A train journey reading E. Jean Carroll's Modest Proposal.
Travelling to Europe by train is an absolute joy. Comfortable, usually, cheaper than flying, and most importantly, better for the environment. There is something wonderful about travelling by train, it’s perhaps the feeling that time is slowing down or the sensation that as soon as you step on board a train, you can look forward to relax and read your book while watching the scenery go by. (I’d have to exclude the English trains from this description, there is nothing relaxed or comfortable about the English railways. Plus, they are ridiculously expensive and dirty.)
A few days ago, I travelled from Munich to Zürich by train. The journey takes as little as 4 hours and 20 minutes and the train travels through the foothills of the Bavarian Alps, as it makes its way to Lindau before it heads towards Bregenz in Austria and finally Switzerland. It is really worth taking the train just for the scenery.
It was during that journey that I read E. Jean Carroll’s book What Do We Need Men For?: A Modest Proposal. For those who doesn’t know E. Jean Carroll, she is the former author of the Ask E. Jean advice column in Elle Magazine. In this book she describes her road trip on the east coast of the United States, with her poodle, Lewis Carroll, stopping in every town named after a woman between Eden, Vermont and Tallulah, Louisiana to ask women a crucial question: What Do We Need Men For?
If you expect a book just about male bashing, you are mistaken. It’s certainly that, but it’s also so much more. E. Jean Carroll’s style and spirited personality is being reflected in the book. It’s funny, witty, refreshing. But it’s also deadly serious, exhausting and depressing. It’s a testament of sexual violence, it’s about women’s compliance and silence that still allows patriarchy to persist. “Our combined silence becomes complicit in allowing patriarchy to remain the status quo,” said Carol Gilligan. But it is also about women sharing their stories and raising their voices, it’s about solidarity and defiance of moral and social conventions.
E. Jean Carroll does not offer any fixes; She is not concerned about with issues of toxic masculinity or any other issues that explain male behaviour. Her focus here is on the women, their struggles, their expectations, their dreams. She becomes the voice of all the women she meets during her journey, empathetic, angry and determined.
“What do we need men for?” I suppose a typical answer to Carroll’s question is: "Oh gosh, that's tough. Not much, really."