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Watching Louis Theroux’s documentary on the manosphere, I was struck by a half-formed thought: we are living in a time when moral clarity and ideological cohesion are extremely rare, and because of this, two things matter very much: that we cut through the bullshit when bros grandstand about their views on human nature and on what “most women” and “most men” want; that anyone who cares about liberation stop letting the manosphere define feminism for us.

If you have not yet watched it, Theroux’s Inside the Manosphere documentary is surprisingly not as rage-inducing as one might expect. The doc follows several red-pilled influencers. Each one comes off as pathetic, uninformed, and transparently insecure. I do understand the accusations of himpathy that have been leveraged against the film. But I’m not sure I felt any sympathy for these men.

Instead, I felt fear for the women we see hanging around these misogynists, even those women who accidentally pass them on the streets. Women whose stories we are all quite glaringly overlooking. The women these men date and exploit are often Insta models and Only Fans girls. I found myself asking repeatedly: where is their documentary or drama?

Coverage of this doc, like Adolescence before it, has largely focused on how the manosphere “preys on young boys” but not how—to Theroux’s credit, this is addressed briefly in the film—these guys directly prey on young women to build their dumb-ass, morally vacuous, absolutely culturally useless empires.

Surprisingly, I laughed a lot watching the doc, at what idiots these guys are.

But that’s the point, and also misses the point.

To merely laugh at these guys makes it easy to forget the violent messages they are hawking. And again, not just to young boys, but to young girls coming of age online today.

Here are just a few examples of those messages: One guy argues he can put his dick in women whenever he wants and tell her exactly when to make him a sandwich. Another accuses women of being liars; one invites women on his podcast, only to harass and degrade them. In the first few minutes of the doc, one says, “If your bitch is going to a club when you said no, destroy her fucking life.” Another says women have done nothing to build society, but of course, he “loves women.”

And we know that men not covered in the doc (I’m not naming any of these assholes here), both online and in conservative media, have said far worse, including things like: rape is not real, women want to be raped, women shouldn’t be allowed to vote, women should be punched in the mouth if they threaten men’s masculinity, etc.

A key tenant of red-pill thinking comes up in the doc: that women have inherent economic currency. Women’s “vaginas and titties,” these men claim, give women power, which men do not have access to. So, men have to build wealth by exploiting and dehumanzing women, and through outrageous stunts online.

Because the men themselves are equally incurious about women, they spend their days streaming to huge audiences, making content not only about fitness and lifestyle crap, but about men’s and women’s alleged desires, things like how important a “body count” is in a mate, and the general economy of sex and relationships. One bullies women into listing what it is they want in a man, then shames those same women for answering the question in a way he doesn’t like.

These men live within many contradictions. They view, for instance, hyper-sexualized young women they fuck or date as clout, and make money of women’s sex work, while also claiming trad views of family and spouting anti-porn views. These guys are critical of “the people at the top of the world” who want to keep everyone down, but also want to be part of the billionaire class. They are homophobic, until pressed, then claim they are not. They are racist, but claim they are not.

These men have, in other words, a complete lack of interest not only in women and equality, but basic humanity, integrity, and being a decent person. They also make no fucking sense.

Some will try to say these are men who feel put out by the economy. To them, I say, BRO, these men could join an anti-capitalist movement literally anytime.

But they don’t. Instead, these guys express their disillusionment with late capitalism, and live by the illusion that they are overthrowing the system by exploiting women and algorithms for personal financial gain. They are playing exactly by the rules they seek to break. And they have no interest in any worldviews that might actually seek to overthrow the systems from which they suffer.

What “most women” want

How do these guys validate this behavior? By claiming to know what literally everyone in the world wants, which just so happens to be what they themselves want—or think they want, in the shadow of some pretty clear childhood trauma.

So many mothers today seem to carry the weight of preventing boys from getting sucked into red pill thinking. But most of the men covered in the doc (and in politics today) seem to be suffering from some pretty clear daddy issues (one influencer in the doc alleges his mother abused him, but there’s no verifiable record of this).

Others have dismissed these guys as simple grifters. I understand the impulse to diminish the cultural power of these influencers in this way. Guys with stupid handles like HSTikkyTokky should not be taken seriously. I mean, come on. But it is precisely their unseriousness that makes them—and their political counterparts—so popular.

The logic right-wing men have embraced today, in the shadow of their trauma and blind allegiance to late capitalism, is brain-rotted, inconsistent, and deeply averse to critical thinking, fact, and the slightest hint of self-reflection. Their idiocy is their appeal, because it implies a life free of accountability or effort. Instead, these guys live in a world where men can just say anything, and make it true.

As a result, they go deep on all sorts of conspiracy theories. The idea that these men know everything, the secrets of the world as it were, feeds and validates their narcissism and megalomania, in a vicious cycle.

When Theroux visits one of the influencer’s homes, his wife speaks to their traditional gender roles. “That’s what works for us,” they both say a few times, followed always by an almost compulsive need to defend (as if for an online audience) their lives by insisting that, actually, what works for them is what works for all humans naturally, innately, biologically. That’s how gender works, bro.

The men do this constantly, claim that “most women” want this or that thing; that “most men” want another. They live in constant paranoia not really of cancellation (which as we know, doesn’t really exist for men), but of simply being wrong.

And that, my friends, to give a little preview of where we’re going here, is not a product of feminism, but a result of being way too online.

A recent NY Mag piece on women leaving the new right tells a similar story: right-wing politics has become full-on brain rot, AI-slop, a meme mess of ideological contradictions shored up by the gospel of personal self-interest. In this era of inane bro politics, the central tenant is not only that men must lead, but that they are entitled to everything.

This idea, in and of itself, relies on the logic of the internet: this is what I want, what I like, what I think is true, and so it’s true for everyone.

Just watch this guy—the CEO of Palantir, an AI company that has multiple contracts with ICE and the US military—say absolutely nothing at all, other than that he hates smart women:

Or this guy, former DOGE bro, who is a walking bot:

The influencers covered in Theroux’s doc similarly have, self-admittedly, absolutely no ethics or morals to speak of. They are simply hollowed out men who feel they deserve whatever they want as “a young, white, male man,” as Erika Kirk put it recently.

Not all of the men in Theroux’s doc are white, but they are all, to be sure, “male men,” more likely to stay within such a movement than young women for obvious reasons, namely that the worldview of the right relies on the exploitation and dehumanization of women. Even so, it’s clear in several on-camera interviews that the women around them are uncomfortable with all the extreme positioning, and perhaps telling them so behind closed doors.

In one scene, for instance, one guy’s girlfriend makes it known that she is not on board with his dream of having multiple wives someday. He tells her to get off camera and do some cleaning—a transparent, childlike effort to reassert his dominance. He is embarrassed that his girlfriend expressed an opinion that differed from his, and doesn’t want to be caught caring about it.

Theroux does a fantastic job breaking through these guys’ public personas to highlight moments like these—when the false images on which these guys have built their platforms drop away. In front of his mom, one guy pulls back on his extreme views. When pressed to defend themselves, the men are all visibly shaken, insecure, not used to having to engage with anyone who doesn’t think like them.

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Patriarchy harms men, but not the way it harms women

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Does this woman become Mary, or someone else, some creation of hers, or maybe a creature of Maggie Gyllenhall’s, who wrote and directed the film?

The ambiguity of the character played by the best actress of our generation, Jessie Buckley, is intentional. This woman has “two minds instead of one.” Whether it’s Mary, or Maggie, or some other woman within this story, this adaptation, this re-visioning of Frank’s previously silent bride, she is definitely rattling off a lot of literary references.

Most of the authors she conjures, at least in the opening of the film, are men. The woman is hysterical, babbling in rhyme and stanza, in the language of men. But this unnamed woman is, by her own account, “disobedient, ungovernable.” She wants us to know this.

She also wants us to know that soon, “everything will change,” because “the sequel is coming.”

“Are you ready?” the woman dares the audience, the men who watch her losing it.

It’s a fun and totally over the top opening that had me settling into my seat in the theater, ready to offer my full attention. Yes, I thought, let’s go!

And then, she’s dead. She’s thrown herself down a flight of stairs, in a scene that reminded me immediately of the epic Michelle Pfieffer transformation into Catwoman in the 1992 Batman Returns, one of my first encounters with a woman on screen made mad and monstrous by the men around her.

Pfieffer’s Selina Kyle is pushed to her death by a guy who is trying to save himself from what she knows, but soon she has her own monstrous rebirth. The Bride! picks up in 1936 Chicago; the woman who has fallen down the stairs is not yet reborn.

These are probably the best scenes in the movie. Frankenstein shows up at the home/lab of the ridiculously-named Dr. Cornelia Euphronius, played brilliantly by Annette Bening. Frank says he’s looking for sex—for a woman to have sex with—and when Cornelia suggests that what he’s asking for is a bride—well, he really perks up. Yes! Made from the body of a dead woman. Yes, he would like one of those, please.

Frank pleads with the doctor.

“Is this about sex, Frank?” Dr. C says. “Because I’m sure there are easier ways of getting sex.”

“This is about loneliness,“ he says. Ha! Of course it is! Frank is suffering from the male loneliness crisis, and he just can no longer handle not having a woman to fuck! He must have a wife stat!

Soon, he’s yelling at Dr. C that “this is an emergency.” She reminds him that everyone is lonely.

The interaction so perfectly recasts the story of Frankenstein and his bride in today’s light I was laughing out loud. Frankenstein is an incel. And Dr. C knows it. But, ya know, she’s curious to see how this will all play out, so she agrees to help Frank.

Together, they dig up the body of Mary Shelley, or that woman who was possessed by Shelley at the beginning of the film, and soon, they’ve reanimated her with an IV and a quick but powerful jolt of electricity.

As soon as she’s “alive,” Frank asks her to get in bed with him.

