Apparently, “skill issue” has entered the discourse and immediately been escorted to the wrong table.

A few days ago, I wrote that men and boys are not in crisis because of feminism. They are in crisis because patriarchy taught them to expect to be the center of the universe while putting in zero effort and now that they are not getting what they want, they often do not have the emotional tools to handle disappointment.

I called this a skill issue.

This has been interpreted by some people as me saying men are personally, individually, morally defective for having been shaped by patriarchy. Which is not what I said. It is also not what “skill issue” means here.

A skill issue can exist because the skill was never considered important enough to teach. It can exist because someone was actively discouraged from learning it. It can exist because the culture around them treated the skill as shameful, feminizing, humiliating, or unnecessary.

That does not make the skill gap imaginary. It does not mean the consequences vanish. And it certainly does not mean everyone else is obligated to live inside the fallout.

A lack of skill is not always your fault.

But once that lack of skill starts hurting other people, it becomes your responsibility.

Patriarchy Is a Terrible Curriculum

Let’s be very clear: patriarchy harms boys.

It teaches them that vulnerability is weakness. It teaches them that anger is strength. It teaches them that sadness is shameful, fear is unacceptable, tenderness is suspect, and needing other people is a humiliation to be managed privately or disguised as rage.

It also teaches them that women are emotional infrastructure. We are supposed to soothe, soften, absorb, forgive, translate, wait, endure, explain, and then apologize for the tone we used while explaining.

That is not nature. That is curriculum. Bad curriculum. Lead-paint curriculum. Curriculum with arsenic in the sugar bowl.

The scholarship is not exactly coy about this. Connell and Messerschmidt’s work on hegemonic masculinity argues that masculinity is not a fixed biological essence, but a social formation connected to gender hierarchy, power, embodiment, and historical change. Masculinity is not simply something men “are.” It is something societies organize, reward, police, and reproduce.

The American Psychological Association’s guidelines for working with boys and men similarly frame masculinity as socially and culturally shaped, and they specifically encourage psychologists to help boys and men navigate restrictive definitions of masculinity.

So yes, when men say they were conditioned into emotional restriction, I believe them. When they say they were taught not to cry, not to ask for help, not to appear weak, not to need affection, not to admit fear, not to talk about pain until it has fermented into hostility, I believe them.

That is patriarchy doing what patriarchy does. It builds a cage, calls it manhood, and then sells everyone else tickets to watch the pacing.

But there is a difference between recognizing the cage and demanding women become the zookeepers.

“They Were Taught the Skill Was Bad to Learn”

One of the objections I received was that emotional literacy is not like learning to maintain a car. Men were not simply “never taught” the skill, the argument went. They were taught the skill was bad to learn. Emotional expression interacts with identity, social conditioning, relationships, childhood, and the nervous system.

Fine.

That is true.

Emotional regulation is not exactly like learning to change a tire. It is deeper than that. It is more intimate than that. It is tangled up with shame, identity, family systems, friendships, culture, and the terrifying little filing cabinet in the brain labeled “things I refuse to feel because my father called them weakness.”

Research on men’s mental health supports this. “The Role of Masculinity in Men’s Help-Seeking for Depression: A Systematic Review” found that conformity to traditional masculine norms affects how men experience depression, how they manage symptoms, and whether they seek help. Norms such as stoicism, self-reliance, and restrictive emotionality can make it harder for men to recognize distress, communicate it, or access support.

So yes, men were often taught not to learn the skill.

That is not an escape hatch from responsibility.

If anything, it makes the responsibility more urgent. Because if patriarchy taught men that emotional literacy is shameful, then adult men have a choice to make. They can keep treating that shame as sacred inheritance, or they can decide that maybe the thing patriarchy told them to avoid is exactly the thing they need.

Therapy exists. Books exist. Support groups exist. Other men exist.

The internet exists, and not just for podcasts by men sitting in front of rented sports cars explaining that women over thirty are expired produce.

Men have options. Many of them have access to resources women were never offered when we were expected to become fluent in everyone else’s emotions just to survive.

Explanation Is Not Exemption

This is where people get slippery.

Because the second you say, “Patriarchy harms boys too,” someone inevitably tries to hand women the mop.

The move goes like this:

• Patriarchy harms men.

• Therefore men lack emotional skills.

• Therefore women should be more patient.

• Therefore women should be less angry.

• Therefore women should be less suspicious.

• Therefore women should soften their critiques.

• Therefore women should help men grow.

• Therefore if women refuse to do this, women are the real obstacle.

And just like that, patriarchy has performed its favorite magic trick: making men’s pain women’s assignment.

No.

Explanation is not exemption. Difficulty is not immunity. Trauma is not a coupon for harming other people.

You can blame the system that shaped boys and still hold adult men responsible for what they do with that shaping. That is not hypocrisy. That is accountability.

bell hooks understood this tension better than almost anyone. Her work on men, masculinity, and love takes male pain seriously without turning male pain into a permission slip. In a New Yorker interview, hooks discussed the need to understand how men are raised into violence, shame, and emotional disconnection, but her work never suggests that women must absorb domination because men were wounded by patriarchy first.

Patriarchy harms men.

Men still have to change.

Both things are true. Both things can sit in the same room without one eating the other.

Women Are Not the Remedial Classroom

Here is the part that seems to cause the most distress: I am not here to coddle men about this.

I am not here to provide soft lighting and a guided meditation because grown men have discovered that being told to learn emotional regulation feels unpleasant. I am not here to rock patriarchy’s graduates gently in my arms and whisper, “There, there, it’s not your fault you never learned accountability.”

It may not be their fault.

It is still their responsibility.

Women are not the remedial classroom for patriarchy’s worst students. We are not the customer service desk for male disappointment. We are not the emotional crash mat for men who are just now realizing that “anger” is not a complete personality, despite what their emotionally stunted and PTSD riddled forefathers told them.

Arlie Hochschild originally coined “emotional labor” to describe paid emotion work, especially the management of feeling required as part of a job. But her broader concepts of emotion work and feeling rules help us think about how emotions are managed socially, not just privately. Her 1979 work on emotion work argues that feeling itself is shaped by social rules and interpersonal expectations.

And the gendered pattern is not imaginary. Research on emotion work in relationships has found that women in both same-sex and different-sex relationships often do more emotion work than men, including encouraging personal sharing and maintaining relational emotional climates.

So when men demand “grace” in response to feminist critique, we should ask a few questions.

Grace from whom?

At what cost?

For how long?

And why is women’s patience always treated like a public utility?

“Grace” Is Not a Debt Women Owe Men

One of the responses I received insisted that men need safe spaces, grace, and lack of shaming in order to unlearn patriarchal conditioning.

Okay.

Build them.

Fund them.

Join them.

Go to therapy. Read books. Talk to other men. Start support groups. Develop friendships where emotional honesty is not treated like a contagion. Practice vulnerability somewhere that does not require women to become the training wheels for your humanity.

What men are not owed is automatic trust from women who have every reason to doubt the safety of men.

What men are not owed is unlimited patience from women they have exhausted.

What men are not owed is the right to interpret every boundary as hostility and every critique as abuse.

This matters because the demand for grace often comes with a tiny little clause hidden in the contract: women must make men’s growth comfortable for men.

Absolutely not.

Growth is often uncomfortable. Accountability is often uncomfortable. Realizing you have harmed people, benefited from a system, or outsourced your emotional life to the women around you is uncomfortable. That does not make the person naming it abusive.

It makes the discomfort evidence that the nerve is still alive.

Healed Men Do Not Demand Automatic Trust

Another objection I received was that feminists treat men as collectively guilty. That even “healed men” are treated as bad because other men harm women. That at some point grace has to replace suspicion and shame.

This is one of those arguments that sounds reasonable until you notice the little entitlement goblin living inside it.

Because a healed man would understand why women have trust issues with men.

A healed man would not hear women’s caution and immediately make it about his wounded innocence. He would understand context. He would understand pattern recognition. He would understand that women are not being mean when we remember what men, collectively and individually, have done with women’s trust.

A healed man would not demand that women pretend the pattern does not exist so he can feel personally affirmed.

And frankly, men need to want to become better versions of themselves for themselves. Not because it gets them a cookie. Not because it earns them access to women. Not because it means women will automatically give them the benefit of the doubt.

Healing is not a vending machine where you insert one therapy token and women dispense trust.

If your growth depends on women immediately rewarding you with softness, access, forgiveness, or praise, you are not doing what you think you are doing. You are not healing, you are not trying to remove the Patriarchal residue from your life, you are simply trying to manipulate your way into women’s pants.

The Boys Deserve Better

This is where I want to be very clear: none of this means boys are doomed.

Boys are not born emotionally defective. Boys are not born allergic to tenderness. Boys are not born clutching a podcast microphone and muttering about “high-value females.”

They are taught.

And because they are taught, they can be taught differently.

Niobe Way’s work on boys’ friendships has shown that boys often do desire deep, emotionally intimate friendships, but those capacities are suppressed by masculine norms that teach vulnerability as weakness and emotional closeness as suspect. There is a crisis of connection among boys and young men, tied to cultural ideals of stoicism, autonomy, and self-sufficiency.

That is where collective responsibility belongs.

We are all responsible for refusing to feed another generation of boys into the same machine and then acting shocked when the machine produces men who cannot name sadness until it has already become rage.

Parents, teachers, coaches, media, communities, and men are all responsible.

Women are also part of the collective society that needs to raise boys differently, yes. But that is not the same thing as making individual women responsible for rehabilitating individual adult men who have access to help and refuse to use it.

Future generations need better emotional education.

Adult men need to do their own homework.

These are not contradictory claims.

The Conversation Eats Itself

Eventually, the conversation did what these conversations always do. It curled into a tiny ouroboros of male grievance and swallowed its own tail.

I said men have a skill issue and need to address it.

I was told that this was hostile.

I clarified that women are not responsible for fixing it.

I was told that refusing to help is fine, but I should not be an asshole about it.

I said criticism of patriarchy is being treated as a personal attack.

I was told “tough love” is neither tough nor love, that it is manipulation, that manipulation to condition behavior is abusive, and that hostility only creates hostility.

Which is fascinating, because “you need to learn a skill” is not abuse. It wasn’t abuse when my dad told me I needed to learn to do the dishes. It wasn’t abuse when my mom taught me to hem pants and sew on buttons. It wasn’t abuse when my professors taught me to skim read so I wouldn’t drown in grad school reading lists.

“Women are not responsible for teaching it to you” is not manipulation.

“I am not going to coddle you through the process of becoming a safer, more emotionally competent person” is not hostility.

It is a boundary.

And that, I think, is the real problem.

For some people, a woman having a boundary feels indistinguishable from a woman being cruel. A woman refusing to soothe feels like an attack. A woman declining the role of emotional tutor feels like abandonment. A woman saying, “This is your responsibility,” feels like hostility because patriarchy has taught men that women’s emotional availability is the default setting of the universe.

So when that availability is withdrawn, it feels like violence.

It is not violence.

It is the end of a service they were never entitled to.

Not Your Fault Is Not the Same as Not Your Responsibility

Patriarchy created the skill issue.

It taught boys to fear emotional literacy, mock vulnerability, outsource care, and mistake women’s patience for a natural resource. It taught them that anger is masculine, sadness is weakness, and accountability is humiliation. It handed them a toolbox containing entitlement, shame, and one rusty wrench labeled “don’t be a pussy,” then acted shocked when adult men could not repair a relationship without setting the garage on fire.

That is real.

That matters.

But adult men are not helpless passengers in their own lives. They have books. They have therapy. They have support groups. They have friends. They have other men. They have search engines. They have choices.

Patriarchy may explain why men were not taught the skill.

It may even explain why they were taught the skill was shameful.

But it does not make women responsible for teaching it now.

Women are not required to coddle men through the process of becoming safer people.

Women are not required to make accountability feel like a warm cup of cocoa.

Women are not required to lower our boundaries so men can experience growth without shame.

We are all responsible for raising future generations differently. Boys deserve tenderness, emotional vocabulary, rejection tolerance, repair skills, intimate friendship, and models of masculinity that do not require them to amputate half their humanity before anyone calls them men.

But grown men?

Grown men are responsible for doing their own damn homework.

And if being told “you have work to do” feels like hostility, that is not proof feminism is cruel.

That is the skill issue talking.

This one started with a question about whether anyone else never pretended to be a bride as a little girl. The expected cultural script is obvious: little girls dream about weddings. Little girls wrap pillowcases around their heads like veils. Little girls practice walking down the aisle because, apparently, heterosexual matrimony is supposed to descend upon the female imagination sometime between learning to tie your shoes and developing opinions about horses.

And then the replies arrived.

“I made witch soups in my garden.”

“I literally pretended to be an assassin.”

“I pretended to be a horse, a knight, and Robin Hood. Not at the same time.”

“I was always in the ravines near my home pretending to be a sorceress or a warrior navigating tense politics between rival nations.”

“I used to play gender flipped Star Trek with my Barbies. Captain Jane Kirk and Ms. Spock!”

Reader, this is not a comment section. This is an feminist academic archive.

What appeared, almost immediately, was not a chorus of women confessing that they had somehow failed girlhood because they did not spend their childhoods rehearsing for David’s Bridal. It was a full parade of feral girlhood world-building: spies, witches, knights, survivalists, orphans, warriors, assassins, pioneers, Starfleet officers, political negotiators, and at least one child conducting what appears to have been a Barbie-based sacrificial religion in the backyard.1

So perhaps the real historical question is not, “Why didn’t some girls pretend to be brides?”

Perhaps the better question is: why were adults so invested in pretending that bride was the default setting?

Because the bride fantasy was the propaganda.

The witch soup was the reality.

Girlhood Was Never as Small as They Told Us

One of the most persistent lies about gender is that femininity reveals itself naturally through play. Girls play house because they are naturally domestic. Girls play with dolls because they are naturally maternal. Girls dream about weddings because they are naturally oriented toward marriage. Put a plastic baby in her arms and, allegedly, biology lights up like a Christmas tree.

But this is not how culture works. This is how culture hides its own fingerprints.

In Catherine Driscoll’s work on girlhood she treats “girlhood” not as a simple biological stage but as a cultural category, one shaped by psychology, education, media, consumer culture, and the marketplace of feminine expectation. In Girls: Feminine Adolescence in Popular Culture and Cultural Theory, Driscoll traces how modern culture made “the girl” increasingly visible while also surrounding her with theories, images, and markets that claimed to explain what she was and what she would become.

That matters because “the girl” is not simply discovered by culture. She is narrated by it.2

And one of the most durable narratives is this: girlhood is a waiting room for wifehood.

This is where the bride enters. The bride is not just a person getting married. She is one of the great symbolic endpoints of traditional femininity. The girl becomes the maiden, the maiden becomes the bride, the bride becomes the wife, the wife becomes the mother, and the whole thing gets presented as a soft-focus life cycle rather than an ideological conveyor belt.

Driscoll even has a chapter titled “Becoming Bride,” which is almost too perfect. The bride, in this framework, is not merely a wedding figure. She is a cultural role through which feminine adolescence gets organized, aestheticized, and disciplined.

In other words, the question “You never pretended to be a bride?” is not neutral. It carries a whole worldview inside it.

It assumes that bridal fantasy is normal girlhood.

It assumes that girls naturally rehearse heterosexual domestic futures.

It assumes that a child who does not imagine herself chosen, displayed, admired, and ceremonially transferred into marriage is somehow unusual.

Meanwhile, half the replies are women saying, “Actually, I was in the yard making mud-based potions and preparing for siege conditions.”

Which, frankly, feels historically important.

Domestic Play Became Destiny. Everything Else Became “Kids Being Weird.”

The trick is not that girls never played bride, house, or mother. Of course some did. Plenty of children play domestic games because children use the materials around them to make meaning, and domestic life is one of the first worlds children observe.

Of course, when I and my friends got control of the playhouse at recess, I was always married to my wife (my best friend). Because even domestic play isn’t constrained by heterosexuality.

The trick is that adults have long interpreted domestic play as destiny while treating every other kind of play as temporary weirdness.

A girl pretends to be a bride, and adults say, “Look, she already knows.”

A girl pretends to be a mother, and adults say, “It’s instinct.”

A girl pretends to be a witch-priestess conducting Barbie sacrifices in a backyard altar system of unclear theological origin, and adults say, “Children are strange.”

But all play is strange. That is the point. Play is rehearsal, experimentation, mimicry, invention, and rebellion wearing a costume made out of whatever was in the closet.

Barrie Thorne’s Gender Play: Girls and Boys in School treats children not as passive recipients of gender but as active participants in making, negotiating, and sometimes disrupting it. Her ethnographic work looked at how children’s everyday social interactions shape gender identities, especially in classrooms and playgrounds.

Children do not simply receive gender like a package left on the porch. They open it, misread the instructions, trade parts with other children, and sometimes use the box as a spaceship.

That is what makes the replies so revealing. Girls were not just failing to absorb the bride script. They were actively producing other scripts.

The ravine became a geopolitical battlefield.

The closet became the setting for a rescue narrative.

The garden became a potion laboratory.

The Barbie collection became Star Trek, but corrected.

And yet when we talk about girlhood, adult culture keeps returning to the same narrow evidence: dolls, dresses, weddings, motherhood, nurturing, domesticity. Patriarchy grades on a curve. It notices the data points that confirm the conclusion and files the rest under “adorable nonsense.”

But the nonsense is where the truth leaks out.

Dolls Were Supposed to Teach Domesticity. Girls Had Other Plans.

This is where doll history becomes delicious.

Miriam Forman-Brunell’s Made to Play House: Dolls and the Commercialization of American Girlhood, 1830–1930 traces how dolls became tied to domesticity, maternity, materialism, and the toy industry’s effort to define proper American girlhood. The book’s description notes that dolls have often been perceived as symbols of domesticity and maternity, but Forman-Brunell shows that the history is more complicated than that.

That complication is the whole point.

Adults and industries handed girls dolls and imagined them rehearsing being tiny mothers. Girls received the dolls and, in several documented anecdotal cases, immediately formed religions, staged wars, invented dramas, conducted medical experiments, reenacted television shows with gender flipped characters, or removed the dolls’ heads for reasons known only to God and second-grade girls.3

Forman-Brunell’s broader work in doll studies emphasizes that dolls are not trivial. They are cultural objects, and their meanings are contested. In interviews about dolls and American girlhood, she describes how her research uncovered girls’ unconventional doll play and the ways girls both accepted and rejected dominant ideals of girlhood.

This matters because dolls are often treated as the smoking gun of natural femininity. See? Girls like dolls. Therefore girls are naturally maternal. Therefore women belong with children. Therefore the entire apparatus of gendered labor is just biology in a tiny bonnet.

Except, no.

A doll is not a destiny. A doll is a prop.

The meaning comes from the play.

One girl might rock a doll like a baby. Another might make the doll president. Another might cast the doll as Ms. Spock. Another might sacrifice the doll to the backyard powers, which I am not endorsing, but I am acknowledging as a bold rejection of domestic passivity.

The adult fantasy was that dolls trained girls for motherhood.

The girlhood reality was often that dolls became whatever the story required.

The Bride Waits at the Altar. The Witch Builds One.

This is why the “witch soup” comment is so perfect.

The witch soup is not just funny, although it is very funny. It is practically a thesis statement with mud in it.

The bride fantasy asks a girl to imagine being chosen.

The witch fantasy lets her imagine having power.

That distinction is everything.

The bride is looked at. The witch looks back.

The bride is arranged, dressed, presented, admired. The witch gathers ingredients. The bride walks toward an institution. The witch makes one in the yard out of leaves, dirt, flower petals, and a bowl she was absolutely not supposed to take outside.

The bride is legitimate power, but only after it has been sanctioned by family, church, law, romance, and the approving gaze of everyone who wants femininity to behave itself.

The witch is unauthorized power.

She knows things she is not supposed to know. She touches what is messy. She makes things happen. She is suspicious, excessive, disruptive, and always one bad harvest away from being blamed for the village’s problems.

No wonder girls like her.

Contemporary scholarship on witches in girls’ and young adult literature often frames the witch as a figure of subversive or reclaimed power. Recent work on witches, gender, and identity in young adult literature argues that witch figures often allow teenage girls to reclaim forms of power historically associated with otherness, suspicion, and oppression.

That does not mean every child making garden soup was secretly doing feminist praxis. Sometimes children are just mixing grass and water and dirt because the forbidden texture compels them. But culturally, witch play gives girls access to something the bride script withholds: agency without permission.

The witch does not wait to be picked.

The witch does the picking herself.4

The Survival Girl Fantasy Was About Competence

Then there were the survival girls.

The Island of the Blue Dolphins girls. The Hatchet girls. The Boxcar Children girls. The My Side of the Mountain girls. The Little House on the Prairie girls. The girls making food stores, building imagined shelters, rationing supplies, preparing for winter, and turning childhood into a low-budget apocalypse drill.

I understand these children on a spiritual level.

I should probably confess something here: the Island of the Blue Dolphins girl was me.

Not literally, obviously. I was not stranded alone on an island off the coast of California with a pack of wild dogs, which is disappointing only in the sense that childhood me had absolutely considered the logistics. But I was one of those girls who read survival stories and absorbed them with the intensity of a religious text.

I did not just read Island of the Blue Dolphins. I mentally moved in.

I was fascinated by Karana’s competence. The food stores. The shelter. The weapons. The careful watching of the world around her. The way survival required attention, memory, patience, and skill. It was not enough to be brave in the abstract. You had to know things. You had to make things. You had to prepare.

And apparently, based on the replies to that thread, I was not alone.

A striking number of women remembered childhood fantasies that revolved around isolation and survival. Not just adventure. Not just “running away.” Survival. Building shelters. Storing food. Learning the woods. Pretending to be orphaned, shipwrecked, stranded, hidden, or otherwise forced into self-reliance.

There is something funny about that, in the way childhood is often funny because children are tiny goblins with elaborate contingency plans. But there is also something quietly devastating about it.

Because why did so many girls find those stories so magnetic? Especially when so many of them were written by male authors, about boys, for boys.

Why did so many of us fantasize not simply about adventure, but about preparedness?

Why did the idea of being alone and capable feel so powerful?

Part of the answer, I think, is that girls learn very early that the world is not necessarily built to help them. Not always consciously. Not in a fully articulated political theory with footnotes and a sensible bibliography. But children notice things. Girls notice who gets protected and who gets blamed. They notice who is expected to be careful. They notice who is told to watch their tone, their clothes, their bodies, their surroundings, their ambitions, their appetites, their anger.

They notice that “safety” often arrives as a list of things they should have done differently.

Don’t walk alone. Don’t dress like that. Don’t be rude. Don’t be too trusting. Don’t be too cold. Don’t be dramatic. Don’t make a scene. Don’t expect anyone to read your mind, but also don’t be too direct. Don’t get yourself into trouble. Don’t need too much saving.

At some point, even before we have the language for it, the lesson gets through: help may not arrive. And if it does, it may arrive late, judgmental, and carrying paperwork.

So the survival fantasy becomes more than a fantasy of escape. It becomes a fantasy of readiness.

There is something powerful about survival fiction when you are a girl. Not because being abandoned is fun. Not because starvation is whimsical. Not because every child yearns to be orphaned in the woods, although children’s literature has certainly tested that theory with commitment.

The appeal is competence.

Survival stories tell children, including girls, that fear does not make you helpless. You can learn the land. You can make tools. You can gather food. You can build shelter. You can observe, adapt, endure.

You can be alone and still be capable. Because if society isn’t going to protect you, at least you can learn to protect yourself.

That is a very different fantasy from the bridal one.

The bride fantasy is built around arrival: the ceremony, the dress, the gaze, the moment of being chosen.

The survival fantasy is built around process: preparation, knowledge, skill, improvisation, self-possession.

Karana was alone, but she was not helpless. That was the part that mattered. She knew where food came from. She knew how to make shelter. She knew how to defend herself. She grieved, adapted, observed, endured. Her isolation was frightening, yes, but it also stripped away the social noise. No one was telling her to be pleasing. No one was measuring her femininity. No one was asking whether she was pretty enough, agreeable enough, marriageable enough, soft enough, quiet enough.5

The question was simpler and harder: can you live?

