The girlboss vs. tradwife debate only has real stakes if you're coming from an illiberal premise. The obvious liberal answer is: women who want careers should pursue them, women who want to stay home should pursue that, and nobody should be hectored either way.
What makes this debate so tedious is that both sides treat a conditional strategy as a universal prescription. Tradwifery is a great strategy conditional on finding a good partner and genuinely preferring domestic life. Girlbossing is a great strategy conditional on having career opportunities you actually enjoy. These aren't competing visions of womanhood — they're different bets that make sense under different circumstances.
The choices are also neither fixed nor made in a vacuum. A 30-year-old frustrated with corporate life can change course. A former stay-at-home mom can reenter the workforce. The decisions are iterative. They're also shaped by class, era, and luck — it's a lot easier to girlboss your way to success if you have capital, credentials, and a functioning 21st-century labor market to operate in.
What Yglesias is gesturing at, and what I think is correct, is that the anti-girlboss turn from both the left and the right requires you to believe women are making systematically wrong choices — which means you have to believe women's choices are less reliable than your ideology. That's a much bigger claim than either side usually admits to making
I would make your last sentence generic. "You believe x's choices are less reliable than your ideology". This explains the far left and far right so very well.
Totally agree with this. People really should have a more "live and let live" attitude rather than looking down their noses at how others choose to live or organize their families.
The only thing I'd add is that there are two sides to this coin. For "girlbosses" to succeed and grow, men also need to be less judged for not adopting stereotypical male roles.
I do think there’s been a lot of progress towards men not being judged. I do the daycare pickup as a man because my job is more flexible than my wife’s and have never felt judged; I’d say it’s probably 50/50 who picks up at my daycare. Some of my male friends without kids are already retired or semi-retired and people are just happy for them.
My male friend who did the majority of parenting in the Obama era encountered a lot of judgment when he went to parks. He was never invited into mom spaces and largely treated as suspect.
Thas has been my experience as a parent and as a teacher. It's a bridgeable divide but it's a delicate process. As a teacher most of my friends are other moms I've met on the jobs but I have a kind of one of the good ones kind of rapport with people I've worked with.
On the other hand there's a lot of politics and drama I get left out of so it does cut both ways.
I don't doubt it, but men also don't want their wives coming home talking about some guy they met at the playground, and a lot of women seem to narrow their social circle and get clannish when they have kids. My husband is an administrator at the school our kids attend, and I'm excluded from the real mom talk because they can't complain to me.
I live in the People's Republic of Somerville so it's hardly representative, but yes everything looks 50/50. When we were still doing swim class with parents, it actually leaned more towards dads.
My dad, who also grew up in Somerville, I'm pretty sure never changed a diaper in his life, and only did school pickup in unusual circumstances, or the period where my school was on his way to the office.
For us specifically, if anything my wife is the traditional breadwinner, she makes twice as much as I do and works like 60 hours a week, so during the week I'm doing most of the child/dog care. And her daycare is on the way to *my* office.
Shoot, my sister’s husband’s brother always picks their sets of kids up from school because his IT job lets him work from home, and he’s literally the most masculine guy I know - served multiple tours of duty in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria and is a colonel in the reserves. Drives a big ass truck and coaches the kids’ baseball. Nobody in Mississippi is judging him for being too feminine because he picks up the kids, that’s for damn sure!
My read is he's claiming, I think correctly, though don't know how you'd prove this, that the heyday of girlbossing did not actually require, or include less judgment for men who worked in stereotypical male roles.
It did coincide with a continued cultural acceptance of gay men though.
To clarify, I'm talking about society generally, not as a specific condition that individual couples must adhere to.
In other words, as a greater percentage of women in total move into "girlboss"- type roles or become primary breadwinners, the percentage of women who are primarily homemakers is going to drop. Men will need to fill those roles.
And this is already a problem - women are more often breadwinners, but domestic labor has not fully shifted over to men at the same pace. In households with children, someone still has to do the unpaid labor: childcare, scheduling, cleaning, meals, logistics and in more cases, that will need to be men.
For girlboss + stay at home dad couples to work, you need more acceptance of men in nontraditional roles. For high-power couples where both mom and dad are boss types, not so much--there, it just needs to be workable to hire nannies and such.
My claim wasn't intended to be a mathematical equation. As a general principle, I don't think a successful society can be built where men and women are considered equals in terms of breadwinning and careers, but unequal in other areas that make societies work, like domestic labor and child rearing.
"A former stay-at-home mom can reenter the workforce," is true, but conditionally true. The 30 year old who decides to gear down has a lot more options than the 30 year old with 3 kids and no work experience. If tradwife is your jam, go for it, but leaving it will be hard if you change your mind.
The tradwife strategy is dubious if your man isn’t a solid provider. So if you are 30 and have 3 kids BUT have credentials and alimony (because you gave up several years of human capital building to be a SAHM) and child support, you could probably pull it off.
Obviously, girlbossing requires some combination of ability and luck, bossing cannot be a majority strategy.
My writing is better when it is edited and I’m not about to pay a copy editor to be on call for when I want to do an SB comment. If this were literature I would have pushed back against a lot of the prolixity, it could definitely still be improved. However, I managed to churn that out in 23 minutes in a Barcelona cafe by reading the article, telling claude my thoughts about it (which are 96% aligned in substance with the comment) but might piss people off with my tone and then approving Claude’s rewrite.
> These aren't competing visions of womanhood — they're different bets that make sense under different circumstances.
Once you read that, you start looking at the rest. Claude still likes em-dashes a lot. It also loves compound nouns hyphenated. That could be a user's stylistic choice, but most people don't bother to physically type "stay-at-home" and "21st-century" you would just type them with spaces.
"That's a much bigger claim than either side usually admits to making" was the part that made me go "wait a minute, that reads exactly like a Claude-ism."
Better formatted version of my comment. Not sure why we need to have this discussion at all! It's a free country. Women can be girlbosses or trad wives if they want to!
The non-dumb version of the arguments wrt sex roles has to do with a collective action problem. It's easier to be a SAHM in a neighborhood and comminity full of them than as the only one on your block. It's easier to be a career woman when that's a very common thing than when you're the only woman in your office.
The same is true for sexual mores--it's easier to hold out for a ring before having sex if most other women in your social class are doing the same, for example. Which gives some juice to the desire to tell everyone else how to live their lives, though I honestly think most of the drive to do that is just that it's fun telling people how to live their lives.
Female in female slut shaming is pretty clearly a form of erotic competition. If the bar for sexual access falls to low, the housewife strategy isn’t viable.
It works both directions, though. If you're a woman who wants to be sexually active/sleep around, that works out a lot better for you in a society where that's common and not anything that gets you turned into a pariah. There are multiple stable equilibria.
Yeah and I guess my response to that would be that culture develops in all sorts of unpredictable ways and I don't think I know the exact right percentage of women who should be working vs being stay at home moms. Like I take your point that a society in which 80% of women would truly rather work than stay at home would probably result in 85% or so working, and visa versa if society were the other way around. I just have no idea what those numbers SHOULD be and it's dubious at best to try to generate government policy around these assumptions.
I agreed with all of this. I would just note that a lot of couples feel like the wife has to work. Because there's no other way to make the numbers work. Even if they might like the wife to stay at home. Especially for the first couple years
I would also say there should be an want for the idea of stay at home dad’s being socially acceptable and respectable. I believe feminism should go both ways
Something that is often underrated in this discourse is that millennial husbands absolutely want an income earning wife -- or at least all the ones I know do. Who wants the pressure of being a single income household?
This is often framed as a woman's choice, and it is, but it's also a couple's choice. More and more couples are choosing to forego the additional flexibility of a SAHP in exchange for a higher living standard and income predictability.
I simply don’t have any male friends or acquaintances who have said they are looking for a stay at home wife.
Dropping an edit on this comment: I'm not at all denigrating stay at home moms or dads, I have many friends, relatives, etc. who stay at home to take care of their kids. Perfectly respectable thing to do and also, what do I know, I have no kids and couldn't imagine the responsibility it entails. Just noting that in my social group, I haven't met anyone who has said this.
It changed once you have kids but that is due to time demands. Most people now don’t want to marry someone who’s goal is to be a homemaker before you have that tradeoffs discussion.
It's very difficult to have two high-powered careers with little kids. Especially careers that require a ton of travel, as a depressing number do. That's what I saw as I watched my friends make their life decisions -- who's going to cancel the critical trip to China to evaluate a new vendor when the kid has a cold and daycare won't take him? It's always Mom. And eventually Mom just drops back career-wise. And is often very resentful.
SURELY some of you guys have seen this with your own eyes?
Where I've seen it happen it's usually less who is foregoing the trip to China and more 'we both work meh 9-5s and daycare costs completely subsume one person's earnings.' Mom fully or partially steps out of the work force for a few years then struggles to make up for the opportunity cost.
I also think there's a bunch of other conflicting and maybe not always clearly stated preferences in the mix but ymmv. This entire exchange is about a particular class cohort, with things murkier further down. Lots of women never leave the work force for any extended period of time because they can't and the low level service jobs they're working are not what we'd normally think of as a career.
Among the many struggles of modern dating is that people tend to date people like them when people who have "high-powered" careers (what a weird construction) date each other, which is a dreadful idea if you want kids. Girlbosses who want kids should marry people who have more flexible and/or less ambitious careers.
One of my close friends met her husband at an elite consulting firm. They're divorcing and he's pushing hard for equal custody. As she put it, he's about to discover the prize for the milkshake drinking contest is another milkshake. He's never done any of the parenting labor and is about to find out what it means to do the unfun stuff 3-4 days a week.
It just isn’t always the woman. My wife earns more than me (our choice) and I’m delighted with that. While that way round is clearly very much a minority of couples, I’m far from the only man I know in that position. (I can think of 3 or 4 other couples friends in the same position as us.)
Occasionally I read articles in the left-wing press (generally The Guardian) about how much men hate their partners earning more than them. I absolutely LOVE my wife earning more than me!
I have to imagine this happens, but I'm also seeing (among urban, professional young Millenial/older Gen Z peers) that every couple having kids tries to fit 1-2 of them in between about the ages of 37 and 41--perhaps to avoid this tradeoff and get both partners to the VP-ish level before kids. So I'm mostly not seeing it...yet. Perhaps the career implications are different when this hits at age 43 instead of 30?
I’m in this boat and it’s hard but workable between taking turns being a single parent while the other travels and hiring help. Does make me think about some benefits of a stay-at-home partner but on the other hand I’d be afraid you’d not have much to talk about after a while because so much of life happens at work.
Most of my wife's workday is just as mundane as mine, even though she runs her practice. You talk about your day because it's how you process it, not because it's that inherently interesting.
If all you give yourself is work, than that is where life will happen by default. Having someone who is planning the home, though, should also include making home more of your life.
You will get fewer after work drinks with the colleagues; but you will get far more meals with the family.
lol…some of these comments are so weird. Imagine saying something that condescending (I wonder what we would talk about) about a woman or man working in a specific profession especially if it was poorly paid.
I never have issues coming up with things to talk about with my SAHM wife because I love her and have always found most of what she says to be interesting and pretend other things are interesting because I love her and it would be rude and selfish to portend otherwise just as she does with me.
I've seen some of this, though usually it's not nearly that explicit as the folks I know all have family nearby, so the answer to that problem is 'grandparents'.
As someone who was a SAHD, yes the societal pressure and default thinking does make the other choice, dad drops back, more challenging. The couple figuring out how to successfully push back against those forces is the secret sauce that's so hard to find.
My only advice is that you have to set the tone early that these burdens have to fall equally. If it's mom that's skipping the trip twice in a row you're already in trouble.
It's not ALWAYS mom, although more often it is. I live near DC, and I know a lot of fathers - including myself - who have some flexibility in our work schedules and can handle some of the family emergencies.
Back in my dating days if a woman had said "I'm looking for a provider that allows me to be a SAHW" I would have told her we're not compatible and good luck on her search.
Ironically I'd be more open to that idea now that I'm in my mid 30s and have a salary that could, with some trade offs, sustain a small family. But I had no way of knowing that in my 20s. Maybe the women that want that should look for age gap relationships.
Yup, the former tends to be an extremely ideological commitment, whereas the latter ranges from some form of ideological to pragmatic. Most SAHMs I know, including the very religious ones, worked outside the home until kids and plan to do so again once childcare demands permit.
Or maybe men especially but also society as a whole needs to change how it thinks about being a SAHP. In my 20s I probably mostly though about how it meant someone was not ambitious was maybe not that smart and how that would be a bunch of pressure on me and maybe mean I can’t afford that lake house. Instead maybe we should focus on how it often means someone who is loving, empathetic, and unselfish. And that maybe having a partner who is those things is a better predictor of happiness than a lake house.
Maybe more 20 year olds should realize that not having a strong salary in your 20s is very normal? They literally write songs about that sort of thing. :D
I think there is some sort of trad movement where that may be true but I’m pretty skeptical that there are many parents telling their daughters to go this route.
I think phrased the way you wrote it would be off putting, but I had this discussion with my now husband when we were dating in our early twenties. Essentially my view was that family is incredibly important to me and the early childhood years are incredibly important developmentally as well as incredibly fleeting and I wasn’t going to marry anyone who wasn’t open to me staying home with our kids while they were young, in part because it would reflect a different prioritization (money over family). Obviously we would assess in the context of our broader finances and not make a decision we couldn’t afford but I didn’t want to be with someone who prioritized the lake house over the focus on raising our children.
Ironically, I’m still working (by my own choice) and soon to welcome #3
That just means you have a homogeneous group of acquaintances.
In 2017 surveys showed large percentages of American men wanted a stay at home wife and over 40 years the numbers have varied somewhat but not THAT much.
Also, every single CxO I've ever known has a stay at home spouse, regardless of their gender, especially if the kids aren't teenagers yet.
At a certain point the marginal value of the dollar is not worth the time tradeoff. It makes sense that highly successful people would be coupled with a SAHP. But most of us are not highly successful.
I was a SAHP for about two years. Family stress levels unrelated to finances are lower with a SAHP. Unfortunately, many women of my generation, Gen X, saw women the generation above us struggle mightily to get back into the workforce and/or have lots of financial troubles after divorce. This is another reason why lots of mothers work when their family isn't getting much more than they would after paying for day care. These are not as much of a worry if you are married to a CxO.
I read some analysis once (admittedly by some relatively progressive think-tank) that stay at home parents dramatically underestimate how much staying out of the workforce costs due to foregone raises, 401k matching, earnings on retirement contributions, increased Social Security payments, etc.
From memory they found that the multiplier was around 3x. That is, if your take home pay was $3,000 a month then your actual long term earnings were closer to $9,000 a month and that was the number you needed to measure against daycare costs because that's how much you'd be giving up by dropping out of the workforce.
Yea in particular if you're upwardly mobile I think the long term case for sucking up the daycare costs even at a temporary net loss to the household for a few years is overwhelmingly strong.
But what's it like for two non college educated people in low skill service sector jobs? We talk about this like it's all college educated, career oriented DINK's debating whether to take the plunge, probably because those are the people who publish their perspectives but there's a much bigger world out there.
I don’t necessarily think that it’s explicitly related to the value / time tradeoff, unless that only kicks in $10m+. I know plenty of investment banker couples, lawyer couples, IB-lawyer couples where both pull low to mid seven figures.
There might be something about the CEO position or managerial positions more generally versus finance/law/professional services? the personality it attracts?
It probably has a lot to do with people marrying within the same class these days. The doctor/nurse and executive/secretary pairings are a lot more rare these days. If one of you is clearly bringing less and has a class identity less tied to the occupation I could see them choosing to stay home more.
Not sure if Ben intended his sentence to mean this but it seems wrongheaded to decide for or against dating a SAHP. Dont get me wrong, I was the same way in my 20’s. In hindsight that’s a stupid way to go about finding a partner for a lot of people.
I had a long term relationship with a med school student and the plan was to not have kids. Anyway for a variety of reasons we broke up. In hindsight we both loved ourselves more than the other person which was the bigger problem than that we did or did not want a SAHP.
I then met my wife and loved her enough that I didn’t care whether she wanted to be a SAHM or not. Turned out she did but if she changed her mind tomorrow we would figure it a way to make that work because I love her and want her to be happy. I think the SAHP issue becomes a proxy for a lot of other things that aren’t really about wanting or not wanting a SAHP.
Right now I feel strongly like I don't want a SAHM wife but I totally get this. CHH had an article a while back arguing that high income men should be more open to letting their wives work and while I disagreed with it for my own life it starkly illustrated how much I actually liked women I had previously dated or been interested in.
For most I genuinely would have been unhappy with that arrangement.
One woman was actively gunning for that in retrospect and I felt like I dodged a bullet there.
And of course there were I couple where I would have been willing to make it work.
Younger millennial man here, but I’m totally open to—with maybe a slight preference for—my wife to stay at home or work part time/do something creative (if that’s what she wants). Obviously dependent on my income, though.
Also, worth noting, I know that’s a semi conservative-coded take, but i’m well to the left of the median slow borer. I think the key is I would never *impose* my SAH preference, but would be pleased if that’s how it shakes out
I'm an elder millennial and also never had friends verbalize a desire for finding a future SAHM partner BUT there are revealed preferences. Anyone who's dating history has a high income skew is likely preferencing future SAHM flexibility.
