Every few weeks, there is tipping discourse. It’s always exactly the same, but because no one has a memory of more than 30 seconds, it plays out as though the whole idea of discussing how much to tip, where and when, and what it all means, is happening on social media for the first time.
So, too, husband discourse. Women are, one is forever reminded, these high-achieving saints, and men are played by Seth Rogen in the movie, or one of the slovenly sitcom dads. A poet wrote about how her lawyer husband failed to treat her poetry career as seriously as his own lawyer one, which is sad and sexist until you remember that households have bills and success as defined by a poem going viral is possibly not helpful towards that goal, or maybe it is, what to I know, I am not a poet, maybe poems earn a billion dollars every time they’re retweeted.
I mention the poet essay not to scoop an upcoming podcast where I may uh discuss that essay but because it is the context for the above-highlighted tweet. The tweeter just so happens to be the author of a (viral?) Guardian essay, “My boyfriend, a writer, broke up with me because I’m a writer.” She clarifies in the thread that she is not mad at the poet, although a part of me (the part that is also, like these two women, a writer) suspects she might feel that a bit of her thunder was stolen here. That this was her topic and now some other lady’s article is doing well, metrics-wise, and now she will own it and that is not fair because she did not arrive at it first. At least, I have had this sort of thought.
Anyway, the thread that ensues after this prompt—and remember kids, prompts are the worst—can only be described as something else.
The prompt is an opportunity for women to announce that they are extremely professionally successful and partnered and partnered to Good Ones. Whether a man’s goodness can be accurately assessed via a single tweet is a separate question, but the tweets keep coming. The tweets are only seemingly about the men themselves. They are in fact about the wisdom of these women, who are simply too good at feminism or being unprecedented successes to have settled for anything less.
There are women whose husbands are gracious about it when they pursue their non-remunerated dreams, dreams that involve extended writing retreats, the husband selflessly doing somehow everything while financially supporting her but also being a stay-at-home dad.
It’s a wild world where alleged human beings live free of resentments, money concerns, or really any anxieties whatsoever. It is, of course, a performance. One that, like tipping discourse, tells you nothing about what’s happening irl with any of these people. (You can post about tipping 30% on a muffin but who is fact-checking this?)
There is one woman proud that her husband is not just Good but Japanese. This, predictably, gets no likes.
There is a woman boasting that her pediatrician husband “sells my picture books in his exam rooms” which I don’t like the sound of, and makes me feel better about living in Canada where yes the doctor might say that you have only so many minutes remaining for the appointment (it really does be like the “Waiting for God” scene screenshotted below) but is at least not trying to sell you a knick-knack.
This whole (emerging?) genre of "recently divorced woman leverages her connections in publishing to trash her ex, for feminism"... man, I don't know. Just once it'd be fun to see the husband given a chance to respond. I, myself, am the male half of a male lawyer/female writer couple with kids, and a whole lot of what Smith seemed to be insinuating was gendered resentment from her husband about her business travel is very, very familiar to me. When our kids were in elementary school, I used to absolutely DREAD having to tell my wife that I had business travel coming up. Not because she was awful about it--she was great! But any time one of us was out of town, the other basically had to switch our work lives into half-time mode (at best). Not always an easy thing to do, and the stress it caused frequently bled into our relationship, at least on a short-term basis. We navigated that and are still happily married because we've always approached each other with the baseline assumption that the other person is doing their best and no one is happy about the stressful short-term situation that life had thrust on us. Who knows, maybe Smith's husband really was a patriarchal jerk. But you certainly can't conclude that just because he got stressed out having to juggle his day job with solo care of young kids (especially because practicing law wasn't really something you did from home before the pandemic and the Zoom revolution).
Honestly, very clever of Kaplan to re-establish her ownership of the topic with some irresistible engagement bait. Well played.