This film continues to get delightfully and playfully meta in a way that Fennell’s Wuthering Heights chose not to, at least narratively. In The Bride!, there are repeated—and I mean repeated(!)—references, for instance, to Melville’s Bartleby. The famous line from Melville’s story—I would prefer not to—becomes The Bride’s refrain. More literary references continue to teach us how to read this update of the story.

Is the lyrical dialogue a bit much, even overwritten, at times? Yes. Is the story wildly convoluted? Yes. Is the film too long? Also yes. But the film both wants to be read as disorderly—as a story about women’s disorder—and fulfills that aim. The maximalism is the intent and appeal. It’s an unruly, feral, monstrous mess, a patchwork of textual allusions, risen from the dead, just like old Frank and his bride—and like, perhaps, any feminist adaptation of a classic tale should be.

As The Bride says at one point in the film, “deprivation makes a hungry cunt.” Maggie Gyllenhaal’s message: women have been deprived of their own stories, their own cinematic and literary styles, long enough, and she is an insatiable, desirous, feral bitch.

The Bride! has plenty of genre play at work. It’s a mash-up of noir, horror, old Hollywood tropes, the gothic, and even, yes, like Fennell’s WH, Romeo and Juliet. But The Bride! is not just irony and winks. The story has real substance, and currency; it feels timely. In fact, the film is far more earnest and politically engaged than I expected, and this is what allows it to meet the moment in ways the plot of Fennell’s WH did not.

Throughout the film, The Bride is constantly asking what her name is, who she is. It’s all quite obviously self-referential. She is an everywoman, she wants us to know, a symbol of those erased by male violence and entitlement, a creation of man trying desperately to be her own.

When The Bride is sexually assaulted on the dance floor after she’s raised from the dead (she realizes she loves to party and dance, ofc!), she and Frank end up killing some men who are harassing her, and then they kill a man chasing them, and eventually, they come for other men who have assaulted other women.

“Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God,” The Bride says at one point, invoking… Susan B. Anthony? It’s an odd reference, but the point is clear: The Bride and her hubby are on a rampage, and it’s good trouble.

In other parts of the film, The Bride is Marlene Dietrich, then Ginger Rogers. Her accent changes as her identity swerves. She is not only, then, a monstrous composite of women in history, but specifically of Hollywood women, of stories told about women in men’s voices.

So, why does she keep quoting Bartleby? Melville was heavily influenced by Mary Shelley, duh!

In any case, Frank and The Bride run away to New York. Finally, having learned to like Frank, who has helped her so much, and no doubt understands the horror of being created by an insanely lonely man to fulfill his own ambitions, The Bride says, “wanna fuck?” Frank chickens out. Turns out Frank, our one-time incel monster, is kind of a nice guy. In fact, he’s been stalking Jake Gyllenhaal’s Fred-Astaire-copy character since 1917, and is slightly queer coded?

When Frank finally meets Jake G at a party, Frank is so overcome by rejection that he… starts a fully choreographed dance party.

Listen, this movie is insane! But that’s the fun of it!!

After the monster mash, the film tries to explain itself a little too much with a complex backstory. I did wish it had remained slightly more dreamy, nonsensical. What’s revealed in the second half of the film, however, gives it an even more explicit feminist angle: The Bride is avenging a mob boss who kills women and cuts their tongues out, as well as other men who have abused and murdered women.

Frank and The Bride finally have consensual monster sex, and soon, newspaper headlines read “riot grrl” and “violent femmes”, as The Bride stirs a feminist revolution and women everywhere become monsters—which are basically feminists with black splotches on their faces?

We veer pretty squarely into revenge plot. As in, cut to the mob boss, tongues in jars behind him, making gross comments about sucking tits and getting sucked off. Significantly, the film is also populated by a woman detective, played by Penélope Cruz, trying to get herself heard over and by men. In the end, it’s a story about a woman seeking vengeance for sexual violence, but also for a more symbolic violence—men taking women’s voices.

The quest for revenge against dirty men who abuse and silence women takes an even more harrowing turn when a cop assaults The Bride while reciting poetry (felt like grad school to me). Mary Shelley’s voice tells The Bride to channel her rage, girl. And let’s just say, she channels it.

The Bride, in the end, is both a woman created to be a toy for a man, and a woman who avenges men who view women this way. She is made, however, even more monstrous by her pursuit of justice.

I won’t completely spoil the ending—or endings, since it feels like we have a couple!—but Melville gets a big recurring part, and feminist refusal is a significant theme. In one of her final monologues, The Bride even explicitly says “me too.” I gasped. It was refreshing to see a film so boldly feminist in this era of backlash.

The Bride says, too—and again quite explicitly—that she is full of female rage. Some critics have chosen to argue that the film lacks depth, which says more about how we view righteous feminine anger, a monstrous and complex form of autonomy, as inherently lacking in depth. Nothing could be further from the truth. We are talking about cries that echo through generations, a bottomless well of survival and pain, right now surging among women yet again, as this week brought more news of men abusing their power.

I personally could do with never seeing another reference to Romeo and Juliet in a feminist film. But despite the reference, this one is not a love story. The Bride refuses to become a wife—she prefers not to, of course! If anything, it’s a film about misfit rebels becoming friends, across gender.

It also isn’t a shallow tale of women’s empowerment, even if the end is exuberant, and hopeful. Rather, this is a film about how the quest for justice, for freedom, for a life and a voice and an identity of one’s own, drives women mad—makes women illegible, choatic, crazy. And it’s about the revolutionary power of feminine rage, which turns us into monsters, the kind we should all root for.

It was a chaotic, wild ride, tailor made for this moment.

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I’m in Oprah Daily! Gabrielle Kassel covered the “fifth shift,” a term I coined on a recent episode of my podcast, . In the episode, linked below, and I discuss the work women do to maintain desire in long-term heterosexual relationships, especially in marriage.

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Marital 'intimacy' is the fifth shift of women's work

Today, we’re talking about the fifth shift — all the labor and consumerism that heterosexual women engage in to maintain their marital sex lives…

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6 months ago · 32 likes · 25 comments · Amanda Montei and Tracy Clark-Flory

The concept brings together a long legacy of feminist writing on how marriage functions as a kind of socially-approved, respectable sex work. You can and should, however, listen to the full episode on the fifth shift here, because we discuss the concept of the fifth shift in all its nuance and complexity, including the problems with that framing. We also break down how the nature of that work, and its corresponding market, has changed as it has been absorbed by late capitalism.

Below are the questions the Oprah writer asked me and my complete responses. As always happens in these sorts of publications, a lot of what we discussed didn’t make it into the piece. But I can publish it all here!

I hope this piece makes these feminist concepts more legible and accessible. And I’m grateful to all paid subscribers to Mad Woman for making this independent feminist criticism—which is increasingly unlikely to get in-depth coverage in legacy or popular women’s publications—possible. If you don’t want to see feminist writing disappear in this era of backlash, please continue supporting it.

Below, I outline why the concept of the “fifth shift” is urgent and useful today, the value of calling distinct forms of relational work “labor,” consumerist sexual empowerment, and the cost of women doing this work alone in hetero relationships.

First things first, what is the fifth shift? I’d love to ask you to define it based on how you’ve been using it.

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I’m not saying that was better. But what our current moment reveals, and specifically what the gender spectacle of the SOTU drove home for me this week, is that American politics has morphed into something not only more brazen and frank, but also dumber, more crude, more brute, and far more childish.

Previously, men in power relied on reason to manipulate and validate a white male supremacist order. They turned to religion and scripture, or appealed to moral sense. This is why, post WWII, we saw philosophers wrestle with the death of reason. It was clear that rationality, scientific logic, could also be used for deeply nefarious, violent ends, not only for improving humanity. Still, “moral” appeals in politics continued. Paul Weyrich, for instance, is on record arguing that to further a white Christian nationalist agenda, and create solidarity among the American right, political leaders had to use the “respectable” cause of ending abortion to appeal to the masses, who no longer favored, at least outright, controversial issues like segregation.

But who needs reason today, when you have fabrication, and blatant hatred?

What was on display at the SOTU this week was not a new movement, but the character has certainly shifted (perhaps you’ve noticed!). There has been much discussion of the meme-ification of American politics, crucial in understanding the gratuitous brand of brain rot masculinity that now dominates American conservative rhetoric. But what about the sports-ification of American politics?

There’s a reason the MAGA crowd gets so upset about football halftime shows that celebrate diversity, queerness, and decolonization. And sure, there’s a bit of a chicken-egg hyperreality at work in American football, which has long been a microcosm for war.

But American politics today does not simply reflect the culture of football. The MAGA movement, and the billionaire class that has advanced, funded and promoted it, sees ruthless neocolonialism, misogyny, and racism as a game they are playing more broadly. So, too, does their base.

I can recall way back in 2016, arguing with some extended family members, about how politics was not a game. They played it exactly like it was— like politics was strictly an armchair debate. We also see this perspective, of course, in moderates today, who are just asking irresponsible questions, or who think the point of politics is people saying whatever they want, no matter how repugnant or violent.

But Trump has long explicitly aligned himself with the politics of sport, including most recently UFC and WWE. Journalist —who writes an excellent independent newsletter on the intersection of sports, gender, queerness, and culture—told me that Trump’s “lifting up of the men's hockey team, who are largely MAGA-coded and from a professional league with some of the highest numbers of players who are registered Republican voters, is a continuation of his pattern of ingratiating himself with the most toxically masculine and politically conservative sporting audiences as a way to garner support for himself. He did it with boxing in the 1980s, WWE in the 1990s, and UFC in the 2010s onward.”

Insecure masculinity, a key feature of this administration and the MAGA crowd, needs the approval of the tough cool boys who win. So, Trump trotted out the US men’s hockey team in the SOTU, while insisting that AMERICA IS WINNING because TRUMP. All while insisting that the women’s team will come to the White House, even though they declined his invitation after he laughed at them. This is rape culture, paternalistic, and just gross. It’s also patently misogynist, a way of yanking the chain at the women’s team. de la Cretaz put it this way: “Trump's focus on the men's team while also degrading the women's shows that no matter what women achieve, they are still considered second class.”