Yeah. Men of my grandfather’s generation were harshly judged by their peers if their wives worked. My grandmother always wanted to work but my grandfather would never let her because it would have affronted his pride. Men aren’t like this now, at all.
If you change the framing so that the partner is able to stay home, you would probably see an uptick in acquaintances that feel that way. Women included.
I don't think we all, necessarily, want the same things. But it should not be surprising that a lot of us want fame/influence/control/power/whatever enough that we could support having all of the house work done for us.
Similarly, I don't know that anyone would object to having a partner that supported them in this. Largely, this will require the funds or other perks that allow building of hobbies and other interests.
The Dutch have crafted an interesting arrangement. Non-menial part time jobs are common. Most women, and a strong majority of Dutch mothers, work 20-30 hours a week. This is one reason Dutch per capita GDP is materially lower than in Sweden or Denmark. But it’s still quite high and the netherlands are a chill, happy place.
Politics should maximize life choices not impose life scripts.
I think that's a huge, underdiscussed problem with our labor market - regulations and incentives make the prospects for decent 20-30-hour-a-week jobs dismally small.
I am lucky to have a 30 hour a week flexible professional job. It is truly the best of both worlds, and was a Godsend when my kids were younger. It is a big reason I have stayed at the same place even though my salary has not kept up with inflation.
I got lucky, too, with a similar situation. Status is a 1099 independent contractor, which has its upsides and downsides, but overall, I'm thankful to have the flexibility, even as my effective pay is also decreasing.
In the health care space there are probably more of those options now than ever. My wife works 10 hours a week for a telehealth company while we have young kids so she doesn’t have a gap in her resume, maintains her professional expertise and she likes having something more intellectual to ally stimulating than playing with our kids.
Like a lot of women (according to surveys I've seen), I would prefer half- or three-quarters-time work if I could get half- or three-quarters-time pay for it. But that's not a commonly available option in my field.
I'm Gen X, and that's also true of most of my peers I know, although I do realize it's a less common attitude than among millennials.
A big challenge, though, is when kids enter the picture, especially multiple kids. It's really difficult for it not to impact at least one person's career unless you're a high income family that can hire a nanny.
My wife and I have three kids, and we decided relatively early that she had the better long-term career (with her doctorate in nuclear engineering) and that I would be the one primarily responsible for the kids. This meant that I was mostly an at-home Dad for several years, then transitioned to a flexible job where I could take care of appointments, handle sick days when child care wasn't available, and handle all the other stuff that comes up. Usually, that falls to the mother. And I can say with some direct experience that filling that role as the one primarily responsible for the kids will have a negative effect on a career, regardless of gender.
My younger brother is like you, his wife for many years had the higher earning 40+ hour career while he worked part time and took the kids to school, doctor appointments, etc. But now that his kids have gotten older he got a new job, is up for a managerial promotion while she has taken a step back in her career because of the stress.
Yeah I think maybe the problem with the girlboss narrative is that it assumes that people really want to be working all the time but as I get into my late 40s I’d really rather be spending more time with my kids and getting into shape. I wonder how many women went all in on their careers in their 30s and get into their 40s/50s and just discover they hate it? In the olden days this was well understood _for men_, think of movies where the cold-hearted career man learns about the importance of family. What is needed to temper girlboss feminism is an understanding that not everyone has or wants a world-striding career (I feel like we’ve mostly ended up in the right spot after the backlash?)
I've known a "girlboss" woman, who was literally my boss at the time, therefore you could say she was my actual girlboss - though I would never call her a "girl" since she was a 40 year old woman - but I digress.
What she told me was that she thought getting married, having children, and even staying home is a valid decision for any woman to make - but she would never do it because she has no particular urge to be a mother and she's never met a man that she liked enough to actually marry.
She wasn't my favorite person, but I admired her honesty with herself, and fully agree that her life is hers to live how she wants. If you don't want to be a mother then you would probably make an awful one.
On another note, I wonder how many MEN get into their 40's or 50's and discover that they hate their career?
I would much rather be home right now doing whatever I want.....instead of pretending to work....just kidding, this is just a short substack break.....I promise....
An aspect you are also leaving out, is that when kids enter into it, it is not at all uncommon for folks to realize all those songs about how work sucks didn't spring out of a void.
If you could choose to be a stay at home parent versus whatever day job you had, picking the family is a lot easier of a choice once you have it.
That’s true to an extent. But having lived it, there are always some big tradeoffs. I tend to think it’s harder for men to do, at least in terms of psychology and personal identity.
There are always tradeoffs. Used to be, the biggest tradeoff in favor of work was the access to the things that only businesses could afford.
That would have included travel, as it isn't like most of us can afford to travel as much as many corporations can support. There is a reason it is called "business class" on flights.
But I challenge that it is any harder for men, socially speaking. There is, of course, a natural forcing function to get women to stay home after child birth. If only for recovery.
But there are similar societal functions that try convince men and women to be in the workforce. And that is not new.
I will say that even if one can hire a nanny as my financial HQ nuclear family lucked out with, it has real stresses. Unless one is totally victorian in attitudes, one feels guilty....
One shouldn't feel guilty for paying for help. If anyone is treating the help as less than themselves, that is not because they are paying them for help. They have an unhealthy relationship with worth and work.
This goes outside in home paid help. We should treat every clerk, janitor, and teller with dignity, already.
That is not the read I got from that. Victorian attitudes is far more likely a reference to social hierarchies than it is to not being with your family
Victorian attitudes reference was to a specific Victorian habit of what was my paternal family's class of packing off the brats to boarding school or similar. Perhaps an overly specific reference, but mathew got me well enough
Yeah it's like, I used to hear dudes be like “women just want your money” and I'd be like, dude you don't make shit what are you talking about. You can't complain that women want a financially stable man but also not want her to work.
I mean my wife doesn’t work and stays at home with the kids - We are liberal and don’t even think about it being conservative-coded. But I don’t think of it as being a good or bad thing. It’s just what works for us.
When I was in highschool all the boys wanted the same lifestyle that the history teacher had. His wife was an executive at a financial company while he got to teach about every middle aged man's favorite subject: American history. They had a beautiful house and an in ground pool and he got to enjoy it the 3 months out of the year when you could while she worked. Something to aspire to really.
Even when the family can live on the breadwinner’s sole income, that income is often precarious because we’ve wrongly decided as a society that dynamism trumps job security. You need the spouse to work to take over if and when the breadwinner loses their job.
Yet another reason for YIMBYism and eliminating property tax subsidies for retirees: it would be great for desirable housing to be affordable on a single income.
Feminism without anti capitalism is good! My mom was an early girl boss of the Boomer generation (why MY wants to totally kick us Catholics out of the coalition I don't understand, given that we remain an important swing demographic but that's another issue). She kicks butt, as do a lot of the girl boss type attorneys I work with, particularly the Xers. A lot of them are the A+ students who do the right thing, the right way, all of the time.
However I want to throw a little wrench and suggest a counter, because I think this piece kind of dodges the gripe, which is feminism high out of its mind on intersectionality is in fact bad.
What's the latter? I'd say it boils down to something like a philosophy of 'girl boss when I win, victim of structural oppression when I lose.' This is the source of the friction, all across the spectrum, from complaints about corporate or academic culture to inane battles over movies, TV shows, and video games. It's at its worst when it runs into various class conflicts, and in particular where working class men are expected to nod along about the supposed marginalization of upper middle class or above women who are self evidently better off than they are, and who, if they ever have objectively experienced any kind of sexism, are clearly no worse for wear for it.
Does this suggest the need for a reversion to some kind of trad fad? Not remotely. But I would say a more self aware feminism that's comfortable with its achievements, and that not all of the ups and downs of life are the result of some pernicious patriarchal abstraction would be more durable. Focus instead on highly specific areas around reproduction, healthcare, and maternity accomodations, sans all the academic deconstruction. I daresay it would have a lot more currency than whatever was going on the last 15 years.
I don't think he's saying he wants to kick Catholics out of the Democratic coalition, but it's pretty clear that affluent Catholics have left it. Very good point in the "heads I win tails I'm oppressed" dynamic that was frustrating in 2010s girlboss-ism.
>...but it's pretty clear that affluent Catholics have left it.<
This comment of yours read a bit of an overreach to my eyes, so I took the liberty of running it past Claude. Claude's response:
"Several things complicate the "affluent Catholics have left" framing specifically:
The class gradient among white Catholics isn't as clean as among white Protestants. Among white Protestants, the affluent-Republican alignment is very strong. Among white Catholics, the relationship is murkier — working-class white Catholics (the Reagan Democrat type) have actually shifted Republican quite dramatically, while the professional/educated Catholic cohort in the Northeast has been more sticky Democratic.
Geography matters enormously. Your instinct about NY and MA is sound. Affluent Irish and Italian Catholic professionals in Boston suburbs, Westchester, Long Island's North Shore, Connecticut — this is still a significant Democratic constituency, not a vanished one. The "Catholic suburb = Republican" pattern is much more pronounced in the Midwest (think DuPage County, IL history) and the Sun Belt than in the Northeast.
Gender: Catholic women are meaningfully more Democratic than Catholic men, and that includes educated/affluent Catholic women, which further undercuts a clean "affluent Catholics have left" narrative.
The bottom line: The more precise and defensible claim would be: white Catholic voters broadly, and especially working-class white Catholics outside the Northeast, have moved heavily toward the GOP over the past 40-50 years. The specific "affluent" framing is where it gets slippery — it may reflect a conflation with the broader pattern of college-educated white professionals (where Democrats have actually made gains recently, including among Catholics) versus non-college whites (where Republicans have dominated).
Your NY/MA intuition isn't wrong. Those states' Democratic margins are built on a coalition that includes a meaningful chunk of affluent Catholics alongside Jewish voters, Black voters, Hispanic voters, and secular liberals. The Democratic Party hasn't been abandoned by affluent northeastern Catholics — it's more that its Catholic base has shifted in composition and geography than that it's been wholesale deserted."
Take that for what it's worth, and, as Claude's response suggests, I was wondering about the situation in states like Massachusetts and NY (and sure, different prompts might garner different emphases). Anyway, my takeaway is *working class* white Catholics have indeed been trending GOP (for years!) but the trend among "affluent" Catholics is more complex.
Yes. I really wish people didn't do this! You can speak in your own voice! When I'm on SB, I want to believe I'm interacting with real human beings, not LLMs.
If you want to use Claude or whatever to research a topic, cool, but then why not summarize the findings in your own words?
The zero sum treatment of the success of women vs men in the discourse didn’t help feminism. The idea that people like Richard Reeves (or the researchers he cite) highlighting issues particular to men comes at the expense of women is something really pernicious.
"to inane battles over movies, TV shows, and video games."
You lost me over this. The inane battles over video games were to have women characters who were there just to be sex objects. Talking about that in a gentle manner lead to death threats, stalking, etc. Video games changed to be more embracing of a much larger audience of potential players (a win for game companies!), but the backlash was horrific.
I don't expect to convert anyone to my worldview but I would consider whether there are in fact any objective stakes in those kinds of flare-ups. I do not believe there are, and that endlessly LARPing as though there might be has been really bad for the epistemology of the participants.
I’m genuinely curious you don’t think there is real life stakes if women express banal preferences like I’d like there to be lady characters in this game that I’d like and therefore receive death threats.
Like when I grew up the kind of feminism I experienced was girls can be anything but there was a weird but not a nerd applied in a lot of the subcultures I was part of. That seems like a big deal. The whole thing seems like a bad deal for everyone involved.
I think the issue with this line of argument is yes death threats are really bad and no one wants them, but unfortunately in this world, you can kinda do anything and get death threats. So being like “wow isn’t it bad that they did XYZ thing and got DEATH THREATS” doesn’t actually prove your point. I’m sure lots of trad wives get death threats for posting content on how to fold laundry or whatever. So yes, I agree women should not get death threats for mentioning it would be nice to have women in video games, but I don’t think that the fact that they got death threats somehow makes the thing they were arguing for more worthy.
I did not mean it literally, obviously everyone screws up and has personal failings, women too. It was a tongue in cheek intentional overstatement to say these are among the most competent people I've worked with. Yeesh.
What seemed bad about the end of girlboss feminism was not just that it ended, but what replaced it. “My feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit” too often turned into a politics where feminism no longer meant advocating for women as such. It meant folding women’s issues into a larger progressive omnicause: anti-racism, climate politics, socialism, anti-Zionism, trans rights, and so on.
None of that is to say those causes are necessarily bad (though I have my criticisms of some). The problem is that once feminism became just one node in a total moral framework, it often stopped being willing to defend women’s interests when they conflicted with other priorities. At that point, it wasn’t really feminism anymore.
And that’s how you get absurdities like Lindy West, of all people, being talked into letting her husband cheat on her in the name of not being racist.
There was a period in 2020 where it was common to hear that feminism’s top issue was the police killing of black men. Several people told me that white women were more immediately dangerous to black womrn tha. Black men. This is obviously nuts but it is very common to hear that the top priority of feminism is some issue that is not specific to women but is the cause of th moment for the very left. It’s quite demoralizing that feminism gets asked to deprioritize the cause of women’s rights in favor of the left’s latest cause
If you spend enough time (which isn't very much) on social media and haven't heavily curated who you follow, you'll get barraged by the most extreme takes because that's what the algorithms drive.
But the "omni-issue" is a lot more defensible than it's credited for here. Police violence impacts women, and especially women of color and other vulnerable women. Queer issues impact women. Racial injustice impacts women. Economic issues impact women. A feminism that engages in "women's issues" is going to be something shallow that prioritizes the most advantaged women over the needs of most women. Maybe your unmet political needs fit entirely into the realm of gender, but that would make you a small minority.
Be that as it may (and I think at least parts of that are actually dead wrong and indeed feminism if taken seriously is often at odds with several of the things you said). But even asuming arguendo the truth of your points, you can't understand things like the animosity of some Black activists to "white feminism" without understanding there are historically grounded stereotypes of white women that go back 165 years or more. (That number, 165, is chosen deliberately.) As well as things that arise out of issues such as the feelings of Black women towards white women who date Black men (if you want some in depth information about this, take a look at the attitudes that Black women in LA had about Nicole Simpson after her murder, which were widely documented).
The point being, race and gender are complicated, they involve deep cultural issues and even historical animosities, and the sort of intersectional happy talk that lefty activists and academics traffic in has very little relationship with the realities of why things are the way they are or what the actual issues here are.
EDIT: one other point, specifically tagging onto myrna loy's comment-- there's also a long, sorry history of the male controlled left constantly shelving and subordinating feminist concerns. For example, basically the entire feminist critique of the surrogacy industry has been completely memory holed because it is inconvenient to gay and trans people who want to have children. Similarly when the "Karen" discourse happened, basically feminists weren't listened to at all as the Left just teed off on women with some really ugly stereotypes. And it's possible to view a lot of what you are saying as an extension of that-- a sort of "what feminists really need to do is not defend the interests of women but instead defend all these other groups in the Left coalition".
None of what I stated was in opposition to your points. Feminism and Black social justice have not always been good partners and have at times embodied all of the prejudice towards the other that society as a whole did. Which is also why "omni-issue" social justice is important. Put each interest group in a silo and they can reinforce the problems of the other interest groups. There's a reason divide and conquer is an effective strategy.
Omni issue social justice is really bad for feminism. Because in practice it means "feminists should subordinate concerns about women to other things", when in fact a central tenet of feminism is not subordinating concerns about women to other things.
Women are a massive part of the Democratic coalition. Instead of asking women to subordinate their concerns, perhaps other groups need to subordinate their concerns and accommodate feminist concerns. (E.g., specifically, the "Karen" discourse should have never happened. It didn't advance the interests of people of color at all; it was just the Left deciding to be sexists.)
It is not subordinating concerns about women to care about other things that impact women. Perhaps you haven't noticed this, but people of color are half women. Issues that impact people of color impact women! Queer people include a lot of women! Economics impact all of the population, not just men!
"Omni issue" social justice allows us to identify when championing one set of interests impacts other sets of interest. Does that mean it's perfect? No. But as we have both pointed out, siloed interests have frequently replicated the biases that exist in general population.
I think the problem that you're identifying as omni interest is actually the weird and unfortunate tendency the left went through was taking all of those interconnected issues and then dividing them by making a hierarchy of who is most disadvantaged and according moral value to being harmed. That is incredibly dysfunctional and harmful. Calling out people who are actively racist is not.*
*Note the internet is really good at getting very angry at people for very stupid things. Rather than blame one group or another, I point you to the algorithms that encourage that behavior.
It's true that saying "feminism's top issue is the police killing of black men" is not intersectional.
On the other hand, it is both fair and intersectional to observe that the partners and potential partners of black men (mostly, though not entirely, black women) are dealing with some shit specifically as a result of police killing of black men, both economically and in terms of family formation.
To the extent that this is happening, and I leave to the audience their assessment of how accurate the claim that it is... is... that sentence got away from me a bit, didn't it... it is definitionally a failure of intersectionality, not a demonstration of it.