For girls raised in cultures that often reward beauty, agreeableness, dependence, and being pleasing, competence can feel like contraband.

The publishing history of Island of the Blue Dolphins makes this even more interesting. Scott O’Dell’s novel, published in 1960 and awarded the Newbery Medal in 1961, centered Karana, a girl surviving alone on an island. Even basic accounts of the book’s background note that O’Dell faced resistance because a publisher thought the protagonist should be male.

Of course they did.

Adventure was supposed to be for boys. Survival was supposed to be for boys. Wilderness competence was supposed to be for boys. Girls could be brave, perhaps, but usually in support of someone else’s plot.

And yet girls found these stories and made them their own. They read survival fiction and then went into the yard to prepare food stores, as if suburbia might collapse by dinner.

This is ridiculous.

It is also revealing.

The comments were funny, yes, but they also showed how many girls were drawn to stories where the central emotional promise was not romance, beauty, or belonging. It was self-sufficiency. It was the possibility that if the structures failed, if the adults disappeared, if society turned out to be useless or hostile, you could still make a plan.

You could build the shelter.

You could store the food.

You could learn the landscape.

You could save yourself.

Maybe that is why so many of us remember those books so vividly. They did not just tell us we could be brave. They told us bravery was practical. Bravery had a pantry. Bravery knew how to make a spear. Bravery was not waiting around in white lace hoping the institution of marriage came with a rescue boat.6

The survival girl fantasy sits uneasily beside the bride fantasy because they offer completely different forms of selfhood.

The bride fantasy says: prepare to be chosen.

The survival fantasy says: prepare to survive whether or not anyone chooses you.

That is not a small difference.

Childhood me loved Island of the Blue Dolphins because Karana’s competence felt like freedom.

Adult me looks back and thinks: of course she did.

Of course a girl would be drawn to the fantasy of being able to rely on herself in a world that was already teaching her not to rely too much on anyone else.

Victorian Domesticity Tried Very Hard to Make This Not Happen

None of this is new. The effort to domesticate girlhood has a long, heavily upholstered history.

Victorian gender ideology sharpened separate spheres into a whole worldview. Men belonged to the public world of work, politics, competition, and empire. Women belonged to the private world of home, morality, piety, motherhood, and decorative emotional labor. Femininity was imagined as physically weak but morally superior, which is a very clever way to put women on a pedestal and then act shocked when they ask why the pedestal has no stairs.

The Victorian ideal did not simply say women were different from men. It built an entire social order around those differences.

Girls were trained accordingly. Their education often emphasized accomplishments, refinement, manners, beauty, and the skills that would make them suitable wives. Marriage was not simply one possible future. It was the central organizing expectation.

This is why the bride fantasy has such deep historical roots. It belongs to a much larger tradition of treating girls as future wives before they are allowed to be full people.

But even Victorian girlhood was not as obedient as the ideology wanted. Scholarship on Victorian doll stories has argued that doll narratives could present girlhood as a distinct stage of life marked by friction with adult expectations, rather than merely a smooth apprenticeship into domestic femininity.

In other words, even under the thick upholstery of Victorian domestic ideology, girlhood kept wriggling around underneath.

Because girls have always done this.

They take the available scripts and revise them. They take the doll and change the story. They take the dress and become a sorceress. They take the stick and become a knight. They take the ravine and invent foreign policy.

The culture says, “Here is how to become a lady.”

The girl says, “What if I become d’Artagnan?”

“Girls Naturally Like This” Is Usually Marketing Wearing a Lab Coat

One of the most annoying things about gender essentialism is how often it points to evidence that has been heavily manufactured and then calls it nature.

Girls like pink. Girls like dolls. Girls like weddings. Girls like princesses. Girls like domestic play. Therefore, femininity is innate.

But by the time a child can choose a toy, the world has already been shouting instructions at her through clothes, colors, cartoons, toy aisles, relatives, picture books, birthday cards, advertisements, and the quiet social punishment that follows any child who plays the “wrong” way.

Gendered toy marketing has been especially blatant about this. Recent work on gendered toy marketing notes that dolls marketed to girls often present idealized constructions of womanhood, including explicitly bridal and hyper-feminized versions of girlhood fantasy.

So when a girl chooses the bride doll, culture calls it instinct.

Historians call it a receipt.

This does not mean children have no preferences. It means preferences develop in a world already organized by gender. The question is not whether girls ever enjoy bridal play, domestic play, or dolls. The question is why those forms of play are treated as proof of nature, while all the witches, spies, survivalists, warriors, and tiny Starfleet officers are treated as exceptions.

That is the ideological sleight of hand.

Girlhood contains multitudes. Patriarchy highlights the ones that serve it.

What Gets Trained Out of Us

The most important thing is not to replace one essentialist story with another.

The argument is not that girls are naturally witches instead of brides, although this would make preschool graduations much more interesting.

The argument is that girlhood is capacious.

Girls can play bride, mother, knight, witch, horse, spy, pirate, astronaut, orphan, warrior, sorceress, farmer, captain, detective, and deeply underqualified cult leader. Sometimes in the same afternoon. Sometimes with the same doll. Sometimes while wearing a tutu and carrying a stick.

The damage comes when one script is rewarded as proper femininity and the others are treated as things girls are supposed to grow out of.

In later reflections on In a Different Voice, Carol Gilligan describes adolescence as a period where girls often confront a tension between human psychology and patriarchal culture, especially as they learn to subordinate their own desires, perceptions, and voices to preserve relationships or meet expectations.

That is where the narrowing happens.

Not always. Not completely. But often enough to feel familiar.

The girl who once made witch soup learns to be less strange.

The girl who played knight learns to be less loud.

The girl who made food stores learns to make herself smaller instead.

The girl who invented tense politics between rival nations learns that being “too much” is unattractive.

The girl who gender-flipped Star Trek with Barbies learns that rewriting the canon makes certain people very nervous.

The tragedy is not that some girls played bride.

The tragedy is how many girls were taught that bride was the only costume they were supposed to keep.

The Girl With the Stick Sword Was Telling the Truth

This is why that thread stayed with me.

Yes, it was funny. Children are bizarre little myth-making engines with poor safety standards. Given a robe, a stick, a bucket, and ten unsupervised minutes, a child can invent a religion, a monarchy, a hostage crisis, or a maritime supply chain.

But it was also evidence.

Evidence that girlhood imagination was never naturally small.

Evidence that many girls did not spend childhood rehearsing submission, romance, or domesticity.

Evidence that even when culture handed girls dolls, dresses, kitchens, and bridal scripts, girls frequently used them incorrectly, which is to say brilliantly.

Some girls did pretend to be brides. That is fine. But many of us were making witch soup. Some of us were building food stores. Some of us were hiding in closets with plastic buckets. Some of us were interrogating neighbors about whether they were Norman or Saxon. Some of us were playing Captain Jane Kirk and Ms. Spock with Barbies because apparently even at age seven we knew canon could use some help with representation.

And maybe that is the part of girlhood worth taking seriously.

Not the fantasy of being chosen.

The fantasy of becoming powerful enough to choose for ourselves.

This was news to Eve.

It was also news to the witches, the “fallen women,” the suffragists accused of destroying the family, the Victorian wives tasked with preserving men’s morality while being legally subordinated to them, and the postwar working women accused by psychiatric “experts” of ruining husbands, children, sex, and civilization itself.

But sure.

New problem.

The original post was simple enough: men and boys are not in crisis because of feminism. They are in crisis because patriarchy taught them to expect to be the center of the universe while putting in very little emotional effort. Now that they are not getting what they want, they do not have the tools to handle disappointment.

This is, clinically speaking, a skill issue.

A man then appeared to explain that I was “half right,” which is always a promising start when a stranger enters your comments to explain your own field to you. According to him, yes, boys and men lacked social and psychological skills, but this was not because of patriarchy. If patriarchy were to blame, he argued, this would have shown up 100 years ago. Or 1,000 years ago.

Reader.

It did.

It has been showing up for so long that the archive is basically one long receipt printed by a furious CVS machine.

To be clear, social media absolutely matters. I am not arguing that it does not. Social media has intensified isolation, resentment, parasocial intimacy, algorithmic grievance, and the weird emotional economy of men turning loneliness into livestreamed contempt. Tech has given a lot of men a place to avoid vulnerability while calling it “logic.”

But amplification is not invention.

A microphone does not create the sermon. It makes the preacher louder.

Social media did not invent men blaming women for their unhappiness. It did not invent the idea that women are responsible for men’s moral development, sexual frustration, emotional regulation, social status, loneliness, family stability, and national decline. It just gave that old story a comment section, a podcast studio, and a Patreon tier.

We can start, as Western patriarchy so often does, with Eve.

The story of the Fall has had an enormous afterlife in Western gender ideology. Eve eats the fruit, gives it to Adam, and suddenly centuries of theologians, preachers, moralists, and ordinary men with opinions decide that women are uniquely susceptible to temptation, curiosity, bodily weakness, and disobedience. Adam is there. Adam eats too. Adam is not exactly tied to a chair being force-fed forbidden produce. But in the larger cultural imagination, Eve becomes the doorway through which sin enters the world.

A woman wanted knowledge and a snack, and somehow men made that everyone’s problem forever.

That basic structure repeats again and again: men act, but women become responsible for the conditions of male action. A man sins because a woman tempted him. A man falls because a woman misled him. A man fails because a woman did not keep him pure, soothed, sexually satisfied, emotionally managed, and safely tucked into the moral bassinet.

By the Victorian era, this logic had acquired lace curtains.

Victorian gender ideology divided society into separate spheres. Men belonged in the public world: politics, commerce, empire, law, industry, competition. Women belonged in the private world: home, children, religion, emotional refinement, and the maintenance of everyone else’s soul. Women were framed as physically weak but morally superior domestic guardians, while men were imagined as physically strong but morally weaker actors in the amoral public world. Your basic ideological setup was: men get the power, women get the responsibility.

Victorian women were told they were too delicate for public life, but somehow strong enough to preserve the moral order of civilization from inside the home. They were too irrational for politics, but rational enough to raise moral citizens. They were too weak for independence, but powerful enough that their failure to be pure, obedient, modest, and domestic could supposedly destabilize society.

That is not equality. That is a hostage situation with better upholstery.

And when women tried to move from moral influence to political rights, the backlash was immediate.

Anti-suffrage activists claimed women voting would disrupt home life, destroy women’s proper role as wives and mothers, spread socialism, create “sex antagonism,” weaken patriotism, empower the wrong voters, and destabilize society. Women voting was not treated as a normal political disagreement. It was framed as the collapse of the home, the nation, racial hierarchy, gender order, morality, and civilization.

Because apparently a woman touching a ballot was enough to make the republic clutch its pearls and faint onto a chaise lounge.

Anti-suffrage propaganda also mocked suffragists as ugly, unwanted, sexually deviant, unfeminine, bad wives, bad mothers, failed women, and threats to men.

Sound familiar?

Modern feminists are still called ugly, bitter, lonely, unfeminine, sexually undesirable, man-hating, anti-family, mentally unstable, and angry. The insult drawer has not been reorganized in a century. Men just keep opening it and acting like they invented storage.

Then came the postwar era, when the United States performed one of its most dramatic ideological costume changes.

During World War II, women were useful. They were patriotic. They worked in factories, offices, volunteer networks, and military-adjacent roles. They were Rosie the Riveter. They were proof that women could do demanding work when the nation required it.

Then the war ended, men came home, and suddenly women’s independence became a problem.

A problem requiring experts.

A problem requiring books.

A problem requiring an entire cultural apparatus to convince women that the fulfillment they had found outside the home was actually pathological, selfish, unfeminine, and dangerous to their children.

Books like Modern Woman: The Lost Sex argued that modern women were psychologically disordered, that working women made bad mothers, and that feminism itself was a deep illness. Women had done what the country asked of them during wartime, and then they were blamed for wanting to keep the income, independence, and identity they had gained.

Again, women were blamed for social instability.

Women gained work, so they were blamed for hurting men.

Women wanted independence, so they were blamed for hurting children.

Women felt trapped by domesticity, so they were told the problem was not domesticity. The problem was them.

This is patriarchy’s diagnostic model: if women are unhappy under the system, the system is fine and the women are broken.

So when a man in 2026 says men blaming women for their loneliness and lack of social skills is a new problem caused by social media, I need everyone to understand how historically silly that is.

The manosphere did not invent this. Andrew Tate did not invent this. Reddit did not invent this. Podcasts did not invent this. Social media did not invent this.

They are not the origin point.

They are the distribution network.

The substance is ancient: your pain is her fault.

Your loneliness is her fault.

Your lack of purpose is her fault.

Your sexual frustration is her fault.

Your inability to handle rejection is her fault.

Your discomfort with equality is her fault.

Your nostalgia for unearned authority is her fault.

This is why the “show me data” move is often less reasonable than it pretends to sound. Evidence matters. Of course it does. But when a woman points to centuries of historical pattern and a man replies, “No, show me current data,” what he often means is: “Please move the conversation onto ground where I feel more comfortable dismissing you.”

Historical evidence is data.

The archive is data.

Patterns are data.

Women’s history is not “vibes.”

And no, invoking your mother’s academic credentials does not solve this. In this particular case, the man’s own public biography notes that he grew up traveling with his mother, anthropologist Dr. Carolyn Heinz. Which is lovely. Truly. But having an anthropologist for a mother does not make your comments peer-reviewed.

Proximity to scholarship is not scholarship.

Being raised near fieldwork does not make every later opinion an ethnographic finding.

“My mother is an anthropologist” is not a citation. It is a biographical detail that makes me want to find his mother on LinkedIn and send a complaint to the manufacturer of the man in my comments.2

What this entire exchange demonstrated was the thing it tried to deny: patriarchy teaches men that their opinions deserve entry into every room, that women’s expertise must remain perpetually available for cross-examination, that correction from women is aggression, that women’s anger invalidates women’s knowledge, and that men can position themselves as victims even while demanding intellectual labor from the women they are dismissing.

That is not new.

That is the archive.

So yes, boys and men are struggling. Yes, many are lonely. Yes, many lack social skills. Yes, many are being radicalized by online spaces that feed them resentment instead of connection.

But the answer is not to pretend this crisis exists outside gender.

The answer is to ask what boys are being taught about women, rejection, sex, care, friendship, vulnerability, entitlement, and power. The answer is to ask why so many men experience women’s autonomy as abandonment. The answer is to ask why men are more comfortable blaming feminism than learning emotional reciprocity.

That is patriarchy.

Not because every individual man is evil.

Not because women are perfect.

Not because social media is irrelevant.

But because patriarchy is the system that trains men to confuse dominance with belonging, control with intimacy, attention with love, and women’s compliance with social order.

When that compliance weakens, backlash follows.

Every time.

That is the data.

That is the history.

And if a man still needs proof that patriarchy teaches men to blame women for their discomfort, he is welcome to consult the archive.

Or, apparently, his own comment history.

This should not have been controversial, but the internet is where nuance goes to die a gruesome death at the hands of wellness influencers and men with podcast mics, so naturally someone responded by explaining that all humans have “female energy” on the left side of the body and “male energy” on the right side. This, apparently, was meant to prove that I was wrong.

It did not.

It did, however, demonstrate the exact problem I was talking about. Because “female energy” and “male energy” may sound softer than “wives submit to your husbands,” but the structure underneath is often painfully familiar. Human traits are sorted into a masculine/feminine binary. That binary is treated as ancient, cosmic, natural, or spiritually obvious. Then people organize themselves around it and call the result balance.

That is not liberation. That is complementarianism with crystals.

And yes, I know. Some people will immediately insist that this is not what they mean. They will say everyone has both masculine and feminine energy. They will say this is about wholeness, not hierarchy. They will say this is ancient, not patriarchal. They will point to Reiki, acupuncture, Wicca, goddess worship, polarity, yin and yang, or whatever spiritual language happens to be nearest the incense holder.1

But the problem is not that people use metaphor. Humans use metaphor because we are meaning-making little goblins trying to survive consciousness. The problem is when metaphor gets mistaken for nature, and nature gets used to discipline people.

Once we start saying that softness, receptivity, intuition, emotionality, nurturing, surrender, fertility, and flow are “feminine,” while structure, action, logic, protection, discipline, penetration, and leadership are “masculine,” we are not outside patriarchy. We are giving patriarchy a moon phase calendar.

Oppression Is Not a Loyalty Program

That matters because rejecting one dominant narrative does not magically free someone from every other one.

Gay men can be misogynistic. Lesbians can have bizarre and rigid ideas about butch/butch relationships, femme legitimacy, gold-star purity, or who is “doing lesbianism correctly,” as though sexuality comes with a homeowner’s association. Queer people can be racist. Black people can be homophobic. Women can uphold patriarchy. Leftists can be sexist. Feminists can be transphobic. Religious trauma survivors can recreate authoritarian dynamics in secular spaces. And New Age, pagan, Wiccan, witchy, goddess-centered, spiritually deconstructed people can absolutely reproduce patriarchy.

Liberation in one area of your life is not a vaccine against domination in another.

That is annoying, because it means nobody gets to graduate from self-examination. There is no final boss battle where you defeat one oppressive system and receive a certificate declaring you Officially Free of Bullshit. Power is not that tidy. It gets into language. It gets into ritual. It gets into aesthetics. It gets into what we call natural, what we call sacred, what we call healing, and what we refuse to question because it makes us feel special.

This is why “but I’m not Christian” is not an accountability framework. It is a bumper sticker.

Leaving Church Does Not Mean Patriarchy Left You

Leaving evangelicalism, Catholicism, conservative religion, or any other patriarchal religious system can be profound. It can be life-saving. It can give people room to breathe after years of being spiritually waterboarded by purity culture, male authority, submission theology, and whatever fresh horror youth pastors were doing with duct tape and object lessons in 2004.2

But leaving organized religion does not automatically mean patriarchy left you. Sometimes it comes with you. Quietly. In the luggage.

A lot of people in New Age, pagan, Wiccan, and witchy spaces treat patriarchy as something that belongs to “organized religion,” especially Christianity. And listen, Christianity has absolutely earned its own haunted mansion of gender nonsense. I am not here to pretend otherwise. Christianity has been used to justify women’s subordination, control reproductive bodies, limit women’s authority, enforce marriage hierarchies, police sexuality, demonize queer people, and make entire generations of women believe that being exhausted, self-erased, and smiling through it was a divine calling.

But patriarchy is not denominational.

It is cultural. Legal. Economic. Political. Medical. Domestic. Sexual. Spiritual. Linguistic. It does not require a church building. It does not need a cross. It does not even need a male God, although that has certainly been convenient for patriarchal PR. Patriarchy can survive perfectly well in a coven, a retreat center, a yoga studio, a tarot reading, an astrology account, or a “feminine embodiment” course taught by someone charging $777 because apparently even enlightenment has surge pricing as long as they can market it as spiritually significant.

A person can reject “wives submit to your husbands” and still believe women need to “soften into their feminine.” A person can reject Father God and still reduce women to wombs, fertility, beauty, nurturing, emotional labor, and mystical receptivity. A person can reject biblical gender roles and then recreate those same roles through “divine masculine” and “divine feminine” discourse. A person can leave purity culture and then wander directly into polarity culture, where the language is different but the assignment is suspiciously familiar: men act, women receive; men lead, women surrender; men structure, women flow.

Complementarianism, But Make It Moonlit

Complementarianism, in its most basic form, is the idea that men and women are equal in worth but naturally designed for different roles. In conservative Christianity, that usually means men lead and women submit. Men protect, women nurture. Men are rational, women are relational. Men are built for authority, women are built for support. The rhetoric is usually wrapped in language about love, order, creation, design, and the beauty of difference, because patriarchy rarely walks into the room announcing, “Hello, I am here to restrict your autonomy.”

It prefers branding.

Now compare that with a lot of New Age gender language. Masculine energy is action, logic, direction, discipline, structure, protection, strength, focus, and leadership. Feminine energy is intuition, softness, receptivity, emotionality, sensuality, nurturing, flow, surrender, and healing.

We are often told that these energies exist in everyone, which sounds expansive until you notice that the filing system has not changed. The same traits are still being sorted into the same binary. And once traits are sorted into masculine and feminine categories, those categories start doing social work. They tell people what is expected. They tell people what is natural. They tell people what is spiritually healthy. They tell people when they are out of alignment.

The moment someone tells a woman she is “too in her masculine” because she is ambitious, intellectual, assertive, angry, direct, skeptical, career-focused, sexually autonomous, or not interested in being a warm emotional marshmallow for everyone around her, we are no longer talking about balance. We are talking about gender discipline.

The binary always claims it is just organizing the closet. Then somehow men end up with the keys to the house.

Ancient Does Not Mean Liberated

One of the common defenses of masculine/feminine energy language is that it is ancient, as though “ancient” ends the conversation. It does not. Ancient does not mean liberatory. Ancient does not mean feminist. Ancient does not mean free from hierarchy. Ancient does not mean immune from critique. Child marriage is ancient. Slavery is ancient. Misogyny is ancient. Some very old things are also very bad ideas. Humanity did not wait until podcasts to invent nonsense.

As much as some people might like to claim, capitalism didn’t invite the flaws in humanity.

There is also a second problem: modern Western New Age culture often takes complex ideas from Asian, Indigenous, African diasporic, esoteric, and other religious or philosophical traditions, filters them through Western individualism, capitalism, self-help, and gender essentialism, then sells them back as “ancient wisdom.” So when someone says, “This is ancient,” the better questions are: ancient where, according to whom, translated by whom, interpreted through what assumptions, commercialized for what audience, and how did we get from a complex cosmology, medical system, ritual practice, or metaphysical framework to “women are soft and receptive, men are active and structured” on Instagram?

This matters because citing “ancient wisdom” can become a way to avoid responsibility for what a concept is doing now. Maybe a source tradition has a much richer understanding of balance, life force, embodiment, or polarity. Maybe it does not map neatly onto Western gender roles at all. Maybe the version currently circulating in wellness spaces has been stripped for parts and rebuilt into something that looks suspiciously like 1950s gender ideology in a recycled jar from Etsy.

This is not about dismissing every spiritual framework that uses duality, balance, polarity, or energy. It is about refusing to treat “old” as synonymous with “beyond patriarchy.”

Patriarchy is old, too. That is kind of the problem.

Wicca Was Not Born Outside History

This is where Wicca and modern paganism get especially interesting, because many of these traditions do have real feminist significance. Modern pagan and Wiccan communities have often offered alternatives to male-dominated religion. Goddess imagery can be powerful for people raised with an all-male God, male clergy, male prophets, male theologians, male church boards, male heads of households, and male podcast hosts explaining why women are happiest when they have fewer rights and more sourdough starter.

The presence of goddesses matters. Priestesses matter. Ritual authority for women matters. The sacredness of bodies, sexuality, nature, cycles, pleasure, and embodiment can be deeply meaningful for people harmed by Christian shame, purity culture, and the idea that bodies are basically sin machines with body hair.

But Wicca was not born in an untouched feminist meadow outside history.

Modern Wicca emerged in the twentieth-century West. It drew on occultism, ceremonial magic, folklore, Romantic3 claims about ancient witchcraft, ritual polarity, and the gender assumptions of its own time. That means patriarchy was already in the room. Probably holding a candle and explaining that actually the athame goes here because symbolism.

Gerald Gardner, often treated as a founding figure of modern Wicca, did not transmit some pristine, untouched, pre-patriarchal spiritual system. He created and compiled rituals within a specific historical context, drawing from earlier occult traditions, folklore, ceremonial magic, and his own imagination.

Doreen Valiente, one of the major figures in early Wicca, famously challenged parts of Gardner’s material, including the so-called Ardanes or “Old Laws,” which critics have long pointed to as containing authoritarian, patriarchal, and misogynistic elements.4

That matters because it shows the internal tension from the beginning. Wicca contains feminist possibilities and patriarchal residue at the same time.

That is not a contradiction. That is history.