The way men’s sports culture shows up in American politics today is also influenced by how late capitalism has changed sports culture itself, by dialing everything up. Teams are corporations; so is the national government. We can trace some of how sports shows up in MAGA culture to the two-party system as well, which invites a continuous winner-loser mentality.

Either way, the power source is brutish intimidation, and total submission to the group’s leader. In this way, men’s sports culture is authoritarian in nature. They require blind allegiance to the team.

At the SOTU, Vance and Johnson sat behind Trump, their facial expressions showing that they did not always believe his bogus statistics and knew he sounded like an idiot. But the proximity to powerful mean grandpa—or perhaps, the wealthy owner of the team, the CEO—was enough for these guys to smile anyway, to keep clapping and standing.

From a young age, boys and men are conditioned for this. This is especially true in boys’ youth sports. They learn to deny moral clarity in exchange for the approval of other boys and men, and to remain on the “winning” team. Young boys are discouraged not only from having human emotions, but from asking questions, standing up for themselves, advocating for others, from calling out sexism or racism.

Fandom feeds the beast. I know some diehard sports fans, and I’m always surprised by their seething displays of anger when anyone dares root for another team. Like, chill! But this is the blind loyalty required of the fan, who has no room for critique.

In this light, the hoots and hollers of “USA” at the SOTU are not just nationalistic, they are that new code for white male power, for anti-wokeness, for hatred of The Democrats™ and women and LGBTQ+ people, for male domination. These chants are an affirmation of total allegiance to the team, whatever its character, even when it is built on obvious misinformation, or led by an unhinged coach who has totally lost his marbles. Those chants are an insistence that, yes, we will win, we are winners, we won, look at us winning.

It’s straight out of the authoritarian playbook. "Trump is using the men’s hockey team as a way of sportswashing the horrors of his administration,” de la Cretaz said, “especially in the lead up to LA 2028,” the forthcoming summer Olympic games, which Trump mentioned in the SOTU, claiming he would make Los Angeles “safe” by then (LA IS FINE). As de la Cretaz pointed out, Russia did the same in the 2010s with the men’s World Cup and Sochi Winter Games, as did Germany with the 1936 Olympic Games.

My feminist colleagues and I have pointed out that the problem with the global elite conspiracy framework for understanding Epstein’s ring is that the same rape culture that enables such abuse also exists for everyday men and boys. We are, in fact, all conditioned to deny the banality and ubiquity of male violence, whether it’s by laughing at the racist or sexist joke, ignoring toxic displays of hyper-masculinity, dismissing feminine or feminist complaints (or feminism writ large), or failing to intervene in the abuse and exploitation of women.

And it is not just men who suffer from the bystander effect. Women laugh at jokes aimed at them or other women, or when witnessing racism. Women stand by when their friend’s husband yells at his wife, or when dad sits on the couch while mom frantically handles the kids and the party. Everyone dunks on moms all the time. The goal is to align with white men.

At the more extreme end, blind allegiance to the team of white male power is of course what leads men to rape another man’s unconscious wife, as in the case of Gisèle Pelicot (or this astonishingly similar case), rather than report that man. And what leads little boys like Nick Fuentes to get such an erotic thrill from simply saying how much he hates women; he desperately wants to be picked for the team.

Kate Manne points out that while patriarchal marriage operates on a narrative of protection, ownership, and male entitlement to sexual, emotional, and material services, the cases of Pelicot and Epstein show us how men bond over violence against women— how men, indeed, often create a “shared sport and lifestyle” built on the abuse of women, perhaps because of men’s own fears of “homosociality and even queerness.”

writes, “There’s a straight line from ‘locker room talk’ to Epstein’s emails to the Internet’s red pilling.” And while we’ve heard much about the dangers of the internet when it comes to young boys, we more rarely talk about the troubling culture of boys’ sports—how it grooms young men for this pipeline. Instead, boys’ sports is often seen as an antidote to hyper-online childhoods, and rarely problematized for the way it prepares boys to grow into men who see the world as a game they must win by maintaining solidarity with other men, at all costs.

The transphobia on display later in the SOTU further highlights how this form of male bonding relies on strict heteronormativity. Trump “claims to want to exclude trans women from women’s sports in the name of ‘protecting’ cis women,” de la Cretaz said, “but we can see what he really thinks of cis women with the way he mocked the gold medal hockey team.”

This is why seeing women and queer folks excel at the winter Olympics moved so many people. Athletes like Alysa Liu, Eileen Gu, and Amber Glenn destabilize the dire hetero politics of sports culture, which almost uniformly relies on things like: gender segregation! transphobia! regressive gender performances with corresponding outfits! and uncompromising political “neutrality” as sportsmanship!

These women actively refuse the hyper-masculine culture that goes along with such pageantry—the kind that would have them deny not only their accomplishments, so as to retain their appearance of female submissiveness, but also their bodies, their emotions, their friendships, and their politics.

This is, too, the wild appeal of Heated Rivalry, which shows male athletes having personalities and, dare I say, hearts. These are men who feel, want, struggle, and care. And that’s not something we usually get to see in men’s sports—or in the athletics of American politics today.

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In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva defines the abject as a disturbance of borders, a rupturing of the line between self and other, between “I’“ and the outer world, from which we are separated tenuously by skin, by the false outline of the body. The abject then threatens to dissolve the self, to collapse identity, and meaning. Sex and desire are, in the best way, deeply abject.

There is a lot of abjection in this film. There are leeches pulling blood and disease from Cathy; an implied at-home abortion turned septic by whatever foreign things have entered the body. There is lots of blood, and a hilariously generous amount of phallic and floral objects pulsing, opening.

The sets the characters inhabit in the film are also deeply uncanny. One of my favorite thinkers on the feminist uncanny is Alexandra Kokoli, author of the book The Feminist Uncanny, who writes that the feminist uncanny is often “unhomely,” subverting the association between women and domesticity. That’s a historical association that leaves women both without a home of their own—since she is in theory created to make homes for men—and trapped in the home—since her worth is always tied to the home. We see some of this arise in Cathy literally running from home to home, belonging nowhere.

But I was struck most by how the wild artifice of the gothic mansions play off their dark interiors, which are all deeply strange, uncanny places. The skin room—a room that looks like Cathy’s body—is brilliant. An absurdly enormous pile of bottles appears unexpectedly in one scene, a visual manifestation of a father’s alcoholism. And there’s a totally thrilling—to me!—fireplace, around which Cathy paces and frets a lot, made entirely of hundreds of white hands.

The home in which Cathy is trapped by marriage is, quite literally, turned into a body that is constantly reaching out for touch. Consensually or not? Yes. Yes.

The eggs, jellies, and other cummy, squelching moments also not only reek of sex, they resist any intimation of the monstrous feminine, which might boil Cathy down to some demonic castrator. These are the sounds and textures of fucking, and they are not just forbidden, and haunting, but titillating, as they beckon Cathy to follow her own desires, and therefore threaten to destabilize the whole social order.

The story in the film, however, lacks this kind of surprise and novelty. One of the most memorable scenes in the film is when Catherine is caught masturbating on the moors. It’s such an overt, long awaited subversion of the Victorian trope of women wandering around in a fog, pining over their lovers, or their marital fates. In this moment, Cathy is not a victim of repressed sexuality, not without agency and direction. She is a figure of desire and embodiment, of want. And once Heathcliff finds her, well, phew. Her corsetry becomes a kind of sex toy. This film has a lot of fingers shoved in mouths. This all, I loved.

I would have loved even more, however, to see the broader narrative of the film adaptation get as unruly and wild as that moment, as the film’s abject and uncanny mood board, and for the film to tug much harder on the thread of repressed sexuality already present in book, and what that did to relationships between men and women. Another one of the best scenes in the film involves some barn BDSM. I had thought we were really on to something there!

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The figure of the evil, haunting maid is of course a key element of the gothic. Think: Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca, or the governess of The Turn of the Screw. And it was no surprise to me to see these narratives reemerging in an era when the conservative fear of any outsider penetrating the nuclear family is causing state violence in the streets.

The scary maid or nanny is the perfect encapsulation, after all, of what my pod co-host calls a “threat to the family.” That threat has tended to be another woman who destabilizes the nuclear unit with her dangerous, monstrous sexuality, and a symbol of the fear that hell really is other people. The scary nanny, in particular, might also be understood as a cinematic embodiment of the more literal anxieties we see today of, say, public schools, “strangers raising your children,” and woke professors.

I was prepared to get a clear example of those anxieties in The Housemaid, and to argue that this is why Sydney Sweeney agreed to do the film. As much as I have tried to resist my own paranoid critical impulses, I remain deeply suspect of all the culture coming out right now! But this film is not really a gothic per se, mostly because this film does not understand what genre it is. By the end, the film also resists the scary maid trope much more than it aligns with its traditions.

The Housemaid does begin, however, with some of the cornerstones of the gothic, namely a creepy nonwhite groundskeeper, a big spooky mansion, a tense marriage, and of course, a housemaid who threatens to upset the balance of the family— who is forced to sleep in the attic.

The script and the book on which The Housemaid was based were both authored by women, but the film is directed by Paul Feig, and let’s just say, this feels like a film directed by a man. At times, it wants to be a romcom, or just a series of unnecessary sex scenes (I love a sex scene but these make no sense??). The film is formally chaotic, and not in a good way, with abruptly shifting POVS, and quite a bit of voiceover.

I could not help but hear Brian Cox as screenwriting guru Robert McKee in Adaptation, saying, “And God help you if you use voiceover in your work!”

The first half of the film, in fact, I spent mostly laughing out loud at how bad Sydney Sweeney is at acting and how prominently her boobs are on display in this film. But also marveling at how impressive Amanda Seyfried is in everything, even this pretty slow and chaotic movie. And also how drippingly hot and charming Brandon Sklenar is (please let him not be one of the bad ones?)!