Which, fair enough, 90 percent of the people using the term intersectionality wouldn't understand the concept if it bit them in the ass, but I think the concept is a genuinely useful one that ought to be rescued from the ash heap of whatever passes for Xitter "history."
It wasn't how intersectionality was originally intended, but it's what it came to mean during the 2010s. There is a version of feminism that acknowledges that women deal with different issues depending on whether they are Black or white, Christian or Muslim, rich or poor, straight or gay, cis or trans, young or old, but still focused on the problems they face as women. There's another version where you decide that women are lower on the progressive stack than other identities, and so "feminism" becomes mostly about protesting Israel's war in Gaza.
You really see this in the dismissive way a lot of progressive, college-educated Millennials and GenZ refer to and stereotype "white women." They would be appalled if I ever spoke about Asian-American, Black or Latina women in the same tone. It's the definition of misogyny and reflects the lack of self-awareness a lot of progressives demonstrate.
"Karen" started out as a somewhat real archetype of problem customer retail workers often face and ended as a way for progressive people to call women with forceful personalities "bitch".
That's so true of so many concepts that start with people thoughtfully grappling with nuances and then people who don't understand the nuances (or aren't interested in them) bring a crude version of the concept to social media and it jumps the shark.
The really frustrating thing with some of these recent concepts, like structural racism, intersectionality, and microaggression, is that the thing they came to mean in the popular discourse was precisely the problematic concept they were supposed to destroy!
The ideas of linear comparison, and attributing everything to bad intentions, are just too strong for people to accept concepts that reject them.
Not Kenny, but "structural racism" is a really easy example of this, because conceptually it is about how a system with zero conscious bigotry on the part of anyone can produce structurally unequal (dramatically unequal, even) results that hamstring the opportunities of racial minorities. And then on Twitter it became the claim that any time there are structurally unequal results that means that everyone involved in the society that produces those results is secretly a Klansman.
That claim is not just inconsistent with the original analysis, it directly contradicts it.
Consider structural racism. As Matt wrote once, Beverly Hills is structural racism -- it was created as part of an effort to structure society in a way that advantages white people. But "we should end structural racism" does not currently mean anything like "we should annex the suburbs and urban enclaves" or similarly general structural reform.
“Intersectionality” is the idea that the social issues facing a white man or a black woman aren’t just the social issues facing a white person plus those facing a man, or the social issues facing a black person plus those facing a woman, but rather that there are often distinctive social issues facing these intersections. Furthermore, not every social issue facing white people or men is an advantage, and not every social issue facing black people or women is a disadvantage. For instance, men are seen as more aggressive than women, which is often a disadvantage, and for black men in particular, this interacts with their race to produce a distinctive social difficulty compared to black women.
“Microaggression” was just a poorly chosen term for the kind of innocent behavior that, if it happened once is easy to ignore, but gets frustrating when repeated by different people - the classic example is an Asian American being asked “where are you from”, and when they say “New Jersey”, being asked “I mean, where are you really from?”, or a black person being asked “can I feel your hair?” Obviously, the person asking in either case doesn’t mean anything harmful, but there’s a kind of frustration one develops at being asked these personal things so frequently.
The concept of "intersectionality" seems so obviously correct that making up a word for it somehow obscured the meaning...I don't know that I've ever once seen it deployed in the wild as part of actual intersectional analysis. If anything, it's usually used to do something like the opposite thing in practice.
Taken seriously, intersectionality simply reduces to individualism. Which is great, except a) it's not new and b) people who want intersectionality to matter want it to be something else. That they can't actually make sensible, because it isn't.
This is sort of true in the same sense that if you chop the area under a mathematical curve into a hypothetical infinite number of rectangular boxes the area of those boxes converges into the actual area under the curve. The closer you get to boxes of infinite thinness the better the estimate gets.
But since we're living in reality and not magic calculus-land there is actually a limit to the number of boxes we can chop, and also it makes a really big difference to use even two or three boxes instead of just slapping one rectangle over the top of the curve and calling it close enough for government work.
What's funny about this is that of course calculus absolutely does allow you to calculate the area under an arbitrary curve precisely. In fact it allows you to calculate the volume of arbitrary 3d objects, and so on into theoretical dimensions.
It's far more useful in practice then the thought experiment of trying to cut up shapes. And yes, i do have a phd in a subject that uses math hehe.
Well, it's an analogy that doesn't work, to make a point that individualism is "one big block". Sure, that's true in the sense that it's true that everything is made of atoms. Both true, and doesn't have the native implications you seemingly believe it does.
If you wanted to be serious you could say that liberals like me believe both in a few universal human commonalities, and a nearly endless amount of individual variation. Whereas identitarians believe that ethnic differences are important markers of individuals that are poorly handled under individualism. *shrug*
The version I heard was that her husband told her that they needed to be in an open relationship because monogamy is like owning people and, therefore, like slavery.
I also did not read the book, but I feel like I've read and listened to a book's worth of podcast/substack/twitter commentary on it.
"...monogamy is like owning people and, therefore, like slavery". In my grouchier moments I read things like that and think post-2014 Progressivism is basically about destroying civilization.
I have never had a conversation with a black person (and I used to work at a Predominantly Black Institution in Jackson, MS on a DoE equity grant) that expressed anything like this idea. West coast white people are truly a whole other thing. I am extremely progressive about redistributive economics and everybody's right to dignity. I had hopes for reparations because of my own family's role in making them necessary. I have had interracial relationships myself. What the hell women 10 years my junior are getting up to in the discourse is not something I can explain.
My takeaway is that *a lot* of younger left-leaning men are poly. And sleazy guys use race-baiting and other deceptive talking points ("I'm trying to not control you") when they want to smash.
it could be the case that the book is actually a novel and has no content about her marriage at all and no one would actually know, because no one has read it, they've just consumed Discourse
"He believed monogamy was, at its root, a system of ownership. I had to admit that perhaps I didn't feel it as keenly, as a white person. Did I colonize Aham to try to fill my disembodied void?"
Practical workplace intersectionality was (is?) tied into the idea that hostility and yelling can magically change society so that all the structural inequities will go away in the blink of an eye because of course everyone will automatically comply with the new rules once they've been properly reprimanded.
The more effective way to thread one's way through these social issues as an individual is to understand them to the extent that you can respond to and counteract them while still pursuing the life you want. In the workforce that means learning who you are, how to be yourself, and how to moderate your behavior in ways that make you a better colleague and boss. This is pretty much true for anyone, isn't it? Perhaps younger women were persuaded to repress this stage of development in favor of "celebrating" victimhood. Too much victimization leads away from personal agency and growth.
(Alas, these observations are probably obsolete in an economy where opportunities for beginning a professional career or even getting a decent job are quickly disappearing. Women may have to go back to the tricks the "obscure" (!) silent generation learned during the depression about feeding and clothing families for pennies.)
One of the most amusing things about the whole #girlboss chapter in history is that when a business would be aggressively marketed as being feminist and women-led, there would always and inevitably be an internal racial uproar that would throw the whole company into chaos.
generally if you lean too hard on "we are the progressive Good Guys" (or gals, as it may be) you are always vulnerable to an identity-based revolt. even anarchist bookstores run by 100% people of color will manage to have this over not enough people being queer or disabled or something.
Treating authoritarian patriarchal autocracies as having greater “feminist” achievements over western liberalism is complete historical revisionism. It’s the type of nonsense that really undermines (legitimate) critiques of our current societal failures from these people.
It's amazing how far the Soviets got with blatantly lying. You could actually visit the Soviet Union in the 80s, it was obviously a desperately poor, misogynistic and colonial society, and here we are almost 40 years later trying to point out that just because they said they weren't, doesn't mean that they weren't.
Here is a fun (or "fun") fact. The Soviet Union made a big damn deal about flying the first woman in space, and indeed, Valentina Tereshkova beat Sally Ride to space by a full twenty years. Make glorious propaganda victory for the grandeur of the motherland, Comrade!
But you look at any of the modern NASA astronaut classes, and they're close enough to 50/50 if you squint (maybe 60/40, I'm not aiming for extreme precision here). Last I checked in detail a couple of years ago, do you know how many female cosmonauts have flown in the entire history of the Soviet/Russian space program? Five. The second of those (Svetlana Savitskaya, who beat Ride by only a year) was, upon her arrival at Salyut 7, presented with an apron.
I am pretty sure this entire thing originates from the often-discussed finding that women in East Germany reported higher sexual satisfaction than women in West Germany. which, AFAIK, is real, but ironically is largely because East German women were girlbossing! (i.e., in the period discussed, it was still relatively abnormal for West German women to be able to support themselves financially, while East German women were much more likely to have good jobs, and thus the West German women were more likely to be stuck in bad marriages).
eta: also, as always with retroactive defenses of the USSR, it always somehow ends up centering on East Germany which was very unlike the USSR in that it was much more interested in delivering consumer goods than building heavy industry for military readiness
East Germany was also massively subsidized by the USSR, the Soviets' colonial empire also drained the coffers of the metropole while providing marginal benefit. Stalin really wasn't great at grand strategy!
I think for a lot of Western feminists, capitalism is "the devil you know". It's very, very easy to talk yourself into "it can't get any worse than this".
Not a lot of former Jezebel readers in this comments section?
What almost instantly turned off so many gen x and millennial feminists about girlbossing is the fact that, once you have elite money and power, what you actually do with that money and power fast becomes more important than your gender while wielding it.
Meta is a company that has developed and scaled genuinely harmful products—harms that fall with a particular weight on teen girls—and Sheryl Sandberg’s carelessness in that whole enterprise is the most salient fact about her career, not whatever glass ceiling she broke.
Anti-feminists conservatives noticed this as well, so we got to enjoy all kinds of takes about how strong criticism of Sarah Huckabee Sanders was “a classic case of women failing to support other women.”
But when you start wielding power, the spiderman principle kicks in and you have to answer for what you are actually doing. That’s what it is to take each other seriously. That is part of equality also.
"When I was in college, I took a seminar taught by Ti-Grace Atkinson"
Goddammit, this is the main reason I'm jealous of people who went to Ivy League schools. You took classes from both Ti-Grace Atkinson and Susan Moller Okin (may she rest in peace, I loved her work so much). And Nozick! (Not a feminist icon, let me point out.) I read all their books but I would have loved to have taken their classes.
And for heaven's sake, if you took classes from Atkinson and Okin, then you could have articulated some of the distinctions between branches of feminism at bit better than you have here.
To be fair, taking one class from each of these people 25 years ago doesn’t always leave as lasting an impression as being engaged with their writings for a long time.
I don’t know if I’m particularly late-blooming or if Ivy high-achievers are particularly early-blooming, but I would not have appreciated any of that at the time I was 19. Decades later, though, I’d love to be able to do seminars with some of these people, ask questions, etc.
As a professor, I often feel that classes are wasted on the young. On many occasions I’ve gone back and re-read books for classes I took, or even just read textbooks for classes I never took, and found so many interesting connections and ideas I never would have when I was a student!
I get why Matt locks in on the "strays" in the argument, and I agree with him about the girl boss, but I would actually enjoy a take on sex positive millennial hook up culture feminism vs the resurgence of heterosexual sex is rape adjacent at best feminist prudishness and it's apparent hold on the youngs.
I think a generation that got bad at socializing because of a combination of the pandemic and living online sometimes tries to turn this into a "well, I didn't want a social life anyway! I hate people" flex as cope for loneliness. "Sex? I didn't want that anyway!" is a part of that.
this is definitely the case for the most psychotic takes you see online. i think people are underrating that the 1% of completely shut-in terminally online loners has expanded to be more like 5% or more of the current generation, which makes it seem like they're all crazy just because those are the ones Posting. in real life it's not nearly that bad, though I do think there's some underlying truth to the idea that young people are a little more sex-negative now than 10-15 years ago.
Never mind the Millennials with "social anxiety" who are still angry that COVID didn't end up being a permanent excuse to hide away forever. I think there is a lot of this kind of "the thing that is hard for me to get is stupid or irresponsible anyway" cope going around.
Is the last part of your sentence true for most youngs? I haven't seen this expressed in real life. Young people definitely have more trouble socializing these days, and perhaps lack of a social script is part of it. The young people I talk to (male and female) don't want a hook up culture - this might be partly due to the increase in the importance of looks, and they don't feel comfortable revealing their bodily flaws to someone they don't know well, coupled with fear because everyone has a camera and video recorder in their pocket - but that doesn't mean they feel that heterosexual sex is adjacent to rape outside of a small minority of people.
Basically, there appears to be a segment of neo-Dworkinite zoomer radical feminists doing purity culture, but from the left, but I think it's pretty exclusively an online phenomenon.
I tend to chalk it up to two things: 1) Early access to internet porn (without any context or previous sexual experience) creating an image of sex as inherently violent and coercive and 2) Covid upending traditional risk/reward calculations (also present among zoomers who are fervently anti-alcohol) - both of these tend to be particularly pronounced among the super online.
I would say, having overheard a few too many conversations between teenagers for my own sanity while being a coach/volunteer, that young women are generally more prudish now than they were when I was in school -- but also, this is not really a bad thing. As with all distributions, the far end gets dramatically larger even with a slight shift in the average in that direction.
I do not think that hookup culture served anyone well, and it's reasonable to want to go back to a norm of not having sex until you have been 'dating' for an extended period.
I hadn’t thought of Gen X as a particularly sex negative generation, but I suppose it’s true that they weren’t as sex positive as either the free loving boomers or the hookup culture millennials.
I would say we were sex-cautious when we were young because we were kids or young adults during the time of the AIDS crisis, which did make sex scary for very good reasons. We are not necessarily the same way now.
I recently read The Believers by Rebecca Makkai, which reminded me about a lot of things I had pushed out of my head about that time period.
This is downstream of safetyism and shrinking gender wage gaps. If you are a woman and you don’t need a man for economic reasons, why not be very careful with your heart? You’ll have options til pretty late in the game— if you even want them.
I feel like the gender wage gap take is presupposing sex-negative assumptions. Why wouldn't the sexual optionality provided by liberation from single male bread-winner dependency be expected to expand the scope of female sexual expression?
I think the safety-ism is more at the heart of it. Of course people who are threatened by everything are going to be more likely to embrace the sex-as-threat model.
Most women enjoy sex with highly desirable partners. Relatively few are able to keep said partners monogamously. Hookup culture has an element of aspirational hyperandry.
"But the practical endgame here is just the majority-male business class closing ranks with social conservatives to choke off any hint of progressivism. "
It's not the endgame. Business will shift with the political winds as it always has. The mistake progressives made is believing that the turn to accept progressive demands and values during the Great Awokening was inherently durable. Trump conservatives are making the same mistake.
So in a pure capitalist system, it would be OK to sell heroin or children or biological weapons.
Really anything that could be treated as a commodity.
But we don't, because we recognize that some values are worth more than just "facilitating a market"
In most other countries, "raising a family" is treated as worth a bit of labor friction and "misallocation" of labor.
Not the US.
It is astounding how many people forget how a lot of the nice things we have now vis a vis the basic functioning of the labor market are the result of the Cold War forcing the structures in the US to be nicer do as not to have propaganda to the Soviets.
Are all the nice things in other countries products of genuinely kinder, more caring, more responsible peoples and cultures or the direct result of cataclysms like World War 2 and centuries of class oppression? How many people in South Korea or Taiwan remember that their landowning class allowed fairly radical redistribution because they didn't want to give local Communists propaganda fooder? You're writing like a true American Exceptionalist.
In a pure socialist system it’s fine to work people to death in service of the state and break up families to raise children in crèches where they can be educated to their role in society. And feed them as much heroin as they demand.
The ills you’re railing against aren’t about capitalism.
"Norovirus is neoliberalism! Soccer is communism! I don't know what words mean!" It's so weird how descriptions of economic systems become about everything but econonmics.
Very true, but also, capitalism (or "late capitalism") getting blamed for stuff that would happen under any economy not run by a benevolent god appears to largely come out of the Great Recession, which coincided with the mass adoption of social media. A whole bunch of un/under-employed millennials who talk constantly on platforms engineered (by capitalists) to maximize emotionally charged content seems like a great way to create capitalism as the left's Satan.
They aren't just economic, they're cultural as well. The generation of material culture is economic, and the arrangement of production is going to reflect and create cultural values.
The question of how to handle economic and productive resources competing for cultural or family resources isn't unique to capitalism. Even a state controlled factory is going to have to address the loss of workers as they prioritize things besides economic production.
Agreed, but I guess my point is orthogonal to that. I just don’t think the word “capitalism” in general usage even refers to an economic paradigm at all. It is just, weirdly, shorthand for “the things about the world I find distasteful”.
I don't understand why people always bring this up.
What is so different about parenting in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, or Washington?
All of those places have mandatory parental leave. What specific empirical data are you saying says "parenting is soooo much better in these states"? If parenting is so much better, why aren't parents moving en-masse to these states?
The whole point of a Federal system of government is you don't get to whine about the lack of national policies and actually have to look at the state by state policies and outcomes and make your arguments based on that.
I don’t understand this argument. There’s a federal minimum wage, why can’t there be federal paid maternity leave?
The idea that federalism means you can’t whine about a lack of a standardized national policy is absurd — the federal government is obviously capable of setting a floor.