Traditions are made by people. People carry assumptions. People argue. People revise. People resist. People inherit harmful ideas and sometimes sanctify them before realizing someone has put misogyny in the ritual text.

Feminist witchcraft and goddess spirituality did not simply emerge because paganism was automatically feminist. They emerged because women and queer people pushed, revised, challenged, created, and sometimes split off to build spaces that better reflected their politics. Starhawk’s The Spiral Dance became a major text in feminist spirituality and goddess-centered witchcraft because it offered a language of power, embodiment, ecology, and spirituality that many people found radically different from the religious worlds they had inherited.5 Zsuzsanna Budapest and Dianic Wicca represent another strand, one that centered women’s spirituality more explicitly, sometimes through separatist practice.6

That history is important. It is also complicated, because some “women’s mysteries” frameworks have excluded trans women or reduced womanhood to biology, menstruation, wombs, and reproductive capacity. Again, the point is not that Wicca or paganism is uniquely sexist. The point is that no tradition is outside history. A pentacle is not a force field against bigotry.

The Goddess Can Still Be a Cage

This is where goddess language can become both powerful and dangerous. For people raised in patriarchal religion, the Goddess can be a revelation. She can offer a way to imagine divinity beyond maleness. She can make the body sacred instead of shameful. She can give women and queer people spiritual authority in traditions that told them authority belonged elsewhere.

That matters.

But the Goddess can also become a pink prison.

If “the feminine” is always associated with fertility, menstruation, motherhood, softness, sensuality, intuition, receptivity, beauty, emotional wisdom, and healing others, then we have not escaped restrictive gender roles. We have made them sacred.

Not all women menstruate. Not all women can get pregnant. Not all women want children. Not all women are nurturing. Not all women are soft. Not all women are intuitive. Not all women are spiritually fulfilled by womb talk. Not everyone with a womb is a woman, and not every woman has a womb.

The moment womanhood gets collapsed into reproductive symbolism, we are back in the same ideological swamp as conservative religion. The signs are different, but the terrain is familiar: anatomy becomes destiny, biology becomes identity, and anyone who does not fit the model becomes an exception, a problem, or a footnote.

This is why some “divine feminine” discourse makes me want to walk directly into the sea.

It is not that feminine imagery is always bad. It is not that fertility symbolism is always oppressive. It is not that people cannot find meaning in cycles, bodies, goddesses, motherhood, menstruation, sexuality, or earth-based spirituality. The issue is what happens when these become the approved template for womanhood.

If your divine feminine requires a very specific relationship to wombs, softness, fertility, beauty, emotional labor, and service, congratulations. You have reinvented patriarchy in a flower crown.

Paternalism Without a Pulpit

Another mistake people make is assuming that because New Age and pagan spaces are often decentralized, they cannot reproduce the authority problems of organized religion. But power does not need a pulpit. Power can sit with coven leaders, gurus, teachers, retreat leaders, charismatic elders, male occult experts, authors, influencers, spiritual healers, and self-appointed guides who claim they are simply helping people access their truth.

Sometimes that help looks a lot like control.

Paternalism shows up when a male teacher claims he can initiate women into their feminine power. It shows up when a spiritual leader tells women their trauma is stored in their womb because apparently even pain needs a gender reveal party. It shows up when assertiveness is called blocked feminine energy, anger is called low vibration, boundaries are framed as fear, and skepticism is treated as spiritual resistance. It shows up when a woman’s illness, anxiety, infertility, pain, or trauma is treated as evidence that she is out of alignment with her natural feminine. It shows up when men position themselves as protectors, guides, warriors, guardians, or divine masculine containers for women’s softness, surrender, and healing.

I cannot stress this enough: a man calling his control “holding space” does not automatically make it less controlling.

Alternative spiritual communities can create the same conditions for manipulation as mainstream religious communities when authority is charismatic, accountability is weak, and critique is treated as spiritual failure. This is especially true in spaces where everything gets individualized. If every problem is a vibration, a manifestation, a karmic lesson, an energy blockage, or an unhealed feminine wound, then structural oppression disappears. Patriarchy becomes your personal homework assignment. Racism becomes a mindset problem. Trauma becomes a lesson you attracted. Poverty becomes scarcity thinking. Abuse becomes a failure to maintain energetic boundaries.

How convenient for power.

How absolutely delightful for every system that would prefer you blame your aura instead of asking who benefits.

Misogyny in Soft Lighting

Misogyny does not always look like open hatred of women. Sometimes it looks like praise. Women are natural healers. Women are more connected to the earth. Women are more intuitive. Women are life-givers. Women are softer. Women are meant to receive. Women are sacred.

That last one is especially slippery, because being told you are sacred can sound better than being told you are inferior. But sacred things are still often controlled. Sacred things are put on pedestals. Sacred things are guarded, protected, purified, interpreted, restricted, and punished when they fail to remain sacred in the approved way.

Women do not need to be sacred to deserve autonomy. We do not need to be goddesses to deserve rights. We do not need to be life-givers, healers, mothers, muses, priestesses, or embodiments of the earth to be fully human.

Misogyny is not only “I hate women.” Misogyny is the policing of women. It is punishing women who refuse the approved performance of womanhood. It is revering women when they are beautiful, nurturing, sexually available, emotionally useful, spiritually pure, or symbolically convenient, then turning on them when they become angry, intellectual, ambitious, skeptical, childfree, disabled, queer, trans, old, fat, loud, exhausted, or uninterested in being someone else’s healing journey.

That is why the language of “feminine energy” deserves scrutiny. When a woman is told she is “too masculine,” what that often means is: too direct, too ambitious, too rational, too angry, too independent, too defended, too unavailable for emotional extraction. And when a man is told to embrace his “divine masculine,” what often gets smuggled in is leadership, strength, protection, direction, authority, and sexual dominance.

This is not neutral. Binaries are rarely neutral. They almost always become hierarchies, even when they begin as poetry.

Nobody Gets a Free Pass

Now, this is where some people will get defensive and insist that paganism, Wicca, goddess spirituality, and New Age practices are still better than conservative Christianity. And maybe, in many cases, yes. In some ways, absolutely.

But “better than evangelical patriarchy” is not the finish line. That bar is on the floor. Possibly under the floor. Possibly in a church basement next to a purity ring display and a youth pastor with a guitar that he knows precisely three chords on.

The point is not that paganism is the enemy. The point is not that Wicca is bad. The point is not that goddess spirituality has no value. The point is not that every person who uses masculine/feminine symbolism is secretly auditioning for a job at Focus on the Family.

The point is that no community gets a free pass.

A community’s self-image is not the same thing as its politics.

A movement can challenge patriarchy in one breath and reproduce gender essentialism in the next. That is not hypocrisy unique to paganism. That is the general human condition.

What Accountability Actually Looks Like

So what do we do with all of this?

I am not saying everyone must immediately stop using every form of masculine/feminine language forever. I am a historian, not the gender police, and frankly the gender police already have too much funding. But I am saying we need to ask better questions.

When a spiritual framework uses masculine and feminine categories, we should ask what traits are being coded masculine or feminine, who benefits from that coding, who gets shamed by it, and whether the framework expands human possibility or shrinks it. We should ask whether it includes trans and nonbinary people as full participants, or only as awkward exceptions. We should ask whether it reduces women to wombs, cycles, fertility, softness, beauty, nurture, or care. We should ask whether it implies that assertiveness, rationality, leadership, anger, ambition, or structure are masculine. We should ask whether it makes trauma into a personal energy failure, whether it excuses male control as protection or guidance, and whether it challenges hierarchy or simply renames hierarchy “balance.”

Most importantly, we should ask whether the framework can survive critique.

Because if asking these questions is treated as negativity, blocked energy, masculine overthinking, lack of spiritual openness, or an attack on the sacred, then the problem is not the question. The problem is the system protecting itself.

Your Altar Is Not a Force Field

The issue was never that someone personally finds meaning in energy work, balance, embodiment, ritual, goddess worship, or alternative spirituality. People are allowed to find meaning. People are allowed to build rituals that help them survive. People are allowed to leave religions that harmed them and create new practices that feel more honest, more embodied, more beautiful, more alive.

I am not interested in ripping meaning away from people. I am interested in asking what that meaning is built on, who it serves, and who it leaves trapped in another supposedly natural role.

Because rejecting Christianity does not automatically free you from patriarchy. Rejecting organized religion does not automatically free you from hierarchy. Rejecting heterosexuality does not automatically free you from misogyny. Rejecting capitalism does not automatically free you from racism. Rejecting gender norms in one area does not mean you are not enforcing them somewhere else. And rejecting “dominant religion” does not mean your spiritual practice is automatically liberatory.

Patriarchy does not care whether you call it God’s design, natural polarity, divine balance, male and female energy, sacred masculine and feminine, or ancient wisdom. It only cares that you keep believing the roles are natural.

So yes, if femininity were natural, it would not need this many etiquette manuals. Or sermons. Or laws. Or men yelling on podcasts. And it would not need endless spiritual rebrands telling women to soften, surrender, receive, nurture, heal, flow, mother, bleed, birth, and embody the feminine while men get structure, action, logic, direction, and leadership.

That is not liberation.

That is the same old cage only now it comes with incense, shadow work, and quartz crystals.

The goal is not to replace Father God with Mother Goddess and call the work done. The goal is to stop mistaking hierarchy for harmony just because someone softened the lighting.

Your altar is not a force field. Patriarchy can walk through incense smoke just fine.

I regret that we apparently have to say this out loud, but here we are, because Arizona Republicans looked at contraception and STI testing and thought: you know what this needs?

Adoption pamphlets.

Gov. Katie Hobbs recently vetoed HB2040, a bill that would have required Arizona schools and colleges that discuss contraception or sexually transmitted diseases to also talk about adoption. The bill would also have required adoption information when schools dispensed contraception or provided STI testing to students, including in college and university settings.

In other words, a student could go to a campus health center for condoms or an STI test and get handed information about adoption, because nothing says “sexual healthcare” like a state-mandated reminder that your body could become a supply chain.

Let us be extremely clear at the top: adoption does not prevent pregnancy. Adoption does not treat chlamydia. Adoption does not stop ovulation, block sperm, prevent implantation, or reduce anyone’s risk of needing reproductive healthcare. Adoption is not contraception. Adoption is not abortion. Adoption is a post-birth legal arrangement.

So why insert it into conversations about contraception and STI prevention?

Because the point is not medical relevance.

The point is moral interruption.

HB2040 was not about helping students make informed choices. It was about barging into a conversation about preventing pregnancy and whispering, “But have you considered becoming a broodmare?”

A condom prevents pregnancy.

Adoption requires one.

And apparently, in Arizona, someone needed that explained with crayons.

Arizona Is Not Abstract to Me

Arizona is not some random red-blue-purple laboratory I study from a safe distance with a clipboard and a little political-science safari hat.

Arizona is where I was born. Flagstaff, specifically, because apparently I came into the world already committed to dramatic landscapes and complicated state politics. It is where I lived most of my life. It is where I became politically active. It is where I learned that Arizona politics can make you feel like you are watching democracy, a fever dream, and a man yelling about chemtrails in a grocery store parking lot all happen at the same time.

So when I write about Arizona trying to staple adoption messaging onto contraception and STI care, I am not writing about “those people over there.”

I am writing about home.

Or at least one of my homes. The prickly, sunburned, politically feral one.

And that is why Katie Hobbs matters here too. In 2022, I remember sitting there refreshing my screen during the Arizona governor’s race, praying for Hobbs to pull it off because somehow, somehow, the race was close between her and Kari Lake, one of the most insanely unqualified hacks I had seen run for governor in a while. Lake, a former television news anchor turned election-denial flamethrower, lost the 2022 governor’s race to Hobbs and then kept challenging the result in court. In June 2024, the Arizona Court of Appeals upheld a lower court ruling against Lake, finding she failed to prove her claims about mail-ballot signature verification in Maricopa County.

That race was close enough to be physically unpleasant. CBS News reported shortly after the election that Hobbs was leading by about 20,400 votes with 97% of results in, a margin of only 0.8 percentage points.

The kind of close where you stare at county returns like they are medical test results.

The kind of close where Maricopa County ballot drops become your entire personality.

The kind of close where you start bargaining with the universe like, “I will become a better person if this state does not elect the human equivalent of a comments section with eyeliner.”

So when Hobbs vetoes a bill like HB2040, it hits differently.

This is not just a procedural note in a state legislature. This is why local and state elections matter. This is why those horrible screen-refreshing nights matter. This is why votes matter, because you never know when the election that keeps your state from becoming a garbage fire rather than just a garbage can will be won by a margin of 0.8 percentage points.

I still sweat when I think about that election night.

Because sometimes the difference between “this becomes law” and “this gets punted into the sun” is one veto pen.

And in Arizona, that pen is doing some heavy lifting.

Sex Education Works When It Is Actually Sex Education

Here is the thing Arizona lawmakers might try learning, perhaps through an educational pamphlet of their own: sex education works best when it is actually sex education.

Not adoption education.

Not moral panic with a glossary.

Not “congratulations, you asked for STI testing, now please consider the miracle of infant relinquishment.”

Actual sex education.

The kind that teaches contraception, condoms, consent, STI prevention, healthy relationships, pregnancy prevention, and what bodies actually do when left unsupervised by a state legislature.

The CDC says well-designed sexual health education is associated with students being more likely to delay sexual intercourse, have fewer sex partners, have fewer experiences of unprotected sex, and increase protection use, especially condoms. WHO’s 2026 fact sheet on comprehensive sexuality education says high-quality, well-implemented programs can delay sexual initiation, reduce sexual risk-taking, and increase contraceptive use, while not increasing sexual activity or encouraging earlier sexual behavior.

ACOG’s committee opinion on comprehensive sexuality education states that such programs reduce rates of sexual activity, sexual risk behaviors, sexually transmitted infections, and adolescent pregnancy, while increasing contraceptive and condom use. UNESCO’s current overview is similarly blunt: abstinence-only programs have been found ineffective in delaying sexual debut, reducing sex frequency, or reducing the number of sexual partners, while effective sexuality education must include reproductive health and contraception.

In other words, the evidence does not say, “Interrupt STI testing with adoption pamphlets.”

It does not say, “A person asking how to avoid pregnancy should be redirected toward a legal arrangement that only exists after birth.”

It does not say, “Give students less information about condoms and more moral stage directions.”

It says: teach accurate information. Teach contraception. Teach condoms. Teach consent. Teach STI prevention. Teach people how to make informed decisions before there is a pregnancy, before there is a crisis, before someone is sitting in a clinic being told their body is now subject to legislative authority.

If Arizona lawmakers actually wanted fewer unintended pregnancies, they would support comprehensive sex education and contraceptive access.

Instead, HB2040 tried to treat adoption like it belongs in the same drawer as condoms.

Adoption Does Not Prevent Pregnancy

Let’s break this down slowly, because apparently we are all trapped in Health Class Purgatory.

Contraception prevents pregnancy.

STI testing detects infections.

Abortion ends a pregnancy.

Adoption transfers legal parenthood after birth.

Adoption is not what you do instead of birth control. Adoption is what someone may consider after pregnancy prevention has already failed, pregnancy has continued, birth has occurred, and the question becomes legal parenthood.

That is not prevention.

That is aftermath.

Adoption does not stop sperm. Adoption does not prevent ovulation. Adoption does not treat gonorrhea. Adoption does not stop someone from becoming pregnant. Adoption is not Plan B. It is not a condom. It is not an IUD. It is not an antibiotic. It is not a Pap smear. It is not an STI test.

So when Arizona lawmakers tried to require adoption information in contraception and STI settings, they were not strengthening sexual health education.

They were changing the subject.

And the subject they wanted to change it to was motherhood.

That is the real function of this kind of bill. It takes a moment that should be about sexual health and bodily autonomy, then smuggles in a reminder that the state would prefer you think of yourself as a potential birth mother before anything else.

A vessel with paperwork.

You Still Have to Be Pregnant First

The anti-abortion movement loves adoption because it lets them talk about babies while skipping over the pregnant person like she is just the loading screen.

“Just choose adoption” sounds tidy if you treat pregnancy as a minor scheduling inconvenience between conception and a beautiful handoff scene in soft lighting. But pregnancy is not neutral. Pregnancy is physical risk, medical vulnerability, time, money, labor, pain, bodily transformation, workplace consequences, family consequences, and physical/mental trauma.

Adoption does not erase any of that.

Adoption does not prevent preeclampsia. Adoption does not prevent hemorrhage. Adoption does not prevent gestational diabetes, job loss, medical debt, birth trauma, postpartum depression, or maternal mortality. Adoption is not a magic eraser for the body.

And this is not abstract. The CDC’s 2023 maternal mortality data found that Black women had a maternal mortality rate of 50.3 deaths per 100,000 live births, significantly higher than rates for white women at 14.5, Hispanic women at 12.4, and Asian women at 10.7. The CDC also reported age-based differences: in 2023, maternal mortality rates were 12.5 deaths per 100,000 live births for women under 25, 18.1 for women ages 25–39, and 59.8 for women age 40 and older.

So no, adoption is not some gentle little alternative that floats above the realities of pregnancy.

It requires pregnancy.

It requires birth.

It requires someone’s body to do the work.

And any political argument that skips that part is not pro-life. It is pro-fantasy.

Adoption Does Not End a Pregnancy

Adoption and abortion answer different questions.

Abortion asks: Do I want to remain pregnant?

Adoption asks: If I give birth, do I want to legally parent this child?

Those are not the same question.

A person who does not want to be pregnant has not had their problem solved by being told they do not have to parent after birth. The pregnancy is the condition they are trying to end.

Guttmacher’s 2023 research on abortion patients found that people seeking abortions did not consider adoption an equally acceptable substitute. In the study, adoption represented “taking on, and then abdicating, the role of parent,” making it unsuitable for many patients’ pregnancy decisions. Guttmacher’s summary of the findings stated plainly that the research counters the narrative that adoption can replace abortion access.

This should not be hard to understand.

Telling someone who does not want to be pregnant that they can place a baby for adoption is like telling someone who does not want to be on fire that, after the fire is over, they can donate the ashes.

You have skipped the emergency.

Adoption Is Not a Cute Little Bow on Forced Birth

None of this means adoption is bad.

Adoption can be loving. Adoption can be chosen. Adoption can be the right decision for some people and families. There are people who choose adoption thoughtfully, lovingly, and with care. There are adoptive families formed through deep love and commitment. There are birth parents who make adoption plans because it is what they want or need.

That is not the problem.

The problem is weaponizing adoption against reproductive autonomy.

The problem is treating adoption as a moral coupon that lets lawmakers ignore the costs, both physical and financial, of pregnancy.

The problem is pretending adoption is a clean and consequence-free alternative to contraception or abortion when it is actually a complex legal, emotional, familial, and bodily decision that only exists after pregnancy and birth.

Adoption should be discussed when it is relevant. Pregnant people deserve accurate, non-coercive information about all of their options if they want it. But adoption should not be used as rhetorical air freshener for forced birth.

It is not a loophole through bodily autonomy.

It is not a way to make pregnancy disappear.

And it absolutely does not belong in the middle of a condom conversation like some unwanted little government pop-up ad.

The Brochure Is the Point

So why require adoption information in contraception and STI settings?

Because the brochure is the point.

Contraception treats sex as something people can manage responsibly without necessarily becoming parents. STI testing treats sexual health as healthcare, not moral failure. Comprehensive sex education treats young people as actual human beings capable of learning, thinking, consenting, preventing, and protecting themselves.

Adoption messaging yanks the conversation back toward pregnancy and motherhood.

It says: even here, even when you are trying not to get pregnant, even when you are just getting an STI test, even when the relevant issue is condoms or contraception or infections, the state would like to remind you of birth.

HB2040 was not education.

It was one of those ads before a YouTube video that you can’t skip.

The bill took a conversation about preventing pregnancy and shoved in a reminder of what the state would prefer you do after failing to prevent one. That is not public health. That is a haunted pamphlet.

And it is revealing because the anti-abortion movement’s entire reproductive politics relies on this constant redirection. We start with contraception, and they pivot to adoption. We start with abortion, and they pivot to babies. We start with maternal mortality, and they pivot to “life.” We start with bodily autonomy, and they pivot to “choice,” but only the choices they approve of.

The pregnant person keeps disappearing.

Which is, of course, the point.

When Bans Fail, Bring Paperwork

HB2040 also fits into Arizona’s broader post-Roe landscape.

Arizona voters approved Proposition 139 in 2024, adding abortion protections to the state constitution. In February 2026, a Maricopa County judge struck down older abortion restrictions that conflicted with those protections, including restrictions involving telemedicine for medication abortion, requirements that patients state a reason for abortion, fetal-genetic-abnormality bans, mandatory ultrasounds, a 24-hour waiting period, and a second doctor visit. Reuters reported that Judge Gregory Como found the laws infringed on patient autonomy and did not offer health benefits. AP similarly reported that the ruling stopped enforcement of older restrictions, including multiple in-person visits, mandatory ultrasounds and Rh testing, bans on telehealth abortions, and bans on mailing abortion pills.

That is the context.

Arizona voters said reproductive freedom.

The court began clearing out some old restrictions.

And Republican lawmakers kept looking for ways to push back.

This is what reproductive backlash looks like after a direct loss. If they cannot slam the front door, they fill the hallway with forms.

They try waiting periods.

They try mandatory counseling.

They try forced ultrasounds.

They try telehealth restrictions.

They try medication abortion barriers.

They try fetal-personhood language.

They try “informed consent” scripts.

They try adoption pamphlets.

When voters protect abortion rights, conservative lawmakers do not stop. They get sneakier, smaller, and more bureaucratic, like termites with letterhead.

This Is Comstock’s Weird Little Grandchild

This is where the history matters, because none of this is new.

American sexual politics has always had a paperwork fetish. If the state cannot stop you from making a reproductive decision, it will try to script the room in which you make it.

The Comstock tradition was not only about banning abortion. It was about controlling sexual knowledge: contraception, sex education, abortion information, obscenity, reproductive materials, and the ability to send or receive information through the mail. The deeper pattern is not only “ban the thing.” It is also “control what people are allowed to know about the thing.”

HB2040 belongs to that lineage.

It is sleight of hand. The state does not always show up with a ban. Sometimes it shows up with a pamphlet. Sometimes it shows up with a script. Sometimes it shows up with a waiting period. Sometimes it shows up with “resources.” Sometimes it shows up in the language of “information,” as if all information is neutral and context never matters.

But information is not neutral when the state requires one kind of message at the exact moment someone is seeking another kind of care.

If someone asks for contraception, the relevant information is contraception.

If someone asks for STI testing, the relevant information is STI testing.

If someone is pregnant and wants to discuss adoption, then adoption is relevant.

But forcing adoption into contraception and STI care is not neutral. It is not “just information.” It is narrative control.

It is cultural gaslighting with a state seal.

The State Wants the Last Word on Your Body

The problem with HB2040 was not that adoption should never be discussed.

The problem was not that pregnant people should be denied information about all their options.

The problem was not that adoption is inherently bad, shameful, or irrelevant to every reproductive conversation.

The problem was that Arizona lawmakers tried to insert adoption into contexts where the actual subject was preventing pregnancy and protecting sexual health.

That is not informed consent.

That is not comprehensive education.

That is ideological interruption.

Using adoption as a state-sponsored guilt pamphlet in contraception and STI settings is not care. It is not education. It is not public health.

It is the anti-abortion movement trying to sneak motherhood into the room before pregnancy has even happened.

And Arizona, for once, had a governor willing to say no.

I’m a lesbian. The chance that I will ever personally need an abortion is low. Not zero, because life is messy and violence exists, but low.

And I was still horrified.

Because reproductive rights were never only about abortion.1

They were about whether women and pregnant people are full legal persons with the right to make decisions about their own bodies. They were about whether the state can force pregnancy, punish sex, and call it morality. They were about whether privacy actually means privacy, or whether your most intimate decisions exist only until five justices decide someone else’s theology matters more.

Women were already unequal in this country. Losing Roe shoved us another rung down.

And I said then that this was the first step in something much worse. That Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell were next in the ideological firing line. Maybe even Loving, if they ever got bold enough to stop pretending this was only about abortion.