But (spoilers ahead) when the film made its turn into revenge plot, of course it had me hooked, because finally things became fun and a little more interesting— if grotesque and, still, quite silly. I love any plot that has women teaming up to settle a cosmic score against abusive men, and the film swerves pretty hard in that direction.

The legacy of the madwoman in the attic is a prominent element of this narrative. In fact, this film is like a pulpy version of Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, which if you don’t know it is the novel that tells the story of Bertha Rochester’s life, before she became Mr. Rochester’s madwoman in attic in Jane Eyre. Even the couple’s last name in The Housemaid feels like a throwback— they are the Winchesters.

In painstaking detail, the voiceovers in The Housemaid also tell the story of how Sklenar’s character, the husband, drove his wife mad by locking her in the attic and demanding she basically physically abuse herself if she wanted to be set free. Which she did, so she could return to her daughter, whom he also abuses and keeps from his mother. Soon, he’s doing the same thing to our poor housemaid (that’s Sweeney of course), and it’s only a matter of time until the two women break free from the attic and lock this crazy guy up there, demanding he similarly abuse himself for penance.

The film thus recasts the tradition of the other woman as impediment to marriage and/or the success of the nuclear family. Instead, in this kind of narrative it is, rightfully, men themselves who are the biggest threat to familial stability and safety. It is also men who are the greatest obstacles to women’s freedom and solidarity. And this—god I can’t believe I’m defending this film!—is a much more compelling and factually true idea than the timeworn image of the sinister “other woman” taking down the family.

In their canonical articulation of the madwoman in the attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar write that “the nighttime specter” Bertha Rochester is in fact a kind of “avatar” for Jane. She does what Jane wants to do; she is her double. There is plenty of overt doubling in The Housemaid. The other woman, we might say, is always actually just a psychological projection of the female protagonist herself. What she fears, what she wants, what her truest desires might look like, if they were taken to the extreme of what we call madness.

Of the ending of Jane Eyre, Gilbert and Gubar write that in all of her books, Charlotte Brontë “was able to act out that passionate drive toward freedom which offended agents of the status quo, but in none was she able consciously to define the full meaning of achieved freedom—perhaps because none of her contemporaries […] could adequately describe a society so drastically altered.” This, of course, is the precise shortcoming— or maybe simply some kind of external lesson— of even these more with-the-times revenge narratives, which always feature a heavy dose of post-payback feminine solidarity. Such plots gesture toward another world, but don’t imagine what that world would look like.

Why am I thinking about this dumb movie so intensely? Well, it should be painfully obvious by now that we are living in an era that is, at the time of writing, being fundamentally altered by the frank truth of the full depravity of men and male power. And fuck, revenge does feel like a kind of freedom right now. But then I am returned always to the question that is fundamental not only to feminist thought, but to feminist art. One that is as impossible to answer, as it is persistent, necessary to keep posing until we find the answer. What comes next?

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Agnes asks her husband to read to her, and he puts the book down, regards her, says he will. “But not now,” he says. He is already undressing her.

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There’s also the familiar refusal of accountability and disinformation in Vance’s statements— the holy war against the wokes undertones. But keep listening, if you can bear it. Because this is the language of American fascism. Trump defended Vance at a recent press conference, calling a bystander at the scene of the murder “so loud and so crazy” and a “professional troublemaker” and “just not normal,” effectively conflating Good with “a woman” on the scene, while pathologizing that woman, and implying the justification for Good’s killing exists therein. Elsewhere, he called Good, who he referred to as “the woman driving the car,” as “very disorderly.”

In addition to the gobbledygook distraction tactics, there’s a distinct misogyny here. These women were mad, insane, raving, he says. This administration implies, without ever having to say it outright, that some women must be shot to keep the peace. We need the state to protect us from them. Sure, there’s a half-assed attempt to characterize Good as some sort of organized radical (as there has been in the move to investigate her wife), though I doubt that, to Trump’s base, it matters if any of that is true. The more sinister and subtle messaging in such statements is this: women, especially queer women, are inherently ornery, loud, crazy, wild, threatening, frightening, disorderly. They don’t know what’s good for them.

This language traffics in a long, institutionalized American history of silencing women who challenge male authority, whether by muzzling or drowning them until they shut up. This kind of public punishment does something more powerful than tell the truth: it makes Good into a symbol, something that is not real, and therefore, never really alive.

We also see conservative media trafficking in silencing and negation, by pointing out Good’s pronouns, the fact that she had a wife, as though these details tell us something about why her life should not matter. I fear those that understand this murder for what it is are doing this, too, qualifying her life with her biography, pointing out that she was a mother or a poet. No one deserves to be killed by the state.

America has a long history of negation and erasure— with limiting what can be said in books and history classes, in established historical narratives, but also with limiting who counts as a real citizen, and under what circumstances. In response to the murder of Renee Nicole Good, some have recalled Judith Butler’s pivotal writing on mourning and dehumanization. In Precarious Life, Butler writes: “If violence is done to those who are unreal, then, from the perspective of violence, it fails to injure or negate those lives since those lives are already negated.” In other words, if they can convince us she was not real, not fully human because she was a woman or queer or leftist, then no violence has actually occurred.

I’m going to give you a key paragraph from Precarious Life in its entirety, because it’s one I have thought about every year since I first read it over a decade ago:

It is not simply, then, that there is a “discourse” of dehumanization that produces these effects, but rather that there is a limit to discourse that establishes the limits of human intelligibility. It is not just that a death is poorly marked, but that it is unmarkable. Such a death vanishes, not into explicit discourse, but in the ellipses by which public discourse proceeds. The queer lives that vanished on September 11 were not publicly welcomed into the idea of national identity built in the obituary pages, and their closest relations were only belatedly and selectively (the marital norm holding sway once again) made eligible for benefits. But this should come as no surprise, when we think about how few deaths from AIDS were publicly grievable losses, and how, for instance, the extensive deaths now taking place in Africa are also, in the media, for the most part unmarkable and ungrievable.

In other words, it’s not just that certain victims or silenced or erased, but that discourse itself creates a vanishing history, which allows the violence to continue. To this vanishing global history we have to add the over 70,000 Palestinians that have been killed since October 2023, at least 20,000 of whom were children.

What has been remarkable about the response to Good’s murder is the level of refusal, the insistence on a national scale that Good was real, not to be forgotten, not to be derealized by this administration. Citing Good’s goodness helps us fight the administration efforts. But this is not America’s first brush with executing people in the street, and this was not even the first time that a woman was shot by the state and called a bitch. Marimar Martinez was shot five times by Border Patrol agent Charles Exum in Chicago just months ago, after he remarked, “Do something, bitch.” As if to say, you cannot act, your are not real, nor are you protected, like me. Exum later bragged about the shooting in a group chat with other agents. Fortunately, Martinez survived.

I’ve been reading a lot about early American life over the past year, while watching our present history unfold. I have thought a lot about phrases you see in history books all the time, like “they were products of their time,” that little line used to dismiss the violence of white men, and any questions. I’m constantly struck by how much we have willfully forgotten with such causal dismissals, such as about what those times looked like, and how surprised we remain when people are beaten or lynched or shot in our streets, as though this has not been American life since its founding. Good was killed just blocks from where George Floyd was murdered by police officer Derek Chauvin.

We should always be surprised, shocked, totally undone by these profound and brutal losses. We have to see them as part of a larger history, too. As the news of Good’s murder was coming in, I was finishing Percival Everett The Trees, a truly haunting and devastating and beautiful and funny clapback to American “history.” The book is about erasure and dehumanization, names and lives and deaths and bodies forgotten. In one chapter, Everett lists the names of people who have been lynched in America. One by one, a key character writes every name out by hand, an act of remembrance. (Everett talks about writing this chapter here, oddly enough with Dua Lipa, but it’s more than worth the quick watch.)

I tried to find a list of those who have been killed by ICE. We do know that 2025 was ICE’s deadliest year, and that 32 people died in custody (their stories are told in brief at this link). I suspect such a number and even the stories included are misleading, incomplete, but they are more than what often enters broad discourse, and I hope we all read and re-read the list, perhaps write it out, by hand. As Everett says in the interview above, however, and as he emphasizes in the novel, it’s the unknown victims who are the most affecting. They are doubly erased.

Ross’s “fucking bitch” comment makes Good’s murder especially triggering and familiar to many women; I understand this on a physical level. Most women have experienced a similar threat of violence from a man who feels they have stepped out of their place. wrote eloquently recently about our “snuff film political economy”, and why else Good’s death has been so publicly grievable, another term from Butler, despite the administration’s continued efforts to erase Good:

I mourn Renée Nicole Good, fully and unreservedly. It is only honor to her memory and her values—and the act of protest that she was murdered for—to state that she is not the only person who has been killed or wounded by ICE recently, or who has died in ICE custody in the last year.

One thing seems very clear to me that distinguishes the public response to Good’s slaying from many of these other incidents: multiple videos exist of her last moments, and those videos circulated widely. Combined with the fact that she was blonde, sweet-faced, a mother, and a U.S. citizen, her death arrived already encoded as sympathetic. Already positioned, I would say, as grievable.

I too have struggled in recent years with how we circulate and witness online images of profound violence and suffering. With how some say, watch this and if you don’t you do not care. Meanwhile, the truth remains that if we are human, it is impossible to process the magnitude of past and present state violence, especially on tiny screens day in and day out, in between washing the dishes and responding to emails and picking children up from school and doing late capitalism, especially without breaking down. I understand that some will argue that’s the point, and I don’t disagree. But the effect of witnessing so much violence can also be to deaden us, especially if we care.

