A review by anpu325
Lady Chatterly's Lover by D.H. Lawrence

1.0

I always thought this book would be good because it was so controversial for the time. Somehow the discourse that men aren't really men any more or that women aren't really women is a conversation that we are still having 100 years later. And that's the whole theme of this book. I literally felt like I was reading a reddit incel rant whenever I read the parts where Mellors was speaking. Connie was the perfect woman for him because she wanted to have sex but only ever to be the passive partner and she could orgasm from penetration alone like a real woman or whatever. When he talks about why he loves her, he admits to sexually assaulting other women then blaming them for not being into it, and he blames every women for not having sex the exact way that he wanted in extremely misogynistic and violently homophobic ways. And Connie sleeps with him after that. (So romantic!) At first I was really sympathetic to the themes of alienation due to industrialization and a feeling of being part of the lost generation. And the kind of sado-masochistic relationships between characters who are from different classes. But ultimately the message of the book was a regressive one even for the time. It was railing against changes to gender norms that were already happening. It's a harkening towards an ideal past that never existed, but that cisgender heterosexual men want to believe existed. The book betrayed that the author didn't even know how women's bodies worked. Connie is always feeling emotions with her womb as of course all women do. Even though Lady Chatterly is the titular character, the book itself is centered around a relationship that is depicted as romantic because she is sexual in exactly the way a man believes a woman should be sexual- passively.