is the first quote I read from her, and I immediately felt a sense of understanding, even though the isolated sentence doesn't make it clear what she actually means by it. I found the full interview in The New Yorker, a profile of Isabella from 2024. After reading the whole article, I still wasn't sure what she meant by it, but I learned about a fascinating woman with a dreamy life.

She calls herself a feminist and believes that "the story of the world has been told by male minds." In her opinion, women don't have a language of their own to express themselves. For a long time, women looked to men to explain the secrets of their own bodies to them and used the language of the other to talk about themselves. So the real liberation happens when women start to develop their own language, to do things our own way instead of imitating male language and simply trying to become better at it.

This all seems very abstract to me. Maybe the first step in developing my own language is not feeling shame about the things that bring me joy in every category of my life. Maybe trying to find out what the right thing to do is instead of listening to my intuition is one of the ways I've internalized misogyny.

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