Still, I agree with Mathews that “something still can happen when we watch somebody die, if our attention is procedurally slowed enough to take in the theft of another human’s life, if we claim them as human and grievable, and if we still believe in our ability to act.” This leaves a lot up to the viewer, to their already established sense of what is real, their moral convictions, their political openness, their desire and capacity to act, their whole mental state. But for those who are moved to grief, or anger, by this or any recent galvanizing moment, the question is always what we do next. As Sontag wrote, pictures of suffering, after all, do not communicate why suffering is wrong, or how to stop it.

Put much more simply, I have been thinking this week about how not to get sucked into the performative and short-lived outrage, while maintaining said outrage, and showing up. The struggle of our times, perhaps—or America always.

I went to the local food bank with my two kids over the weekend and got offline. We sorted donated produce for distribution. We pulled overripe oranges out of huge palettes, put 6-7 into each bag as instructed, while the kids made 6-7 jokes and pushed their fingers into the moldy, soft holes of the oranges that had already turned, which they jump-shot into trash cans. We took a break, munched on chips and sipped hot chocolate. Then reminded ourselves why we planned to stay for two hours, training our attention on the tasks ahead. We weighed potatoes and onions, three lbs. each, dropped them into red plastic netted bags, tied them off. Danced as we worked to the music playing in the cold warehouse, alongside strangers. The kids enjoyed weighing the vegetables on the metal scales, then lobbing bags over the side of the big crate where all the finished bags went.

We talked, too, as we worked, about the families we did not know who would eat from the bags we packed. How we wanted them to feel the work was done with love. Faceless, nameless people. And I thought about how valuable it is to cultivate that sense of care for those we do not know, and will never meet, much less know fully.

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Witness

I Hadn't Heard Shit About What They Did to Keith Porter

Welcome to Witness, a reader-supported publication where I write in the traditions of Black resistance, survival, and truth-telling in an age of artistic and political suppression, and rampant deception. If you find something of value here, pleas…

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3 months ago · Robert Jones, Jr.

W. Kamau Bell asks, "Who's With Me?"

Can America Please Learn The Lesson From ICE Killing Renee Nicole Good That We Have Refused To Learn?

The Sizzle…

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3 months ago · 1272 likes · 132 comments · W. Kamau Bell

More to Hate

Renee Good’s Murder was Misogyny

Content warning: misogyny, murder…

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3 months ago · 814 likes · 49 comments · Kate Manne

I’ve been slow coming back from the holiday, not only because everything is so bad, but because I’m finishing a big edit on my manuscript. By slow I mean, I’m still spending hours writing thoughtful essays for you every week (!), but this platform has trained us all to think in terms of unsustainable and near-constant outputs, so if I’m sending you less than two emails a week, I somehow think I’m failing and fear your generous support (and the income I rely on!) will evaporate. All to say, Monday posts and community chats will return soon— next week or the end of January at the latest! Thank you for understanding while I make this book good for us and try to be a little less online for a couple weeks.

The most common response, however, has been an apology, the kind that makes me feel as though I just lost a loved one without realizing it. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” people say, accenting their regret and surprise, even though divorce is statistically common—and, increasingly, recognized as a net benefit for women.

Others have used my news as an invitation to share about their own lives, which used to frustrate me, but I’ve warmed to the way women, especially, instantly open up about their previously secreted experiences. How eagerly they whisper about their brushes with separation, or how they finally got out. Divorceland is not unlike the world of motherhood, which can feel so insular from the outside. Everyone has a story to tell, and yet, so many of the stories share common threads of wisdom about how the world works.

Most people, though, simply panic. One family member, long divorced herself, didn’t comfort me or ask how long I had been hurting in my marriage, or even why I chose to end it. Instead, she insisted that getting a divorce wouldn’t make me happy and proceeded to cry. I found the reaction almost comically insensitive, but when she later warned me how hard it was to be a single mother, I knew her perspective came from decades of her own struggle, raising children in a society that makes parenting without a male spouse alienating and onerous for women.

But, was she suggesting that the alternative was to stay? I suppose it’s easier to imagine another person muscling through a vague pain—easier, that is, than wanting it for yourself.

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When I have not had to awkwardly comfort people about this change in my own life, I’ve found that the brand of compassion extended to the divorcing woman comes with the assumption that the end of a marriage means the shattering of that woman’s life, rather than—finally—the beginning.

Some reactions have been more helpful. A mother of one of my kids’ schoolmates was a little stunned but quickly pivoted to say she’d be happy to help support with childcare, moving days, and new coparenting arrangements. Another mother, previously divorced, said simply, and knowingly, “You’re not alone.” One divorced friend sent me a card of congratulations, which I read one cold morning in my car after dropping my kids off at school. On the front was an image of a smiling woman in bathing suit riding a fish; the card read Happy Divorce! Here’s to the other fish in the sea! I cried with gratitude at her handwritten note, which read, “Let’s be honest, we know that the system is the problem, not the individual men, but freeing ourselves of the individual men helps.”

Most people—family, friends, loose acquaintances—have shown little interest in my own personal turmoil or joy, much less in discussing the cultural and political stakes of marriage for women, that system, despite the glaringly misogynist political backdrop of America today. Instead, people have asked about the kids (even if they’ve never met them) and my family (which rarely seems to include me). One guy friend of mine even reached out to my ex, though the two men barely knew each other, to ask how he and the “family” were doing. The former friend never contacted me, so I suppose I had been excluded from his new definition of “family.”

Such responses betray some of our most basic assumptions about divorce— that there is always a wronged party (usually the man, astonishingly), that separation hurts children (but bad marriages and ordinary heterosexual inequality does not), and that if women appear in any way content when a marriage ends, she must have sinned in some way (probably, in wanting too much).

Buying into these ideas, we fail to ask more important questions about what came before the breakup, and to acknowledge the truth of what we know about marriage: women are happier on every level when they do not have to care for a male spouse, every cultural and financial hetero-norm disincentivizes women to leave marriages, which means most women have likely experienced considerable strain before the announcement of a split.

The tendency to treat divorce like a tragedy also assumes that any marriage that ends in divorce (rather than death) must be tossed off as a failure. Nothing could be further from the truth. During the hardest parts of my marriage, I could hardly look at our wedding album, or pictures of my family of four. It felt dishonest to swoon over false imagery. But when my former husband and I began speaking honestly with each other about our needs, and about the possibility that we may not be able to meet them for each other, we found ourselves reminiscing again about happier times.

Releasing myself from the lie of marriage—the idea that one person can and must fulfill another person for their entire lives, and within a system that is plagued by gender inequality—allowed me to celebrate the many years of comfort and laughter we had given each other.

I will admit, however, that the process of divorce—a seemingly endless and psychologically excruciating process—has dark parts for which we all deserve a robust apology. I have been truly floored at the monetary expenses and legal complexity of untying one’s life from another, at how little women are warned about this, and by how openly society is designed to support men with wives, while penalizing single people. And obviously, breakups are always a bit melancholy, even on the best of terms, because they signal the end of something.

By far what is most upsetting, however, is that the only alternative to the false tragedy of divorce seems to be that millions of women continue working overtime to preserve marriage for marriage’s sake. I know plenty of women who remain married to men they are not attracted to, do not love, or simply cannot stand to stave off the sense of tragedy and failure we attach to a marriage’s end, even more who simply feel a dogged, low hum of inner conflict about their marriages, and still more who are financially trapped, with no other options.

There are much worse stories available, too, from women who are abused, exploited, and coerced by men who once promised to love them. This is the real tragedy— the way so many women and men lose themselves in their efforts to maintain an outwardly palatable fiction. And that this is how we understand love.

As Deborah Levy writes, “I will never stop grieving for my long-held wish for enduring love that does not reduce its major players to something less than they are.”

Feeling reduced by my husband and by the confines of marriage to a wife damaged my identity, my faith in my intuition, my sense of self, to degrees that often felt irreparable. But these low points, these moments of realizing what marriage asks of women, what it takes from them, some of the most confusing and disorienting of my life, were all experienced within marriage, not divorce.

I’ve mulled over what might feel like a more appropriate response to the making public of such news. I struggle to imagine a world in which everyone acknowledges divorce is a relief when it’s finally decided. But those who have been through it know to say, Congratulations— you’ve escaped!

We could start, too, with better questions, like the kind that are helpful in moments of both tragedy and welcome change, such as, How can I help?

Better yet, why not invite women to tell their own stories by asking, first and foremost, How do you feel?

This essay was originally published in this newsletter earlier this year. So much has happened since, but I’ve pulled this essay out from behind the paywall for those who might need it right now.

If you want to hear more about where I am with all of this today, check out the most recent episode of , which tackles a timeless, and extremely timely, question: Can married and divorced women be friends?

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“When men and women punish each other for truth telling, we reinforce the notion that lies are better. To be loving we willingly hear the other’s truth, and most important, we affirm the value of truth telling. Lies may make people feel better, but they do not help them to know love.”
― bell hooks, All About Love

It’s officially December, which means many of us are preparing to brave the annual tradition of proving ourselves to loved ones who don’t actually know us that well, by way of awkward, sometimes painful conversations at family gatherings. For many women in heterosexual marriages, this season may mean actively hiding the problems in their relationships—specifically the problems they’re having with their husbands.

Which also means that, after a year characterized by so many conversations about heteropessimism, and by the generally fraught landscape of straight relationships, I am thinking about Karen, from the beloved holiday film Love Actually, the patron saint of mothers who lie to their children about dad’s shitty behavior.

The image above, of course, depicts one Emma Thompson as Karen, a married mother of two whose husband, Harry, is sleeping with his younger, hotter, utterly predictable trope of a secretary. After Karen figures out Harry is having an affair—on Christmas morning no less!—she retreats into the bedroom to cry alone, hiding her devastation from her children, because she does not want to spoil the holiday vibes. It’s bad enough that she has to suffer in silence. But in the end, the couple stays together.

