Must we keep doing this?
The worst feminism
Isn’t it annoying how, in life, there are other human beings? With needs of their own? And if you want to get anything out of life, personally or professionally, you have to live in the world of other people? L’enfer, c’est les autres, per a certain Nobel-rejecting existentialist.
Tweak misanthropy slightly and you get its gender-split symbiotic cousins, misogyny and misandry. And it’s the latter we’re dealing with in this blog post (newsletter, say newsletter, then they won’t know you’re one birthday shy of 40!).
I don’t know why the thing where certain individual women realize they don’t like their perfectly nice husbands/they don’t like having husbands and contort this realization into a feminist epiphany keeps getting published. Is it thought to be so relatable ladies? Or is it for the hate-clicks? Regardless, the NYT went and ran another from the AI template that produces these, or so it feels, it was in fact written by someone who is doubtless a lovely human being but wrote an article about which I have one or two Thoughts.
Why did the author, a mother of two, divorce? “I realized that my soul was no longer aligned with my husband’s, much less the whole project of straight monogamous marriage.” In plain language, what does this mean? It’s impossible to know. But it gestures at something all the progressive well-educated lady-sorts are meant to nod along approvingly with. Wouldn’t it be so much better if we all lived in a commune! It takes a village! Love has no limits!
It sounds like the author was a bit burnt out, but also like the divorce could have been avoided had she found a babysitter: “Before my divorce, I hadn’t had more than a few hours alone for over a decade.”
Maybe the best passage, because there’s just so much to unpack:
Am I suggesting that every frustrated woman should get divorced just so she can stop spending her weekends picking a grown man’s socks off the floor and self-actualize instead? I mean, no. Divorce is a real hassle! And some people like being married. Good for them.
What 1980s sitcom universe is this happening in? (This is about the socks.)
And the cutesy disbelief that some people love their spouses. Because feminism, or something.
The cringiest aspect of the article is its innovative twist: look, a divorcée knows how to do marriage better than the still-marrieds! To get a sense of the tone…
“And remember: A husband who packs the kids’ lunches isn’t ‘helping’ his wife. He’s parenting his children. A husband who does the laundry every other week isn’t ‘doing a chore’ for his wife. He’s being an adult.”
Who is this for? Who is having these conversations?
Remember “peach mom”? Is this that?
But I thought men were the real victims? Or… dun dun dun… is that claim just backlash to articles like this, which treat life as a woman as tragic on account of the mere existence of men?
“It has been both intuited by my group chats and proved by research…”
Truly, truly, a quote for our times.
Every part of that piece SCREAMED "different people have different expectations". She talks about divorced dads being "forced" to take care of their children and themselves, but like virtually 100% of men have periods of their life where they take care of themselves and survive? The tone of this entire piece was just "well he did the laundry, but he didn't do the laundry the way I want him to do the laundry". Also weird how the kid's feelings are entirely absent from this. She doesn't even try and claim anyone other than her is happier - she says that everyone likes her more and everyone notices how happy SHE is, but the feelings of 2/3rds of the people in the story are just completely absent from the story?
OH so she realized that relationships are work and parenting can be drudgery and sometimes partners are not satisfactory in their roommate duties? I wonder if her ex was like “womp womp divorce is such a drag!” or if he’s, like, heartbroken and confused by this act of anticisheteronormative patriarchy? I hope not the latter.