The argument is not that the federal government can’t do that. The argument is that if mandatory parental leave made such a huge difference, why don’t we see evidence that parenting is so much easier and better in states that have it?
Obviously if we’re talking about 12 or 16 weeks of paid leave it’s not going to make the entire job of parenting “so much easier and better” - but if you are in a bunch of parents groups on Facebook as I am you will hear a lot about how pleasant paid leave is vs either unpaid leave or having rush back to work.
The argument is, if you can't point to the benefits in California and New York then why should the federal government waste time and political capital implementing it?
The Federal minimum wage was implemented in 1938 when Democrats has overwhelming control and hasn't been changed since 2009 because few people think it is worth the political capital to bother trying.
The benefit is that parents don’t have to materially draw down their savings or rush back to work and can spend time with their newborns. I’m not sure what particular metric you’re hoping to measure, but to act like there is no benefit to parents bonding with their babies and women recovering postpartum is silly.
Okay then... What's so great about feminism in Japan or South Korea or Hungary or Romania or Greece...all places that have paid parental leave.
If it is such a silver bullet why do aren't those countries doing better?
For that matter, it isn't even like being a parent and/or feminist in France or Germany or the UK is somehow materially better. Their birthrates and women's workplace participation and number of female CEOs are all within the margin of error of the US.
There is zero evidence that paid parental leave is a significant contribution to any empirical metric.
This is frankly the biggest freakin' elephant in the "TFR/Family Size" debate that is resolutely ignored in my experience -- basically every progressive-coded solution that anyone proposes has already been implemented and often doubled or tripled down on by a few dozen other countries, for many years or even decades, and those countries almost all have lower TFRs than the U.S. (That does NOT mean conservative-coded solutions are necessarily correct, but it does make it pretty obvious that goal is just to use concerns about TFR to push progressive policy objectives, not to actually fix the problem. See also the Green New Deal and several other things supposedly intended to address various crises that would similarly be expected from the objective historical record to have little to no effect on the subject matter.)
Progressive policy objectives are the most important thing, it’s true, and yes, the end of a cradle to grave, full economic security for everyone welfare state justifies basically any means in my view
Not to mention the family support system is likelier to be in the state of origin, and that’s going to trump a few months of paid parental leave any time
I'm pretty sure parents in all these states you listed appreciate the availability of parental leave! My son was born in Massachusetts and my daughter in California, and I sure as heck appreciated being able to take two months off after giving birth each time! Childbirth + sleep deprivation = majorly unfun times, despite all the joy a new baby brings.
As for "well then why don't all parents move to these 11 states, haha, checkmate, parental leave activists" = all the usual reasons, such as: expensive housing, need to find jobs (possibly for both parents), don't want to move away from extended family/community/older child's school, etc.
Ignorance is bisque, as they say. It's always amusing to me when I tell people in real life "sorry, I don't know what $MEME is, I'm not on social media" and they're always like good for you, you don't want to know anyway. The natural follow-up, of course, is: why are you on it then?
I have many thoughts and maybe I’ll post more of them later, but as the mother of two children, including an infant, I was really hoping to see more of your thoughts on how to support “girlbosses” who are mothers.
Writing “rah, rah, go women in the workplace! Yay feminist capitalism!” in sparkly pink font is cheap and easy. Actually implementing policies that help new mothers balance their careers and looking after their children is hella hard. Just the other day I read a post on the “Ask a Manager” blog where the letter writer was saying: “I’m a boss at a family-friendly company, and when an employee asked for time off to pump breast milk, I agreed, but it’s 90 minutes per day! I didn’t realize it was going to be so much! It’s really cutting into my employee’s billable hours, what should I do?” The Manager explained to the letter writer that yes, if you pump 3 times during a work day and each session is 30 minutes (a very standard pumping schedule if you want to maintain your milk supply), that will take up 90 minutes/day, and it’s just an accommodation you are legally required to provide.
A true “girl boss” culture is one where everyone involved knows and understands this. Actions matter; words are wind.
And the leave situation ugh. After having my second kid my leave balance has plummeted. I no longer can take vacation time or sick leave for myself because I have to use it when my kids are sick and/or schools are closed. My organization tends to promote childless people or people with grandparents in town (coincidence or no?) so the understanding of issues parents of young children have to deal with is low.
Anyway, I've never been very involved in the girl boss discourse. I thought a lot of the backlash to it had to do with the argument that women had to change themselves to adopt a more masculine style instead of working on society and on men to be more adapted to and encouraging of women's general needs and more feminine communication styles. Or maybe that was just my own personal disagreement with it.
I'm also disappointed in this essay. I'm not sure the point of it. I also had to scroll quite a bit to see any female representation in the comments.
Very well said! The struggle is real. Ultimately, there no way around the fact that you can't do your job and look after children at the same time. We can and should have policies that enable mothers to stay in the workforce - I'm in favor of subsidized childcare - but tradeoffs and constraints abound.
I agree that I was asking myself "what's the point?" as I read this piece.
And yes, the SB comments section tends to be male-heavy.
Also, you can't force them to pump in a stall in the ladies' room, as my (female!) former executive director did to one of my direct reports. At least not in Colorado. You have to provide them with a room with a door. I was glad to know the law on that.
More honest Narrator: (he did, in fact, wish to add to the discourse, which is why he's brought this salacious but trivial topic up twice in the last week now)
CHH helped me understand this more. Girlboss feminism is an alternative to the highly neurotic feminism of people like West.
Girlboss = dad is a dentist and mom is the big boss at Acme Insurance with two kids a dog and a cat.
West Feminism: Lindy getting tucked in to her bed in the guest room by her husband and his girlfriend and then clutching a stuffed animal as her husband and his girlfriend go at it in the next room.
That's where the anti-capitalism comes in. Her neuroticism drives her into relationships with guys like her non earning trumpet player husband while the girl boss is living it up with the periodontist. Under not-capitalism trumpet players and periodontists will make the same money and there will be no penalty paid for Lindsay's terrible taste in men.
I don’t know who this person is but if she’s fat like the other commenter is saying, maybe it’s just that her choice of men is limited and she doesn’t have much bargaining power in the relationship?
I hope everyone has the choice not to live with a disgusting bastard. You can always just leave. Being on your own has to be better than what she dealt with.
It's like a female version of "The Trip" where Steve Coogan is "living the dream" with his 25 year old girlfriend, romantic flings with Polish waitresses, a million dollar apartment, and great media gigs, but is secretly pretty miserable. While Rob Brydon's boring and routine upper middle class life with a wife and kid and terraced house seems to make him quite content and happy.
I think it's pretty clear that you weren't applying very much charity or kindness in the sentence 'Lindsay getting tucked in to her bed in the guest room by her husband and his girlfriend and then clutching a stuffed animal as her husband and his girlfriend go at it in the next room'.
Well, to be fair to BZC, Lindy isn't very kind or charitable to people who have slightly different politics from hers. She describes driving through flyover country and expresses tremendous disgust at perfectly nice people because she suspects them of being Trump voters. They haven't said anything! She just knows they're Trump voters.
Why should I? She's making terrible choices in life. She needs some tough love and needs to stop supporting those two and kick their sorry asses to the curb. Trumpet boy can then earn an honest living.
You can and will do what you want, of course. I would just say that sometimes, when men are critiquing what they feel are the absurd excesses of feminism, it can be easy to forget that these emerge in no small part as ways of coping with a world shaped by male power and/or aggression.
My problem with 'capitalism' as a word can be summarised pretty simply, which is that there are two entirely different things that people mean when they say 'capitalism'.
One is "money can be exchanged for goods and services" (to quote Homer Simpson), in which case capitalism good.
The other is "a small number of people own the vast majority of the capital and have effective control over both the economy and politics as a result", in which case capitalism bad.
Without clarifying what he means by 'capitalism', Matt's line "I think it was, in fact, perfectly reasonable and correct for women to insist on fair treatment without becoming radical critics of capitalism, because capitalism is basically fine and good." ceases to have any meaning.
"a small number of people own the vast majority of the capital"
Maybe there is some place this is true (where?), but it isn't the case in either your home country or mine. Total market capitalization for US-listed companies is ~$70 Trillion. Add in the capital in private companies and your are probably near $100 Trillion. Now add in the capital stock of houses in the US and you are at $150 Trillion.
Who are the "small number of people" who own the vast majority of this $150 Trillion amount of capital?
It doesn’t map perfectly to total US capital, but the top 1% has a household wealth of $50 trillion which is 1/3 of all US household wealth (so that number is also $150 trillion). And the top 10% holds ~70% of the wealth.
We can quibble over whether 10% is a “small number of people” but clearly wealth is very concentrated!
Fair - but if I restated the claim as “a very small number of people hold a wildly disproportionate share of the wealth” (as opposed to saying “vast majority”), it doesn’t really change the substance of it.
I think it does. When I hear Bernie types claim "a very small number of people hold a wildly disproportionate share of the wealth” ... I think they think they're talking about like nine people.
I found this whole piece really thin today. 'Capitalism' is not the only problematic term; 'girlboss' is also I think poorly defined. Also the piece seems to be structured as if 'girlbosses' are under equal pressure from left and right, but what is the actual pressure from the left? That Jezebel might write a snarky article about your products and cringe marketing strategy? Oh well. Meanwhile the threat from the right is of a masculinist revanchism from the top to the bottom of the movement.
Thank you. I kind of hate "girlboss." I worked outside the home in jobs that required post-graduate degrees, but I wasn't a girlboss, whatever that is. I was a woman with a decent job.
"Girlboss" seemed to be a very specific thing applied to a type of Instagram-aesthetic startups. Beyond Sandberg (whom I'm not sure even used the term for herself), I don't think I ever heard a professional women outside that very specific Buzzfeedy milieu call themselves a girlboss.
Right, I'm presuming that Mary Barra doesn't consider herself a 'girlboss'? But if it's really about one particular milieu, and not just 'female bosses and/or entrepreneurs in general', then a wide-angle post like this one is useless. We'd need instead to do some kind of balancing of the benefits and harms of bootstrap businesses based around influencer-adjacent lifestyles.
"a small number of people own the vast majority of the capital"
Maybe this is becoming the colloquial definition, but if so, that's really too bad because it could describe places like North Korea and Cuba just as well as most "capitalist" societies.
I used to get twisted up about this but my take is that it usually is shorthand for various market failures, problems with the American welfare state/health insurance system, forms of self dealing by the wealthy, and/or outsized influence of big businesses in the government. Is that 'capitalism'? Not really but it at least is useful for understanding what people are griping about.
I'm also trying to untwist myself for the same reasons but haven't gotten quite as far as you, lol.
Somewhere I've heard a comparison of "it's capitalism" to "the system" or "'the man' is keeping me down". The latter phrases began as sincere everyday social critiques from everyday persons (before eventually becoming more comic than serious).
The problem with capitalism, though is it already has a definition! So it really clutters discussions because as Richard says, it's hard to know what people actually mean.
Agreed, it's not ideal and also in my experience based on a bunch of not particularly accurate beliefs about life in the Nordic countries. Even my wife who is a lot leftier than me will often say 'Yes, yes, it's very sad we have to get up and go to work in the morning.'
When I've seen someone complaining about "capitalism" I typically find they're either talking about society prioritizing the preferences of its more productive members, being upset by the reality of tradeoffs, or simply complaining about "the bad thing I dont like" in the same way people talk about fascism.
To me this kind of the difference between capitalism in theory vs how capitalism often works in a lot of industries(healthcare, childcare etc etc). In a perfect capitalist system the rate of profit is nearly zero. Perfect capitalism requires symmetry of information and no barriers to entry. Almost no industry works like that, and as such while you don't get the type of mercantilism that existed in Adam Smith's day, regulatory capture by businesses that can find ways to reduce competition and create rent-seeking behavior is a feature of many industries. Their is a difference between being pro-business and pro-market and while their not mutually exclusive, often times the interests of an individual business will diverge or be contrary to the interests of the broader market or the consumer.
To write this more conventionally and less in memes and TLDR:
There is a perfectly respectable approach to describing capitalism as a failure mode of the free market where there is an overconcentration of economic and therefore political power in the hands of a small number of capitalists. Obviously, Marx was one of the theorists who problematised this, but its entirely possible to see this as a possible failure mode of the free market without accepting Marx’s view that it’s an inevitable failure mode.
Being anti-capitalism and pro-free market is entirely compatible under this understanding of capitalism, and I think that Matt is exactly in that position (and I know I am).
I’m pretty sure that anticapitalists are against a market economic system, and instead want means of production owned by workers and the economy to be commanded by the government. The reason they support that is they believe that the inevitable result of capitalism is concentration of economic and political power in a small number of people. Not that they think the definition of capitalism is that concentration.
The girlboss vs. tradwife debate only has real stakes if you're coming from an illiberal premise. The obvious liberal answer is: women who want careers should pursue them, women who want to stay home should pursue that, and nobody should be hectored either way.
What makes this debate so tedious is that both sides treat a conditional strategy as a universal prescription. Tradwifery is a great strategy conditional on finding a good partner and genuinely preferring domestic life. Girlbossing is a great strategy conditional on having career opportunities you actually enjoy. These aren't competing visions of womanhood — they're different bets that make sense under different circumstances.
The choices are also neither fixed nor made in a vacuum. A 30-year-old frustrated with corporate life can change course. A former stay-at-home mom can reenter the workforce. The decisions are iterative. They're also shaped by class, era, and luck — it's a lot easier to girlboss your way to success if you have capital, credentials, and a functioning 21st-century labor market to operate in.
What Yglesias is gesturing at, and what I think is correct, is that the anti-girlboss turn from both the left and the right requires you to believe women are making systematically wrong choices — which means you have to believe women's choices are less reliable than your ideology. That's a much bigger claim than either side usually admits to making
I would make your last sentence generic. "You believe x's choices are less reliable than your ideology". This explains the far left and far right so very well.
Totally agree with this. People really should have a more "live and let live" attitude rather than looking down their noses at how others choose to live or organize their families.
The only thing I'd add is that there are two sides to this coin. For "girlbosses" to succeed and grow, men also need to be less judged for not adopting stereotypical male roles.
I do think there’s been a lot of progress towards men not being judged. I do the daycare pickup as a man because my job is more flexible than my wife’s and have never felt judged; I’d say it’s probably 50/50 who picks up at my daycare. Some of my male friends without kids are already retired or semi-retired and people are just happy for them.
I don't think people have a problem with men helping out around the house or with the kids
What people have a problem with is, if the man is stay at home
With WFH this is probably changing somewhat, but I do think it’s probably looked down upon to have the woman be the breadwinner for a house husband
My male friend who did the majority of parenting in the Obama era encountered a lot of judgment when he went to parks. He was never invited into mom spaces and largely treated as suspect.
Thas has been my experience as a parent and as a teacher. It's a bridgeable divide but it's a delicate process. As a teacher most of my friends are other moms I've met on the jobs but I have a kind of one of the good ones kind of rapport with people I've worked with.
On the other hand there's a lot of politics and drama I get left out of so it does cut both ways.
That was my experience as well.
I don't doubt it, but men also don't want their wives coming home talking about some guy they met at the playground, and a lot of women seem to narrow their social circle and get clannish when they have kids. My husband is an administrator at the school our kids attend, and I'm excluded from the real mom talk because they can't complain to me.
I live in the People's Republic of Somerville so it's hardly representative, but yes everything looks 50/50. When we were still doing swim class with parents, it actually leaned more towards dads.
My dad, who also grew up in Somerville, I'm pretty sure never changed a diaper in his life, and only did school pickup in unusual circumstances, or the period where my school was on his way to the office.
For us specifically, if anything my wife is the traditional breadwinner, she makes twice as much as I do and works like 60 hours a week, so during the week I'm doing most of the child/dog care. And her daycare is on the way to *my* office.
Shoot, my sister’s husband’s brother always picks their sets of kids up from school because his IT job lets him work from home, and he’s literally the most masculine guy I know - served multiple tours of duty in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria and is a colonel in the reserves. Drives a big ass truck and coaches the kids’ baseball. Nobody in Mississippi is judging him for being too feminine because he picks up the kids, that’s for damn sure!
Actually count them. Take one week and count the moms and count the dads. I bet it will not be 50/50 at all.
I agree the trendline is positive, but there is still a long way to go.
"
For "girlbosses" to succeed and grow, men also need to be less judged for not adopting stereotypical male roles.
"
Agreed. But I just don't think that's going to happen. That just doesn't seem to be what most women are looking for in a man.
They want tall and successful
that’s empirically false.
What, specifically, is empirically false?
My read is he's claiming, I think correctly, though don't know how you'd prove this, that the heyday of girlbossing did not actually require, or include less judgment for men who worked in stereotypical male roles.
It did coincide with a continued cultural acceptance of gay men though.
“For "girlbosses" to succeed and grow, men also need to be less judged for not adopting stereotypical male roles.”
There certainly isn’t a necessary relationship I doubt the r squared is over 0.8
To clarify, I'm talking about society generally, not as a specific condition that individual couples must adhere to.
In other words, as a greater percentage of women in total move into "girlboss"- type roles or become primary breadwinners, the percentage of women who are primarily homemakers is going to drop. Men will need to fill those roles.