Karen has inspired many a meme because Karen is all of us. She is the wife who hides how little her husband contributed to the Christmas joy. The one who makes excuses for her husband being an asshole to everyone or getting too drunk or just being antisocial. The one who tells her friend her husband isn’t that bad, or was just raised differently, or who talks up her guy, even though everyone can see he’s kind of a jerk.

In Love Actually, Karen confronts Harry later, after the kids’ Christmas play, for which she’s of course made the children’s costumes. She wonders aloud if she should stay in her marriage “knowing her life would always be a little bit worse.” And she does stay, because she is the wife of a good guy who says, in response, that he’s “a classic fool,” as though he’s only just remembered he has a wife he likes to have around. Through it all, Karen is the mother who puts on a happy face for the kids while all of this is going down—who does not let her sadness, or her anger, show.

Karen has been on my mind ever since I started listening to Lily Allen’s West End Girl on repeat, and not just because of this meme:

Allen’s album has been embraced as “a welcome antidote to the pressure on women to be silent and sanitised,” as skilled in the “radical art of oversharing,” and as evidence that “creative women are becoming increasingly dangerous to men who have historically gotten away with being shitty.”

Unfortunately, the album has also been the impetus for some weird pro-monogamy/trad marriage treatises. Even so, the album has been wildly successful because it offers straight women permission to do something they are told not to do: be honest about the men who hurt them.

Though many would like to believe we are living in a postfeminist era in which the gains of the feminist movement and the sexual revolution have been fully realized (lol), there remains a presumption today that it behooves us all to keep the problems that plague heterosexual relationships hidden, indeed private. In some cases, the argument even goes that the problems inherent to heterosexual relationships in a society in which men and women remain unequal should be hidden from the men themselves, even the ones who are the cause of those problems!

Allen has said that her kids will come on tour with her, and that this album, despite its lyrics about pussy palaces and butt plugs, is as much for them as it is for her. This may surprise some, but as she remarked, they were there, and they suffered, too. Kids already know, in other words, when their dads are behaving badly, and the idea that hiding men’s behavior, wherever it lands on the spectrum of shittiness, and/or that staying together “for the kids” but living “a little bit worse” life, a la poor Karen, is somehow good for children, is baffling.

Lying to children about the problems of heterosexuality hurts all of us. Who, after all, do we imagine benefits from this masquerade? We still live with the idea that it is a mother’s job to paint fathers in the best light possible no matter how those fathers behave, and that this is somehow beneficial to children. Commonplace divorce advice, for example, urges partners not to bad mouth each other in front of their kids, because this can damage the child’s relationship with the other parent. It’s an extension of the ol’ “don’t keep score” advice that married people receive. But who exactly does it benefit to avoid keeping score? It’s not women.

Yes, a divorce is a breakup, and often the person one leaves or are left by looks like the worst person in the world. The pain of any lost love can cause us to see the partner who hurt us as a villain, rather than a person. And some men are shitty husbands, but good dads (a subject that warrants another essay). Young children obviously shouldn’t be burdened by petty adult conflict, or by details of betrayals and sexual escapades. But most moms I know are incredible holders of nuance, and skilled storytellers. They know how to take a complex adult story, and break it down for a child’s mind. They can handle this.

As a child, I was exposed to adult drama and post-divorce resentment too young and too often. I knew when the child support wasn’t paid. I knew way too many intimate details about what led my parents to divorce. I would never repeat those patterns in my relationships with my children, or encourage others to do so. But I have to admit, even when that honesty went too far, I learned invaluable lessons about how the world works.

Which is to say, we can and must tell the truth to children about men misbehaving, especially when it comes to the patterns so many adult men fall into in marriages. I’m personally less interested in making sure kids know when men cheat (sorry Karen), than I am in examining the pervasive dishonesty baked into so many heterosexual marriages about gender inequality in the home.

Married women regularly exhaust themselves making excuses for husbands who yell at their children, who treat their wives poorly, or who do not pull their weight around the house. But lying about the ways men hurt women (and kids) is certainly not for the mothers who do it— and it’s not for the children either.

In fact, it’s a practice that only contributes to a broader tendency to blame women, especially mothers, for everything, and can have the effect of turning child against their mothers. In the Freudian sense, the child must reject the mother and learn to identify with the paternal power. But so much more simply: As Jacqueline Rose writes in her book-length essay Mothers, the mother is everyone’s trusty scapegoat for whatever goes wrong in the world. And this is because we have so normalized and silenced the inequalities that are actually to blame for everyone’s suffering.

Even so, the mother has historically been at least one source of the masquerade, because she is tasked with keeping up the fantasy of the nuclear family. This is especially true at holiday time. Later, however, mom will be revealed to be the liar, the betrayer, the failed teacher, the one who did not prepare us for the harsh realities of the world. She does such a good job covering everyone else’s tracks, nurturing the image of the happy family, creating domestic bliss, it’s only a matter of time until everyone turns on her, making her the target of the whole family’s ire.

And isn’t that comfortable? We are so used to making men’s bad behavior something women have done that we are probably all familiar, in one way or another, with that sense of mother blame— that anger we hold for the women who raised us for cheating us out of the truth, or failing to equip us for the world.

Meanwhile, young girls are taught from a young age to cover for boys and men, to keep the peace. As they observe grown women around them doing it, too, putting up with men who fail here and there, who demean or embarrass them, who don’t pull their own weight, girls get the message: women are to overfunction, and overcompensate, even if that means living “a little bit worse” life.

It’s part of a larger cultural impulse to simply paper over inequalities of all sorts. Mel Robbins (and her co-author Karl Pillemer) recently insisted that this holiday season, of all the holidays seasons, if “your husband’s side of the family has politics that bother you” (like, maybe, they think you shouldn’t have rights, or that racism is funny, or don’t think trans people are people, or are pro kidnapping and separating families), well that’s just like when “your college-age kids don’t call as much as you’d like” and you should “accept it and move on.” These authors offer a little thought experiment to illustrate their point: If you only had a year left to live, “would you want to spend your last Thanksgiving resenting your father’s politics?”

Robbins and her co-author seem awfully interested in depoliticizing politics, the family, and the holidays. Subscribing to this kind of thinking means buying into the idea that having political convictions about things like human rights and bodily autonomy is “resentful” rather than an expansion of what is possible. These authors seem to think that all that power and equality stuff just shouldn’t be allowed to penetrate the family unit, lest it mess us all up.

But the way we practice politics within intimate family settings is the very work of social reproduction. It’s how whole worlds get made, unmade, remade.

Hiding men’s poor treatment of women from children is not love. It’s a form of patriarchal socialization. It is a choice that reflects a willingness to remain in a world in which men can behave badly, and women will cover for them. What does that teach children about the roles men and women are expected to play in a relationship? Among other things, it teaches young girls to lie to themselves and others, and young boys that they need not concern themselves with accountability, because a woman will be there to pick up the pieces, and cover for them.

Even so, I understand why women do it. I have been there, holding the sadness or the anger at bay. Women don’t only hide their suffering because they want to shield children they love from the adult world. They also tend to hide how they feel about the men in their lives in intimate and public settings because they know there are so few caring audiences for their complaints. When men’s behavior isn’t something women have miraculously done to themselves, it’s something women have nevertheless chosen to endure.

The belief that most men can’t handle the truth— that it is just too much for them to have to face real honesty when they do not show up in their families and communities—is also pervasive. But actual love, and the hope of any kind of better future for our kids, requires us to get real.

Don’t forget to listen to the holiday episode—and remember, Santa is women.

Dire Straights

Christmas is an ad for heterosexuality

You just survived Thanksgiving. You might now be surviving the onslaught of holiday commercials and Hallmark movies starring big-city career women who are reminded of the true meaning of Christmas…

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5 months ago · 23 likes · 2 comments · Tracy Clark-Flory and Amanda Montei

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When I first started writing this newsletter, my children were very young. Now they are older, and while this means they are more independent and less needy in some ways, they are also socially busier, their calendars more demanding, their sports weirdly serious. My weekends tend to be frayed by their commitments.

I long ago gave up on the idea that I would be a weekend writer, and though now I have every other weekend to myself in theory, in practice these hours are often filled with kids’ events anyway. Nearly every weekday, however, despite juggling writing clients, teaching classes, a podcast, and this newsletter, I have set myself down for a few hours to dip into my manuscript.

This week, in my memoir class, we had a visit from the novelist Chelsea Bieker, who remarked that most of us who have chosen the “extreme act” of writing a book tend to go hard and overachieve in other areas of our lives. This sentiment really rings true for me, as a recovering academic who pursued both a MFA and PhD, and who no doubt writes so much because I have always wanted to feel loved and lauded and accomplished in ways I never did in my youth!

But this idea also got me thinking about how, for mothers especially, and particularly in this polarized antifeminist climate, there continues to exist a unique tension between the value of artmarking and of mothering, a tension that really need not be there at all.

Within the institution of motherhood, which we internalize through every cultural story we have about mothers, sacrificial overfunctioning is praised as the minimum requirement for goodness. I have noticed this especially comes up, oddly, quite a bit in true crime, a genre that often portrays women victims as utterly devoted to their children, and to nothing else, such that they are missed more deeply by their family and friends when they suffer violence at the hands of men. The lesson: Women are only worthy of protection and safety when they have first been very very good by patriarchal standards.

It’s also true that we tend to think women are only worthy of creativity, of that extreme act, and frankly of having public lives, when they have shown themselves to be very very good in other more traditionally feminine areas.

I have been thinking a lot lately about a statistic that keeps coming up in my work with Tracy over at the podcast— data that shows that married women do the most housework of all women. As I find myself doing less housework now that I do not live with a man, and really living the reality of this statistic, I have been mindful of where exactly all that labor went. In part, yes, I have my kids half the time, and that has lessened the mess around me, because now my former husband cares for and runs a home for children exactly half the week. I also have one less adult person to clean up after.