That was not paranoia.

That was reading the room while the room was actively on fire.

Because Roe was not some isolated abortion case floating alone in constitutional space. It was part of a larger framework around privacy, bodily autonomy, contraception, intimacy, marriage, and family life. The right to access birth control. The right to marry across racial lines. The right to have consensual sex without being criminalized. The right for same-sex couples to marry.

These cases were not identical, but they were connected by a basic question: does the government get to invade your private life and dictate what you can do with your body, your partner, your marriage, your family, and your future?

The answer, for decades, was supposed to be no.

Then came Dobbs.

And suddenly, the answer became: well, it depends who you are, what state you live in, what your body is capable of, and how much your private life offends the people currently holding power.

Which is not exactly a comforting constitutional doctrine.

It is worth remembering, too, that the current anti-abortion position was not handed down on stone tablets between the Ten Commandments and a casserole recipe.

The Southern Baptist Convention supported abortion access in the 1970s, including after Roe v. Wade. In 1971, the SBC passed a resolution calling on Southern Baptists to support legislation that would allow abortion in cases of rape, incest, severe fetal deformity, and “carefully ascertained evidence” of likely damage to the emotional, mental, or physical health of the mother.

So no, the absolutist anti-abortion politics we see now were not some eternal, unchanging Christian consensus. They were built. Revised. Politicized. Fundraised off of. Weaponized. Then sold back to the public as if Jesus personally drafted the GOP platform in a church basement with bad coffee.

Even within Christianity, the question of when life, personhood, or ensoulment begins has not been as simple or consistent as modern religious conservatives like to pretend. Thomas Aquinas believed in delayed ensoulment, not ensoulment at conception. That does not make Aquinas pro-choice, because history is not a vending machine where you insert one quote and receive a modern political platform.

But it does make the absolutist claim that “everyone has always known life begins at conception” historically flimsy.

And that matters.

Because if your own religious tradition has debated this for centuries, and your denominations have changed their position within living memory, then what right do you have to use the state to force your theology onto everyone else?

Especially onto women and pregnant people who may not share your religion at all.

This is the part that so often gets buried under the rhetoric of “life.” Anti-abortion politics are framed as moral clarity, but in practice they produce legal chaos, medical danger, and state-enforced suffering.

Banning abortion does not stop abortion. It stops medically safe abortion.

It turns pregnancy into a legal hazard and miscarriage into a crime scene. It forces doctors to call lawyers before treating patients. It makes desperate people more desperate, and then pretends the suffering was an unfortunate side effect instead of the policy doing exactly what it was built to do.

Every woman denied lifesaving care because a hospital is afraid of prosecution?

Every pregnant person forced to carry a nonviable pregnancy while politicians congratulate themselves for “protecting life”?

Every woman trapped in poverty because childbirth bankrupted her, derailed her education, or tied her more permanently to an abusive partner?

Every child pushed into an already underfunded, overburdened system by the same people who will not fund healthcare, childcare, housing, food assistance, public schools, or paid leave?

That is not a tragic accident.

That is the bill coming due.

And we all know the people screaming “life” the loudest are not about to build the systems that actually help people live. They are not lining up to expand welfare. They are not fighting for universal healthcare. They are not demanding affordable childcare, paid parental leave, safe housing, better schools, or protection from intimate partner violence.

They want forced birth, followed by austerity, followed by moral lectures about “personal responsibility.”

Because this was never really about life.

It was about power.

And the minute they start coming for Griswold, Eisenstadt, Lawrence, Obergefell, and maybe even Loving, they will prove the point they keep insisting we are hysterical for making.

They will not be able to help themselves.

Because the goal was never simply to “save babies.”

The goal was to decide who gets autonomy. Who gets punished for sex. Whose families count. Whose bodies become public property. Whose private life can be dragged into court and disciplined by someone else’s religion.

And yes, when the draft leaked, people said we were overreacting.

They said we were being dramatic.

They said we were catastrophizing.

Years before they had said the Court would never actually overturn Roe.

Then it did.

So I’ll say now what I said then:

I dare anyone to tell me I was being irrational.

I fucking dare you.

Because “hysterical” is what people call women when we notice the knife before it lands.

And I noticed.

So did millions of others.

The tragedy is not that we were wrong.

The tragedy is that we were right.

The tragedy is that we have continued to be right.

In this episode, we dive into the work of Gerda Lerner—the historian who helped build women’s history as a field and, in the process, exposed how traditional history erased half the population while pretending to be objective.

From The Creation of Patriarchy to The Female Experience, Lerner shows that patriarchy is not natural, feminist consciousness is not automatic, and history itself is a site of power.

We also talk about something a little more personal: what it means to live inside a system you don’t yet have language for—and why naming things, whether in history or in your own life, is often the first step toward understanding them.

If you’ve ever felt like something was wrong but couldn’t quite explain why, this one’s for you.

Reading List

• Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (1986)
  The blueprint. If you read one thing, read this. Explains patriarchy as a historical system, not a biological fact.

• Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness (1993)
  The follow-up. How women learned to see themselves as a political group—and why that took centuries.

• Gerda Lerner, The Female Experience (1977)
  A documentary history built from women’s voices. This is where the archive starts talking back.

• Gerda Lerner, The Majority Finds Its Past (1979)
  Essays on why women’s history changes how we do history, not just what we study.

• Gerda Lerner, The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina (1967)
  Feminist consciousness in motion. Also a great entry point if you like narrative-driven history.

And not in a fun “someone has discovered a podcast microphone and a deep personal relationship with the Roman Empire” way. More in the aggressively stupid, intellectually bankrupt, “I have mistaken a half-formed thought for political theory” way.

So I wanted to push this out quickly, because apparently we need to review a basic point:

No one is saying individual couples never specialize.

That is not the argument.

In real relationships, people divide labor all the time. One person cooks because they enjoy cooking. One person handles bills because spreadsheets do not make them want to walk into the sea. One person is better at scheduling appointments. One person can fix the sink. One person remembers birthdays. One person has the emotional range necessary to call the dentist.

That is normal.

That is life.

That is two or more people trying to keep a household from becoming a small, expensive cave of laundry and resentment.

But that is not what people mean when they critique gender roles.

The problem is not “partners develop different skills.” The problem is when those skills are assigned before anyone’s actual personality, ability, interest, or circumstances are even considered.

Gender roles are not neutral household specialization. They are social prescriptions.

They say women are naturally suited to caregiving, emotional management, domestic labor, sexual availability, and self-sacrifice.

They say men are naturally suited to authority, financial control, public life, stoicism, and decision-making.

And then society rewards people who comply and punishes people who do not.

That is the difference.

A couple deciding, “You cook because you like it, and I’ll handle the car insurance because bureaucracy has not yet defeated me,” is specialization.

A society deciding, “Women belong in the kitchen and men who nurture their children are weak,” is patriarchy.

Those are not the same thing, even if they occasionally produce the same outward behavior.

A woman who loves homemaking is not the issue.

A man who likes being the breadwinner is not the issue.

A couple who freely choose a more traditional arrangement is not automatically the problem.

The issue is the cultural machinery that treats that arrangement as morally correct, biologically inevitable, and politically desirable, while treating every other arrangement as deviant, failed, unnatural, or evidence that civilization is personally being murdered by a woman with short hair.

Even where population-level averages exist, they do not tell us what any individual person should be trained for, allowed to do, expected to want, or punished for rejecting.

Averages are not destinies.

Human societies are not built by looking at a bell curve and then assigning everyone a life path based on their genitals at birth.

“But most people are straight,” someone will say, as if heterosexuality is a sorting hat that assigns one person to laundry and the other to financial authority.

Again: no.

Most people being straight does not mean women are naturally responsible for domestic labor. It does not mean men are naturally exempt from emotional literacy. It does not mean household work should be gendered before the actual people in the household have even entered the room.

And the “this sucks for tomboys and femboys, but they’re in the minority” framing is telling.

Because the solution to oppressive gender roles is not “well, the misfits can find each other online now.”

The problem is not that gender nonconforming people need better matchmaking.

The problem is that they should not have to flee into niche communities to escape a social order that treats them as defective exceptions to a supposedly natural rule.

Tomboys, femboys, queer people, trans people, gender-nonconforming people, women who hate homemaking, men who love caregiving, and every person whose soul curdles at the phrase “real man” are not glitches in the system.

They are evidence that the system is too small for actual human life.

The question is not whether couples can divide tasks.

Of course they can.

The question is who gets to decide.

If the answer is “the people actually living in the relationship,” great. That is an adult partnership.

If the answer is “tradition, religion, law, economic pressure, family shame, political propaganda, and some man in my comments explaining that tomboys are statistically inconvenient,” then we are not talking about household efficiency.

We are talking about patriarchy with a chore chart.

It sounds like something a satirical novelist invented after drinking too much coffee and reading one too many Facebook posts from a woman named Blessed Mama Bear Patriot. Unfortunately, no. It is real, aimed at teaching women how to become submissive, compliant wives within a conservative evangelical framework. The course promotes “proactive submission,” encourages women to defer to husbands, reframe complaints positively, and track emotional cycles so they can better serve their spouses.

And on a personal note, as someone who grew up in the Southern Baptist church, the idea of anything even tangentially connected to that ecosystem offering women a lesson plan on how to behave makes me want to open my calendar and search for the phrase emergency therapy sessions near me.

Because this is not happening in a vacuum. The Southern Baptist Convention has spent years publicly reckoning with a massive sexual abuse scandal. A 2022 independent Guidepost Solutions investigation found that influential Southern Baptist leaders had ignored, belittled, and intimidated survivors of sexual abuse for nearly two decades while protecting the legal interests of churches accused of harboring abusers. Earlier reporting from the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News identified about 400 Southern Baptist church leaders and volunteers who had faced allegations of sexual misconduct over roughly 20 years, including pastors, ministers, youth pastors, Sunday school teachers, deacons, and church volunteers, leaving behind more than 700 victims.

So forgive me if I am not especially eager to receive behavioral guidance from the same broader religious world where women and children were so often told to submit, forgive, stay quiet, protect the church, and trust male authority, all while that male authority was victimizing women and children with zero consequences.

That is the part that makes Wife School so much more disturbing than its beige internet packaging suggests. This is not merely a quirky conservative marriage course. It is part of a larger religious culture that has repeatedly taught women to soften themselves around male power, then acted shocked when male power behaved exactly like power with insufficient accountability tends to behave.

And listen. I have questions.

Most of them begin with: if this is supposedly natural, why does it require a syllabus?

Because that is always the tell, isn’t it? The entire premise of “traditional gender roles” is that they are natural. Women are naturally submissive. Women are naturally domestic. Women are naturally nurturing. Women are naturally happier when they serve, defer, marry, mother, organize the spice cabinet, and orbit the male household like a cheerful domestic moon.

Fine.

Then why do these roles require centuries of conduct books, sermons, etiquette guides, legal restrictions, finishing schools, home economics curricula, purity talks, marriage manuals, women’s magazines, religious conferences, mommy blogs, influencer courses, and now apparently downloadable homework?

Nature usually does not need this many press releases.

No one had to create Oxygen School to convince humans to breathe. No one had to publish 400 years of advice literature on the proper feminine way to digest lunch. But somehow, “natural womanhood” has required an entire historical enforcement apparatus, and every time women wander too far from the approved script, someone shows up with a book, a pastor, a law, a psychiatrist, a school board, or a pastel PDF explaining how to behave.

That is not nature.

That is maintenance.

And maintenance is patriarchy’s confession.

If It’s Natural, Why Is There a Curriculum?

The history of gender roles is not the history of women naturally floating toward domestic submission like enchanted laundry sprites. It is the history of societies repeatedly teaching, rewarding, punishing, sentimentalizing, theologizing, and legislating femininity into existence. Gender roles do not survive because they are inevitable. They survive because a staggering number of institutions have worked very hard to make them feel inevitable.

Which brings us back to Wife School, the latest glittering little goblin in the long history of teaching women to behave.

The Black Plague School of Marriage Counseling

One of the most revealing details in The Guardian’s reporting is a story Dillehay tells about a woman frustrated that she has to remind her “germophile” husband to wash his hands. Dillehay’s advice was not, apparently, “perhaps this adult man could take responsibility for his own hygiene.” Instead, she suggested it would be better for the family to get “the black plague and die” than for the wife to keep treating her husband like a toddler.

Which is certainly one approach to marriage.

A terrible one, but an approach.

This is the core logic of submission culture: a man’s authority must be protected even from the consequences of his own behavior. If he will not wash his hands, the wife’s problem is not germs. The wife’s problem is tone. She must not nag. She must not mother him. She must not imply that he, the household leader, has somehow failed at the complex masculine art of soap.

Welcome to patriarchy, where apparently bubonic plague is preferable to a woman saying, “Did you wash your hands?”1

The most revealing thing about Wife School is not that it exists. It is that it belongs to a very old genre: the woman-improvement project. The specific language may be modern, but the structure is ancient. A woman is dissatisfied. A woman is angry. A woman is exhausted. A woman notices that her marriage, church, household, or community requires her to constantly shrink herself while calling it love.

And the answer?

Not structural change. Not mutual accountability. Not equal partnership. Not “maybe your husband should grow up and understand germ theory like an adult and wash his hands without instruction because he’s not a fucking toddler.”

No. The answer is that she must become better at submission.

Her resentment becomes a spiritual failing. Her frustration becomes nagging. Her exhaustion becomes poor attitude management. Her desire for reciprocity becomes rebellion. Her legitimate complaint gets dropped into the patriarchal blender and comes out as a personal growth opportunity.

Congratulations, babe. The problem is not the system. The problem is your tone.

Patriarchy, But Make It a Tandem Bike

Dillehay reportedly uses a tandem bike metaphor to describe marriage: the husband rides in front and steers, while the wife pedals behind him. She tells women, “You’re exerting effort without being in control.”

That line deserves to be put in a museum of accidental honesty.

Because yes. That is the arrangement. Women exert effort without control. They cook, clean, birth, soothe, manage, schedule, remember, sexually accommodate, emotionally regulate, and keep the family machine from wheezing itself into a ditch. But control? No, no. That belongs to the husband at the front of the metaphorical bicycle, presumably steering everyone toward God’s plan or an urgent care clinic because someone still did not wash his hands.

This is why the “natural gender roles” argument collapses so quickly under historical pressure. If women were naturally built for this, patriarchy would not have needed to spend centuries training them into it.

The Natural Woman Had a Reading List

The “natural woman” had a reading list.

From the late seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century, there was a boom in conduct books for women, texts designed to instruct them in proper manners and moral behavior. Trinity Hall Cambridge notes that these books reveal anxieties about social conduct and the expectations placed on women.

That anxiety matters.

Conduct literature did not simply reflect womanhood. It tried to produce it. These texts taught women modesty, restraint, obedience, religious devotion, silence, politeness, and the endless management of their bodies, speech, and desires. Women were instructed not merely in what to do, but in how to be perceived doing it. Femininity became a performance of effortlessness that required constant effort.

Which is one of patriarchy’s greatest scams: making women work very hard to look naturally passive.

The ideal woman was supposed to be modest without seeming self-conscious, intelligent without appearing threatening, attractive without seeming vain, religious without seeming fanatical, sexually pure without being cold after marriage, deferential without looking resentful, and socially graceful without admitting she had been trained like a show pony with better gloves.

And when women failed, as human beings tend to do when handed an impossible assignment, the answer was always more instruction.

More books. More correction. More rules. More shame.

Separate Spheres: Hierarchy with Curtains

By the nineteenth century, this had developed into one of the most famous ideological cages in gender history: separate spheres.

Victorian gender ideology claimed that men and women were naturally suited to different worlds. Men belonged in public: work, politics, commerce, competition, money, ambition, law. Women belonged in private: home, children, morality, religion, comfort, decoration, emotional care. The ideology rested on supposedly natural differences, casting women as physically weaker but morally superior and therefore suited to domesticity.

Please appreciate the elegance of this trap.

Men got power, money, political authority, property, education, professional life, and legal identity. Women got moral superiority, which is a bit like being handed a beautifully embossed certificate that says Congratulations, You May Now Be Oppressed Poetically.

Separate spheres were sold as complementarity. In reality, they were hierarchy with curtains.

The domestic sphere was framed as women’s natural domain, but there was nothing natural about the legal and economic structures that trapped women there. Marriage laws, property laws, inheritance systems, educational restrictions, employment barriers, sexual double standards, and political exclusion all worked together to make women’s dependence appear inevitable. The cage was built, locked, wallpapered, and then called biology.

This is the trick: first deny women access to public power, then point to their absence from public power as proof that they were never suited for it.

It is the historical equivalent of pushing someone into a pond and then writing a bestselling book called Women: Naturally Damp.

Finishing Schools: Because Femininity Apparently Needed Final Edits

And because gender roles had to be performed correctly, not merely occupied, upper-class femininity needed even more formal polishing. Enter the finishing school.

Finishing schools historically focused on teaching young women social graces, deportment, etiquette, and upper-class cultural rituals. The goal was not intellectual independence. It was social presentation, marriageability, and class performance. Even the name gives the game away: women had to be “finished” into acceptability.

Again: if femininity is natural, what exactly needed finishing?

The posture? The silence? The way one entered a room? The careful ability to seem charming but not ambitious, educated but not intimidating, decorative but not frivolous, desirable but not desiring?

Finishing schools reveal something crucial about gender: femininity was not only about sex. It was about class, race, respectability, marriage markets, and social reproduction. A “proper woman” was not simply born. She was trained to signal the status of her family and future husband. Her body became a résumé. Her manners became currency. Her softness became proof that someone else had enough money to protect her from visible labor.

Nothing says “natural womanhood” like paying an institution to teach girls how to sit down correctly.

Home Economics: When the Prison Became a Laboratory

The story gets more complicated when we move into home economics, because history enjoys refusing to fit neatly into our little ideological drawers.

Home economics is easy to mock as “how to fold napkins and become Mrs. Patriarchy 1954,” and yes, it absolutely could reinforce domestic gender roles. But it also offered women a route into science, professional authority, public education, nutrition, consumer advocacy, public health, and academia.

That contradiction matters.

Home economics emerged in the late nineteenth century as a field that applied science, efficiency, and professional standards to domestic labor, and women such as Ellen Swallow Richards and Lillian Gilbreth used it to influence nutrition, household management, and consumer practices. The field has also been described as swinging between scientific education for women and vocational training for future wives and mothers, which is basically the whole gender-role contradiction wearing an apron and carrying a clipboard.

Home economics did not prove women naturally belonged in kitchens. It proved that once women were shoved into kitchens, some of them started taking measurements, founding disciplines, studying sanitation, rethinking labor, and turning the prison into a laboratory.

That is not the same thing as liberation, but it is historically important. Women have always found ways to carve power out of constrained spaces. The tragedy is not that women made domestic work intellectual. The tragedy is that domestic work had to be intellectualized before anyone would admit it was work.

This is one of the central gaslights of gender history: domestic labor is treated as sacred when men benefit from it, natural when women perform it, worthless when women demand compensation for it, and civilization-ending when women stop doing it for free.

The Housewife Had to Be Manufactured

By the twentieth century, especially after World War II, the idea of the natural housewife had to be manufactured all over again.

During the war, women entered industrial labor, military support roles, offices, factories, transportation, agriculture, and public life in highly visible ways. Then the war ended, men came home, and American culture launched one of its most aggressive re-domestication campaigns. Women did not simply glide back into the home because biology tugged them gently toward the vacuum cleaner. They were pushed by employers, policymakers, advertisers, educators, psychologists, religious leaders, popular culture, and a postwar political economy built around the male breadwinner ideal.

This is where Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique becomes historically useful, even with all the important critiques of its white middle-class focus. Friedan challenged the postwar belief that fulfillment for American women had one definition: the housewife-mother. The “problem that has no name” was not simply personal sadness. It was the collision between women’s humanity and a culture insisting that marriage, children, sex, and appliances should be enough.

The key point is not that all housewives were miserable or that domestic life is inherently empty. That is too simple, and history punishes simplicity by making it look foolish in public.

The point is that women were told their dissatisfaction was individual failure rather than structural confinement.

If they felt trapped, they were ungrateful. If they wanted work, they were unfeminine. If they wanted education, they were threatening. If they did not want children, they were unnatural. If they wanted sex without compulsory motherhood, they were immoral. If they wanted a self beyond wife and mother, they were sick.

And sometimes, quite literally, they were pathologized.

Postwar anti-feminist psychology and popular “expert” culture often treated women’s independence as neurosis. The very existence of books like Modern Woman: The Lost Sex2 shows how much intellectual labor went into reasserting women’s domestic destiny after the disruptions of war. The “natural” family order had to be defended with pseudo-science, moral panic, and cultural propaganda because it was not simply reasserting itself.

Again, nature usually does not require an advertising campaign.

If the housewife was so natural, why did it take magazines, psychiatrists, advertisers, politicians, pastors, school curricula, television writers, and appliance companies working in chorus to produce her?

Why did women need to be told, over and over, that the home was enough?

Why did their desire for more have to be renamed illness?

Tradwife Culture: Obedience with Better Lighting

That same machinery continues today in tradwife culture, except now it has better lighting and affiliate links.

The modern tradwife aesthetic is not just about women staying home. It is about making submission look soft, beautiful, moral, and freely chosen, while stripping away the political and economic scaffolding that makes “choice” such a slippery little eel of a word. The Guardian has also described tradwife culture as a curated performance that packages domestic submission, motherhood, and feminine service as a nostalgic lifestyle, often obscuring labor, privilege, and political regression beneath the visuals.

A wealthy influencer baking bread in a sun-drenched kitchen is not the same as a working-class woman trapped in financial dependence. A woman choosing homemaking with legal rights, contraception, divorce access, and her own bank account is not the same as a woman told obedience is her divine assignment and marital sex is her obligation.

Choice matters.

But choices are made inside structures.

That is the part the tradwife fantasy works very hard to airbrush out.

Wife School is not just teaching women to be nicer wives. It is teaching them to interpret unequal power as moral order. It takes patriarchal hierarchy and translates it into personal spiritual discipline. It tells women that the problem is not male entitlement, not religious authoritarianism, not unpaid labor, not sexual obligation, not emotional asymmetry, not the way “leadership” often means “he decides and you cope.”

The problem is that she has not submitted correctly.

“A Husband Expects a Yes” Is Not Romance

That becomes especially disturbing when the subject turns to sex. The Guardian reports that Dillehay tells wives that “a husband expects a yes” when he asks for sex, citing Corinthians and framing refusal through religious obligation.

There is a word for a marital sexual ethic built around a husband “expecting a yes,” and it is not romance.

It is marital rape.

And again, I say this as someone raised in the Southern Baptist church: when a religious institution with a documented abuse crisis starts teaching women that holiness looks like sexual availability, submission, and obedience, the appropriate response is not polite curiosity. It is every alarm bell in the county climbing out of its tower and sprinting down the street.

Because we have seen what happens when churches teach women that male authority is sacred, female resistance is rebellion, and institutional reputation matters more than bodily autonomy. We have seen what happens when “forgiveness” becomes a muzzle, “submission” becomes a shield for abusers, and “biblical marriage” becomes a velvet rope around women’s ability to say no.

This is where the whole “traditional roles” conversation stops being quirky internet anthropology and becomes something much darker. Once submission is treated as a wife’s spiritual duty, the line between “loving sacrifice” and coercion becomes dangerously easy to blur. A woman’s body becomes another site where her virtue is measured by access.

And again: if women are naturally fulfilled by this arrangement, why does it require so much theological reinforcement?

Submission Is Not a Personality Trait

This is the old script in a new format.

Conduct books taught women to behave. Separate spheres taught women where they belonged. Finishing schools taught women how to perform classed femininity. Domestic ideology taught women that the home was their kingdom, while quietly making sure someone else held the deed. Postwar psychology taught women that wanting more was a symptom. Tradwife culture teaches women that obedience is empowerment if you film it in linen.

Wife School just adds course modules.

