After her recent memoir, Adult Braces, was received with widespread concern, her husband Aham has been on a rampage: arguing in Substack comments, posting angrily on his Instagram stories, and — most notably — sending a vicious email to journalist Saachi Koul, who wrote what I thought was a remarkably empathetic and even-keeled profile of West for Slate. His grievance? That Koul hadn’t devoted enough space to his career. In a profile of his wife.

The email read: “This was such a shitty thing to do, Scaachi. You intentionally skewed this story to fit your own bitter narrative. You wasted my time and all of our time to write an article that was going to be the same no matter what we said. You absolutely dehumanized me and intentionally diminished my personhood and career. Roya and I were on a shared project in Boston. However you worded it, I was performing four shows at the Paramount, and Roya is my producer. I am a person with a life and a great career and a complicated life, and you boiled me down to a cheater who was on a school project making a diorama or some shit because you are mad about your life. You barely wrote about the book, you just wrote rage bait articles specifically designed to direct hate toward me. You are a shitty fucking person, you’re a bitter, untalented mean girl, and you should be absolutely ashamed of yourself. You fucking suck.”

The passage that apparently destroyed his personhood? This: “West is solo in the cabin this week as she prepares for her 14-city book tour. Oluo and Amirsoleymani are away working in Boston on a shared project.”

It is not lost on me that Saachi Koul is also very publicly divorced and wrote a memoir about it — which makes his use of the word “bitter” feel less like a critique and more like a dog whistle.

Reading the reactions on social media, I noticed a consistent theme among women: secondhand embarrassment. But not really for Aham. For Lindy. Even Roxane Gay weighed in: “husbands just be out here doing embarrassing and unacceptable things sometimes.” Other women called it “humiliating.” In the viral Vogue piece “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?”, one woman put it plainly: “I was in a relationship for 12 years and never once posted him or talked about him online. We broke up recently, and I don’t think I will ever post a man. Even though I am a romantic, I still feel like men will embarrass you even 12 years in, so claiming them feels so lame.” Sabrina Carpenter is out here singing, “I beg you, don’t embarrass me, motherfucker.”

I’ve felt this in my own little corner of the internet. Whenever I’ve posted about something kind my partner has done, the responses are reliably the same: “Don’t let that man embarrass you.” Don’t let yourself believe you’re the exception. I understand the impulse, unfortunately.

Women are sharing their bad relationship and divorce stories more than ever. Books like This American Ex-Wife, Splinters, and Mad Wife — all chronicles of the less picturesque realities of being a wife and mother — shot immediately to the New York Times bestseller list. They clearly resonate with enormous numbers of women. But there's one particular response to these stories that gets under my skin: "Why did you marry such a loser in the first place?"

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As Taylor Swift once wrote, "the empathetic hunger descends." There is a smugness to it, a quiet superiority. I once knew a woman in an online mom group who would respond to every story of a husband's bad behavior with "Matthew would never." Matthew later abandoned her and their two children to marry a woman he had been sexting.

This is the new competition, apparently: My husband loves me more than your husband loves you, sorry babe! Should have picked better! as if thoughtful, helpful, selfless men who will love you like Hunter loves Maya are all around us, but you were too stupid to marry him and now you have to pick up a guy named Kyle’s socks for eternity and beg him to plan dates. Because picking a “bad,” or even mediocre man is a personal failing. If only women had higher standards (as we are simultaneously being told to lower our standards), we wouldn't be in this mess!

It feels like what no one wants to say is that “good men” who don’t resemble the men in these divorce memoirs in the slightest are not surrounding us. Women being unsatisfied and unhappy, more so than men, in heterosexual partnerships is the norm. And women who are “public” feminist women are in an impossible position where living up to your ideals means that another person has to share those ideals and live up to the role…and we cannot control other people. Are you only a real feminist if your husband is kind to you? If he takes on his share of the mental load, if he’s politically informed, if he’s an “involved dad” (a phrase we would never use to describe a mom)? And what if he’s not? Well, a “good feminist” would get divorced. In this excellent piece, “Beware Hetero-Exceptionalism” the author says, “I’d add: a happy marriage is not a solution to systemic problems in the same way that divorce in an unhappy marriage is not a solution to systemic problems.”