But these points alone do not explain where all the extra time I have suddenly found has come from. There’s no way to confirm what I speculate is at least partly the reality behind such a statistic, other than anecdotally: I suspect that most married women report they are doing more housework because they are constantly overfunctioning in every domestic area. Everything feels harder and more cumbersome when you are doing it all alone, despite the possibility of help right beside you; housework can also be a way to escape the pain of the present, and to prove yourself as a woman.

I have many times observed, for instance, how women, especially mothers, busy themselves with extra projects, or with trying to get their husbands to do x and y, or simply with keeping up appearances, because they are trying so hard to avoid looking too squarely at their own unhappiness, or at the inequality in their lives. When I have spoken to academics and therapists about women’s loss of desire, they have also pointed out how hard women are working within homes, and how this can destroy all erotic energy.

Over the years, I have worked with many writers who are also parents. I have noticed this tendency in mothers who are married, and who find they have little time for their own creative pursuits. Sometimes, the strains are so clearly economic, and caused in large part by a lack of a social safety net. And to be clear, inequality in the home is not women’s fault, it is systemic.

When children are very young, they do also require so much attention, so much focus. But I also know that when my kids were younger, I tended to overfunction in motherhood as a way to prove my own worth—as a mother, a wife, a woman, and a person—because I really didn’t believe that anything I did in my life could possibly be more valuable, or even as valuable. This damaging belief persists.

It’s just one reason why I lament the direction the new mommy wars has taken us all, into this foolish and transparently sexist dichotomy between corporate feminism and motherhood. As though women can only be of value if they billionaires or trad wives! As though mothering is the only transformative, caring, creative role women can inhabit! As though we don’t need women who are transforming, creating, and caring outside the home!

In an era in which some claim we need (of all things!) to put masculinity back in the center of our artistic landscape, I thought it might be useful to share some of the dogged beliefs I have had to let go of over the years, so that I could continue doing creative work in the world.

A few ways I am resisting patriarchal definitions of motherhood that previously kept me from my work:

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Much of that creative desperation has lately been directed at gaudy-ass real estate projects, AI tech companies, and convoluted political and social theories that center white male grievance. Meanwhile, politicians are busy playing God, getting crafty with language to introduce increasingly restrictive reproductive legislation.

Then there’s the conservative creep in media, a trend that can look deceptively like the creation of new ideas, even as it relies on tired old ideas of blaming women and on destroying actually novel movements and ideas. Case in point:

Male creation, in other words, often quickly transforms into a monstrous form of destruction.

I’m grateful to Guillermo del Toro for adapting Mary Shelley’s classic novel Frankenstein just in time, because it gives us a great frame to understand what’s going on here. Sometimes cultural history writes itself.

First, let’s get into some of the discourse surrounding the latest adaption of Shelley’s novel, which has centered around the question of whether or not the film is feminist. As I’ve said before, the question of whether or not something or someone is adequately feminist tends to be the wrong question. It’s much more generative to just look at the cultural object with a feminist eye—that is, to consider what the thing we’re looking at says about gender and power, and how it reflects the current moment.

del Toro’s Frankenstein is visually juicy, sometimes in a gratuitously violent way, which, okay, it’s a story about a monster. But when it’s not grotesque for the sake of being grotesque, the costumes and cinematography are pretty delicious. Mia Goth as a quivering, desirous, autonomy-thwarted Elizabeth is totally captivating. And while it’s true that the film’s script rewrites many of the original female characters (the erasure of the character of Justine, a key figure in the book, is disappointing), the Elizabeth of the film embodies many of Shelley’s ideas about ambition and creativity. She is in some ways a stand-in for Shelley herself, commenting on the story as it unfolds, as in one compelling, if short, monologue on agency and choice that feels very of the moment.

(Goth plays Victor Frankenstein’s mother in the film too, which—what a Freudian statement!)

Other criticisms of the film have been of the “book is better” variety, and let’s just be real, the book is always better! But who can really complain about watching Oscar Isaac be Oscar Isaac, or his butt, or a hot monster. The bloody wedding dress alone is a feminist statement.

All that said, the last half hour of the film is… kind of all over the place. The film devolves into two men fighting over a woman, then the final scenes are an indecisive mashup of father/son redemption, and Frankenstein becoming, like, a real boy? The ending is kind of exactly like the ending of Barbie?

The Lord Byron quote at the end of the film has also been much debated online (at least on Threads, a platform that is a monster in its own right). Some people are mad it’s a man’s words that close the film, but Byron makes sense, since Shelley, yes, did have a relationship with Lord Byron (more on that in a moment). For me, the problem is that the final quote tells the viewer to read the film as one about heartbreak and the monsters love makes of all of us. That diffuses the potency of the film’s more interesting gestures to Shelley’s original story, a story that is actually about some very timely topics, like male loneliness and ambition.

It’s no surprise that this film, as well as The Bride!—a re-imagining of the companion Victor refuses to make for his monster, set to be released next year— are coming back into cultural consciousness. Frankenstein, the novel, is a book about how alienation and loneliness can lead men to manic ambitions that destroy the world! It’s a story about a man forging ahead with an idea, in isolation, without thinking about the consequences.

There are lots of little micro-arguments about the book and the film online right now. There are also many ways to read the novel, because that’s how good novels work, in contrast to how the internet works, which is on the one-take-must-be-right model.

I’ll just focus on two reads of the book, which are not incompatible: the book is about a parent failing to care for his child, and the book is about men’s unchecked power and ambition. In recent years, while hot takes on the dangers of feminine ambition have become exhausting, there’s been little discussion of men’s ambition. But Shelley knew, two hundred years ago, that male ambition was responsible for the most lasting destruction the world has seen.

In the novel, after Victor creates his monster, he immediately realizes that he has created something terrifying he cannot control, and falls into a deep depression over it. He even comments on how all the worst moments of Western civilization, from enslavement in Greece to the discovery of America, can be traced back to the same morally compromised, unchecked power.

Comparisons between the techbros who have unthinkingly forged ahead to a future overrun by social media and AI should be obvious here. But it’s important to note that in the novel Victor is terribly lonely and this is why he throws himself into his scientific work, to avoid the feeling. He’s had an idyllic, loving childhood, but when Victor goes off to his studies, he has no friends or family, because, well, that’s academia (!). He misses his “old familiars.” He becomes isolated, too myopic in his study of the natural sciences, and obsessed with doing something no one has done before. That is what leads him to create a monstrous creature he cannot care for or control.

Not a far cry from the world we live in today, an era when the monstrous creations of insecure, lonely men threaten to destroy the world.

Outside the more obvious comparisons between the Elon Musks of the world and Victor, in media and politics today the ongoing practice of armchair philosophy, in which white men debate how many rights other people who don’t look like them should have, also betrays this kind of reckless ambition. We see this kind of unthinking obsession with intellectual creation in the Scott Galloways and Ezra Kleins of the world, who pontificate aloud about the perfect word salad of traits that make a man, or a Democratic political strategy. All are desperate to say something new, rather than listen to what has already been said. Frankenstein has always been a story about exactly that.

This emphasis on loneliness does not come through in the film. Instead, Victor is given a traumatic childhood, and playing God is a way to avenge his mother’s death, and his father’s early cruelty. del Toro’s Frankenstein also depicts the academia of old as too narrow-minded and constrained by religious beliefs. Victor wants to play God, and they think that sounds dangerous, because they have their own God. It’s a little man in the garage, ahead of his time.

Shelley’s novel, however, is much clearer that the danger is not just in playing God or going against the grain, but in using human intellect to create without emotional intelligence, and without thinking about what comes next. If men have indeed ruined everything, it is because they have too often pursued ideas for the sake of doing what no one has done before. Shelley was critiquing colonialism and imperialism, but also, ahead of her time, the “move fast and break stuff” mentality.

The book, however, is also a story about men who don’t show up for their kids. Byron and other men in Shelley’s life abandoned their children, and many critics have suggested that the novel is about this failure to care for the creature one gives life—especially the failure of men who are too blinded by their own creative ambitions, and their own individualistic pursuit of genius. So, the story is about little “f” fatherhood, the parenting of one’s child, even as it is also about capital “F” Fatherhood, the desire men have to be the ultimate paternal authority on a larger scale.

Not to get all psychoanalytic, but this is where we run into a theme del Toro’s film does try to drive home, which is that many men have unresolved issues with their inability to create life, or to save those they love from death. Many feminists have pointed out that men’s desire to play Father, often while falling down on the job of actual fathering, stems from male anxiety about procreation. They fear their own irrelevance. And so, rather than, like, help out, they run off and try to create the next big thing.

I also watched All Her Fault, a new TV series, this past weekend, and thought it was the best televised representation of mother-blame I’ve seen. It’s also a story about men who turn their back of fathering, while going to great lengths to install themselves as The Father. The first act of the series spends substantial time setting up a world in which wealthy mothers who work outside the home do it all, while their husbands fail to manage basic childcare tasks like school pickups and play dates. These dads think they’re good guys because they ask their wives to tell them what to do, even though they throw their hands up at the babies, claiming there’s nothing they can do, because they don’t have breasts. You know the sort.

These are married mothers we also know well, the ones who do all the social and managerial work, who are expected to hold it all and are praised for being super moms, only to become the target of blame for anything that goes wrong in the family. It’s clear in the series how little the husbands are doing, and how much their wives (and nannies) are overfunctioning as a result.

After a dramatic opening that establishes one mother’s son has gone missing, the titular blame-the-mother tension gets thick. As the series gets deeper into its twisty plot, we learn that the men who refuse to participate in the invisible labor of childrearing, and in the mental load of family life, are not actually short on time. While the mothers struggle to keep their heads above water, the men are off manufacturing crises so they can save the day, feel important, and fulfill their God complexes.

In other words, because these husbands refuse to help their wives in the basic, daily work of parenting, they end up with way too much time on their hands, lonely and with no sense of purpose. As a result, they wind up using all their creative energy for nefarious ends. You know the sort!