And this is why “gender roles are natural” is not a neutral claim. It is a political claim. It takes historical arrangements created by law, religion, economics, education, media, and violence, then pretends they emerged from the misty depths of biology.

But biology did not write conduct manuals.

Biology did not ban women from universities.

Biology did not create coverture.

Biology did not publish Victorian advice books.

Biology did not deny women the vote.

Biology did not fire women after marriage.

Biology did not write school dress codes.

Biology did not tell wives to submit to husbands.

Biology did not invent purity culture.

Biology did not create the mommy wars.

Biology did not decide that men “babysit” their own children while women “parent.”

People did that.

Institutions did that.

Power did that.

And power loves nothing more than disguising itself as nature.

The Panic Is the Proof

The real giveaway is the panic.

If traditional gender roles were natural, then women refusing them would not cause such hysteria. There would be no need to panic over women working, voting, divorcing, not marrying, not having children, using contraception, becoming doctors, becoming politicians, dating women, staying single, keeping their last names, wearing pants, opening bank accounts, demanding orgasms, or asking men to wash their own hands.

Yet every major expansion of women’s autonomy has been greeted as a crisis.

Women’s education would destroy femininity. Women’s suffrage would destroy the home. Birth control would destroy morality. Divorce would destroy marriage. Working mothers would destroy children. Queer women would destroy the family. Trans people would destroy gender. Feminism would destroy civilization. No-fault divorce would destroy men. Childfree women would destroy the birthrate. Women with standards would destroy dating.

At a certain point, one begins to suspect civilization is a bit dramatic.

At the very least it’s got the physical constitution of a Victorian orphan with tuberculosis and I think it might be time to give it a DNR.

What these panics reveal is not that women are defying nature. They reveal that gender hierarchy is fragile. It has to be defended constantly because people keep noticing it is not inevitable.

That is why feminist movements have always been so threatening. They do not simply demand rights. They expose the scaffolding.

The Home Has Always Been Political

Second-wave feminism’s famous claim that “the personal is political” mattered because it refused to treat marriage, sex, child-rearing, housework, and family life as private little islands floating outside power. It named the home as a political space. It insisted that gender was not only something that happened in legislatures and workplaces, but something enforced at the dinner table, in the bedroom, in the nursery, in the doctor’s office, in the church pew, and in the kitchen where someone was always expected to notice the trash needed taking out.

That is precisely why conservative movements are so invested in reclaiming the home. The household is not politically neutral. It never has been.

The “traditional family” is not just a family structure. It is a governance model.

Someone leads. Someone submits. Someone earns. Someone depends. Someone speaks. Someone softens. Someone decides. Someone adapts. Someone owns the public name, and someone does the invisible work that makes his life possible.

Call it natural enough times, and maybe no one will notice it is a power arrangement.

The Syllabus Gives Away the Scam

That is why Wife School matters. Not because every woman who takes a course on marriage is oppressed. Not because homemaking is bad. Not because religious women are foolish. Not because domestic labor is worthless.

The problem is not women choosing home, marriage, motherhood, faith, domesticity, or care.

The problem is a political culture that keeps insisting those things are women’s natural destiny while treating every alternative as rebellion, pathology, selfishness, or sin.

The problem is calling submission freedom.

The problem is calling hierarchy harmony.

The problem is telling women that peace means becoming easier to control.

And the problem is pretending any of this is new.

Wife School is funny because it sounds absurd. It is frightening because it is familiar. It belongs to a long tradition of teaching women to mistake obedience for virtue, exhaustion for love, and self-erasure for peace.

But the need for all that instruction gives away the whole scam.

If submission were natural, it would not need a course.

If domesticity were destiny, it would not need centuries of manuals.

If femininity were instinctive, it would not require etiquette training, purity pledges, dress codes, marriage seminars, conduct books, finishing schools, lifestyle influencers, and theological customer support.

And if patriarchy were truly inevitable, it would not be working this hard.

Additional Reading

Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963).

Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era.

Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap.

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex.

Joan Wallach Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” The American Historical Review, 1986.

Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.

Beth Allison Barr, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth.

Just a quick note for the people who have apparently appointed themselves Assistant Deputy Commissioners of My Sexuality: if you hop into my comments or my DMs to tell me what my orientation really is, I am not arguing with you. I am blocking you.

Not because I am fragile. Not because I “can’t handle discussion.” But because I am deeply uninterested in being audited by strangers who think one celebrity thirst post, one broad use of the word “attracted,” or one acknowledgment that human desire is a little more complicated than a preschool shape sorter means they now have jurisdiction over my identity.

This whole thing started because I made what I genuinely thought was a fairly obvious point: attraction is a broad word. I can recognize that a man is hot. I can recognize that Shawn Hatosy is, in fact, a snack. I can say so publicly without that meaning I want to sleep with him, marry him, or submit paperwork to have my lesbian card revoked.

As I once told a friend, the fact that I only buy clothes from one side of the store doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate a well tailored outfit from the other.

And yet somehow this was enough to summon the identity auditors out of the floorboards like the world’s most annoying paranormal event.

Which is funny, in a grim little way, because what this discourse reveals is not that I am secretly confused. It reveals that a lot of people are still wildly invested in the idea that sexuality should be tidy, fixed, simple, and externally legible at all times. They want it to sit still. They want it to behave. They want it to come in neat little boxes with clear labels and no leakage.

They want sexuality to be ceramics.

Unfortunately for them, it is often more like a lava lamp.1

And I say that as someone who is still very much a lesbian.

I did not survive one moral regime for rainbow-flavored version 2.0

Part of why this irritates me so much is that I did not grow up getting told I could be damned to hell because of my sexuality only to arrive in adulthood and discover that some people in my own queer community have reinvented the same policing impulse with better branding and more self-righteous vocabulary.

I did not survive one moral regime just to be handed another with a pride flag slapped on it like a rebrand.

There is something especially galling about being told by queer people that your identity is invalid unless it remains perfectly legible to them at all times. One sentence. One exception. One joke. One celebrity crush. One broader understanding of attraction than they personally use, and suddenly they are acting like unpaid HR reps for the Department of Orientation Compliance.

No. Absolutely not.

And maybe that is part of what makes this so absurd. At a moment when queer rights are actively under attack, when actual material harm is being done to queer people in real time, some people have apparently decided their most urgent political project is auditing whether strangers are using the correct label for their own interior life.

Incredible priorities.

We have managed to look at a burning house and say, “Yes, but before we address the fire, I would like to police how someone else describes their own furniture.”

No, recognizing a snack does not mean I have to eat it

Part of the problem here is that people keep flattening everything into one giant blob called “sexuality,” and then acting shocked when the blob turns out to contain multiple things.

Attraction is not always the same as desire. Desire is not always the same as action. Action is not always the same as identity. Fantasy is not always the same as intention. Recognition is not always the same as pursuit.

I can recognize that a man is attractive and still have no interest in sex with men. I can understand beauty, charisma, chemistry, and hotness without that becoming a constitutional crisis for my lesbianism.

That should not be hard to understand, and yet here we are.

People hear “I can find a man attractive” and somehow translate it into “I have now fundamentally reorganized my erotic life around men.” That is an astonishing interpretive leap. It is like hearing someone say “that painting is beautiful” and replying, “So you plan to steal it in a high stakes museum heist?”

No. I am describing recognition, not rewriting my identity.

And I think some people are less upset by that complexity than by what it takes away from them. If attraction is broader than one narrow script, they lose the comfort of instant categorization. They lose the fantasy that they can hear one sentence and know everything important. They lose the satisfaction of pinning somebody down with certainty.

And some people really, really like their little pins.

The queer theorists were, in fact, onto something

One of the things queer theory is actually useful for, beyond giving people expensive words to misuse online, is that it reminds us sexuality has never been as simple or as “natural” as people pretend.

Jeffrey Weeks argues that sexuality is not some timeless fixed object but a historical subject “in constant flux,” and he explicitly notes that intimacy, sex, reproduction, and desire do not all collapse into one neat category. Foucault similarly dismantles the fantasy that sex is some hidden inner truth waiting to be properly decoded by experts, institutions, or random busybodies with opinions. Instead, sexuality gets produced through discourse, classification, and regulation. Judith Butler challenges the supposedly natural coherence between sex, gender, and desire, and warns against systems that treat only certain expressions as real, true, and legitimate while dismissing others as false or derivative. Michael Warner also notes that queer theory’s major break was to stop treating sexuality as merely individual “orientation” and start asking how norms and institutions decide which forms of desire count as legitimate in the first place.

In other words, the filing cabinet was always fake.

That does not mean labels are meaningless. I am not doing the lazy “everything is fluid, nothing matters, identity is just vibes” routine. Labels matter because language matters. Community matters. Self-description matters.

The point is not that categories are useless.

The point is that they are not neutral little facts of nature descending from heaven on laminated cards.

They are historical. Social. Contested. Negotiated. And enforced with far more confidence than accuracy.

Also, attraction itself is not one single thing

This is where the conversation gets even more annoying for the identity bureaucrats, because once you start looking at how attraction actually functions, the black-and-white model starts falling apart fast.

Sapiosexuality, demisexuality, graysexuality, asexuality, aromanticism, and nonbinary identity all complicate the fantasy that desire is immediate, visually obvious, binary, and basically the same for everyone.

Part of why this whole debate feels so stupid to me is that people are assuming attraction works for me the way it works for them.

It doesn’t.

I’m sapiosexual, or at least that is a term that helps describe my experience. Intelligence matters enormously to me. Intellectual connection matters enormously to me. And that means a person can be aesthetically attractive without that being what actually lights the fuse. Recognition is not the same as wanting access. Appearance is not always the engine. For some of us, intellect, emotional connection, trust, or context are doing a lot more of the work. And sometimes the intellect, emotional connection, or trust can be there without the other half of the equation, sexual attraction, showing up. That part of the Venn diagram is usually where I find my best friends.

And once you admit that, the whole “you found one man hot, therefore you must be X” framework starts looking even more ridiculous.

Because it was already too simplistic for gay, bi, and straight people.

It becomes completely absurd once you account for ace-spectrum identities, aromantic identities, and the fact that nonbinary people exist.

Asexual and graysexual people complicate the assumption that attraction is universal, constant, and central. Aromantic people complicate the idea that romance and sexuality are naturally bundled together. Demisexuality complicates the assumption that desire is immediate. Nonbinary identities complicate the whole idea that sexuality can always be sorted through a clean man/woman binary in the first place. And bisexuality, while broad and real and important, is not always the final container for every complicated relationship to attraction, desire, romance, gender, and embodiment.

Sometimes the available labels overlap. Sometimes they do not. Sometimes one describes the gendered direction of desire, another describes the conditions under which desire appears, and another describes how romance does or does not function.

That is not confusion.

That is complexity.

And frankly, queer people should be better at tolerating complexity than this.

Since we’re apparently going there, let’s talk about BDSM

One of the aspects of sexuality that often complicates the dialog on sexual orientation is BDSM, because BDSM is one of those spaces where people’s tidy little assumptions about sexuality start melting like chocolate left on a dashboard in July.

Most people hear BDSM and assume “sexual.” Full stop. And yes, obviously, it can be sexual. But not always, not in the same way you understand sexual, and not for the same reasons. Sometimes what is happening there is less about sexual attraction and more about power, structure, sensation, ritual, trust, embodiment, control, surrender, or kink. Sometimes those things overlap with sexuality. Sometimes they do not line up neatly with orientation at all.

Which means if I, as a lesbian, were to do a nonsexual scene with a man, would that somehow make me less of a lesbian? Why, exactly?

Because some people cannot tolerate the idea that power and desire are not always identical?

Because they need every charged interaction to fit into one approved orientation script?

Because we have collectively decided that anything embodied, intimate, or transgressive must automatically count as evidence in the Case Against My Label?

That is not understanding sexuality more deeply. That is understanding it less.

And honestly, even if you pushed the example one step further into sexual contact within BDSM, I still do not think one act, one framework, or one exception automatically overrides how a person understands their entire sexuality. Identity is not a criminal trial where one piece of evidence gets to overrule the rest of your lived reality. Human sexuality is not a courtroom drama, and I am not interested in cross-examining myself for the entertainment of people who think one exception should redraw the whole map.

Once you stop assuming every embodied act tells one coherent truth, the whole category-policing enterprise starts wobbling on its little bureaucratic heels.

Good.

Let it wobble.

Sexuality is personal.

This is the part that keeps getting flattened into nonsense.

Sexuality is not just a theory problem or a taxonomy problem. It is a personal reality. It is a lived experience. It is not a community vote.

And yes, people can choose labels that feel truest, most useful, most honest, and most livable to them. That does not mean labels are arbitrary. It means they are inhabited. They are negotiated. They are shaped by experience, comfort, desire, history, politics, and the language that feels possible in your own mouth.

That is also why “why not just call yourself bisexual?” does not work for me.

Not because bisexuality is not real. Not because the label is bad. But because a label can be valid, politically important, and deeply meaningful for many people and still not be the right fit for a specific person. “Bisexual” implies something I am not comfortable with as my standard. It suggests a habitual or meaningful orientation toward men as well as women that does not reflect how I move through the world, how I view men, how I understand my desire, or how I live my life.

That is not an insult to bisexuality.

That is called self-knowledge.

Because, quite frankly, I find dicks unappealing to look at and even less appealing anywhere near my person.

And if someone else would use that label for themselves in a similar situation, fine. Great. Love that for them. But my sexuality is not a crowdsourced branding exercise.

And yes, sexuality is political.

How could it not be?

Political structures have spent centuries policing sexuality, classifying it, pathologizing it, rewarding some forms of it and punishing others. Families police it. Religions police it. Laws police it. Schools police it. Entire cultural systems decide which desires are respectable, which relationships are real, which bodies are intelligible, and which people get recognition, safety, legitimacy, and rights.

That is why queer politics and theory exist in the first place.

We do not fight for recognition and equal rights because sexuality is apolitical. We fight precisely because it has always been political, because power has always had a great deal to say about whose love counts, whose bodies make sense, whose relationships deserve protection, and whose desires get treated as dangerous, illegible, ridiculous, or disposable.

So yes, sexuality is political.

But that is exactly why I am so uninterested in queer people taking up the same policing function and pretending it is enlightenment.

You cannot build a more expansive world by doing the sorting work of patriarchy for it.

You cannot create liberation by becoming unpaid interns for the identity registry.

And you definitely cannot claim to be resisting sexual regulation while jumping into someone else’s DMs to inform them that, after a brief review of the evidence, their orientation has been administratively denied.

Sexuality is personal because it is lived by actual people.

Sexuality is political because systems of power are constantly trying to determine what those people are allowed to be.

Both things are true.

And if we actually care about liberation, then our job is not to replicate those systems of validation and invalidation inside queer communities. Our job is to make that world bigger, looser, safer, and more livable than the one that was handed to us.

If that makes you uncomfortable because it doesn’t fit with how you define your sexuality and the terms you use for it, it might be time to sit with why it is that you think your experience is universal and binding.

A brief history of people being weirdly obsessed with sorting everyone

Historically, we should know better than this.

Modern systems did not merely “discover” sexual identities. They classified them, managed them, pathologized them, sorted them into the normal and the deviant, the productive and the perverse.

So when people insist sexuality must be perfectly fixed, immovable, and interpretable from the outside, they are not standing outside that patriarchal history.

They are speaking its language.

And queer communities are not magically immune from reproducing the same habits. When we start acting like our job is to police who gets to use which label based on a handful of approved criteria, we are not doing liberation. We are doing paperwork.

And not even interesting paperwork.

Maybe the problem is not my sexuality

I am not saying nobody can ever question their identity. Of course they can. People do. They should. People change. Language shifts. Self-understanding evolves. That is real, and good, and often liberating.

What I am rejecting is the smug little assumption that because some stranger thinks one statement sounds inconsistent to them, they therefore get to overrule the person actually living the life in question.

You do not.

You are not the final authority on someone else’s sexuality because you found an edge case. You do not get to seize one celebrity crush, one kink, one joke, one weird little blob in the lava lamp, and declare yourself chief archivist of another person’s desire.

Maybe the issue is not that I have failed to fit the box.

Maybe the issue is that some people have confused liberation with better box-sorting.

I’m still a lesbian. Your filing system still sucks.

I am still a lesbian.

Not because sexuality is simple, but because it isn’t.

Not because identity never contains contradiction, ambiguity, surprise, or overlap, but because human beings do.

And not because I owe anyone a performance of total coherence, but because I do not.

If that makes some people uncomfortable, I would gently suggest they sit with that discomfort instead of trying to make it my administrative problem.

I am still a lesbian.

Your filing system just sucks.

Resources

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction

Jeffrey Weeks, The Invention of Sexuality

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity and Critically Queer

Michael Warner, “Queer and Then?”

Cathy J. Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?”

Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy, Chapter 3: “Equality, Inc.”

For me, one of those moments happened in a 400-level Women in History course I was teaching via Zoom.

This is important context, because in a physical classroom, a student staying after class has a certain ritual quality to it. They linger near the podium. They clutch their notebook. They wait while other students shuffle out, letting the room empty before asking something vulnerable, confusing, or occasionally so unhinged that the academic gods decide to spice up your afternoon.1

But on Zoom, “staying after class” is stranger. It is not a student hovering at the front of the room. It is the digital equivalent of everyone else vanishing into the ether while one little square remains.

One by one, the students clicked out. Cameras blinked away. The class dissolved into black rectangles and silence. I was probably expecting a question about the research paper. Or maybe a clarification about suffrage. Or, if the universe was feeling especially generous, a student wanting to talk about Gerda Lerner and women’s right to know their own history, which was literally one of the questions built into my suffrage lecture. In that unit, I had students think about why women having “the right to know [their] own history” matters, especially when the story of suffrage is so often flattened into a tidy little parade float of progress.

Instead, this young man looked at me through the glowing portal of Zoom and said something along the lines of:

Now, I want you to understand the exact psychic violence of this moment.

This was not week one.

This was not the “welcome to the syllabus, please do not plagiarize, yes, Chicago citations are real, and unfortunately, they can hurt you” portion of the semester.

This was after weeks of women’s history.

Weeks.

We had talked about women being revered and demeaned at the same time. We had talked about how cultures can praise women for their reproductive, moral, social, or symbolic value while still treating actual living women like decorative livestock with opinions. In one early lecture, I framed the course around exactly that question: why can women be revered in cultures for the value they bring, and yet still be treated as less than in daily life? I believe the exact discussion and lecture that week centered around Catholic depictions of Mary.

We had talked about benevolent sexism. Not just “I hate women” sexism, but the much slipperier kind. The kind that smiles. The kind that holds the door open with one hand and locks the voting booth, bank account, lecture hall, and clinic with the other. Benevolent sexism, as I explained in that lecture, includes those comments and stereotypes that “feel both nice and wrong,” like the idea that women are delicate flowers who need male protection or naturally kinder and more caring than men. It sounds complimentary, but it still limits women’s roles.

We had talked about suffrage. We had talked about abolitionism. We had talked about the split between movements for women’s rights and Black civil rights, and how the question of who “deserves” rights first became one of the ugliest recurring subplots in American political life. We had talked about women moving from moral influence in the private sphere toward claims to actual political rights. We had talked about 1848, Seneca Falls, Frederick Douglass, the Fifteenth Amendment, Wyoming, the Nineteenth Amendment, and all the ways that even “victory” was never as clean as the textbook would like everyone to believe.

We had talked about feminism, backlash, the personal as political, power relations in marriage, sex, child-rearing, family, work, law, and the state. In the feminism unit, radical feminism appears not as a scary Halloween decoration for Fox News segments, but as a political analysis that power relations do not only exist between people and the state. They also exist between people in society, and those intimate power relations shape larger structures of inequality.

So when this student said Andrew Tate had “some good ideas,” I did what any historian would do when confronted with a vague claim wandering loose in the discourse like an unsupervised toddler with scissors.

I asked him to clarify.

“Which ideas?”

And that is when it got awkward.

Not because I yelled. I did not yell. Yelling and insults are reserved for men with unearned confidence and audacity, commenting on my articles and sending me hate mail. Not students who are still trying to learn.

I didn’t launch into some theatrical feminist monologue while lightning cracked behind me and the ghosts of suffragists rattled chains in the Zoom background.

I simply asked the most basic historical question: what do you mean?

This is the danger of asking people to define their terms. Suddenly, the fog machine breaks.

Because “he has some good ideas” is easy to say when the ideas remain vague. Vague is cozy. Vague is where bad arguments go to wear sweatpants. Vague lets someone gesture in the direction of discipline, confidence, financial independence, fitness, masculinity, responsibility, “traditional values,” or whatever other self-help confetti has been tossed over the actual ideology.

But once you ask, “Which ideas?” the whole thing begins to wobble.

Because if the “good idea” is “men should exercise,” that is not an Andrew Tate idea. That is a gym teacher idea. That is a doctor idea. That is a “your knees will start making rice cereal noises after thirty” idea.2

If the “good idea” is “young men should take responsibility for their lives,” that is not Andrew Tate. That is every grandmother, coach, mentor, therapist, and exhausted older sibling who has ever looked at a young man playing video games for thirteen hours straight and said, “Please drink water and apply for something.”

If the “good idea” is “men are lonely and need guidance,” fine. True. Let’s talk about it. Young men are lonely. Many are isolated. Many are angry. Many are emotionally underdeveloped because they have been raised in a culture that treats tenderness like a design flaw and vulnerability like an invasive species. That is a real problem.

Not only that, but it’s a problem created and enforced by patriarchy.

But here is where the little classroom goblin starts chewing through the wires.

The problem is not that young men are being told to improve themselves.

The problem is that they are being sold ordinary self-help advice wrapped in contempt for women.

And that wrapping matters.

A protein bar dipped in sewage is not a health food.

This is why the “some good ideas” defense drives me up a wall. Because misogynistic ideology rarely survives by introducing itself honestly. It does not walk into the room wearing a name tag that says, “Hello, I believe women are lesser beings and should exist in service to male power.”

That would be too easy to clock from the start.

Instead, it arrives wearing the language of discipline. Or protection. Or biology. Or tradition. Or “natural roles.” Or “hard truths.” Or “men and women are just different.” Or “I’m just saying what everyone is afraid to say.”

History is basically one long record scratch of men saying, “I’m just saying,” and then building a legal system around it.

That is what made the moment so mind-boggling. Not that a young man in one of my classes had encountered misogynistic influencer content online. Of course, he had. We live in a cursed algorithmic terrarium where young men can watch one video about push-ups and within forty-eight hours be fed a worldview suggesting women caused the fall of Rome, their personal credit score, and possibly the death of the dinosaurs.

The mind-boggling part was that he had been sitting in a Women in History course.

He had heard the pattern. He had participated in the discussions. He was engaged and listening, not defensive or resistant to the ideas or the primary source documents.

Week after week, the course had been laying out the machinery.

Women are told they are morally superior, then denied public power because politics is too dirty for them.

Women are told they are naturally domestic, then economically punished for unpaid labor.

Women are told they are delicate, then blamed when male “protection” becomes control.

Women are told their biology is destiny, then treated as irrational for objecting to laws, customs, and institutions built around that assumption.

Women are told they are revered, then punished for acting like full human beings.

That is the old trick.

And once you have taught women’s history for long enough, you start to recognize the trick even when someone has put sunglasses on it, handed it a podcast microphone, and rented a sports car.

The thing about patriarchy is that it has always had excellent branding.

In the Victorian era, for example, women were not simply told, “We hate you and want you powerless.” That would have been vulgar. Instead, they were placed on a pedestal, which is just a prison cell with better lighting.

Victorian gender ideology framed women as physically weak but morally superior, suited to the domestic sphere as spiritual guardians and ornamental trophies, while men occupied the public sphere of business, politics, and competition. In my lecture on the Victorian era, I described this as the sharpening of separate spheres: women as physically weak and morally superior, men as physically strong and morally weak.

On paper, that can sound almost flattering. Women are purer! Women are kinder! Women are the moral center of civilization!

Great. Do they get property rights?

No.

Can they vote?

No.

Can they pursue education on equal terms?

Let’s not get hysterical.

Can they control their own money, bodies, marriages, sexuality, or public lives?