And this is already a problem - women are more often breadwinners, but domestic labor has not fully shifted over to men at the same pace. In households with children, someone still has to do the unpaid labor: childcare, scheduling, cleaning, meals, logistics and in more cases, that will need to be men.
For girlboss + stay at home dad couples to work, you need more acceptance of men in nontraditional roles. For high-power couples where both mom and dad are boss types, not so much--there, it just needs to be workable to hire nannies and such.
Expressed a an historical correlation I agree. Expressed as a necessary relationship, no.
My claim wasn't intended to be a mathematical equation. As a general principle, I don't think a successful society can be built where men and women are considered equals in terms of breadwinning and careers, but unequal in other areas that make societies work, like domestic labor and child rearing.
"A former stay-at-home mom can reenter the workforce," is true, but conditionally true. The 30 year old who decides to gear down has a lot more options than the 30 year old with 3 kids and no work experience. If tradwife is your jam, go for it, but leaving it will be hard if you change your mind.
The tradwife strategy is dubious if your man isn’t a solid provider. So if you are 30 and have 3 kids BUT have credentials and alimony (because you gave up several years of human capital building to be a SAHM) and child support, you could probably pull it off.
Obviously, girlbossing requires some combination of ability and luck, bossing cannot be a majority strategy.
Very reasonable points, but I'm telling people, it's fine to just write comments! You don't have to use Claude.
there’s nothing wrong with using an editor
Nothing *wrong* it just takes me out of the comment if you get those strong Opus 4.6isms. But maybe I'm too sensitive, most people didn't really care.
My writing is better when it is edited and I’m not about to pay a copy editor to be on call for when I want to do an SB comment. If this were literature I would have pushed back against a lot of the prolixity, it could definitely still be improved. However, I managed to churn that out in 23 minutes in a Barcelona cafe by reading the article, telling claude my thoughts about it (which are 96% aligned in substance with the comment) but might piss people off with my tone and then approving Claude’s rewrite.
Out of curiosity, what was the tell that he used Claude?
> These aren't competing visions of womanhood — they're different bets that make sense under different circumstances.
Once you read that, you start looking at the rest. Claude still likes em-dashes a lot. It also loves compound nouns hyphenated. That could be a user's stylistic choice, but most people don't bother to physically type "stay-at-home" and "21st-century" you would just type them with spaces.
"That's a much bigger claim than either side usually admits to making" was the part that made me go "wait a minute, that reads exactly like a Claude-ism."
For me, it was the "It's not X - it's Y" construction, which I think is one of the most idiosyncratic LLMisms.
I find that’s more specific to ChatGPT. Claude 4.6 is big on “honestly? [something agreeing with you.]” and on the phrasing to which I alluded.
Being mad at people for wanting the wrong things and not wanting the right things is always in fashion.
Better formatted version of my comment. Not sure why we need to have this discussion at all! It's a free country. Women can be girlbosses or trad wives if they want to!
The non-dumb version of the arguments wrt sex roles has to do with a collective action problem. It's easier to be a SAHM in a neighborhood and comminity full of them than as the only one on your block. It's easier to be a career woman when that's a very common thing than when you're the only woman in your office.
The same is true for sexual mores--it's easier to hold out for a ring before having sex if most other women in your social class are doing the same, for example. Which gives some juice to the desire to tell everyone else how to live their lives, though I honestly think most of the drive to do that is just that it's fun telling people how to live their lives.
Female in female slut shaming is pretty clearly a form of erotic competition. If the bar for sexual access falls to low, the housewife strategy isn’t viable.
It works both directions, though. If you're a woman who wants to be sexually active/sleep around, that works out a lot better for you in a society where that's common and not anything that gets you turned into a pariah. There are multiple stable equilibria.
Yeah and I guess my response to that would be that culture develops in all sorts of unpredictable ways and I don't think I know the exact right percentage of women who should be working vs being stay at home moms. Like I take your point that a society in which 80% of women would truly rather work than stay at home would probably result in 85% or so working, and visa versa if society were the other way around. I just have no idea what those numbers SHOULD be and it's dubious at best to try to generate government policy around these assumptions.
I agreed with all of this. I would just note that a lot of couples feel like the wife has to work. Because there's no other way to make the numbers work. Even if they might like the wife to stay at home. Especially for the first couple years
Yeah, among other things, one-income families are competing for housing with two-income families.
I would also say there should be an want for the idea of stay at home dad’s being socially acceptable and respectable. I believe feminism should go both ways
Something that is often underrated in this discourse is that millennial husbands absolutely want an income earning wife -- or at least all the ones I know do. Who wants the pressure of being a single income household?
This is often framed as a woman's choice, and it is, but it's also a couple's choice. More and more couples are choosing to forego the additional flexibility of a SAHP in exchange for a higher living standard and income predictability.
I simply don’t have any male friends or acquaintances who have said they are looking for a stay at home wife.
Dropping an edit on this comment: I'm not at all denigrating stay at home moms or dads, I have many friends, relatives, etc. who stay at home to take care of their kids. Perfectly respectable thing to do and also, what do I know, I have no kids and couldn't imagine the responsibility it entails. Just noting that in my social group, I haven't met anyone who has said this.
It changed once you have kids but that is due to time demands. Most people now don’t want to marry someone who’s goal is to be a homemaker before you have that tradeoffs discussion.
It's very difficult to have two high-powered careers with little kids. Especially careers that require a ton of travel, as a depressing number do. That's what I saw as I watched my friends make their life decisions -- who's going to cancel the critical trip to China to evaluate a new vendor when the kid has a cold and daycare won't take him? It's always Mom. And eventually Mom just drops back career-wise. And is often very resentful.
SURELY some of you guys have seen this with your own eyes?
Where I've seen it happen it's usually less who is foregoing the trip to China and more 'we both work meh 9-5s and daycare costs completely subsume one person's earnings.' Mom fully or partially steps out of the work force for a few years then struggles to make up for the opportunity cost.
I also think there's a bunch of other conflicting and maybe not always clearly stated preferences in the mix but ymmv. This entire exchange is about a particular class cohort, with things murkier further down. Lots of women never leave the work force for any extended period of time because they can't and the low level service jobs they're working are not what we'd normally think of as a career.
Among the many struggles of modern dating is that people tend to date people like them when people who have "high-powered" careers (what a weird construction) date each other, which is a dreadful idea if you want kids. Girlbosses who want kids should marry people who have more flexible and/or less ambitious careers.
One of my close friends met her husband at an elite consulting firm. They're divorcing and he's pushing hard for equal custody. As she put it, he's about to discover the prize for the milkshake drinking contest is another milkshake. He's never done any of the parenting labor and is about to find out what it means to do the unfun stuff 3-4 days a week.
It just isn’t always the woman. My wife earns more than me (our choice) and I’m delighted with that. While that way round is clearly very much a minority of couples, I’m far from the only man I know in that position. (I can think of 3 or 4 other couples friends in the same position as us.)
Occasionally I read articles in the left-wing press (generally The Guardian) about how much men hate their partners earning more than them. I absolutely LOVE my wife earning more than me!
My wife makes more than twice what I do. It's great!
I have to imagine this happens, but I'm also seeing (among urban, professional young Millenial/older Gen Z peers) that every couple having kids tries to fit 1-2 of them in between about the ages of 37 and 41--perhaps to avoid this tradeoff and get both partners to the VP-ish level before kids. So I'm mostly not seeing it...yet. Perhaps the career implications are different when this hits at age 43 instead of 30?
I’m in this boat and it’s hard but workable between taking turns being a single parent while the other travels and hiring help. Does make me think about some benefits of a stay-at-home partner but on the other hand I’d be afraid you’d not have much to talk about after a while because so much of life happens at work.
Most of my wife's workday is just as mundane as mine, even though she runs her practice. You talk about your day because it's how you process it, not because it's that inherently interesting.
You can always talk about all the people who are wrong on the Internet.
If all you give yourself is work, than that is where life will happen by default. Having someone who is planning the home, though, should also include making home more of your life.
You will get fewer after work drinks with the colleagues; but you will get far more meals with the family.
It's totally fine. My stay at home wife with the MBA still totally remembers her office job that she hated
lol…some of these comments are so weird. Imagine saying something that condescending (I wonder what we would talk about) about a woman or man working in a specific profession especially if it was poorly paid.
I never have issues coming up with things to talk about with my SAHM wife because I love her and have always found most of what she says to be interesting and pretend other things are interesting because I love her and it would be rude and selfish to portend otherwise just as she does with me.
You are more interested in hearing about your wife’s office politics than you would be hearing what she and your kids have been up to all day?
I've seen some of this, though usually it's not nearly that explicit as the folks I know all have family nearby, so the answer to that problem is 'grandparents'.
And that's swell, but many families don't have that.
It should absolutely be the norm though
Good luck. I appreciate your posts but with this crowd you have a losing battle ahead of you.
As someone who was a SAHD, yes the societal pressure and default thinking does make the other choice, dad drops back, more challenging. The couple figuring out how to successfully push back against those forces is the secret sauce that's so hard to find.
My only advice is that you have to set the tone early that these burdens have to fall equally. If it's mom that's skipping the trip twice in a row you're already in trouble.
It's not ALWAYS mom, although more often it is. I live near DC, and I know a lot of fathers - including myself - who have some flexibility in our work schedules and can handle some of the family emergencies.
Having one spouse work for the school system is great because that spouse has the same schedule as the kids.
Back in my dating days if a woman had said "I'm looking for a provider that allows me to be a SAHW" I would have told her we're not compatible and good luck on her search.
Ironically I'd be more open to that idea now that I'm in my mid 30s and have a salary that could, with some trade offs, sustain a small family. But I had no way of knowing that in my 20s. Maybe the women that want that should look for age gap relationships.
I think there's a very different tone implied between aspiring to be a SAH*W* and a SAH*M.*
Yup, the former tends to be an extremely ideological commitment, whereas the latter ranges from some form of ideological to pragmatic. Most SAHMs I know, including the very religious ones, worked outside the home until kids and plan to do so again once childcare demands permit.
Or maybe men especially but also society as a whole needs to change how it thinks about being a SAHP. In my 20s I probably mostly though about how it meant someone was not ambitious was maybe not that smart and how that would be a bunch of pressure on me and maybe mean I can’t afford that lake house. Instead maybe we should focus on how it often means someone who is loving, empathetic, and unselfish. And that maybe having a partner who is those things is a better predictor of happiness than a lake house.
Maybe more 20 year olds should realize that not having a strong salary in your 20s is very normal? They literally write songs about that sort of thing. :D
Fair enough for sure. Do women really say they want to be a SAHW though?
So the unspoken point of the thread, many are told that is what they should aim to be.
I think there is some sort of trad movement where that may be true but I’m pretty skeptical that there are many parents telling their daughters to go this route.
I think phrased the way you wrote it would be off putting, but I had this discussion with my now husband when we were dating in our early twenties. Essentially my view was that family is incredibly important to me and the early childhood years are incredibly important developmentally as well as incredibly fleeting and I wasn’t going to marry anyone who wasn’t open to me staying home with our kids while they were young, in part because it would reflect a different prioritization (money over family). Obviously we would assess in the context of our broader finances and not make a decision we couldn’t afford but I didn’t want to be with someone who prioritized the lake house over the focus on raising our children.
Ironically, I’m still working (by my own choice) and soon to welcome #3
Yeah, they’d be perceived as a golddigger
That just means you have a homogeneous group of acquaintances.
In 2017 surveys showed large percentages of American men wanted a stay at home wife and over 40 years the numbers have varied somewhat but not THAT much.
Also, every single CxO I've ever known has a stay at home spouse, regardless of their gender, especially if the kids aren't teenagers yet.
At a certain point the marginal value of the dollar is not worth the time tradeoff. It makes sense that highly successful people would be coupled with a SAHP. But most of us are not highly successful.
I was a SAHP for about two years. Family stress levels unrelated to finances are lower with a SAHP. Unfortunately, many women of my generation, Gen X, saw women the generation above us struggle mightily to get back into the workforce and/or have lots of financial troubles after divorce. This is another reason why lots of mothers work when their family isn't getting much more than they would after paying for day care. These are not as much of a worry if you are married to a CxO.
I read some analysis once (admittedly by some relatively progressive think-tank) that stay at home parents dramatically underestimate how much staying out of the workforce costs due to foregone raises, 401k matching, earnings on retirement contributions, increased Social Security payments, etc.
From memory they found that the multiplier was around 3x. That is, if your take home pay was $3,000 a month then your actual long term earnings were closer to $9,000 a month and that was the number you needed to measure against daycare costs because that's how much you'd be giving up by dropping out of the workforce.
Yea in particular if you're upwardly mobile I think the long term case for sucking up the daycare costs even at a temporary net loss to the household for a few years is overwhelmingly strong.
But what's it like for two non college educated people in low skill service sector jobs? We talk about this like it's all college educated, career oriented DINK's debating whether to take the plunge, probably because those are the people who publish their perspectives but there's a much bigger world out there.
If someone is basing their decision on having kids as a NPV of their 401K and retirement payments then I hope they choose the money.
I don’t necessarily think that it’s explicitly related to the value / time tradeoff, unless that only kicks in $10m+. I know plenty of investment banker couples, lawyer couples, IB-lawyer couples where both pull low to mid seven figures.
There might be something about the CEO position or managerial positions more generally versus finance/law/professional services? the personality it attracts?
It probably has a lot to do with people marrying within the same class these days. The doctor/nurse and executive/secretary pairings are a lot more rare these days. If one of you is clearly bringing less and has a class identity less tied to the occupation I could see them choosing to stay home more.
Most of the CxOs I know including all of the female ones have working partners.
Interesting. Complete opposite here in Chicago. Outside of a double partner BCG couple, every CxO type I know has a SAHM partner.
EDIT: Here's the prototypical examples in Winnetka: https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5536229/2024/06/04/chicago-cubs-white-sox-jed-hoyer-chris-getz/
EDIT EDIT: I take that back Sofia Colucci's husband works so you're probably right about female ones have more working partners.
https://www.molsoncoors.com/about/leadership-team
Nobody I know wants a stay at home wife, either.
But when you have kids a stay at home mom starts to sound a lot more appealing.
Not sure if Ben intended his sentence to mean this but it seems wrongheaded to decide for or against dating a SAHP. Dont get me wrong, I was the same way in my 20’s. In hindsight that’s a stupid way to go about finding a partner for a lot of people.
I had a long term relationship with a med school student and the plan was to not have kids. Anyway for a variety of reasons we broke up. In hindsight we both loved ourselves more than the other person which was the bigger problem than that we did or did not want a SAHP.
I then met my wife and loved her enough that I didn’t care whether she wanted to be a SAHM or not. Turned out she did but if she changed her mind tomorrow we would figure it a way to make that work because I love her and want her to be happy. I think the SAHP issue becomes a proxy for a lot of other things that aren’t really about wanting or not wanting a SAHP.
Right now I feel strongly like I don't want a SAHM wife but I totally get this. CHH had an article a while back arguing that high income men should be more open to letting their wives work and while I disagreed with it for my own life it starkly illustrated how much I actually liked women I had previously dated or been interested in.
For most I genuinely would have been unhappy with that arrangement.
One woman was actively gunning for that in retrospect and I felt like I dodged a bullet there.
And of course there were I couple where I would have been willing to make it work.
Younger millennial man here, but I’m totally open to—with maybe a slight preference for—my wife to stay at home or work part time/do something creative (if that’s what she wants). Obviously dependent on my income, though.
Also, worth noting, I know that’s a semi conservative-coded take, but i’m well to the left of the median slow borer. I think the key is I would never *impose* my SAH preference, but would be pleased if that’s how it shakes out
I'm an elder millennial and also never had friends verbalize a desire for finding a future SAHM partner BUT there are revealed preferences. Anyone who's dating history has a high income skew is likely preferencing future SAHM flexibility.
Yeah. Men of my grandfather’s generation were harshly judged by their peers if their wives worked. My grandmother always wanted to work but my grandfather would never let her because it would have affronted his pride. Men aren’t like this now, at all.
Maybe the edit is not needed? That's what we're talking about here, right? No need for "Some of my friends are stay-at-home [parents]"
If you change the framing so that the partner is able to stay home, you would probably see an uptick in acquaintances that feel that way. Women included.
I don't think we all, necessarily, want the same things. But it should not be surprising that a lot of us want fame/influence/control/power/whatever enough that we could support having all of the house work done for us.
Similarly, I don't know that anyone would object to having a partner that supported them in this. Largely, this will require the funds or other perks that allow building of hobbies and other interests.
The Dutch have crafted an interesting arrangement. Non-menial part time jobs are common. Most women, and a strong majority of Dutch mothers, work 20-30 hours a week. This is one reason Dutch per capita GDP is materially lower than in Sweden or Denmark. But it’s still quite high and the netherlands are a chill, happy place.
Politics should maximize life choices not impose life scripts.
I think that's a huge, underdiscussed problem with our labor market - regulations and incentives make the prospects for decent 20-30-hour-a-week jobs dismally small.
I am lucky to have a 30 hour a week flexible professional job. It is truly the best of both worlds, and was a Godsend when my kids were younger. It is a big reason I have stayed at the same place even though my salary has not kept up with inflation.