Both of these stories, in their own way, are about men who have a desire to create, to be important, even to caretake. They are also about men who are so focused on their need to be The Father, the authority, the genius, the savior, and the God, that they refuse to do any actual fathering, and end up destroying everything around them.

In Shelley’s story, the monster eventually demands that Victor create a companion for him, because he’s so lonely. It’s something we hear a lot these days. Men just need a female companion to take care of them. I look forward to seeing what The Bride! will do with this. Who does the woman become if she is just the source of blame when The Father, who has left her to handle everything that actually matters, fucks things up? If she is only meant to be his trusty companion?

What the monsters among us actually need is less Father, more fathering. That’s what would stop the cycle of destruction. Like father, like son!

Shelley’s classic story suggests an answer for our times: Men don’t actually need to create anything new, to make themselves important, to continue their centuries old quest to dominate in every field.

They just need to show up for what they have already created.

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But boyfriend content is just the beginning, since it’s the premarital equivalent of what Sara Petersen calls “husband veneration content.” Joseph argues that if having a boyfriend is embarrassing, it’s not not because of all that heteropessimism discourse, and that’s a discourse that has no doubt changed our cultural conversations about marriage drastically in recent years. The divorce plot has shifted, the divorce memoir boom has boomed, and millennials are officially in their divorce era. And yet, because being partnered remains a primary arbiter of social status, we still see this kind of content everywhere.

Some women are doing more than promptly unfollowing their friends who are centering men a little too heavily on their grids. In a recent discussion event for subscribers of this newsletter, a woman shared that she doesn’t even like to be around her friends who are obsessed with the marriage market. She just doesn’t relate. Joseph cites similar stories. Other women told her they fear the men they date will embarrass them, so when it comes to social media, they simply won’t post about their male partners. I recalled Sabrina Carpenter’s “Please Please Please,” in which she begs an incompetent man not to embarrass her.

A caveat feels needed here: I certainly know many women who get divorced, write about the problems of marriage as a heterosexual institution plagued by inequality, and get their own share of unsubscribes. Plenty of partnered people, even of the liberal persuasion, refuse to engage with critiques about marriage as an institution, because such analysis can feel too confrontational, or implicating.

I know that's not you, our love is real

And I am already arguing in my head with the spate of hot takes that are no doubt stacking editorial calendars across the media landscape— articles and personal essays asking whether Gen Z and millennial women have gone too far with their critiques of dating and marriage, thereby destroying human intimacy. I’ve already read a couple.

In other words, it feels like a bit of a stretch— or at least like selective perception, or manifestation content?— to say without qualification that being partnered is now “fundamentally uncool,” or even that it is now a “flex” to be single. We’re far from a postfeminist world.

What’s a source of social capital in one community/algorithm, is often a source of shame and embarrassment in another. That’s the very problematic nature of the purposely polarizing digital ecosystem in which we all live now.

Joseph’s essay explores these complications, and I found this passage especially true and compelling:

As straight women, we’re confronting something that every other sexuality has had to contend with: a politicization of our identity. Heterosexuality has long been purposefully indefinable, so it is harder for those within it, and outside of it, to critique. However, as our traditional roles begin to crumble, maybe we’re being forced to reevaluate our blind allegiance to heterosexuality.

Of course, straightness has always been political, just as other supposedly neutral identity markers like whiteness and masculinity have been. Each are social constructs, categories of identity with political stakes, hierarchies, value systems, and moralism baked in. What has changed is that heterosexuality is now more politicized, which means that straightness has become a legible talking point, drawn out from the shadows of alleged neutrality and objectivity.

Conversations about how heterosexual institutions like marriage and motherhood uphold the status quo, for instance, have exploded online, in books, on social media, and in podcasts in recent years. All this thinking, of course, is descended from queer and feminist theory, which paved the way for the more accessible conversations we have today about heteronormativity and systemic gender inequality.

Joseph continues (and let’s not forget this passage when the articles titled “How Gen Z Learned to Dread Marriage” start rolling in!):

And as long as we’re openly rethinking and criticizing heteronormativity, “having a boyfriend” will remain a somewhat fragile, or even contentious, concept within public life. This is also happening alongside a wave of women reclaiming and romanticizing their single life. Where being single was once a cautionary tale (you’ll end up a “spinster” with loads of cats), it is now becoming a desirable and coveted status—another nail in the coffin of a centuries-old heterosexual fairytale that never really benefited women to begin with.

In other words, the conversations about dating and marriage are not going to cool anytime soon, just as conversations about motherhood and caregiving are not likely to get less contentious anytime soon, because we are all actively struggling toward another way of relating to each other.

Is it true that just four years after JD Vance lamented the “childless cat ladies” of the world that we’ve fully reclaimed the single life for women? I really love the energy, but I fear we have a ways to go. Women are romanticizing and sentimentalizing singlehood, as a counter to centuries of romanticizing and sentimentalizing marriage and motherhood as the only path to happiness and fulfillment for women.

Others want to toss young women’s rejections of dating and marriage off as a rejection of love and connection, or to blame technology, or the downfall of earnestness and the rise of cringe (was how I phrased that millennial cringe? hmmm). But the issue with reducing the “is having a boyfriend embarrassing” conversation to a symptom of a culture in which connection/love is cringe and earnestness is embarrassing (both of which are bad for all of us!) is that it sidesteps legitimate critiques of heterosexual culture and institutions, and of male behavior.

Many feminist thinkers have been telling us for decades that real love and connection are only possible when we free ourselves of patriarchal, heterosexual, white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal institutions, and when love and connection are not defined by inequality.

In other words, it’s a depoliticized and myopic way of looking at the question of why so many women are withdrawing from relationships with men. To take that perspective, one also has to subscribe to the idea that heterosexual marriage and straight relationships today, as they stand, are a sure avenue to happiness and fulfillment. That’s a fool’s errand, because literally all the data, and all the women, have been telling us otherwise.

It’s certainly possible to be partnered and feel fulfilled. But it’s not statistically likely if you’re a straight woman. More often, relationships with men today feel like “a humiliation ritual,” a practice of begging for scraps and attention and some equality, as a treat. If being in partnership with men is “embarrassing,” it’s because too many men are being embarrassing right now!

Philosopher Roland Barthes writes in A Lover’s Discourse that the dependence love produces is always somewhat of an embarrassment—saying I love you is so hard because the other may not meet the demand, or return the utterance. As a result, “the only addressee guaranteed not to be embarrassed or discomforted by it is a parent, or God.”

Yes, love, poet Olivia Rodrigo tells us, is embarrassing as hell.

But rejecting dating or traditional models of partnership in this cultural and political climate is not simply a rejection of the more unavoidable hazards of intimacy, pleasure, love, and connection. Neither is deciding not to have children. Especially not in an era in which red pill and incel thinking is going mainstream, and in which more and more social and economic policies are trying to coerce us all into regressive binary gender roles.

Many women, as Tressie McMillan Cottom put it recently, are simply learning from the legacy of Black women to organize at the site of social reproduction.

Since I announced that my marriage was ending, I have had a vague, mostly unspoken sense around my married friends and family that they think I look down on them. It’s not untrue, but it’s not quite accurate. I look down on marriage as an institution, and the way it sucks the life out of brilliant and ambitious women. I look down on the way so many women are asked to rearrange their entire lives when they become mothers, even though they have husbands who could never handle the layers of work and pain these career shifts involve.

I look down on men who would rather argue with women about their experiences of the world than wrack their own damn brains to figure out how they could help women more, and be a part of the solution rather than the problem.

I look down on these fucks who are running our country into the ground because they believe we need them, or want them, or because they’ll literally become authoritarian to avoid going to therapy.

I look down on the idea that marriage is an arbiter of maturity and emotional intelligence, because everything we know about marriage tells us this isn’t true. And I Iook down on the idea that divorce and being single is any sort of failure. And actually, I’m a romantic at heart, hopelessly so, which means I’m utterly and sometimes dumbly tied to fantasies about heterosexuality. It is embarrassing!

But those uncomfortable feelings pale in comparison to how I know most married and partnered women still look down on me, and how so many in this country look down on anyone who seeks love, connection, and family outside the narrow confines in which we’ve been taught to recognize them. Right now, I’m working on an episode for about tensions I’m sensing between married and unmarried women.

For now I’ll just say, having a boyfriend, or a husband, isn’t embarrassing because no one wants love or connection anymore. It’s because so many women have for so long felt they needed men and marriage to complete them, and they’re finally figuring out that, all this time, that wasn’t true.

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But it’s with a spirit of openness to conversations about class, race, and feminism that I wade into these chaotic and muddy waters, and invite you to join me for just a moment more, because this particular cycle of discourse, despite its innumerable flaws, illustrates that the problem of choice feminism is very much still with us.

From the first listen, I felt this album was a set of bops with occasionally catchy and occasionally very contrived lyrics. But I felt strongly the cultural dissonance of Swift’s latest era. This is the Travis Kelce album, and it shows. And I’m not just talking about his wood. I’m glad she’s having some good sex, even if the play with sexuality on this album feels cribbed from her campy contemporaries. But does she not know into which America she was releasing this album?

My own critiques aside, as usual, people’s responses to the album have been even more telling than the album itself. While we’ve witnessed in recent months the slow cultural realization that all trad wives are actually girl bosses who hold jobs as content creators and answer to their boss-husbands (!), many are still stuck defining feminism as a woman’s right to choose… if she wants to be a mom or have a career.

And it’s this mentality that has characterized so much of the Swift album discourse, and that has made it hard to parse more meaningful analysis. Let’s discuss.

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Here is my confession.

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The essay was published the same week my book, Touched Out, was released into the world— a book I wrote mostly holed up alone in my home, trying to understand what the first few years of parenting had felt like for …

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The report was issued, unsurprisingly, by Mormon college Brigham Young University’s Wheatley Institute, in partnership with the Institute for Family Studies, a right-wing think tank whose stated miss…

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