Certainly not. But someone may write a poem about how angelic they are while denying them those things, so that’s nice, I guess.

This is the historical pattern: praise women in the abstract, control women in reality.

And that is exactly why “good ideas” can be such a trap. Because antifeminist and misogynistic movements often do not begin with a sneer. They begin with a compliment.

Women are special.

Women are precious.

Women are naturally nurturing.

Women are the heart of the home.

Women are too valuable to be degraded by politics.

Women are too sacred to be sullied by work.

Women are too emotional for leadership.

Women are too important as mothers to be distracted by autonomy.

There is always a reason.

There is always a story.

There is always some “good idea” tucked into the machinery to make the machinery look less like a cage.

And that is why I asked the student to clarify.

Because when someone says, “I don’t agree with him on everything, but he has some good ideas,” the next question has to be: which ones?

And after that: why do those ideas require this messenger?

Because young men do not need misogynists to learn discipline.

They do not need misogynists to learn confidence.

They do not need misogynists to learn how to exercise, save money, take responsibility, develop ambition, or stop treating their lives like an abandoned group project.

They need adults who can help them build self-respect without making women the villain of their coming-of-age story.

That is the bait-and-switch.

A lot of these influencers identify a real wound. Male loneliness is real. Male insecurity is real. Male purposelessness is real. The emotional starvation created by narrow masculinity is real. Boys and men are often told they can feel anger, lust, pride, and not much else without risking ridicule. That is not healthy. That is not sustainable. That is emotional malnutrition with a gym membership.

But instead of helping men become fuller human beings, misogynistic influencers give them a script.

You are not lonely because we have a shredded sense of community, because digital life has replaced intimacy with performance, because patriarchal masculinity has taught you that needing people is weakness, or because nobody ever taught you how to name your feelings without wanting to fake your own death.

No, no.

You are lonely because women are shallow.

You are insecure because women have too much power.

You are sexually frustrated because feminism ruined everything.

You are unhappy because men are no longer “real men” and women are no longer obedient enough to make that fantasy work.

It is a very old con.

Take a structural problem. Blame women. Sell masculinity back to men as domination.

Rinse. Repeat. Add ring light.

This is why women’s history matters. Not because it teaches students that men are bad. Despite what the internet’s least literate comment sections seem to believe, Women in History is not a semester-long ritual where I light candles, summon Susan B. Anthony, and hex men named Brad.3

Women’s history teaches students to see systems.

It teaches them to recognize that gender is not just a private identity or a set of personal preferences. It is political. It is legal. It is economic. It is cultural. It is enforced through stories, laws, customs, institutions, medical theories, religious teachings, family structures, jokes, textbooks, advertisements, and, now, podcasts where men in suspiciously tight shirts explain civilization.

That is why “the personal is political” remains such an important concept. In the lecture on feminism and empowerment, I explained that radical feminists argued that personal experiences in marriage, sex, and child-rearing had political consequences and that power relations between men and women shaped women’s broader position in society.

That matters because misogyny does not only operate through obvious public policy. It also operates through the intimate. Through who gets interrupted. Who is believed? Who is expected to sacrifice? Who is assumed to be naturally caring. Who is allowed anger? Who is punished for ambition? Who has to soften every sentence with a smiley face so nobody mistakes authority for cruelty?

It operates in the household. In the classroom. In the workplace. In dating. In marriage. In sex. In the group chat. In the comment section. In the Zoom room, one student thinks he is making a reasonable point, and his professor is silently wondering whether she can legally assign him the entire history of patriarchy as homework.

The other reason that moment stuck with me is that he knew enough to hedge.

He did not say, “Andrew Tate is right.”

He said, “I don’t agree with him on everything, but…”

That “but” is doing Olympic-level gymnastics.

It is the verbal equivalent of putting a napkin over a grease fire.

“I don’t agree with him on everything” means he knew there was something there he needed to distance himself from. He knew the name carried baggage. He knew, at least vaguely, that he could not simply endorse the whole worldview in a Women in History class without sounding like he had wandered into the wrong Zoom link by accident.

But he still wanted to preserve the “good ideas.”

And that, to me, is where the lesson lives.

Because patriarchy does not need every young man to become an open cartoon misogynist. It does not need him twirling a mustache and announcing his plan to repeal women’s suffrage before lunch.

It only needs him to keep making exceptions.

It only needs him to say, “Well, yes, the misogyny is bad, but…”

It only needs him to treat contempt for women as an unfortunate side dish rather than part of the recipe.

It only needs him to separate “discipline” from the worldview it is being used to launder.

And it only needs him to believe that women objecting to that worldview are overreacting.

That is the part I want people to understand.

When women object to misogynistic influencers, we are not objecting to young men having role models. We are not objecting to men working out, finding purpose, making money, improving their mental health, or developing confidence. Contrary to popular belief, feminism is not hiding in the bushes waiting to confiscate dumbbells and protein powder.

We are objecting to the political education happening underneath the ‘self-help.’

We are objecting to the idea that male confidence requires female subordination.

We are objecting to the idea that men can only become strong by treating women as weak, disposable, manipulative, childish, sexually obligated, or naturally inferior.

We are objecting to a worldview that takes the real pain of young men and turns it into resentment toward women, rather than teaching them to seek mental health help and community where they can genuinely express their emotions without being mocked for being “girly” or “weak.”

That is not empowerment.

That is patriarchy wearing a motivational hoodie.

And historically, this is familiar. Exhaustingly familiar. Put-it-in-a-museum-next-to-the-other-terrible-ideas familiar.

Anti-suffragists argued that women entering politics would disrupt the home. They argued women’s service as citizens belonged in wifehood and motherhood, not voting. They connected women’s suffrage to social disorder, anti-patriotism, socialism, race panic, and the collapse of the natural order. In my suffrage lectures, I had students trace how anti-suffrage rhetoric framed women’s political power as a threat to home life, citizenship, and social stability.

That rhetoric was not always “women are trash.”

Sometimes it was “women must be protected.”

A compliment-shaped cage.

In the twentieth century, the same pattern reappeared in domestic ideology. Women were told that fulfillment came through marriage, sex, children, and housework. In the lecture on The Feminine Mystique, the course covered the assumption that women would be fulfilled by domestic life, and that “truly feminine” women should not want work, education, or political opinions.

That message was also sold as protection. As happiness. As natural order. As psychological health. As family stability.

Not domination.

Never domination.

Domination has terrible PR, so it usually travels under an alias.

This is why the “which ideas?” question matters so much. It forces the alias to show ID.

If the idea is “men should have discipline,” wonderful. Let’s teach discipline.

If the idea is “men should build confidence,” great. Let’s teach confidence.

If the idea is “men need spaces to talk honestly about pain, failure, loneliness, and fear,” absolutely. Let’s build those spaces.

But if the idea is “men can only heal by restoring dominance over women,” then we are not talking about self-improvement anymore. We are talking about backlash.

And backlash is also a historical pattern.

It shows up after women gain rights. After women enter public life. After women challenge sexual norms. After women become economically independent. After women demanded education. After women refuse compulsory motherhood. After the violence against women. After women stop pretending private suffering is private.

Backlash says: things have gone too far.

Backlash says: men are the real victims now.

Backlash says: feminism destroyed the family, dating, sex, universities, workplaces, comedy, children, movies, the military, and apparently the entire fragile ecosystem of male podcasts.

Backlash says: we just need to return to something natural.

And women’s history, if taught honestly, responds: natural according to whom?

Because the “natural order” has always required a remarkable amount of law, violence, religion, propaganda, economic pressure, sexual control, and educational exclusion to keep it looking natural.

Funny how that works.

My student probably did not mean to walk into all of that when he stayed after class on Zoom. I doubt he was trying to initiate a full-scale historiographical crisis. He was probably testing an idea out loud. Students do that. Sometimes they are brave. Sometimes they are thoughtful. Sometimes they are wrong in ways that make your left eye twitch and hit the bar that evening.

But that is also the point of teaching.

Not to dunk on students for not already knowing everything.

Not to humiliate them for repeating something they absorbed from the cultural sludge machine.

But to ask the next question.

Which ideas?

Where did they come from?

Who benefits from them?

What assumptions are they carrying?

What kind of world do they imagine?

What kind of power do they protect?

And why, after half a semester of women’s history, did those ideas still sound good?

That last question is the one that stays with me.

Because it is not really about one student. It is about the limits of information. You can put the evidence in front of someone. You can walk them through centuries of women being praised into submission, protected into dependence, excluded for their own good, silenced for social stability, controlled in the name of morality, and punished for wanting to be full human beings.

And still, patriarchy whispers, “Okay, but what if this time they really are just overreacting?”

That is why we have to teach the pattern.

Not just the facts. The pattern.

Andrew Tate and his compatriots are only interesting because he is a modern delivery system for a much older story.

The story says men are naturally rulers and women are naturally subjects.

The story says male pain is women’s fault.

The story says male emotion is weakness.

The story says equality is humiliation.

The story says domination is discipline.

The story says hierarchy is order.

The story says women’s freedom is men’s crisis.

And then, because the story knows it cannot always say that directly, it adds:

Also, remember to work out, dress nicely, and drive a nice car.

That is the trick.

That is the trap.

That is the historical fungus growing under the motivational poster.

So yes, I still think about that student. I think about his little Zoom square. I think about the awkward pause after I asked him which ideas he meant. I think about the way vague admiration becomes harder to defend once it has to become specific.

And I think about how many young men are being handed the same poisoned sandwich and told it is protein.

They deserve better than that.

Women certainly deserve better than that.

And if the “good ideas” only remain good when you peel them away from the contempt for women, then maybe they were never his ideas in the first place.

Maybe discipline does not belong to misogynists.

Maybe confidence does not belong to men who need women smaller.

Maybe responsibility does not require domination.

Maybe young men can become whole without being taught that women are the obstacle, the prize, the temptation, the enemy, or the helpmeet.

Maybe the actual good idea is this:

If your masculinity requires women’s subordination to function, it is not masculinity.

It is a hostage situation with a podcast.

Normally I would not begin with a writer’s Substack bio, but in this case it feels relevant. His description reads: “Don’t listen me. I have no idea what I’m talking about.”

Paul Spooner

Grievance Feminism and the Yelp Review Model of Society

Grievance Feminism and the Yelp Review Model of Society…

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23 days ago · 3 likes · 4 comments · Paul Spooner

Reader, I should have listened.

Because the post in question, titled “Grievance Feminism and the Yelp Review Model of Society,” is not a serious engagement with feminist analysis. It is a familiar anti-feminist trick dressed up in the language of moderation, realism, and mature concern. It takes structural critique, renames it grievance, invents a fake opposition between accountability and action, and then congratulates itself for being the only adult in the room.

This genre is not new. Every few months, some man rediscovers feminism, gets annoyed that women are naming patterns instead of soothing his feelings about them, and produces a long essay explaining that the real problem is not sexism, violence, entitlement, or the social distribution of harm. No, the real problem, apparently, is women being too “grievance-oriented” when we talk about those things.

And because the piece is built almost entirely out of rhetorical sleight of hand, it is worth slowing down and answering a few of its core moves directly.

1. Feminism is not a Yelp review of society

He writes:

And:

This is the first sleight of hand, and it is doing a lot of work for him. Feminist critique is not a customer service complaint. Women are not standing outside society like annoyed diners sending back a cold entrée. Feminism is not saying, “my experience was suboptimal and I would like a refund.” It is asking how institutions, culture, norms, law, labor, family structures, and everyday behavior distribute harm, authority, credibility, and risk unevenly.

That is not consumer logic. That is structural analysis.

He is taking a political framework and reducing it to the image of an unreasonable woman leaving a one-star review because that caricature is easier to mock than the actual argument. It is an old trick. If women name a system, turn it into a feeling. If women describe a pattern, call it whining. If women critique power, recast them as difficult customers.

Cute metaphor. Empty argument.

Women are not upset because “the experience doesn’t match expectations.” Women are angry because violence, coercion, entitlement, and inequality are not random accidents. They are patterned. They are normalized. They are political. That is not Yelp. That is history.

2. “Who failed?” and “What is my role?” are not opposing questions

He writes:

This is where he tries to sound like the adult in the room, and instead ends up announcing that he does not know how analysis works.

If you want to do anything meaningful, you have to ask all of those questions.

Who failed?
Who is responsible?
Who benefits?
Who bears the cost?
What structures produced the outcome?
What is my role?
What actually works?
How do we reduce harm realistically?

Those are not opposing frameworks. They are sequential ones.

Diagnosis is not the enemy of action. It is the precondition for it.

You cannot reduce harm “realistically” without naming what kind of harm you are dealing with, how it is reproduced, who is empowered by it, who is endangered by it, and who is expected to quietly absorb it. Pretending that naming responsibility is somehow less mature than “moving on to solutions” is not nuance. It is evasiveness dressed up as wisdom.

And this is a recurring problem in anti-feminist writing. Structural critique gets recast as passivity, while vague calls for “personal responsibility” get recast as pragmatism. But serious political work has always required both. Ask what happened. Ask who made it possible. Ask who benefits. Ask what can change. Ask what your role is. Ask what collective action looks like.

“Who failed?” and “What is my role?” are not enemies. They are consecutive questions.

3. No, rage is not proof of irrationality

This part really gives the game away.

Because why exactly would people not rage?

Why would women not rage at a society harming them, their families, their friends, and strangers half the world away? Why would queer people not rage? Why would marginalized people not rage? Why would anyone watching violence, domination, and cruelty get neatly folded into the furniture of everyday life respond with a calm little nod and a spreadsheet smile?

Rage is not proof that analysis has failed. Often it is proof that someone still has a functioning moral nervous system.

If your reaction to violence, exploitation, and systemic harm is not rage, I am less impressed by your nuance than I am concerned by your deadened moral imagination. Too often “nuance” in pieces like this just means feigned helplessness in a blazer: a way of pretending nothing can really be done, no one can really be named, and no one should get too upset about any of it.

What he is doing here is one of the oldest tricks in the book: treating emotional detachment as the only legitimate form of thought. “Nuance, context, or data” are presented as neutral goods, and rage is framed as the embarrassing response of people too irrational to handle complexity.

But context can clarify, yes.
Data can illuminate, yes.
Nuance can sharpen analysis, yes.

They can also be used to blur responsibility, anesthetize urgency, flatten lived reality into abstraction, and dress feigned helplessness up in tidy intellectual clothes. The issue is not whether we should use context or data. Of course we should. The issue is how they are being used.

Are they helping us understand harm more clearly?
Or are they being deployed to smooth over brutality with abstraction and delay accountability until everyone is too tired to keep asking?

Flat affect is not the same thing as depth. A calm tone does not make an argument more ethical. It only makes it more socially comfortable.

Too often, what gets sold as “nuance” is just moral cowardice with a neutral accent.

4. Feminists are not asking for utopia. We are asking who produces the world we live in.

He writes:

And:

This is a straw man so old it should qualify for a pension.

No serious feminist argument depends on the belief that all violence, risk, and harm can be eliminated forever in a perfectly frictionless world. The claim is not that human beings can build a paradise where nothing bad ever happens. The claim is that many forms of harm are socially produced, politically structured, culturally normalized, and unevenly distributed.

Which means they can be reduced.

They can be interrupted.
They can be made harder to commit.
They can be treated as public problems instead of private fate.
They can be made less acceptable, less rewarded, and less invisible.

“You can’t eliminate all harm” is not a rebuttal to “this harm is patterned and preventable.” It is just a lazy way of lowering the bar until no one can ask anything of society at all.

And then there is his line, “Utopia has a problem though. It has no producer.”

The fuck it doesn’t.

We are the producers.

Society is not weather. It is not an accidentally occurring puddle. It is made and remade all the time by institutions, laws, schools, churches, media, families, workplaces, norms, habits, and culture. Some people have much more power over that process than others, obviously. That is the point. Human beings produce social arrangements. That is why critique matters. That is why politics matters. That is why feminism matters.

We are not consumers standing outside society filing product complaints. We are its producers, maintainers, critics, and repair crew. If unjust arrangements can be made, they can be unmade. Or at the very least made less cruel, less violent, less unequal, and less structured around the comfort of those already best served by them.

5. “Shared responsibility” is not the same thing as equal responsibility

He writes:

And:

This is where he wants the social prestige of sounding complex without actually saying anything useful.

Of course systems are reproduced broadly. Feminists know that. Feminist scholarship has spent decades analyzing how gender norms are reinforced through families, education, religion, media, labor, law, and culture. He is not adding complexity here. He is using complexity to muddy accountability.

Because shared participation is not the same thing as equal power.

Shared participation is not the same thing as equal risk.

Shared participation is not the same thing as equal responsibility for outcomes.

A woman navigating male entitlement in public is not situated the same way as the man producing that entitlement. A service worker being verbally cornered by a customer is not “equally responsible” for the structure of that interaction simply because both are alive inside society. A world can be collectively reproduced without its burdens falling evenly.

That is one of feminism’s most basic observations: we may all live inside a system, but we do not all occupy the same position within it.

So no, naming patterns of male violence, male entitlement, or patriarchal structure is not “outsourcing.” It is analysis. The actual outsourcing move is pretending that because everyone participates somehow, no one can be named clearly enough to be held accountable.

That is not nuance. It is a fog machine.

6. Calling women’s anger “grievance” is just tone policing in a nicer outfit

He writes:

And:

This is, frankly, just tone policing in a blazer.

Women point to harm. Women speak sharply about harm. Women refuse to wrap every sentence in little bows of emotional reassurance, and suddenly the focus shifts. Not to the harm itself, but to our tone. Our intensity. Our anger. Our “moral clarity.” Our failure to sound sufficiently detached while discussing our own precarity.

Men’s anger is so often read as seriousness.
Women’s anger is still read as excess.

Men’s outrage becomes evidence that something important has happened.
Women’s outrage becomes evidence that we are overreacting to it.

That is not neutrality. That is hierarchy with better vocabulary.

And it is especially rich in this case, because the whole post is itself a grievance performance. A man reads feminist analysis, dislikes the emotional and political implications, and writes a long essay about how women noticing patterns too angrily is the real problem. He has not transcended grievance. He has simply redirected it at feminism.

7. The article accidentally proves the feminist point

He writes:

And:

But the irony here is almost too perfect.

A woman says: male entitlement in public creates risk, delay, and silent self-management for the people around it, especially women.

His answer is not to engage the structure of that claim. His answer is to complain that feminism is too grievance-oriented, too angry, too blame-focused, too insufficiently impressed by data and “nuance.”

That is not a rebuttal. That is a demonstration.

Women say, “Here is how male grievance becomes social force.”
A man replies, “Have you considered that women naming this pattern are the real grievance merchants?”

You could not ask for a cleaner case study if you tried.

What feminists actually ask

Since he is so invested in pretending feminism begins and ends with “Who failed me?”, let’s be clear about what feminist analysis actually asks.

It asks:

What structures make certain harms more likely?
Whose fear is normalized?
Whose behavior is excused?
Who gets to externalize their discomfort?
Who is expected to manage it?
Who is believed?
Who is punished for speaking?
What forms of labor, law, narrative, and custom reproduce this?
What interventions actually work?
How do we reduce harm materially, culturally, and politically?
What do we owe one another?
And yes, what is my role in making this better?

That is not passivity.
That is not consumer logic.
That is not utopian fantasy.

That is political work.

The difference is that feminism refuses to answer the question “How do we build something better?” by pretending it is impolite to ask who built the current mess.

Final thought

In the end, the piece offers a familiar trick. Recast feminist structural critique as personal grievance. Recast accountability as childish blame. Recast systemic change as utopian fantasy. Recast women’s anger as proof that the real problem is our tone.

It is not especially rigorous. It is not especially original. And it is nowhere near as nuanced as it thinks it is.

But in fairness to the author, he did warn us.

“Don’t listen me. I have no idea what I’m talking about.”

For once, I do not disagree.

There are suddenly a lot more of you here, which is exciting, flattering, and slightly alarming in the way that realizing people are actually reading your thoughts on purpose always is.

So I thought it was probably time to do a proper welcome post. Think of this as the little brochure you get at the entrance to a museum, except instead of a quiet map of the Renaissance wing, it comes with strong opinions about gender, media, politics, and the historical crimes of the American nuclear family.

Welcome to Bitchy History.

I’m Professor Meredith. I’m a historian, writer, podcaster, graduate student, former history professor, and general menace to oversimplified narratives. I have a background in history, a master’s degree in Global and Colonial History, and I previously taught history at the college level, which means I have spent a truly heroic amount of time explaining that no, history is not just memorizing dates, and yes, context does actually matter. I’m currently working on my MA in Gender Studies, and in October, I’ll also be starting my PhD, because apparently I looked at academia and thought, “Yes, I would like more of this, but with higher stakes and worse sleep.”

Some of my former students are lurking in the subscriptions. Apparently they liked my pedantry enough to want to get hit with it regularly without a grade riding on it.

My work lives in the strange, fascinating, deeply cursed intersection of gender, politics, media, cultural history, and power.

Which is a very academic way of saying: I spend a lot of time asking why society is like this, who benefits from it being like this, and why so many people keep trying to blame feminism for problems that were clearly installed by patriarchy, capitalism, empire, and a casserole dish.

My research interests include women’s history, gender studies, cultural history, Cold War history, media history, political nostalgia, reproductive politics, science fiction, and the many ways popular culture teaches us what to believe before we realize we are being taught anything at all.

I write a lot about the 1950s, not because I believe it was a golden age, but because I believe it was one of America’s most successful marketing campaigns. The perfect housewife, the cheerful nuclear family, the benevolent father, the happy consumer home, the kitchen as destiny: all of these things were packaged, sold, televised, and then later weaponized by people who would very much like us to confuse propaganda with tradition.

So if you are interested in how sitcoms trained Americans to find hierarchy comforting, how domesticity became a political project, how “traditional values” often means “historical fanfiction with a production budget,” you are in the right place.

I also write about science fiction, because science fiction is where societies go to have nervous breakdowns about themselves in space. I love Star Trek, Babylon 5, and stories that use aliens, empires, time travel, and suspiciously attractive revolutionaries to ask very real questions about war, race, gender, fascism, colonialism, morality, and hope.

Basically, if someone has ever said, “It’s just a TV show,” I have probably already prepared a 3,000-word rebuttal.

Around here, you will find essays, podcast updates, historical deep dives, cultural criticism, political analysis, media analysis, feminist rage, jokes that got out of hand, and occasional dispatches from the haunted attic of American memory.

Some recurring themes include:

The myth of the “traditional family.”

The politics of nostalgia.

Women’s history and the long, exhausting career of misogyny.

The historical roots of modern right-wing gender politics.

Reproductive justice and the policing of bodies.

Pop culture as political (mis)education.

Science fiction as cultural critique.

The Cold War, empire, propaganda, and all the little ways power tries to make itself look normal.

And because this is Bitchy History, the tone is generally: historically grounded, politically irritated, emotionally invested, and occasionally standing in the ruins of someone’s bad argument holding a shovel.

Now, a note about paid subscriptions.

I do not put most of my work behind a paywall because I do not believe knowledge should be gatekept. I do not want the people who most need historical context, political analysis, or feminist media critique to hit a little digital tollbooth and be told, “Sorry, knowledge is for premium members only.”

That feels rude. Also, deeply on-brand for the systems I spend most of my time yelling about.

So the majority of what I publish will remain free. That matters to me. History should be accessible. Analysis should be accessible. The tools for understanding power should not only be available to people with disposable income and a fondness for monthly subscriptions.

That said, if you enjoy my work and you are in a position to support it financially, paid subscriptions are very welcome and deeply appreciated. They help me keep researching, writing, podcasting, and producing the kind of work that requires time, books, databases, caffeine, and the occasional emotional support pastry.

They also help support the broader ecosystem of my work while I continue graduate study, prepare for doctoral research, and attempt to keep all my academic, creative, and public history projects from forming one giant sentient paper pile in the corner of my office.1

Think of a paid subscription less as “unlocking exclusive content” and more as tossing a coin to your local feminist historian so she can continue wandering through the archives with a torch and a suspicious expression.