I got lucky, too, with a similar situation. Status is a 1099 independent contractor, which has its upsides and downsides, but overall, I'm thankful to have the flexibility, even as my effective pay is also decreasing.
In the health care space there are probably more of those options now than ever. My wife works 10 hours a week for a telehealth company while we have young kids so she doesn’t have a gap in her resume, maintains her professional expertise and she likes having something more intellectual to ally stimulating than playing with our kids.
I think about switching to healthcare allllll the time.
Like a lot of women (according to surveys I've seen), I would prefer half- or three-quarters-time work if I could get half- or three-quarters-time pay for it. But that's not a commonly available option in my field.
I'm Gen X, and that's also true of most of my peers I know, although I do realize it's a less common attitude than among millennials.
A big challenge, though, is when kids enter the picture, especially multiple kids. It's really difficult for it not to impact at least one person's career unless you're a high income family that can hire a nanny.
My wife and I have three kids, and we decided relatively early that she had the better long-term career (with her doctorate in nuclear engineering) and that I would be the one primarily responsible for the kids. This meant that I was mostly an at-home Dad for several years, then transitioned to a flexible job where I could take care of appointments, handle sick days when child care wasn't available, and handle all the other stuff that comes up. Usually, that falls to the mother. And I can say with some direct experience that filling that role as the one primarily responsible for the kids will have a negative effect on a career, regardless of gender.
My younger brother is like you, his wife for many years had the higher earning 40+ hour career while he worked part time and took the kids to school, doctor appointments, etc. But now that his kids have gotten older he got a new job, is up for a managerial promotion while she has taken a step back in her career because of the stress.
Yeah I think maybe the problem with the girlboss narrative is that it assumes that people really want to be working all the time but as I get into my late 40s I’d really rather be spending more time with my kids and getting into shape. I wonder how many women went all in on their careers in their 30s and get into their 40s/50s and just discover they hate it? In the olden days this was well understood _for men_, think of movies where the cold-hearted career man learns about the importance of family. What is needed to temper girlboss feminism is an understanding that not everyone has or wants a world-striding career (I feel like we’ve mostly ended up in the right spot after the backlash?)
I've known a "girlboss" woman, who was literally my boss at the time, therefore you could say she was my actual girlboss - though I would never call her a "girl" since she was a 40 year old woman - but I digress.
What she told me was that she thought getting married, having children, and even staying home is a valid decision for any woman to make - but she would never do it because she has no particular urge to be a mother and she's never met a man that she liked enough to actually marry.
She wasn't my favorite person, but I admired her honesty with herself, and fully agree that her life is hers to live how she wants. If you don't want to be a mother then you would probably make an awful one.
On another note, I wonder how many MEN get into their 40's or 50's and discover that they hate their career?
I would much rather be home right now doing whatever I want.....instead of pretending to work....just kidding, this is just a short substack break.....I promise....
An aspect you are also leaving out, is that when kids enter into it, it is not at all uncommon for folks to realize all those songs about how work sucks didn't spring out of a void.
If you could choose to be a stay at home parent versus whatever day job you had, picking the family is a lot easier of a choice once you have it.
That’s true to an extent. But having lived it, there are always some big tradeoffs. I tend to think it’s harder for men to do, at least in terms of psychology and personal identity.
There are always tradeoffs. Used to be, the biggest tradeoff in favor of work was the access to the things that only businesses could afford.
That would have included travel, as it isn't like most of us can afford to travel as much as many corporations can support. There is a reason it is called "business class" on flights.
But I challenge that it is any harder for men, socially speaking. There is, of course, a natural forcing function to get women to stay home after child birth. If only for recovery.
But there are similar societal functions that try convince men and women to be in the workforce. And that is not new.
I will say that even if one can hire a nanny as my financial HQ nuclear family lucked out with, it has real stresses. Unless one is totally victorian in attitudes, one feels guilty....
One shouldn't feel guilty for paying for help. If anyone is treating the help as less than themselves, that is not because they are paying them for help. They have an unhealthy relationship with worth and work.
This goes outside in home paid help. We should treat every clerk, janitor, and teller with dignity, already.
The guilty part is because you are missing out of family time
That is not the read I got from that. Victorian attitudes is far more likely a reference to social hierarchies than it is to not being with your family
Victorian attitudes reference was to a specific Victorian habit of what was my paternal family's class of packing off the brats to boarding school or similar. Perhaps an overly specific reference, but mathew got me well enough
yes, exactly.
I have to be clear exactly zero guilt about paying for help.
the balance of life issue one feels guilty, generally irrationally.
Yeah it's like, I used to hear dudes be like “women just want your money” and I'd be like, dude you don't make shit what are you talking about. You can't complain that women want a financially stable man but also not want her to work.
I mean my wife doesn’t work and stays at home with the kids - We are liberal and don’t even think about it being conservative-coded. But I don’t think of it as being a good or bad thing. It’s just what works for us.
Andy above is entirely right - people need to be less goddamned judgmental in all directions.
When I was in highschool all the boys wanted the same lifestyle that the history teacher had. His wife was an executive at a financial company while he got to teach about every middle aged man's favorite subject: American history. They had a beautiful house and an in ground pool and he got to enjoy it the 3 months out of the year when you could while she worked. Something to aspire to really.
Even when the family can live on the breadwinner’s sole income, that income is often precarious because we’ve wrongly decided as a society that dynamism trumps job security. You need the spouse to work to take over if and when the breadwinner loses their job.
Yet another reason for YIMBYism and eliminating property tax subsidies for retirees: it would be great for desirable housing to be affordable on a single income.
That certainly wasn't something I was looking for when I was dating
But now that I'm making good money and we have 2 kids. It's awfully nice.
Feminism without anti capitalism is good! My mom was an early girl boss of the Boomer generation (why MY wants to totally kick us Catholics out of the coalition I don't understand, given that we remain an important swing demographic but that's another issue). She kicks butt, as do a lot of the girl boss type attorneys I work with, particularly the Xers. A lot of them are the A+ students who do the right thing, the right way, all of the time.
However I want to throw a little wrench and suggest a counter, because I think this piece kind of dodges the gripe, which is feminism high out of its mind on intersectionality is in fact bad.
What's the latter? I'd say it boils down to something like a philosophy of 'girl boss when I win, victim of structural oppression when I lose.' This is the source of the friction, all across the spectrum, from complaints about corporate or academic culture to inane battles over movies, TV shows, and video games. It's at its worst when it runs into various class conflicts, and in particular where working class men are expected to nod along about the supposed marginalization of upper middle class or above women who are self evidently better off than they are, and who, if they ever have objectively experienced any kind of sexism, are clearly no worse for wear for it.
Does this suggest the need for a reversion to some kind of trad fad? Not remotely. But I would say a more self aware feminism that's comfortable with its achievements, and that not all of the ups and downs of life are the result of some pernicious patriarchal abstraction would be more durable. Focus instead on highly specific areas around reproduction, healthcare, and maternity accomodations, sans all the academic deconstruction. I daresay it would have a lot more currency than whatever was going on the last 15 years.
I don't think he's saying he wants to kick Catholics out of the Democratic coalition, but it's pretty clear that affluent Catholics have left it. Very good point in the "heads I win tails I'm oppressed" dynamic that was frustrating in 2010s girlboss-ism.
For sure, my intent was not to be overly self serious about a topic where that's gotten hard to avoid but maybe I failed!
>...but it's pretty clear that affluent Catholics have left it.<
This comment of yours read a bit of an overreach to my eyes, so I took the liberty of running it past Claude. Claude's response:
"Several things complicate the "affluent Catholics have left" framing specifically:
The class gradient among white Catholics isn't as clean as among white Protestants. Among white Protestants, the affluent-Republican alignment is very strong. Among white Catholics, the relationship is murkier — working-class white Catholics (the Reagan Democrat type) have actually shifted Republican quite dramatically, while the professional/educated Catholic cohort in the Northeast has been more sticky Democratic.
Geography matters enormously. Your instinct about NY and MA is sound. Affluent Irish and Italian Catholic professionals in Boston suburbs, Westchester, Long Island's North Shore, Connecticut — this is still a significant Democratic constituency, not a vanished one. The "Catholic suburb = Republican" pattern is much more pronounced in the Midwest (think DuPage County, IL history) and the Sun Belt than in the Northeast.
Gender: Catholic women are meaningfully more Democratic than Catholic men, and that includes educated/affluent Catholic women, which further undercuts a clean "affluent Catholics have left" narrative.
The bottom line: The more precise and defensible claim would be: white Catholic voters broadly, and especially working-class white Catholics outside the Northeast, have moved heavily toward the GOP over the past 40-50 years. The specific "affluent" framing is where it gets slippery — it may reflect a conflation with the broader pattern of college-educated white professionals (where Democrats have actually made gains recently, including among Catholics) versus non-college whites (where Republicans have dominated).
Your NY/MA intuition isn't wrong. Those states' Democratic margins are built on a coalition that includes a meaningful chunk of affluent Catholics alongside Jewish voters, Black voters, Hispanic voters, and secular liberals. The Democratic Party hasn't been abandoned by affluent northeastern Catholics — it's more that its Catholic base has shifted in composition and geography than that it's been wholesale deserted."
Take that for what it's worth, and, as Claude's response suggests, I was wondering about the situation in states like Massachusetts and NY (and sure, different prompts might garner different emphases). Anyway, my takeaway is *working class* white Catholics have indeed been trending GOP (for years!) but the trend among "affluent" Catholics is more complex.
Outsourcing shitposting in the SB comments to robots smh
Yes. I really wish people didn't do this! You can speak in your own voice! When I'm on SB, I want to believe I'm interacting with real human beings, not LLMs.
If you want to use Claude or whatever to research a topic, cool, but then why not summarize the findings in your own words?
The zero sum treatment of the success of women vs men in the discourse didn’t help feminism. The idea that people like Richard Reeves (or the researchers he cite) highlighting issues particular to men comes at the expense of women is something really pernicious.
Especially when he goes out of his way to assure people that it’s not a zero sum choice between helping boys and helping girls!
"to inane battles over movies, TV shows, and video games."
You lost me over this. The inane battles over video games were to have women characters who were there just to be sex objects. Talking about that in a gentle manner lead to death threats, stalking, etc. Video games changed to be more embracing of a much larger audience of potential players (a win for game companies!), but the backlash was horrific.
I don't expect to convert anyone to my worldview but I would consider whether there are in fact any objective stakes in those kinds of flare-ups. I do not believe there are, and that endlessly LARPing as though there might be has been really bad for the epistemology of the participants.
I’m genuinely curious you don’t think there is real life stakes if women express banal preferences like I’d like there to be lady characters in this game that I’d like and therefore receive death threats.
Like when I grew up the kind of feminism I experienced was girls can be anything but there was a weird but not a nerd applied in a lot of the subcultures I was part of. That seems like a big deal. The whole thing seems like a bad deal for everyone involved.
I think the issue with this line of argument is yes death threats are really bad and no one wants them, but unfortunately in this world, you can kinda do anything and get death threats. So being like “wow isn’t it bad that they did XYZ thing and got DEATH THREATS” doesn’t actually prove your point. I’m sure lots of trad wives get death threats for posting content on how to fold laundry or whatever. So yes, I agree women should not get death threats for mentioning it would be nice to have women in video games, but I don’t think that the fact that they got death threats somehow makes the thing they were arguing for more worthy.
I'm going to wager you have always been well-represented in media and never had to think about it.
“ who do the right thing, the right way, all of the time.”
Huh?? No one is like this. argus phrase makes me question your epistemic seriousness.
I did not mean it literally, obviously everyone screws up and has personal failings, women too. It was a tongue in cheek intentional overstatement to say these are among the most competent people I've worked with. Yeesh.
What seemed bad about the end of girlboss feminism was not just that it ended, but what replaced it. “My feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit” too often turned into a politics where feminism no longer meant advocating for women as such. It meant folding women’s issues into a larger progressive omnicause: anti-racism, climate politics, socialism, anti-Zionism, trans rights, and so on.
None of that is to say those causes are necessarily bad (though I have my criticisms of some). The problem is that once feminism became just one node in a total moral framework, it often stopped being willing to defend women’s interests when they conflicted with other priorities. At that point, it wasn’t really feminism anymore.
And that’s how you get absurdities like Lindy West, of all people, being talked into letting her husband cheat on her in the name of not being racist.
Yes some of those causes are necessarily bad.
There was a period in 2020 where it was common to hear that feminism’s top issue was the police killing of black men. Several people told me that white women were more immediately dangerous to black womrn tha. Black men. This is obviously nuts but it is very common to hear that the top priority of feminism is some issue that is not specific to women but is the cause of th moment for the very left. It’s quite demoralizing that feminism gets asked to deprioritize the cause of women’s rights in favor of the left’s latest cause
If you spend enough time (which isn't very much) on social media and haven't heavily curated who you follow, you'll get barraged by the most extreme takes because that's what the algorithms drive.
But the "omni-issue" is a lot more defensible than it's credited for here. Police violence impacts women, and especially women of color and other vulnerable women. Queer issues impact women. Racial injustice impacts women. Economic issues impact women. A feminism that engages in "women's issues" is going to be something shallow that prioritizes the most advantaged women over the needs of most women. Maybe your unmet political needs fit entirely into the realm of gender, but that would make you a small minority.
Be that as it may (and I think at least parts of that are actually dead wrong and indeed feminism if taken seriously is often at odds with several of the things you said). But even asuming arguendo the truth of your points, you can't understand things like the animosity of some Black activists to "white feminism" without understanding there are historically grounded stereotypes of white women that go back 165 years or more. (That number, 165, is chosen deliberately.) As well as things that arise out of issues such as the feelings of Black women towards white women who date Black men (if you want some in depth information about this, take a look at the attitudes that Black women in LA had about Nicole Simpson after her murder, which were widely documented).
The point being, race and gender are complicated, they involve deep cultural issues and even historical animosities, and the sort of intersectional happy talk that lefty activists and academics traffic in has very little relationship with the realities of why things are the way they are or what the actual issues here are.
EDIT: one other point, specifically tagging onto myrna loy's comment-- there's also a long, sorry history of the male controlled left constantly shelving and subordinating feminist concerns. For example, basically the entire feminist critique of the surrogacy industry has been completely memory holed because it is inconvenient to gay and trans people who want to have children. Similarly when the "Karen" discourse happened, basically feminists weren't listened to at all as the Left just teed off on women with some really ugly stereotypes. And it's possible to view a lot of what you are saying as an extension of that-- a sort of "what feminists really need to do is not defend the interests of women but instead defend all these other groups in the Left coalition".
None of what I stated was in opposition to your points. Feminism and Black social justice have not always been good partners and have at times embodied all of the prejudice towards the other that society as a whole did. Which is also why "omni-issue" social justice is important. Put each interest group in a silo and they can reinforce the problems of the other interest groups. There's a reason divide and conquer is an effective strategy.
Omni issue social justice is really bad for feminism. Because in practice it means "feminists should subordinate concerns about women to other things", when in fact a central tenet of feminism is not subordinating concerns about women to other things.
Women are a massive part of the Democratic coalition. Instead of asking women to subordinate their concerns, perhaps other groups need to subordinate their concerns and accommodate feminist concerns. (E.g., specifically, the "Karen" discourse should have never happened. It didn't advance the interests of people of color at all; it was just the Left deciding to be sexists.)
It is not subordinating concerns about women to care about other things that impact women. Perhaps you haven't noticed this, but people of color are half women. Issues that impact people of color impact women! Queer people include a lot of women! Economics impact all of the population, not just men!
"Omni issue" social justice allows us to identify when championing one set of interests impacts other sets of interest. Does that mean it's perfect? No. But as we have both pointed out, siloed interests have frequently replicated the biases that exist in general population.
I think the problem that you're identifying as omni interest is actually the weird and unfortunate tendency the left went through was taking all of those interconnected issues and then dividing them by making a hierarchy of who is most disadvantaged and according moral value to being harmed. That is incredibly dysfunctional and harmful. Calling out people who are actively racist is not.*
*Note the internet is really good at getting very angry at people for very stupid things. Rather than blame one group or another, I point you to the algorithms that encourage that behavior.
It's true that saying "feminism's top issue is the police killing of black men" is not intersectional.
On the other hand, it is both fair and intersectional to observe that the partners and potential partners of black men (mostly, though not entirely, black women) are dealing with some shit specifically as a result of police killing of black men, both economically and in terms of family formation.
To the extent that this is happening, and I leave to the audience their assessment of how accurate the claim that it is... is... that sentence got away from me a bit, didn't it... it is definitionally a failure of intersectionality, not a demonstration of it.
Which, fair enough, 90 percent of the people using the term intersectionality wouldn't understand the concept if it bit them in the ass, but I think the concept is a genuinely useful one that ought to be rescued from the ash heap of whatever passes for Xitter "history."
It wasn't how intersectionality was originally intended, but it's what it came to mean during the 2010s. There is a version of feminism that acknowledges that women deal with different issues depending on whether they are Black or white, Christian or Muslim, rich or poor, straight or gay, cis or trans, young or old, but still focused on the problems they face as women. There's another version where you decide that women are lower on the progressive stack than other identities, and so "feminism" becomes mostly about protesting Israel's war in Gaza.
