Clementine Ford on love, her critics and leaving Twitter

For years Clementine Ford has attracted brutal criticism online – then one tweet changed everything instantly.

For Clementine Ford, writing her latest book has left her feeling very exposed.

The well-known feminist has written about love – specifically her own loves: The unrequited kind of her teenage years, the love affairs of her 20s, becoming a mum and dating in her 30s.

Ford’s How We Love will likely come as a shock for critics of the writer, which was part of the reason why she wanted to write such a personal book.

“It’s the last thing anyone would expect from me and I do like to be surprising,” she told news.com.au.

Melbourne writer and feminist Clementine Ford’s new book may come as a surprise for her critics. Picture: Instagram/Clementine Ford.

But she admits that writing about love in all its messy, wonderful and heartbreaking forms was an intimidating experience at times.

“You’re effectively standing naked in front of people and saying, ‘Don’t laugh at me’,” Ford said.

“Probably what made me feel the most vulnerable was a sense that I didn’t have a political argument to hide behind. I was literally just offering myself, and that is a pretty big thing to put out in the world.”

Famous for her razor sharp (and often divisive) commentary, Ford says it has been “very tiring, being the target of all that animosity” over the years.

“I’ve felt quite misunderstood by people my entire career,” she said.

“This (book) was a way to, I guess, demonstrate that I’m much more complicated and well-rounded a figure than a lot of people would like to admit.”

Ford said she has felt ‘quite misunderstood’ for most of her writing career. Picture: Instagram/Clementine Ford.

The backlash Ford attracted has mostly been in response to her rapid fire tweets, which over the years have been aimed at public figures ranging from Prime Minister Scott Morrison to reality shows like MAFS.

Ford admits she has “given back as good as I’ve got” when it comes to the hate she has received, but is also self-reflective of her time on Twitter.

She was a prolific Twitter user up until May last year when Ford tweeted out: “Honestly, the coronavirus isn’t killing men fast enough.”

Ford had written the tweet as a “hyperbolic rage” response to an article she had read about the impact the coronavirus pandemic was having on women’s economic futures.

Ford left Twitter last year after finding it was ‘bad for my soul’. Picture: Instagram/Clementine Ford.

People were outraged and she later deleted and apologised for the tweet after speaking to a friend overseas and realising men – particularly men of colour – were dying from Covid.

“My argument with jokes has always been you obviously can’t kick down,” Ford said.

“That joke I realised was kicking down because men, mostly men of colour, were losing their lives to Covid.”

But the backlash against Ford was swift, and she made the decision to leave Twitter soon after realising it was “bad for my soul and poisonous”.

“With that experience (I realised) wow, this is not a good place for me to be,” she said.

“Twitter is such a toxic place – I’m not blaming it on Twitter, I’m not saying that I had no responsibility, I chose to tweet that, I have to own it.

Ford with her new book, How We Love. Picture: Instagram/Clementine Ford.

“But when you’re on Twitter for years … when you feel like every time you log on to Twitter you have to kind of take a deep breath and arm yourself at whatever is thrown at you and you’re maybe hearing things every day like, ‘You should kill yourself’ or ‘You’re too ugly to rape’ the most toxic horrible things, it kind of becomes normal to you … it becomes a totally normal form of discourse.”

Ford now only tweets sporadically about work and projects she is involved in, mainly using Instagram where her (mostly female) audience has almost doubled in last 12 months.

She likens Instagram to a salon – a nice-looking safe space where women and non-binary people can share ideas without too much male intrusion.

For Ford, this means getting to share uniquely female content on everything from sexual coercion to domestic inequality in the home with her 191,000 followers.

“I’ve had so many women who, I’m proud to say, have left unsatisfying, inequitable relationships because of things that they’ve read on my page, where they’ve woken up one day and said I am not happy and this is not the life that I want,” she said.

How We Love is available to buy at all good bookstores now.

Originally published as Clementine Ford on love, her critics and leaving Twitter