No pressure. No guilt. No velvet rope.

Just support, if you can and want to.

Whether you are here as a free subscriber, a paid subscriber, a longtime reader, a new arrival, a fellow history gremlin, a feminist killjoy, a science fiction nerd, or someone who simply looked around at the state of the world and thought, “Surely there is historical precedent for this nonsense,” I am glad you are here.

Bitchy History is a place for people who want context. People who want the receipts. People who understand that the past is not dead, it is just standing behind us in a novelty apron whispering bad policy ideas into the present.

So welcome.

Pour yourself something caffeinated, alcoholic, herbal, or otherwise emotionally stabilizing.

We have a lot to unpack.

And unfortunately, history packed most of it in asbestos-lined luggage.

He got on the bus without paying. There was also, as I recall it, a whole situation involving pizza. Not pizza in the abstract, but pizza as a supporting actor in a drama that absolutely did not need one. The driver told him to get off. He refused to get off. The rest of us sat there, trapped in what I can only describe as the most irritating one-act play in the English language, waiting for this deeply stupid standoff to end.

And because the universe occasionally likes to season ordinary evenings with a pinch of absurdity, it did not end quickly.

Now, what I wanted to say to this man, with all the weary sincerity of someone who had hit her limit, was: for Christ’s sake, it is eight p.m. I would like to go home, watch TV, and go to sleep. Could you please make this, I’m sure, very principled stand another time?

That is what I wanted to say.

What I actually did was sit there silently and think it, because women are trained, often very sensibly, not to escalate with an already angry man in an enclosed space. I also did not get off the bus, because getting off would have required walking past him, and I was not particularly interested in starring in a second, more dangerous drama titled Strange Man Redirects His Rage at Random Woman on Her Way Home.

So I stayed put. Everyone stayed put. And we all waited sixteen minutes for a police officer to arrive and tell him exactly what the bus driver had already told him: get off the bus.

Sixteen minutes. Sixteen entire minutes because one man had decided that his feelings, his defiance, or his relationship to basic public rules were now more important than everyone else’s evening.

And the thing is, this was not even the first time I had encountered a man who seemed to believe that his emotions should affect the schedule of a bus.

Because there was also the other guy about six weeks ago on my way to campus. The one who held up an entire bus because he wanted to tell the driver that he didn’t appreciate his tone when he’d instructed the man on some point of bus rules.

His tone.

Not some gross injustice. Not an actual emergency. His tone.

These are not isolated incidents. This is a genre. A genre in which one man decides that his annoyance, embarrassment, wounded pride, or general inability to hear the word no has now become a matter of public concern.

Once you start looking at it that way, the bus stops being just a bus. It becomes a tiny, rolling kingdom. A perfect little case study in power, entitlement, grievance, and the deeply cursed social tradition of treating male discomfort like breaking news.

Because this is not really about buses.

It is about the long history of men who think their feelings stop traffic.

The Bus as a Tiny Kingdom

Public transit is one of the last places in modern life where society asks us to participate in the radical little experiment of acknowledging that other people exist.

That is the bargain.

You get on the bus. You pay your fare. You obey the rules. You try not to make your personal issues everybody else’s logistical nightmare. You do not listen to music without headphones. The driver drives. The passengers passenger. We all mutually agree not to become the problem.

Most people understand this. Some, apparently, do not.

And what fascinates me about these incidents is that the man making the scene almost always seems to imagine himself as the protagonist of a principled drama. In his own mind, he is not delaying a bus full of tired strangers. He is standing up for something. He is asserting himself. He is refusing to be disrespected. He is, perhaps, the Rosa Parks of being told to follow standard transit procedure.

Unfortunately for the rest of us, the lived experience of this grand act of self-assertion is much less cinematic.

For the passengers, it is just dead time and tension.

It is checking the clock.

It is mentally recalculating when you are going to get home or if you are going to be late to work or class or miss your train.

It is wondering whether this is going to become a story you tell later as a ridiculous inconvenience or the opening paragraph of something much worse.

That is one of the things that often gets lost when people talk about public entitlement as though it is just a personality quirk. It is not just that one guy is annoying. It is that his annoyance becomes everyone else’s problem. His mood enters the infrastructure. His ego becomes part of the route.

And that is not random. That is social training.

A Brief History of Men Treating Their Feelings Like Governance

For centuries, men were treated as the default actors in public life. They were the legal heads of households, the property holders, the voters, the civic authorities, the people whose voices had weight attached to them. Their judgments mattered. Their status mattered. Their grievances mattered.

Meanwhile, women were trained into a different political education entirely. We were taught deference, flexibility, self-management, and emotional containment. Smooth things over. Do not make a fuss. Adapt. Endure. Be pleasant. Be careful. Be smaller.

This is one of patriarchy’s nastiest tricks. It does not only distribute formal power unevenly. It distributes emotional permission unevenly too.

Some men are taught, over and over again, that if they feel slighted, that feeling is meaningful. It should be registered. It should be responded to. It should be apologized for. Their discomfort is not just discomfort. It is treated as evidence that something is wrong with the world around them.

A surprising amount of history boils down to this: society treating male irritation like an official document.

That does not mean every rude man on a bus is consciously reenacting nineteenth-century patriarchal household authority. It does mean he is moving through a world built by those assumptions. A world that has long told men that their dignity has public value and that being denied, corrected, or inconvenienced may constitute a form of disrespect.

Which brings us, beautifully, absurdly, to the sentence: I didn’t appreciate his tone.

Tone, or, I Was Wrong but I’d Like to Make It Your Fault

The man who held up a bus because he needed the driver to know that he did not appreciate his tone is, I regret to inform you, a near-perfect artifact.

Because “tone” is one of those words that often appears when someone has lost on substance but would still like to feel morally victorious.

Not always. Sometimes tone genuinely matters. Sometimes people are cruel, threatening, or abusive. But very often, especially in conflicts like this, “I didn’t appreciate your tone” means something more like: I did not like being corrected, and I would now like to make your delivery the issue instead of my behavior.

It is a beautiful little escape hatch for the ego.

And it is also deeply political.

Women, queer people, workers, and marginalized people have spent centuries being told that the content of what they say matters less than the manner in which they say it. Too loud, too sharp, too emotional, too blunt, too cold, too angry, too shrill. Entire hierarchies have been maintained through the policing of tone. If the less powerful are always required to speak gently, then the more powerful never have to seriously engage with what is being said.

Service workers live inside this trap constantly. A bus driver, cashier, waitress, nurse, receptionist, teacher, or call center employee is expected not merely to do the job but to do it with the correct emotional lighting. Firm enough to maintain order, soft enough not to offend. Authority without visible irritation. Boundaries without edge. Correction as a spa treatment.

Apparently the bus driver was meant to enforce transit policy2 with the soothing aura of a meditation app.

And this is where entitlement gets especially revealing. Because some people do not just want service. They want deference. They want the person enforcing the rules to do so in a tone that reassures them they are still, somehow, the center of the interaction.

He was not denied liberty. He was denied concierge-level emotional handling.

Women Learn Risk Management, Men Learn Public Performance

What really got me about the pizza bus guy was not just that he held up the bus. It was that I knew exactly what I wanted to say and also exactly why I was not going to say it.

I wanted to tell him to knock it off. I wanted to point out that it was eight at night and some of us would very much like to go home before the heat death of the universe. I wanted to ask him, with what I think would have been admirable restraint, to conduct his deeply principled stand against bus policy at literally any other moment.

But I did not say that.

Not because I was not angry.
Not because I was not right.
Not because I had nothing to say.

I did not say it because women are taught, often for very good reason, not to provoke an already angry man in a confined space.

And I did not get off the bus either, because getting off meant walking past him.

That is the whole architecture right there.

He got to have a public emotional event. The rest of us got assigned threat assessment.

His role in the evening was grievance. Ours was logistics.

That is such a familiar gendered split that many women will recognize it instantly. Men like this are often allowed to externalize their discomfort. They get loud. They get difficult. They perform outrage. They force the environment to respond to them.

Women are taught the opposite. Internalize. Calculate. Adjust. Stay alert. Do not become the next target. Do not make yourself memorable to the wrong man. Think three steps ahead. Keep the peace where possible. Get home safe.

This is not passivity. It is risk management.

It is not agreement. It is strategy.

It is not that women do not know exactly what should be said in these moments. It is that we also know what it can cost to say it.

That is why these incidents are more than irritating. They are revealing. They show us who gets to turn their feelings outward and who must quietly absorb the consequences.

Public male entitlement often works like this: one man exports his emotions, and everyone else imports the cost.

The Hidden Workforce of Male Entitlement

One of the most annoying things about public entitlement is that it creates a hidden workforce.

Someone has to enforce the rule.
Someone has to de-escalate.
Someone has to wait.
Someone has to miss a connection.
Someone has to recalculate a walk home.
Someone has to decide whether getting off the bus is safer than staying on it.
Someone has to absorb the delay, the discomfort, the uncertainty, the possibility that this gets worse before it gets better.

In this case, the bus driver had to do the impossible balancing act service workers know too well: enforce the policy, keep the passengers safe, avoid escalation, stay professional, and somehow also not injure the delicate feelings of the man actively derailing the route.

Then the passengers had to sit there and wait while one person’s ego temporarily annexed public infrastructure.

Then the police had to show up to repeat the original instruction.

And after all that, the grand conclusion of this epic struggle between Man and Bus and Society was exactly the same as it would have been sixteen minutes earlier: get off the bus.

That is what makes these little public dramas feel almost elegant in their stupidity. No new principle has been established. No truth has been discovered. The whole spectacle exists simply to prove that one man can, for a brief period, force the system to orbit him.

A tiny tyrant in a tiny kingdom.

The Tiny Tyrant Tradition

The man on the bus is not a king, senator, bishop, or CEO. But for sixteen deeply stupid minutes, he was acting out the same old logic: my grievance matters more than the collective. My feelings outrank the schedule. Your time is less important than my pride. Normal operations will now pause for my dissatisfaction.

That is patriarchy in miniature.

Not always the law. Not always a sermon. Not always a speech from a podium. Sometimes it is just a daily rehearsal of dominance through inconvenience and disruption.

You see it everywhere once you start looking.

The man screaming at a cashier because a coupon expired.
The man demanding that a female barista smile.
The man who reacts to being corrected by a woman as though he has suffered a diplomatic insult.
The man who treats any boundary as humiliation.
The man who cannot simply lose one small interaction and move on with his day.

He must become the event.

And this is why these bus stories matter, ridiculous as they are. If you want to understand how power works, you cannot only study presidents, judges, and lawmakers. You also have to study habits. Rituals. Expectations. Who gets indulged. Who gets policed. Who gets to take up space. Who gets to make a scene. Who gets punished for responding.

Power survives not only in institutions, but in ordinary performances. In the thousand tiny moments where one person’s ego is allowed to become everyone else’s problem.

Sir, This Is a Bus

One of the most exhausting things about patriarchy is that it rarely arrives announcing itself as ideology. Sometimes it just gets on the bus, doesn’t pay, carries unsecured pizza, and expects a vehicle full of strangers to reorganize their evening around its feelings.

And the rest of us, especially women, are left doing the quiet work of staying calm, staying alert, staying strategic, and staying safe.

And yes, it was only sixteen minutes. In the grand scheme of things that doesn’t feel like that big of a deal. I got off at my stop, hit the Tesco Express3 for the milk I need for coffee tomorrow and made my way home.

But it wasn’t just sixteen minutes. It was a tremor in my hand because no one could be sure it wouldn’t escalate. It was the fear of making eye contact so he wouldn’t think I wanted to start something. It was the knowledge that one man’s bad mood could up-end something as basic as taking the bus home from the train station in a predictable manner.

And if your bruised ego can stop public transit, that is not a quirky little personality flaw.

That is a social structure.

@cgmovie69#thepitt #fyp #movie #tiktok #usa

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And there it is. The sentence. The whole cursed little ideological nesting doll.

Because that line is not just bad medicine. It is bad history. And, more importantly, it is bad politics.

It is also not the first time I’ve been on this particular beat. In my Bitchy History episode “A Brief History of Setting Women on Fire,” I talked about the long war against women’s healing knowledge: the witch hunts, the demonization of midwives, and the patriarchal professionalization of medicine that turned women’s expertise into something suspect, punishable, and eventually replaceable. The point was never that premodern birth was a feminist paradise. The point was that women were not ignorant by default, communities did not leave childbirth to chance, and patriarchal institutions had to work very hard to make women’s reproductive authority look dangerous.

Which is why Judith’s logic is so infuriating. It takes a real history of misogyny in medicine and somehow turns it into a fantasy where women have always just wandered off alone to give birth in nature like they were extras in a deeply unserious fertility cult. No. Women have not historically “done this on their own.” Women have historically done this with the help of other women: midwives, mothers, sisters, aunts, grandmothers, neighbors, traditional birth attendants, and other experienced companions. Across cultures and across centuries, childbirth has usually been communal, supported, and socially embedded. The World Health Organization explicitly describes companionship during labor and childbirth as deeply rooted in women’s preferences and traditions, and a major review of labor support notes that women have generally been attended by and supported by other women throughout labor and birth.

Because humans are communal animals. We are not cats slinking off behind the shed. We are not woodland cryptids crouching barefoot in a mossy field waiting for “the body to know what to do.” Birth has always been dangerous enough that communities developed people whose whole thing was helping women survive it.

That is what makes the “women have always done this naturally and on their own” line so deeply stupid. It takes one true thing, that childbirth predates modern hospitals, and wraps it around a lie, that premodern childbirth was solitary, instinctive, and unsupported. That fantasy is not some ancient feminine truth. It is a modern delusion with a ring light.

And the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that this rhetoric sits exactly at the weird intersection of two deeply cursed ideological streams.

On one side, you have crunchy wellness culture: crystals, incense, “divine feminine” nonsense, anti-medical romanticism, vibes masquerading as wisdom.1 On the other, you have right-wing biological determinism: pronatalism, anti-contraception politics, demographic panic, and the increasingly explicit belief that pregnancy is women’s “natural” state and reproduction their “destiny.” Katie Miller, wife of D.C. Nazi-Cryptid Stephen Miller, recently made that logic painfully visible when she condemned falling teen birth rates and hormonal birth control, claiming that “our biological destiny is to have babies.”

So what you get is the Frankenstein’s monster of Make America Healthy Again and “Actually The Handmaid’s Tale sounds kind of efficient” politics, stitched together with linen, sage smoke, and a fraudulent reverence for “nature.”

That is what I want to talk about.

Not just why Judith’s history is wrong, though it is.

But why this particular kind of wrongness is doing political work.

No, women did not historically give birth “on their own”

Let’s start with the historical part, because this is the easiest section and also the one most likely to make me start throwing books.

Midwives are ancient. Not metaphorically. Literally. Midwifery is as old as childbearing itself. Midwives were often women who became known for attending the births of neighbors and family members. It also notes that obstetrics was for a very long time the province of female midwives before male physicians began pushing into the field in early modern Europe.

Read that again.

The history of childbirth is not “woman alone.” The history of childbirth is “women helping women.”

That help could be informal or formal, depending on period and place. In some communities, it was kin and neighbors. In others, it was recognized local midwives or traditional birth attendants with years of experiential knowledge. Contemporary global health literature still defines traditional birth attendants as people who assist mothers throughout pregnancy and childbirth, and notes that they often acquire their skills through experience and apprenticeship.

Apprenticeship.

Not “manifesting cervical dilation by the light of the moon.”
Not “trusting the body” while alone and untreated.
Not “just doing what women have always done.”

Apprenticeship. Experience. Community knowledge. Practical support.

And this is where I want to underline something I talked about in “A Brief History of Setting Women on Fire.” Midwives were not just random ladies hanging around waiting for someone’s water to break. They were often among the most experienced medical practitioners in a community. They learned through repetition, observation, apprenticeship, and embodied knowledge passed between women. They were trusted precisely because birth was dangerous enough that communities needed people who knew what they were doing. The historical model was not “woman alone.” The historical model was “women helping women survive an event that literally rearranges your organs and rips you open.”

Even modern public health debates about traditional birth attendants make this obvious. For decades, international maternal health policy argued over whether traditional attendants should be trained, integrated into health systems, partnered with clinics, or superseded by formally credentialed skilled attendants. That debate existed because these attendants were real, socially important figures in childbirth care, not because women have historically been expected to white-knuckle labor in total isolation.

And the companionship point matters too. WHO guidance on childbirth emphasizes not only safety but the value of emotional and practical support, including a companion of choice during labor and childbirth. That is modern clinical language describing something women have wanted for a very long time: not to be left alone during one of the most painful, dangerous, and vulnerable experiences of their lives.

Because again: humans are communal animals.

Historically, women did not avoid support because support was somehow “unnatural.” They sought support because birth was risky enough to require it.

That is the point.

Childbirth was not safer in the past. It was just less treatable.

One of the most poisonous little tricks in “wild pregnancy” rhetoric is the way it turns premodern birth into an aspirational aesthetic.

You know the type. A little sepia-toned fantasy of “ancient women” who were somehow both spiritually attuned and medically invincible, squatting gracefully in candlelight and exhaling babies into linen while patriarchy and hospital fluorescent lighting had yet to be invented.

This is nonsense.

The reason midwives and birth attendants existed is because childbirth has always been dangerous. Historically, maternal and infant mortality were horrifyingly common. That was not because women were weak or broken or “too modern.” It was because human childbirth is hard, human babies have giant heads, bodies go wrong in creative and appalling ways, and before modern medicine there were only so many tools available when things started to spiral.

So when someone says, “Women have been having children on their own for thousands of years,” what they are really doing is romanticizing an era when a lot more women and babies died.

That does not become feminist because you pair it with soft lighting and a basket of organic oranges.

It is still romanticizing preventable death.

And yes, before anyone writes me a 17-paragraph DM in beige font: modern medicine has absolutely failed women in specific and infuriating ways. Women’s pain is dismissed. Black women face scandalous maternal health disparities. Medical institutions can be paternalistic, racist, dismissive, and structurally cruel. Respectful, evidence-based maternity care is still not nearly universal. WHO has repeatedly stressed the importance of improving not only the clinical safety of childbirth but women’s experience of care and protection from disrespect and abuse.

But that critique does not lead to “therefore no prenatal care.”

It leads to “therefore better prenatal care.”

It leads to “therefore evidence-based care that treats women like people.”
It leads to “therefore midwives, doulas, nurses, and doctors working in systems that respect autonomy.”
It leads to “therefore stop treating laboring patients like malfunctioning incubators.”

What it does not lead to is anti-medical cosplay.

The actual history is feminist. The fantasy is individualist nonsense.

Here is what really gets under my skin about this whole thing: it steals from women’s history while erasing women’s labor.

The people romanticizing “unassisted” birth often imagine themselves as reclaiming an ancient female wisdom. But the actual historical female wisdom was not solitary. It was relational. It was learned. It was social. It was practical. It was often literally passed from one woman to another in the form of observation, memory, and repeated embodied experience.

The premodern lesson is not “women don’t need anyone.”

The premodern lesson is “women built systems of support for each other because the work of keeping each other alive mattered.”

That is such a different political vision.

One says: your highest truth is surrendering to nature, alone, without interference.
The other says: your community developed practices of care because nobody should be left alone in crisis.2

One is neoliberal individualism in a peasant blouse.
The other is collective survival.

And it is no accident that the first one is easier to monetize on Instagram.

This is where the crunchy and the authoritarian start kissing

Now for the politics, because this is where this gets chilling, not just infuriating to my sensibilities as a historian and student of gender studies.

The line from The Pitt is not just wrong about history. It also smuggles in a very specific ideology: that pregnancy is women’s most natural condition, that childbirth is simply what female bodies are “for,” and that support, intervention, or deliberate reproductive control are somehow deviations from a natural order.

That is where the crunchy “divine feminine” girlies and the right-wing pronatalist weirdos accidentally discover that they are, in fact, reading from the same cursed script.

The language changes.
The aesthetic changes.
The candle budget changes dramatically.

But the core message is the same:

Women are most authentic when they are reproductive.

That is the message behind “biological destiny.”
That is the message behind anti-contraception panic.
That is the message behind tradwife nostalgia.
That is the message behind a lot of “natural motherhood” rhetoric that quietly treats women’s lives before, after, or outside of childbearing as somehow less real.

When Katie Miller talks about birth control as poison and says women’s biological destiny is to have babies, she is saying the quiet part loud.

When a free-birth influencer says hospital intervention is unnatural and women have always done this “on their own,” she is saying a prettier version of the same thing.

Different packaging, same rot.

That is also why this current moment feels so cursed. In “A Brief History of Setting Women on Fire,” I argued that the panic over women’s healing knowledge was never just about superstition. It was about power: who gets to control women’s bodies, who gets to define legitimate care, and who gets cut out of authority when reproduction is on the line.

That same logic is still here, just wearing new outfits. Now it shows up either as soft-focus “divine feminine” nonsense or as right-wing pronatalism dressed up as concern for women’s health. But the throughline is the same: women’s bodies are not fully their own, pregnancy is treated as a natural obligation, and any attempt by women to define care on their own terms gets folded back into somebody else’s ideology.

Both ideologies flatten women into reproductive bodies.
Both treat pregnancy as a natural mandate rather than a choice.
Both romanticize women’s suffering.
Both distrust women’s autonomy when it takes the form of controlling fertility rather than surrendering to it.

That is why this stuff makes my skin crawl.

Because it pretends to be anti-establishment while reproducing some of the oldest, ugliest ideas in patriarchy.

Pregnancy is not women’s “natural state”

Let me say this as clearly as possible:

Pregnancy is a human capacity.
It is not a female destiny.
It is not a moral calling.
It is not a proof of womanhood.
It is not the default purpose of having a uterus.
It is not the highest expression of the “divine feminine,” whatever the hell that means other than “we found a way to rebrand gender essentialism in earth tones.”

Women are not reproductive infrastructure.
We are not national resources.
We are not demographic solutions.
We are not morally superior broodmares with playlists and glitter bomb gender reveals.

And the reason I’m so suspicious of rhetoric that makes pregnancy sound “natural” and therefore politically sacred is because history is full of people, mostly conservatives, often men, who hear “natural” and immediately start writing legislation.

If womanhood is naturally reproductive, then contraception is suspect.
If motherhood is destiny, then abortion becomes rebellion.
If birth is what women are “meant” for, then declining it starts to look deviant.
If suffering is sanctified, then safer options can be framed as corruption.
If women’s bodies are supposedly designed for pregnancy, then what they want matters a lot less than what those bodies can be made to do.

That is the road.

And I would like us not to walk down it barefoot while burning palo santo to cleanse the “bad vibes” of gestational diabetes and pre-eclampsia.

The real feminist takeaway

The feminist lesson here is not that women should trust institutions blindly.
It is not that hospitals or doctors are above critique. God knows saying that would be dishonest on a level that I cannot physically handle.
It is not that every intervention is good, or that every doctor listens, or that all medical systems are safe and fair.

The feminist lesson is that women deserve respectful, evidence-based, autonomy-centered care.
They deserve support.
They deserve companionship.
They deserve to be listened to.
They deserve not to be abandoned in labor for the sake of someone else’s aesthetic attachment to “nature.”
They deserve not to have their reproductive capacity turned into ideology by either crunchy mystics or right-wing natalists.

And historically, women knew that.

That is why they built birth cultures around support.
That is why midwives mattered.
That is why attendants existed.
That is why childbirth was communal.

If you listened to “A Brief History of Setting Women on Fire,” then this argument will sound familiar. The problem has never been women having knowledge about birth. The problem has been patriarchal systems deciding that women’s knowledge only counts when it can be subordinated, sanitized, regulated, or replaced. That does not mean the answer is to reject prenatal care and hope for the best. It means the answer is to fight for forms of care that are evidence-based, historically informed, and actually respectful of women’s autonomy.

Women did not survive childbirth because they “did it alone.”
Women survived childbirth because, as much as possible, they did not.

So no, Judith from The Pitt, and no to every influencer and pronatalist creep echoing her logic in a different accent.

Women have not always done this on their own.

They have done it with each other.