You really see this in the dismissive way a lot of progressive, college-educated Millennials and GenZ refer to and stereotype "white women." They would be appalled if I ever spoke about Asian-American, Black or Latina women in the same tone. It's the definition of misogyny and reflects the lack of self-awareness a lot of progressives demonstrate.
"Karen" started out as a somewhat real archetype of problem customer retail workers often face and ended as a way for progressive people to call women with forceful personalities "bitch".
That's so true of so many concepts that start with people thoughtfully grappling with nuances and then people who don't understand the nuances (or aren't interested in them) bring a crude version of the concept to social media and it jumps the shark.
The really frustrating thing with some of these recent concepts, like structural racism, intersectionality, and microaggression, is that the thing they came to mean in the popular discourse was precisely the problematic concept they were supposed to destroy!
The ideas of linear comparison, and attributing everything to bad intentions, are just too strong for people to accept concepts that reject them.
Can you clarify your first paragraph for me? Maybe examples would help? Thanks!
Not Kenny, but "structural racism" is a really easy example of this, because conceptually it is about how a system with zero conscious bigotry on the part of anyone can produce structurally unequal (dramatically unequal, even) results that hamstring the opportunities of racial minorities. And then on Twitter it became the claim that any time there are structurally unequal results that means that everyone involved in the society that produces those results is secretly a Klansman.
That claim is not just inconsistent with the original analysis, it directly contradicts it.
Consider structural racism. As Matt wrote once, Beverly Hills is structural racism -- it was created as part of an effort to structure society in a way that advantages white people. But "we should end structural racism" does not currently mean anything like "we should annex the suburbs and urban enclaves" or similarly general structural reform.
Others have tackled “structural racism”.
“Intersectionality” is the idea that the social issues facing a white man or a black woman aren’t just the social issues facing a white person plus those facing a man, or the social issues facing a black person plus those facing a woman, but rather that there are often distinctive social issues facing these intersections. Furthermore, not every social issue facing white people or men is an advantage, and not every social issue facing black people or women is a disadvantage. For instance, men are seen as more aggressive than women, which is often a disadvantage, and for black men in particular, this interacts with their race to produce a distinctive social difficulty compared to black women.
“Microaggression” was just a poorly chosen term for the kind of innocent behavior that, if it happened once is easy to ignore, but gets frustrating when repeated by different people - the classic example is an Asian American being asked “where are you from”, and when they say “New Jersey”, being asked “I mean, where are you really from?”, or a black person being asked “can I feel your hair?” Obviously, the person asking in either case doesn’t mean anything harmful, but there’s a kind of frustration one develops at being asked these personal things so frequently.
The concept of "intersectionality" seems so obviously correct that making up a word for it somehow obscured the meaning...I don't know that I've ever once seen it deployed in the wild as part of actual intersectional analysis. If anything, it's usually used to do something like the opposite thing in practice.
Taken seriously, intersectionality simply reduces to individualism. Which is great, except a) it's not new and b) people who want intersectionality to matter want it to be something else. That they can't actually make sensible, because it isn't.
This is sort of true in the same sense that if you chop the area under a mathematical curve into a hypothetical infinite number of rectangular boxes the area of those boxes converges into the actual area under the curve. The closer you get to boxes of infinite thinness the better the estimate gets.
But since we're living in reality and not magic calculus-land there is actually a limit to the number of boxes we can chop, and also it makes a really big difference to use even two or three boxes instead of just slapping one rectangle over the top of the curve and calling it close enough for government work.
What's funny about this is that of course calculus absolutely does allow you to calculate the area under an arbitrary curve precisely. In fact it allows you to calculate the volume of arbitrary 3d objects, and so on into theoretical dimensions.
It's far more useful in practice then the thought experiment of trying to cut up shapes. And yes, i do have a phd in a subject that uses math hehe.
Sure, I mean, if your takeaway from my comment was "calculus is fake and gay" you should reread it.
Well, it's an analogy that doesn't work, to make a point that individualism is "one big block". Sure, that's true in the sense that it's true that everything is made of atoms. Both true, and doesn't have the native implications you seemingly believe it does.
If you wanted to be serious you could say that liberals like me believe both in a few universal human commonalities, and a nearly endless amount of individual variation. Whereas identitarians believe that ethnic differences are important markers of individuals that are poorly handled under individualism. *shrug*
I thought Lindy West was primarily talked into letting her husband cheat on her in the name of not being anti-queer. I haven’t read the book though
The version I heard was that her husband told her that they needed to be in an open relationship because monogamy is like owning people and, therefore, like slavery.
I also did not read the book, but I feel like I've read and listened to a book's worth of podcast/substack/twitter commentary on it.
"...monogamy is like owning people and, therefore, like slavery". In my grouchier moments I read things like that and think post-2014 Progressivism is basically about destroying civilization.
I have never had a conversation with a black person (and I used to work at a Predominantly Black Institution in Jackson, MS on a DoE equity grant) that expressed anything like this idea. West coast white people are truly a whole other thing. I am extremely progressive about redistributive economics and everybody's right to dignity. I had hopes for reparations because of my own family's role in making them necessary. I have had interracial relationships myself. What the hell women 10 years my junior are getting up to in the discourse is not something I can explain.
My takeaway is that *a lot* of younger left-leaning men are poly. And sleazy guys use race-baiting and other deceptive talking points ("I'm trying to not control you") when they want to smash.
A lot of right-leaning guys are willing to say what they need to smash themselves, but yes! Each side has its own set of lines.
it could be the case that the book is actually a novel and has no content about her marriage at all and no one would actually know, because no one has read it, they've just consumed Discourse
And what deliciously dramatic Discourse it is.
Don't worry. It doesn't seem like anyone else did, either. https://link.nymag.com/public/45097624
"He believed monogamy was, at its root, a system of ownership. I had to admit that perhaps I didn't feel it as keenly, as a white person. Did I colonize Aham to try to fill my disembodied void?"
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/2026/03/polyamory-adult-braces-lindy-west/686409/
Practical workplace intersectionality was (is?) tied into the idea that hostility and yelling can magically change society so that all the structural inequities will go away in the blink of an eye because of course everyone will automatically comply with the new rules once they've been properly reprimanded.
The more effective way to thread one's way through these social issues as an individual is to understand them to the extent that you can respond to and counteract them while still pursuing the life you want. In the workforce that means learning who you are, how to be yourself, and how to moderate your behavior in ways that make you a better colleague and boss. This is pretty much true for anyone, isn't it? Perhaps younger women were persuaded to repress this stage of development in favor of "celebrating" victimhood. Too much victimization leads away from personal agency and growth.
(Alas, these observations are probably obsolete in an economy where opportunities for beginning a professional career or even getting a decent job are quickly disappearing. Women may have to go back to the tricks the "obscure" (!) silent generation learned during the depression about feeding and clothing families for pennies.)
One of the most amusing things about the whole #girlboss chapter in history is that when a business would be aggressively marketed as being feminist and women-led, there would always and inevitably be an internal racial uproar that would throw the whole company into chaos.
generally if you lean too hard on "we are the progressive Good Guys" (or gals, as it may be) you are always vulnerable to an identity-based revolt. even anarchist bookstores run by 100% people of color will manage to have this over not enough people being queer or disabled or something.
Our petty workplace drama is anti-capitalist and intersectional
Treating authoritarian patriarchal autocracies as having greater “feminist” achievements over western liberalism is complete historical revisionism. It’s the type of nonsense that really undermines (legitimate) critiques of our current societal failures from these people.
It's amazing how far the Soviets got with blatantly lying. You could actually visit the Soviet Union in the 80s, it was obviously a desperately poor, misogynistic and colonial society, and here we are almost 40 years later trying to point out that just because they said they weren't, doesn't mean that they weren't.
Here is a fun (or "fun") fact. The Soviet Union made a big damn deal about flying the first woman in space, and indeed, Valentina Tereshkova beat Sally Ride to space by a full twenty years. Make glorious propaganda victory for the grandeur of the motherland, Comrade!
But you look at any of the modern NASA astronaut classes, and they're close enough to 50/50 if you squint (maybe 60/40, I'm not aiming for extreme precision here). Last I checked in detail a couple of years ago, do you know how many female cosmonauts have flown in the entire history of the Soviet/Russian space program? Five. The second of those (Svetlana Savitskaya, who beat Ride by only a year) was, upon her arrival at Salyut 7, presented with an apron.
I am pretty sure this entire thing originates from the often-discussed finding that women in East Germany reported higher sexual satisfaction than women in West Germany. which, AFAIK, is real, but ironically is largely because East German women were girlbossing! (i.e., in the period discussed, it was still relatively abnormal for West German women to be able to support themselves financially, while East German women were much more likely to have good jobs, and thus the West German women were more likely to be stuck in bad marriages).
eta: also, as always with retroactive defenses of the USSR, it always somehow ends up centering on East Germany which was very unlike the USSR in that it was much more interested in delivering consumer goods than building heavy industry for military readiness
East Germany was also massively subsidized by the USSR, the Soviets' colonial empire also drained the coffers of the metropole while providing marginal benefit. Stalin really wasn't great at grand strategy!
I think for a lot of Western feminists, capitalism is "the devil you know". It's very, very easy to talk yourself into "it can't get any worse than this".
Not a lot of former Jezebel readers in this comments section?
What almost instantly turned off so many gen x and millennial feminists about girlbossing is the fact that, once you have elite money and power, what you actually do with that money and power fast becomes more important than your gender while wielding it.
Meta is a company that has developed and scaled genuinely harmful products—harms that fall with a particular weight on teen girls—and Sheryl Sandberg’s carelessness in that whole enterprise is the most salient fact about her career, not whatever glass ceiling she broke.
Anti-feminists conservatives noticed this as well, so we got to enjoy all kinds of takes about how strong criticism of Sarah Huckabee Sanders was “a classic case of women failing to support other women.”
But when you start wielding power, the spiderman principle kicks in and you have to answer for what you are actually doing. That’s what it is to take each other seriously. That is part of equality also.
1000%
"When I was in college, I took a seminar taught by Ti-Grace Atkinson"
Goddammit, this is the main reason I'm jealous of people who went to Ivy League schools. You took classes from both Ti-Grace Atkinson and Susan Moller Okin (may she rest in peace, I loved her work so much). And Nozick! (Not a feminist icon, let me point out.) I read all their books but I would have loved to have taken their classes.
And for heaven's sake, if you took classes from Atkinson and Okin, then you could have articulated some of the distinctions between branches of feminism at bit better than you have here.
To be fair, taking one class from each of these people 25 years ago doesn’t always leave as lasting an impression as being engaged with their writings for a long time.
I don’t know if I’m particularly late-blooming or if Ivy high-achievers are particularly early-blooming, but I would not have appreciated any of that at the time I was 19. Decades later, though, I’d love to be able to do seminars with some of these people, ask questions, etc.
As a professor, I often feel that classes are wasted on the young. On many occasions I’ve gone back and re-read books for classes I took, or even just read textbooks for classes I never took, and found so many interesting connections and ideas I never would have when I was a student!
I would love to be a permanent student
FWIW, without commenting on those folks specifically, I have had the following conversation several times in my life.
"At [amazing university], I took a class from [very famous person who I greatly admire]."
"Oh, that must have been amazing."
"Well, I feel very fortunate I got to take the class, but they were a terrible teacher."
The influence of Okin's work has been visible in a lot of Matt's work in the background, although not here.
I get why Matt locks in on the "strays" in the argument, and I agree with him about the girl boss, but I would actually enjoy a take on sex positive millennial hook up culture feminism vs the resurgence of heterosexual sex is rape adjacent at best feminist prudishness and it's apparent hold on the youngs.
I think a generation that got bad at socializing because of a combination of the pandemic and living online sometimes tries to turn this into a "well, I didn't want a social life anyway! I hate people" flex as cope for loneliness. "Sex? I didn't want that anyway!" is a part of that.
this is definitely the case for the most psychotic takes you see online. i think people are underrating that the 1% of completely shut-in terminally online loners has expanded to be more like 5% or more of the current generation, which makes it seem like they're all crazy just because those are the ones Posting. in real life it's not nearly that bad, though I do think there's some underlying truth to the idea that young people are a little more sex-negative now than 10-15 years ago.
These numbers do seem about right to me. 5% of 330 million or whatever can combine to make an awful lot of noise #online.
Never mind the Millennials with "social anxiety" who are still angry that COVID didn't end up being a permanent excuse to hide away forever. I think there is a lot of this kind of "the thing that is hard for me to get is stupid or irresponsible anyway" cope going around.
That feels like a Gen Z, not a Millennial thing. One of the primary reasons I think we need a draft
Is the last part of your sentence true for most youngs? I haven't seen this expressed in real life. Young people definitely have more trouble socializing these days, and perhaps lack of a social script is part of it. The young people I talk to (male and female) don't want a hook up culture - this might be partly due to the increase in the importance of looks, and they don't feel comfortable revealing their bodily flaws to someone they don't know well, coupled with fear because everyone has a camera and video recorder in their pocket - but that doesn't mean they feel that heterosexual sex is adjacent to rape outside of a small minority of people.
There was a big discourse on Twitter around this that Cartoons Hate Her wrote about: https://www.cartoonshateher.com/p/many-such-takes-reflect-on-the-blowjob
Basically, there appears to be a segment of neo-Dworkinite zoomer radical feminists doing purity culture, but from the left, but I think it's pretty exclusively an online phenomenon.
I tend to chalk it up to two things: 1) Early access to internet porn (without any context or previous sexual experience) creating an image of sex as inherently violent and coercive and 2) Covid upending traditional risk/reward calculations (also present among zoomers who are fervently anti-alcohol) - both of these tend to be particularly pronounced among the super online.
I wouldn't dismiss this movement if I were you. Look at South Korea.
I'd argue that the "hetero sex is rape-adjacent" ultra-feminists are the mirror twins of incels on the right. Best to be ignored and at best pitied.
Or set up with each other at mixers!
I would say, having overheard a few too many conversations between teenagers for my own sanity while being a coach/volunteer, that young women are generally more prudish now than they were when I was in school -- but also, this is not really a bad thing. As with all distributions, the far end gets dramatically larger even with a slight shift in the average in that direction.
I do not think that hookup culture served anyone well, and it's reasonable to want to go back to a norm of not having sex until you have been 'dating' for an extended period.
Yes, both of my descriptive poles on the spectrum are somewhat hyperbolic.
These things go in cycles. In 10-15 years the praise of hookup culture will be on the upswing.
I hadn’t thought of Gen X as a particularly sex negative generation, but I suppose it’s true that they weren’t as sex positive as either the free loving boomers or the hookup culture millennials.
I would say we were sex-cautious when we were young because we were kids or young adults during the time of the AIDS crisis, which did make sex scary for very good reasons. We are not necessarily the same way now.
I recently read The Believers by Rebecca Makkai, which reminded me about a lot of things I had pushed out of my head about that time period.
This is downstream of safetyism and shrinking gender wage gaps. If you are a woman and you don’t need a man for economic reasons, why not be very careful with your heart? You’ll have options til pretty late in the game— if you even want them.
I feel like the gender wage gap take is presupposing sex-negative assumptions. Why wouldn't the sexual optionality provided by liberation from single male bread-winner dependency be expected to expand the scope of female sexual expression?
I think the safety-ism is more at the heart of it. Of course people who are threatened by everything are going to be more likely to embrace the sex-as-threat model.
Most women enjoy sex with highly desirable partners. Relatively few are able to keep said partners monogamously. Hookup culture has an element of aspirational hyperandry.
"But the practical endgame here is just the majority-male business class closing ranks with social conservatives to choke off any hint of progressivism. "
It's not the endgame. Business will shift with the political winds as it always has. The mistake progressives made is believing that the turn to accept progressive demands and values during the Great Awokening was inherently durable. Trump conservatives are making the same mistake.
Bold of you to write this without mentioning that we are the only advanced or even semi advanced country without mandatory paid parental leave.
Because that seems like a clear case where capitalism put its boot on the face of feminism and has been stomping on it for decades.
That also seems like fair litmus test for whether person A values human flourishing or shareholder value more.
Many of those countries with parental leave are also capitalist. How is this a failure of capitalism rather than a failure of American government?
So in a pure capitalist system, it would be OK to sell heroin or children or biological weapons.
Really anything that could be treated as a commodity.
But we don't, because we recognize that some values are worth more than just "facilitating a market"
In most other countries, "raising a family" is treated as worth a bit of labor friction and "misallocation" of labor.
Not the US.
It is astounding how many people forget how a lot of the nice things we have now vis a vis the basic functioning of the labor market are the result of the Cold War forcing the structures in the US to be nicer do as not to have propaganda to the Soviets.
Are all the nice things in other countries products of genuinely kinder, more caring, more responsible peoples and cultures or the direct result of cataclysms like World War 2 and centuries of class oppression? How many people in South Korea or Taiwan remember that their landowning class allowed fairly radical redistribution because they didn't want to give local Communists propaganda fooder? You're writing like a true American Exceptionalist.
In a pure socialist system it’s fine to work people to death in service of the state and break up families to raise children in crèches where they can be educated to their role in society. And feed them as much heroin as they demand.
The ills you’re railing against aren’t about capitalism.
