Why women can’t be ‘negative’

Or make bad “choices”!

We’ve seen a lot of misogynistic thinking on motherhood and marriage lately! I know this week we’re hard pivoting to Democrats-have-finally-awoken-from-deep-slumber mode, but I have some stray thoughts on all the JD Vance blabber that has been making the rounds recently—from the idea that the purpose of the post-menopausal “female” is simply to continue providing free childcare, or that women should stay in abusive marriages. Or the idea that life is boring and unfulfilling for women unless they become mothers and wives and grandmas—thereby fulfilling their true purpose!

I’ve been thinking about how such ideas— and the explicit political program and assault that we see encapsulated in documents like Project 2025— are too often completely absent from the ongoing literary-critical anxiety surrounding stories of motherhood and marriage.

Tracy Clark-Flory recently coined the term “hetero-exceptionalism,” a perspective on heterosexuality that she says is tinged with “a sense of superiority”— the kind often lobbed at testimonies of divorce, but that also comes up in “the stanning of Tim Walz and the Good Husband meme-ing of Doug Emhoff” each which are a “desperate and grasping case of hetero-optimism that says, so very hopefully: Look how good men can be! Or could be, hypothetically!” Tracy writes further:

Love is often about exceptionalism. It’s about finding a special person who is unlike the rest. But the poison of hetero-exceptionalism is that it regards shitty husbands and bad boyfriends as personal and individual failings, even when the shitty and the bad arise from broader systemic forces that invade our most intimate relationships—all of them, to varying degrees.

I like this concept because I, like Tracy, have been observing the backlash against recent writing on marriage and divorce— and it really echoes the backlash against those who write critically or thoughtfully or frankly about motherhood. Much of the recent criticism of divorce books has been written by women who claim women writers are just trying to re-frame their “bad choices” (i.e. shitty husbands and boyfriends) as political issues. Putting aside for the moment how, in such a perspective, the shitty husbands and boyfriends are separated from their own socialization and agency—this critical backlash is so similar to the one that met recent writing on motherhood, but stretches all the way back to early reviews of Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work, which called Cusk’s memoir “bleak and foreboding” and disappointingly not a “cheerful baby shower gift.”

In a piece about the subversive joy of being alone, Lyz Lenz writes about how her critiques of marriage have sometimes been interpreted by readers as displays of hostility toward marriage, rather than articulations of how marriage, as an institution, remains hostile to so many women. “I think it’s important to note that even if the system works for you,” Lenz writes, “that doesn’t mean it’s a good system.” And

Women who interrogate or explore motherhood or marriage as systems arouse a lot of defensive fear and anger! Especially from other women, for whom the systems might be working. And in general, wow, we have an incredibly low cultural tolerance for critiques of motherhood and marriage.

The fact remains that both are central patriarchal institutions! Recent critiques of women’s personal bad “choices” (i.e. she chose the wrong man like a dummy) suggest that political histories and issues are purely personal. In truth, we are all, as individuals, inseparable from not only systems— as in social and political policies and structures—but also ideologies— that is, the narratives that shape how we live and love, and the social pressures we face.

I’ve become accustomed to the kind of convoluted rhetoric that is leveled at women who write about individual, personal, intimate relationships with the social and political forces that shape us—those who try to untangle the way we are always tangled in systems and ideology. In response to an essay I wrote a few years ago for Slate on how American mothers got so touched out, one poster wrote a short diatribe about how millennial women are spoiled and narcissistic and thus shocked by the demands of motherhood because they’re so entitled and can’t deal with putting other people before themselves.