That is the history.

And that is exactly what makes the modern fantasy of solitary, “natural,” unsupported birth so revealing. It is not ancestral. It is not feminist. It is not radical. It is an ahistorical mash-up of wellness brainworms and biological determinism, wrapped in the language of empowerment and aimed squarely at women’s autonomy.

Which is to say: bad history, worse politics, and one more reminder that if something sounds like it was written jointly by Gwyneth Paltrow and a Heritage Foundation intern, you should probably back away slowly.

You know the one. A character behaves badly, becomes harder to like, lashes out, makes a mess of themselves, hurts people, or otherwise fails to remain a perfectly legible little morality puppet, and suddenly half the internet starts acting like they have been deputized by the Bureau of Narrative Disposal. Bad person. Toxic. Irredeemable. Misogynist. Delete him. Launch her into the sun. Case closed. Gold star for everyone involved, apparently.

And to be clear, I am not talking about viewers noticing harm. Characters can and do behave horribly and we need to recognize that. Sometimes they are cruel. Sometimes they are selfish. Sometimes they are deeply unfair to the people around them. That is not the issue. The issue is that more and more people seem to think identifying bad behavior is the same thing as interpreting it.

It is not. Not even close.

What has been so interesting to me about the discourse around The Pitt, especially around Dr. Robby and D. Santos, is that it reveals a deeper problem in how a lot of people watch television now. We do not just analyze characters anymore. We sort them. We classify them. We assign them a moral label as quickly as possible so we can escape the discomfort of having to sit with what the story is actually doing.

And The Pitt is a very uncomfortable show if you are committed to that kind of shortcut.1

Because The Pitt is not asking us to approve of its difficult characters. It is asking us to witness them. It is asking us to watch what pressure, trauma, grief, ego, shame, burnout, and institutional chaos do to people over time. It is asking us to confront something a lot of viewers seem increasingly allergic to: the fact that human beings are messy, contradictory, and sometimes genuinely ugly without ceasing to be human.

That is the part I think a lot of people do not want to look at. Not really.

Because if we are being honest, what many viewers actually want is not complexity. They want complexity with good branding. They want damage that is poetic. Trauma that is eloquent. Depression that is photogenic and self-aware and preferably packaged in one devastating monologue per season. They want pain that still knows how to perform itself in a way that makes everyone around it look thoughtful and compassionate.

What they do not want is what trauma and emotional collapse often actually look like.

Which is annoying. Repetitive. Petty. Mean. Defensive. Shut down. Irrational. Exhausting. Sometimes selfish. Sometimes humiliating. Sometimes ugly in ways that are not especially cinematic.

That is where The Pitt comes in and starts flipping tables.

Robby is a great example of the kind of character audiences claim to want right up until they get him. People love to say they want realism. They want stories about burnout, mental health, grief, and the strain of institutional pressure. But then a character actually starts unraveling in a way that makes him worse to work with, worse to listen to, less patient, less generous, less emotionally coherent, more likely to let the pressure cooker of trauma explode and make it everyone else’s problem, and suddenly people are acting like the show has committed a moral crime by no longer making him easy to love.

But that is the point.

Robby is not compelling because he is secretly innocent underneath it all. He is compelling because the show lets deterioration look like deterioration. It does not turn him into a tragic little ceramic figurine arranged attractively in the window of prestige television. It lets him get harsher. It lets him get harder. It lets him become more difficult to defend. It lets his damage spill outward in ways that affect other people. And that is precisely what makes him feel human.

And no, saying that does not mean his behavior is fine. This is where people lose the plot in a way that makes me want to hand out helmets.

Understanding a character is not excusing them. Accepting that a person’s pain often looks petty and cruel from the outside is not saying that we have to just let people lash out with no accountability.

Recognizing that someone is behaving badly because they are in pain does not magically make the bad behavior disappear. The people around them still get hurt. The damage is still real. Accountability still matters. But if all we do is slap a label on the character and call the case closed, we are not doing criticism. We are doing moral filing. We are shoving a complicated human process into a little drawer so we do not have to think about it anymore.

And that is not just intellectually lazy. It is emotionally cowardly.

Because one of the hardest things fiction asks us to confront is the truth that people do not become inhuman the second they become unpleasant. Trauma does not transform someone into a separate species called Bad People. It turns them into wounded people who may wound others. It can make them smaller, pettier, colder, more defensive, more controlling, less generous. It can make them ugly before it makes them wiser.

That is not a bug in the human condition. That is part of it.

And, honestly, this is part of why I find these conversations so frustrating on a personal level too. I have dealt with my own mental health struggles, and one of the least glamorous truths about struggling is that it does not always make you a softer, more emotionally articulate version of yourself. Sometimes it makes you withdrawn. Sometimes it makes you sharp. Sometimes it makes you hard to be around. Sometimes it makes you feel like your own mind has become a hostile workplace run by incompetent management and one very mean supervisor. There is nothing noble about it in the moment. There is certainly nothing aesthetically pleasing about it. Sometimes it’s crying on the floor of the shower at 2am and sometimes it’s yelling abuse at someone just trying to help you, when you don’t feel particularly worthy of help.

One of the things I have had to learn, and keep learning, is that healing is not the same thing as being pretty. Growth is not always graceful. Becoming better does not always begin with a breakthrough and a tasteful string quartet in the background. Sometimes it begins in embarrassment. In defensiveness. In saying the wrong thing. In realizing you have been unfair. In recognizing, with immense irritation, that pain has made you smaller than you want to be.

That recognition matters. And I think stories matter partly because they let us practice it.

That is also why Santos matters so much here.

Because The Pitt does not just give us one difficult man falling apart. It gives us a difficult woman who does not go out of her way to make herself easy to digest. Santos is sharp, ambitious, defensive, abrasive, often right, sometimes unfair, and in absolutely no mood to package herself as lovable for the convenience of the audience. Which means the reaction to her tells us a great deal about how viewers actually process difficult characters, especially female ones.

Because fandom does not just judge behavior. It judges who is allowed to behave badly without becoming narratively disposable.

Abrasive men are often read as complicated. Abrasive women are more likely to be read as unbearable. A difficult man gets analysis. A difficult woman gets a personality indictment. A man can be sharp-edged and still be treated as narratively substantial. A woman is often expected to earn complexity by first being likable enough to deserve it.

And if she does not? Suddenly everyone has a doctorate in why she is the worst.

Santos exposes that nonsense beautifully. She is not there to be easy. She is there to be human. Jaggedly, frustratingly, recognizably human. And the speed with which some viewers wanted to flatten her this season says a lot less about the writing than it does about the audience’s own tolerance for women who do not soften themselves into emotional customer service.

That is one of the reasons The Pitt works so well for me. It understands something I wish more viewers did: bad behavior is not the end of interpretation. It is often the beginning of it.

What interests me about Robby and Santos is not whether they behave badly. They do. What interests me is what that bad behavior reveals. About pressure. About gender. About institutional violence. About survival. About the stories people tell themselves when they are barely holding it together. About the way pain can become arrogance, control, harshness, withdrawal, or cruelty. About the very unsexy reality that damage does not always make people more profound. Sometimes it just makes them harder.

And if we cannot handle that in fiction, I am not convinced we are very serious about understanding it in life.

Because this is not just about television. It is about humanity. It is about whether we can tolerate the reality that people are capable of immense good and real harm, sometimes at once, sometimes in succession, sometimes in ways that make neat moral categories feel almost embarrassingly inadequate. It is about whether we can accept that ugliness is part of growth, part of trauma, part of healing, part of being alive among other flawed people.

We have become very attached to the fantasy that goodness is always aesthetically pleasing. It is not. Sometimes goodness is buried under grief, burnout, fear, pride, shame, or old wounds that have been left to fester too long. Sometimes healing starts in behavior that looks ugly before it looks noble. Sometimes the first step toward becoming better is not enlightenment. Sometimes it is the miserable realization that you have become someone you do not particularly enjoy meeting.

That is true in life. It should be true in fiction too.

And great stories have known this for a long time. BoJack Horseman refused to let damage become an excuse while also refusing to pretend damage was irrelevant. The Bear understands that trauma can be repetitive, controlling, joyless, and brutal to be around. Better Call Saul works because Jimmy McGill can never be reduced to either “good deep down” or “rotten all along” without flattening the whole tragic point. And Star Trek VI gives us one of the most jarring moments in Kirk’s history when grief hardens into prejudice and he spits out, “Let them die.”

The film is not asking us to shrug and move on because he is hurting. It is asking us to confront the horrifyingly human truth that hurting people are still capable of becoming unjust, hateful, and small.

Not because they are monsters.

Because they are people.

That is the point. That is always the point.

To recognize ugliness in a character is not to absolve them. It is to refuse the comforting lie that harm only belongs to people unlike us. And to me, that is what stories like The Pitt are doing at their best. They are not asking for moral laziness. They are asking for moral seriousness and nuance. They are asking us to hold multiple truths at once.

This person is causing harm. This person is in pain. This person is not reducible to one thing. Accountability matters. Compassion matters. Recognition matters. None of these truths cancel the others out.

But that kind of reading takes work. It is much easier to throw a character away. It is much easier to declare them irredeemable and call that insight. It is much easier to confuse disposal with accountability and certainty with intelligence.

I do not think that makes us better readers. I think it makes us more frightened ones.

Because if every difficult person must be launched into the sea the moment they become hard to love, then we are not really engaging with human complexity at all. We are trying to protect ourselves from it.2 We are asking stories to reassure us that goodness is tidy, that badness is obvious, and that everyone can be sorted cleanly into categories that leave our own consciences sparkling.

Real life, inconveniently, does not work that way.

Neither does trauma. Neither does healing. Neither does growth.

And thank God, neither do the best stories.

If The Pitt has anything to teach us, it is not that we should excuse human ugliness. It is that we should be honest enough to recognize it. In others. In ourselves. In the painful, unbeautiful work of becoming better. The point is not approval. The point is recognition. The point is that people under strain are rarely graceful, and that does not make them narratively worthless or humanly disposable.

It just makes them human.

Which, points for honesty and clever wording on that one.

Because that ad did not invent anything new. It just said the quiet part loud.

For all the breathless talk about disruption, optimization, and innovation, what a lot of AI marketing is actually selling is a very old fantasy: a woman who works constantly, asks for nothing, soothes everyone around her, and never develops the inconvenient sense that she is a human being with needs. The fantasy is not intelligence. The fantasy is obedience.

Patriarchy keeps trying to invent the perfect woman, and now it’s calling her AI.

The thing about “ideal womanhood” in the historical imagination is that it was never only about beauty, virtue, or femininity in the abstract. It was always, at heart, a labor arrangement. Women were praised as morally superior, naturally nurturing, and uniquely suited to care for others, but those so-called compliments worked like handcuffs with lace trim. Even the gentler forms of sexism, the ones dressed up as reverence, still defined women by service, patience, and sacrifice. As one of my podcast episode puts it, women have long been both revered and demeaned at the same time, praised for special virtues that just so happen to keep them in subordinate roles.

The Victorian version of this was especially efficient in its hypocrisy. Men belonged to the public world of competition, commerce, and action. Women were assigned the domestic sphere, where they were expected to function as spiritual guardians, decorative proof of male success, and managers of the emotional climate. They were framed as physically weak but morally superior, too pure for public struggle and therefore perfectly suited to the endless unpaid labor of making private life possible.

In other words, the ideal woman was never just a person. She was infrastructure.

Once the twentieth century really got going, that arrangement did not disappear. It just changed outfits. The domestic servant became the typist, the secretary, the receptionist, the office wife, the girl Friday, the pleasant voice on the switchboard, the human buffer between the boss and the chaos of ordinary life. Women entered wage labor in larger numbers, but often in roles coded as support rather than authority. They organized, remembered, soothed, scheduled, transcribed, hosted, absorbed tension, and kept the whole machine from flying apart, while men continued to collect most of the titles, pay, and public credit. Even when industrialization and reform expanded women’s presence beyond the home, those older assumptions about usefulness, deference, and gendered service remained stubbornly intact.

Then came the great mid-century backlash, one of patriarchy’s all-time favorite sequels. After women proved beyond any reasonable argument that they could do industrial labor, military service, clerical work, and professional work at scale, postwar culture tried to shove them back into domesticity with the emotional subtlety of a falling piano. By the late 1940s and 1950s, American culture was busy insisting that women were fulfilled by housework, marriage, motherhood, and staying pleasantly out of the way. Betty Friedan would later call this “the feminine mystique,” but before Friedan named it, a whole apparatus of experts, magazines, advertisers, and moral scolds had already built it.

The backlash was not subtle. Modern Woman: The Lost Sex, a 1947 bestseller, argued that modern women were psychologically disordered, that women’s independence was socially destructive, and that working outside the home threatened proper family order. The message was simple: if women wanted too much, if they pursued achievement, if they did not gracefully disappear into service, something had gone wrong in their heads.

That is what makes the AI employee fantasy feel so familiar. It is not a rupture. It is a digitized update of an old patriarchal wish list.

Look at what is being promised. No illness. No childcare conflicts. No sick leave. No boundaries. No union. No harassment complaint. No burnout. No need for rest. No rent. No body. The AI woman is not simply efficient. She is frictionless. And “frictionless,” in labor terms, means stripped of personhood.

That is the real appeal. Not intelligence, but compliance. Not creativity, but availability. Not emancipation from drudgery, but the fantasy of extracting labor without having to negotiate with a laboring human being.

And when that fantasy gets coded as feminine, the whole thing becomes even more revealing. Because now we are not just automating work. We are automating a very specific idea of womanhood: cheerful, low-maintenance, always on, emotionally smoothing, and exempt from the kinds of rights that make exploitation more difficult. Tech did not invent that woman. It inherited her.

This is also why so many digital assistants, service bots, and AI interfaces feel woman-shaped even when nobody explicitly says so. Their work is to help, guide, reassure, and absorb frustration. They are sold as competent but never threatening, efficient but never domineering, available but never demanding. They do not merely perform tasks. They perform a social role women have been forced into for generations: the role of making life easier for other people while asking very little in return.

A lot of AI branding is less “future of intelligence” than “what if the office wife had been uploaded to the cloud and legally prevented from resenting you.”

And here is where the article gets darker, because this would already be ugly if it stopped at sexist marketing. It does not.

The same culture that keeps fantasizing about compliant synthetic women also keeps failing to clearly name misogyny when actual women are harmed by it. A major global media analysis published this week found that only 1.3% of all global online stories in 2025 referred to misogynistic abuse, the lowest level since 2017, despite the scale of violence against women and girls and the rise of AI-facilitated abuse. The study analyzed 1.14 billion articles over nine years and found a stunning absence of gender-based analysis even in coverage of major abuse scandals.

So on one side of the culture, we get obsessive, detailed, investor-friendly fantasies about the ideal woman as infinite labor source. On the other, when real women are threatened, silenced, deepfaked, stalked, or abused, public language suddenly develops a tragic case of passive voice. Images “circulate.” Abuse “sparks controversy.” Women “face backlash.” Harm “goes viral.” Somehow the sentence structure always seems to misplace the men, the systems, and the ideology doing the damage.

This is not just a stylistic problem. It is a political one.

UNESCO’s latest global survey found that 75% of surveyed women journalists experienced online violence while doing their jobs in 2025, up from 73% in 2020. Forty-two percent linked online attacks to offline abuse, harassment, or assault, more than double the 2020 level. Twenty-four percent of all respondents reported AI-assisted online violence, and among women journalists and media workers specifically, 19% reported it. UNESCO’s framing is blunt: online violence is increasingly spilling into the real world, and coordinated digital abuse is now a major barrier to women’s participation in journalism, public debate, and democratic life.

There it is. The same technological culture that sells the fantasy of woman-as-service is helping intensify the punishment of women who are too visible, too vocal, too opinionated, too present in public. The perfect woman is the one who helps you organize your inbox without ever developing class consciousness. The unacceptable woman is the one with a byline, a political opinion, or a body that refuses to stay inside the story patriarchy assigned her.

That is the throughline.

Patriarchy does not hate women because it finds them useless. Quite the opposite. It is obsessed with women’s usefulness. It wants women as workers, carers, emotional regulators, assistants, mothers, symbols, interfaces, fantasies, and support systems. What it resists is women as human beings. Women with agency. Women as people whose labor is not naturally available for extraction. Women as people whose pain is political, not incidental. Women as people who get to say no.

So yes, that AI ad was grotesque. But what made it striking was not its originality. It was its honesty. It took a fantasy that is usually wrapped in softer language, productivity, innovation, convenience, personalization, and laid it out in public where everyone could see it. A woman who works all the time, costs less, asks for nothing, and does not need rights. Some people heard “future of work.” The rest of us heard the housewife industrial complex booting back up with better graphics.

The future, it turns out, is not always new. Sometimes it is just patriarchy with a startup valuation.

There is a very specific kind of feminist rage that blooms when the flat group chat becomes less a communication tool and more a hostage negotiation over dishes.

Not bills.

Not emergencies.

Not anything dramatic.

Just the same two women, over and over again, politely reminding four grown men that soaking their dirty dishes is not a replacement for actually washing them eventually and trash does not levitate itself out of the bin through the power of vibes alone.

And what really makes it sing is that it’s never framed as what it actually is. No one says, “Hey, sorry, we have quietly assigned you the role of household manager because you appear to possess functional eyeballs and a basic relationship to consequences.” That would at least be honest. Instead, it arrives disguised as social drift. A little silence here. A little avoidance there. A little collective amnesia every time the sink starts developing its own ecosystem.

Then suddenly the group chat is just the women in the flat posting increasingly passive aggressive messages trying to get the men to do their dishes and take out the trash once in a while.

At a certain point you have to marvel at the efficiency of patriarchy. It can recreate itself in basically any environment. Parliament. Corporations. Churches. A shared kitchen with a suspicious smell coming from somewhere near the hob. Give it enough time and it will quietly appoint women as managers of everyone else’s basic survival.

That’s the part that gets me. It is never just about the dishes.

It is about the administrative labor. The noticing. The monitoring. The remembering. The deciding when something has become disgusting enough that someone has to say something. The drafting of the message. The calculation of tone. Too nice, and it gets ignored. Too direct, and now you’re “coming across a bit harsh.” Too passive aggressive, and suddenly the real problem is not the mold colony in the sink but the fact that you used the phrase “once in a while” with detectable irritation.

Women are so often assigned this invisible role of domestic project manager that people stop recognizing it as labor at all. It becomes personality. Competence. Caring. “Just being more organized.” But what it actually means is that one person gets to live like an oblivious woodland creature while another has to become the unpaid minister of sanitation.

And I would like to formally decline the position.

The thing that makes this even more absurd is that I am categorically not the person who should be cast in the role of household manager. I have ADHD. I have depression. I regularly go through stretches where even my own basic chores and bodily hygiene feel like trying to push a boulder uphill with a pool noodle. There are absolutely weeks where I would rather bedrot all day and avoid the kitchen entirely than deal with producing one more dish I’ll have to wash or one more bag of trash I’ll have to take out. I am not some gleaming avatar of domestic competence. I am not the patron saint of routine. I am, in fact, exactly the kind of person you would think society would excuse from becoming the household reminder app.

And yet somehow, even here, the job still drifts toward the women.

That’s part of what makes this kind of labor so infuriating. It is not assigned based on who is best equipped to do it. It is not assigned based on who has the most energy, the most executive function, or the most stable relationship to daily tasks. It gets assigned based on expectation. Based on who is assumed to notice, who is assumed to care, and who is assumed to eventually crack first under the weight of living in a mess.

So it is not just that I do not want to mother four grown men who are all university students. It is that I am already spending a ridiculous amount of energy trying to negotiate with my own brain just to keep myself vaguely functional. The idea that I should also be drafted into managing someone else’s chores because I happened to be born female is honestly deranged.

I am childfree. I did not opt out of motherhood just to become a part-time mother to four adult men who can absolutely see the trash is full and the recycling bin where they put their frozen pizza boxes is overflowing. I refuse the promotion. I reject the apron. I will not be entering my “nagging but weirdly essential household authority figure” era because somebody else thinks rinsing a pan is an act of oppression.

There is also something so deeply unserious about the way men are often allowed to fail at domestic adulthood without it being read as a character flaw. If women live in chaos, it becomes evidence. She’s lazy. She’s messy. She’s irresponsible. She can’t manage a home. If men do it, it’s treated like weather. An unfortunate but natural phenomenon. Ah yes, the plates have stacked again. Mysterious. Unsolvable. No one could have predicted this.

But someone always does predict it. Someone always notices. Someone always absorbs the psychic cost of living in a space that feels one ignored mess away from becoming a cautionary tale. And somehow, in this flat, that someone keeps being the women.

Funny how that works.

This is the thing about gendered labor in domestic spaces: it doesn’t always arrive with a 1950s husband barking orders from an armchair. Sometimes it shows up as studied incompetence, selective blindness, and a group chat full of reminders sent by women who are tired of being drafted into the role of household organizer.

And yes, I know there are bigger problems in the world than who took out the trash.

But domestic labor has always been one of the main places inequality learns how to make itself feel normal. It thrives in repetition. In habits. In who notices and who gets not to. In who can comfortably wait to be told. In whose discomfort matters enough to force action. These tiny everyday arrangements are where people rehearse their expectations about care, responsibility, and who is supposed to keep life running.

That’s why the dishes matter.

Not because a dirty fork is some grand political symbol. But because somewhere along the line, women are still being assigned the role of manager, cleaner, reminder, and reluctant enforcer, while men get to cosplay incompetence until somebody else snaps.

So no, I am not the flat mother.

I am not the chore foreman.

I am not the passive aggressive fairy of sanitation, fluttering through the kitchen to remind everyone that bins are real and soap has uses and you should actually replace your sponge before it becomes sentient.

I live here. That is all.

Which means the revolutionary proposal I am putting forward is this: wash your dish. Take out your trash. Do not wait for a woman to narrate adulthood at you like it’s an audiobook you can ignore in the background.

Because if the group chat has become two women trying to drag this flat toward the bare minimum of hygiene, then what we do not have is a shared household.

What we have is the 1950s with Wi-Fi and I’m not okay with that.

In this episode of Bitchy History, I’m joined by Lindsay Denninger to talk about her book You Know You Love Me: How Gossip Girl Changed Pop Culture as We Know It, why female-centered pop culture is so often dismissed as unserious, and why that dismissal is complete nonsense. We get into the show’s feminism, its failures, its cultural afterlife, and the reason it still feels weirdly relevant in an era of curated identities, toxic men, and lives lived half for the camera.

Because popular media matters. “Trashy” media matters. The things girls and women are told not to take seriously usually turn out to be doing a whole lot of cultural work behind the scenes.

So yes, we’re talking about Gossip Girl. But we’re also talking about power, gender, performance, and the fact that this show walked so the modern internet could run headfirst into a wall.

XOXO

Buy: You Know You Love Me: How Gossip Girl Changed Pop Culture as We Know It

(Buy local if you can, but Amazon is fine if it’s all you have at home.)

Find Lindsay on social media!

https://www.instagram.com/lindsaydenninger

lindsaydenninger.substack.com

A group of women gathered, declared that “all men and women are created equal,” and kicked off the fight for the vote. Simple. Inspiring. Done.

Except… not quite.

In this episode, we take a closer look at what actually happened in 1848—and what didn’t get included in that story. Because while the Declaration of Sentiments used universal language, the reality of the movement was much more specific.

We’ll break down:

• how abolition and reform movements made Seneca Falls possible

• why the demand for the vote was controversial—even in the room

• how Frederick Douglass helped push suffrage forward

• and how Sojourner Truth exposed the limits of who counted as a “woman”

Along the way, we’ll bring in historians like Gerda Lerner, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Angela Davis to keep us grounded in what was actually happening—not the polished version we like to tell later.

RECOMMENDED READING

Primary Sources

• Declaration of Sentiments

• Report of the Woman’s Rights Convention

• Ain’t I a Woman?

Key Background

• Gerda Lerner — The Creation of Feminist Consciousness; The Meaning of Seneca Falls

• Angela Davis — Women, Race, & Class