This use of the word capitalism to mean “all the stuff I don’t like about the world” has become so common we almost don’t see it anymore
"Norovirus is neoliberalism! Soccer is communism! I don't know what words mean!" It's so weird how descriptions of economic systems become about everything but econonmics.
Very true, but also, capitalism (or "late capitalism") getting blamed for stuff that would happen under any economy not run by a benevolent god appears to largely come out of the Great Recession, which coincided with the mass adoption of social media. A whole bunch of un/under-employed millennials who talk constantly on platforms engineered (by capitalists) to maximize emotionally charged content seems like a great way to create capitalism as the left's Satan.
That factor combined with the Right's tendency to label everything it doesn't like as socialism has led us into such a stupid time rhetorically.
My new thing is to blame our problems on "early stage capitalism."
After all, we've only had it for a few hundred of the last 200,000 years.
They aren't just economic, they're cultural as well. The generation of material culture is economic, and the arrangement of production is going to reflect and create cultural values.
The question of how to handle economic and productive resources competing for cultural or family resources isn't unique to capitalism. Even a state controlled factory is going to have to address the loss of workers as they prioritize things besides economic production.
Agreed, but I guess my point is orthogonal to that. I just don’t think the word “capitalism” in general usage even refers to an economic paradigm at all. It is just, weirdly, shorthand for “the things about the world I find distasteful”.
There's a Substack for that: https://www.persuasion.community/p/ugh-capitalism
I don't understand why people always bring this up.
What is so different about parenting in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, or Washington?
All of those places have mandatory parental leave. What specific empirical data are you saying says "parenting is soooo much better in these states"? If parenting is so much better, why aren't parents moving en-masse to these states?
The whole point of a Federal system of government is you don't get to whine about the lack of national policies and actually have to look at the state by state policies and outcomes and make your arguments based on that.
I don’t understand this argument. There’s a federal minimum wage, why can’t there be federal paid maternity leave?
The idea that federalism means you can’t whine about a lack of a standardized national policy is absurd — the federal government is obviously capable of setting a floor.
The argument is not that the federal government can’t do that. The argument is that if mandatory parental leave made such a huge difference, why don’t we see evidence that parenting is so much easier and better in states that have it?
Obviously if we’re talking about 12 or 16 weeks of paid leave it’s not going to make the entire job of parenting “so much easier and better” - but if you are in a bunch of parents groups on Facebook as I am you will hear a lot about how pleasant paid leave is vs either unpaid leave or having rush back to work.
The argument is, if you can't point to the benefits in California and New York then why should the federal government waste time and political capital implementing it?
The Federal minimum wage was implemented in 1938 when Democrats has overwhelming control and hasn't been changed since 2009 because few people think it is worth the political capital to bother trying.
The benefit is that parents don’t have to materially draw down their savings or rush back to work and can spend time with their newborns. I’m not sure what particular metric you’re hoping to measure, but to act like there is no benefit to parents bonding with their babies and women recovering postpartum is silly.
What’s so different is that in these states, parents continue to be paid when they take time off after birth.
Many of places also have some of the highest housing costs in the country, which may counterbalance overall ease of parenting for non-homeowners.
Okay then... What's so great about feminism in Japan or South Korea or Hungary or Romania or Greece...all places that have paid parental leave.
If it is such a silver bullet why do aren't those countries doing better?
For that matter, it isn't even like being a parent and/or feminist in France or Germany or the UK is somehow materially better. Their birthrates and women's workplace participation and number of female CEOs are all within the margin of error of the US.
There is zero evidence that paid parental leave is a significant contribution to any empirical metric.
This is frankly the biggest freakin' elephant in the "TFR/Family Size" debate that is resolutely ignored in my experience -- basically every progressive-coded solution that anyone proposes has already been implemented and often doubled or tripled down on by a few dozen other countries, for many years or even decades, and those countries almost all have lower TFRs than the U.S. (That does NOT mean conservative-coded solutions are necessarily correct, but it does make it pretty obvious that goal is just to use concerns about TFR to push progressive policy objectives, not to actually fix the problem. See also the Green New Deal and several other things supposedly intended to address various crises that would similarly be expected from the objective historical record to have little to no effect on the subject matter.)
Progressive policy objectives are the most important thing, it’s true, and yes, the end of a cradle to grave, full economic security for everyone welfare state justifies basically any means in my view
I mean when doing a comparison between countries, you have to take into consideration lots of different factors.
Did anyone say that one policy is a silver bullet??
Their infant and maternal mortality rates are all appreciably lower.
Not to mention the family support system is likelier to be in the state of origin, and that’s going to trump a few months of paid parental leave any time
I'm pretty sure parents in all these states you listed appreciate the availability of parental leave! My son was born in Massachusetts and my daughter in California, and I sure as heck appreciated being able to take two months off after giving birth each time! Childbirth + sleep deprivation = majorly unfun times, despite all the joy a new baby brings.
As for "well then why don't all parents move to these 11 states, haha, checkmate, parental leave activists" = all the usual reasons, such as: expensive housing, need to find jobs (possibly for both parents), don't want to move away from extended family/community/older child's school, etc.
Because policies like paid parental leave don’t exist in a vacuum!
Contrast the economic growth of the US to the EU and try to justify paid parental leave.
I'm so blessed as per the footnote to not know what spurred on this post!
The take in the final paragraph rings true.
I don’t know, by this point it’s provided WEEKS of entertainment to lots of people.
Ignorance is bisque, as they say. It's always amusing to me when I tell people in real life "sorry, I don't know what $MEME is, I'm not on social media" and they're always like good for you, you don't want to know anyway. The natural follow-up, of course, is: why are you on it then?
You've had some pretty good dad jokes lately.
Hi Matt Y,
I have many thoughts and maybe I’ll post more of them later, but as the mother of two children, including an infant, I was really hoping to see more of your thoughts on how to support “girlbosses” who are mothers.
Writing “rah, rah, go women in the workplace! Yay feminist capitalism!” in sparkly pink font is cheap and easy. Actually implementing policies that help new mothers balance their careers and looking after their children is hella hard. Just the other day I read a post on the “Ask a Manager” blog where the letter writer was saying: “I’m a boss at a family-friendly company, and when an employee asked for time off to pump breast milk, I agreed, but it’s 90 minutes per day! I didn’t realize it was going to be so much! It’s really cutting into my employee’s billable hours, what should I do?” The Manager explained to the letter writer that yes, if you pump 3 times during a work day and each session is 30 minutes (a very standard pumping schedule if you want to maintain your milk supply), that will take up 90 minutes/day, and it’s just an accommodation you are legally required to provide.
A true “girl boss” culture is one where everyone involved knows and understands this. Actions matter; words are wind.
And the leave situation ugh. After having my second kid my leave balance has plummeted. I no longer can take vacation time or sick leave for myself because I have to use it when my kids are sick and/or schools are closed. My organization tends to promote childless people or people with grandparents in town (coincidence or no?) so the understanding of issues parents of young children have to deal with is low.
Anyway, I've never been very involved in the girl boss discourse. I thought a lot of the backlash to it had to do with the argument that women had to change themselves to adopt a more masculine style instead of working on society and on men to be more adapted to and encouraging of women's general needs and more feminine communication styles. Or maybe that was just my own personal disagreement with it.
I'm also disappointed in this essay. I'm not sure the point of it. I also had to scroll quite a bit to see any female representation in the comments.
I think by this point most women don't bother. I spent 20 years arguing with dudes on the internet and I'm basically done. It's not worth it.
Very well said! The struggle is real. Ultimately, there no way around the fact that you can't do your job and look after children at the same time. We can and should have policies that enable mothers to stay in the workforce - I'm in favor of subsidized childcare - but tradeoffs and constraints abound.
I agree that I was asking myself "what's the point?" as I read this piece.
And yes, the SB comments section tends to be male-heavy.
Also, you can't force them to pump in a stall in the ladies' room, as my (female!) former executive director did to one of my direct reports. At least not in Colorado. You have to provide them with a room with a door. I was glad to know the law on that.
I believe that's the case everywhere in the US.
> I have no particular desire to add to the Lindy West Discourse
Narrator: Notwithstanding the desire, the Discourse was added to.
More honest Narrator: (he did, in fact, wish to add to the discourse, which is why he's brought this salacious but trivial topic up twice in the last week now)
CHH helped me understand this more. Girlboss feminism is an alternative to the highly neurotic feminism of people like West.
Girlboss = dad is a dentist and mom is the big boss at Acme Insurance with two kids a dog and a cat.
West Feminism: Lindy getting tucked in to her bed in the guest room by her husband and his girlfriend and then clutching a stuffed animal as her husband and his girlfriend go at it in the next room.
EXCEPT that West is also the sole support of the family. After she is tucked in at night, she's the one working her ass off to pay the bills.
Lindy West is letting herself be exploited because she hates herself because she's fat. It's actually really depressing.
That's where the anti-capitalism comes in. Her neuroticism drives her into relationships with guys like her non earning trumpet player husband while the girl boss is living it up with the periodontist. Under not-capitalism trumpet players and periodontists will make the same money and there will be no penalty paid for Lindsay's terrible taste in men.
I don’t know who this person is but if she’s fat like the other commenter is saying, maybe it’s just that her choice of men is limited and she doesn’t have much bargaining power in the relationship?
I hope everyone has the choice not to live with a disgusting bastard. You can always just leave. Being on your own has to be better than what she dealt with.
And yet, disgusting bastards don't seem any more or less lonely than a replacement-level guy.
People make bad choices sometimes.
She's chosen to remain fat, in the face if highly effective treatments, because reasons.
Some people have bad side effects or similar reasons.
Her reasons relate back to her fat acceptance advocacy and concerns about her fragile mental health. This despite:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/article-abstract/2833558
That's certainly what she believes about herself.
Lindy, not Lindsay.
Well, that's even worse.
It's like a female version of "The Trip" where Steve Coogan is "living the dream" with his 25 year old girlfriend, romantic flings with Polish waitresses, a million dollar apartment, and great media gigs, but is secretly pretty miserable. While Rob Brydon's boring and routine upper middle class life with a wife and kid and terraced house seems to make him quite content and happy.
Is there any need to be quite so much of a dick about it?
About what? These aren't things that happened to her, these are choices she deliberately made/is making.
I think it's pretty clear that you weren't applying very much charity or kindness in the sentence 'Lindsay getting tucked in to her bed in the guest room by her husband and his girlfriend and then clutching a stuffed animal as her husband and his girlfriend go at it in the next room'.
Well, to be fair to BZC, Lindy isn't very kind or charitable to people who have slightly different politics from hers. She describes driving through flyover country and expresses tremendous disgust at perfectly nice people because she suspects them of being Trump voters. They haven't said anything! She just knows they're Trump voters.
“flyover country”
America’s breadbasket neatly aligns with its basket of deplorables.
Why should I? She's making terrible choices in life. She needs some tough love and needs to stop supporting those two and kick their sorry asses to the curb. Trumpet boy can then earn an honest living.
I don’t get the sense that what you are giving here is tough *love*.
What do you think she needs? To be endlessly indulged in her poor choices?
You can and will do what you want, of course. I would just say that sometimes, when men are critiquing what they feel are the absurd excesses of feminism, it can be easy to forget that these emerge in no small part as ways of coping with a world shaped by male power and/or aggression.
No, you don't understand, when I'm being mean to people online it's because they deserve it and it's for their own good.
My problem with 'capitalism' as a word can be summarised pretty simply, which is that there are two entirely different things that people mean when they say 'capitalism'.
One is "money can be exchanged for goods and services" (to quote Homer Simpson), in which case capitalism good.
The other is "a small number of people own the vast majority of the capital and have effective control over both the economy and politics as a result", in which case capitalism bad.
Without clarifying what he means by 'capitalism', Matt's line "I think it was, in fact, perfectly reasonable and correct for women to insist on fair treatment without becoming radical critics of capitalism, because capitalism is basically fine and good." ceases to have any meaning.
"a small number of people own the vast majority of the capital"
Maybe there is some place this is true (where?), but it isn't the case in either your home country or mine. Total market capitalization for US-listed companies is ~$70 Trillion. Add in the capital in private companies and your are probably near $100 Trillion. Now add in the capital stock of houses in the US and you are at $150 Trillion.
Who are the "small number of people" who own the vast majority of this $150 Trillion amount of capital?
It doesn’t map perfectly to total US capital, but the top 1% has a household wealth of $50 trillion which is 1/3 of all US household wealth (so that number is also $150 trillion). And the top 10% holds ~70% of the wealth.
We can quibble over whether 10% is a “small number of people” but clearly wealth is very concentrated!
Top 10% is 35 million people. I suspect the diversity of their views are as varied (or more varied) than the country as a whole.
Fair - but if I restated the claim as “a very small number of people hold a wildly disproportionate share of the wealth” (as opposed to saying “vast majority”), it doesn’t really change the substance of it.
I think it does. When I hear Bernie types claim "a very small number of people hold a wildly disproportionate share of the wealth” ... I think they think they're talking about like nine people.
The top 9 alone hold more than 1% of US wealth (in total they have ~$1.7 trillion). Bernie types aren’t wrong on this one!
I found this whole piece really thin today. 'Capitalism' is not the only problematic term; 'girlboss' is also I think poorly defined. Also the piece seems to be structured as if 'girlbosses' are under equal pressure from left and right, but what is the actual pressure from the left? That Jezebel might write a snarky article about your products and cringe marketing strategy? Oh well. Meanwhile the threat from the right is of a masculinist revanchism from the top to the bottom of the movement.
Thank you. I kind of hate "girlboss." I worked outside the home in jobs that required post-graduate degrees, but I wasn't a girlboss, whatever that is. I was a woman with a decent job.
"Girlboss" seemed to be a very specific thing applied to a type of Instagram-aesthetic startups. Beyond Sandberg (whom I'm not sure even used the term for herself), I don't think I ever heard a professional women outside that very specific Buzzfeedy milieu call themselves a girlboss.
If one of those terms mainly used in a derogatory fashion.
Right, I'm presuming that Mary Barra doesn't consider herself a 'girlboss'? But if it's really about one particular milieu, and not just 'female bosses and/or entrepreneurs in general', then a wide-angle post like this one is useless. We'd need instead to do some kind of balancing of the benefits and harms of bootstrap businesses based around influencer-adjacent lifestyles.
"a small number of people own the vast majority of the capital"
Maybe this is becoming the colloquial definition, but if so, that's really too bad because it could describe places like North Korea and Cuba just as well as most "capitalist" societies.
I used to get twisted up about this but my take is that it usually is shorthand for various market failures, problems with the American welfare state/health insurance system, forms of self dealing by the wealthy, and/or outsized influence of big businesses in the government. Is that 'capitalism'? Not really but it at least is useful for understanding what people are griping about.
I'm also trying to untwist myself for the same reasons but haven't gotten quite as far as you, lol.
Somewhere I've heard a comparison of "it's capitalism" to "the system" or "'the man' is keeping me down". The latter phrases began as sincere everyday social critiques from everyday persons (before eventually becoming more comic than serious).
The problem with capitalism, though is it already has a definition! So it really clutters discussions because as Richard says, it's hard to know what people actually mean.
Agreed, it's not ideal and also in my experience based on a bunch of not particularly accurate beliefs about life in the Nordic countries. Even my wife who is a lot leftier than me will often say 'Yes, yes, it's very sad we have to get up and go to work in the morning.'
When I've seen someone complaining about "capitalism" I typically find they're either talking about society prioritizing the preferences of its more productive members, being upset by the reality of tradeoffs, or simply complaining about "the bad thing I dont like" in the same way people talk about fascism.
To me this kind of the difference between capitalism in theory vs how capitalism often works in a lot of industries(healthcare, childcare etc etc). In a perfect capitalist system the rate of profit is nearly zero. Perfect capitalism requires symmetry of information and no barriers to entry. Almost no industry works like that, and as such while you don't get the type of mercantilism that existed in Adam Smith's day, regulatory capture by businesses that can find ways to reduce competition and create rent-seeking behavior is a feature of many industries. Their is a difference between being pro-business and pro-market and while their not mutually exclusive, often times the interests of an individual business will diverge or be contrary to the interests of the broader market or the consumer.
To write this more conventionally and less in memes and TLDR:
There is a perfectly respectable approach to describing capitalism as a failure mode of the free market where there is an overconcentration of economic and therefore political power in the hands of a small number of capitalists. Obviously, Marx was one of the theorists who problematised this, but its entirely possible to see this as a possible failure mode of the free market without accepting Marx’s view that it’s an inevitable failure mode.
Being anti-capitalism and pro-free market is entirely compatible under this understanding of capitalism, and I think that Matt is exactly in that position (and I know I am).
I’ve never heard of the second as a definition of capitalism.
That’s what many anti-capitalists mean when they say “capitalism” - overconcentration of economic-political power in the hands of capitalists.
Marxists talk about the inevitable consolidation; social democrats tend to talk about the necessity of market regulation to prevent this.
I’m pretty sure that anticapitalists are against a market economic system, and instead want means of production owned by workers and the economy to be commanded by the government. The reason they support that is they believe that the inevitable result of capitalism is concentration of economic and political power in a small number of people. Not that they think the definition of capitalism is that concentration.
He is reflecting the ambiguity of capitalism's definition as used by it's opponents.