My hope for straight women is that they will not hide their partner’s shitty behavior because they are ashamed of it. The shame needs to switch sides. And maybe that's the most clarifying thing about watching Aham Oluo post his way through his wife's book tour: he's not embarrassing himself. According to the rules we've all quietly agreed to, he's embarrassing her. Until we decide that's no longer how it works, we're all just one viral email away from being Lindy West.

And to be clear, I have no good solution. The instinct to quietly claim your relationship, to protect yourself from the inevitable I told you so, makes complete sense to me. So does the longing to just love someone without it being a referendum on your judgment or your politics. I just wish we'd stop punishing women for the audacity of having tried.

Lindy is about ten years my senior, but we are both millennial women who grew up in a very specific and brutal anti-fat era of misogyny. Lindy was a pioneer of the body positivity movement. She wrote one piece I haven’t stopped thinking about: “My Wedding Was Perfect — and I Was Fat as Hell the Whole Time.” In it, she talks about the pain of feeling like she would never get married, because marriage was for thin women.

“I’ve dated men who relished me in private but refused to be seen with me on the street, or who told me, explicitly, that we had no serious future because they were afraid their friends would laugh at them…I just wanted to be a person, and, if I was lucky, to fall in love with a person — neither in spite of my body nor because of it. Once I finally did, I wanted to crystallize that, make it solid, and broadcast it where younger versions of myself could find it.”

In another piece about her wedding, she writes something similar:

“Thin girls were chosen, treasured, treated like a prize. Fat girls were settled for at best, and we settled, in turn, for whomever would take us. I never thought I’d be able to marry my hot best friend and have fun and feel wanted every day of my life.”

Looking back, her wedding reads as the ultimate middle finger to everyone who said she would never be loved by who she wanted to love her. After years of extreme online trolling as a very public fat feminist — not to mention the near-total absence of media representation showing fat women being desired and happy — being chosen by Aham and marrying him was her magnum opus. The confidence that radiates from those pieces is quickly punctured in this newest memoir, because what if the truth was that her partner didn’t want just her, and only her, every day of their life?

In Adult Braces, Lindy describes her partner telling her he wants to be non-monogamous. He tells her that he finds monogamy to be a form of “ownership,” and suggests that maybe she doesn’t understand because she is white. Lindy is crushed — and instead of engaging, she avoids it. She avoids it and tries her damnedest to be the best wife who has ever wifed. Maybe if she never complains, lowers her expectations, takes on more…maybe he won’t leave. Maybe he’ll only want her.

Lindy has referenced this dynamic several times since the book came out — that she is not “poly under duress” because Aham told her right away. He never lied about what he wanted; it was her who refused to believe him, her who avoided it and cried every time it was brought up. And because monogamy versus non-monogamy is such a fraught subject, Lindy knows that framing alone makes readers more likely to be on “her” side — and she doesn’t want that. She wants us to understand where Aham is coming from, too.

My response to that is this: good partners don’t let you self-abandon.

She portrays Aham as someone who is simply asking for what he wants — someone who doesn’t struggle with the codependency that plagues her so heavily. In the book she writes, “He wanted me, but he needed to stay true to himself. It wasn’t healthy to put my needs ahead of his own.” She said recently in an Instagram Live, “You are allowed to ask for what you want in a relationship” — and she is correct. But if you are in a relationship with someone, you should be attuned to them. If you notice your partner constantly twisting themselves into knots to please you while you would not piss on them if they were on fire, you are exploiting them. And if you don’t notice that — why aren’t you paying attention to the person you purport to love?

The book unfolds as Lindy road trips across the country in a van, ostensibly doing the work. She’s trying to undo the belief that her husband not wanting monogamy means he isn’t committed to her — trying to accept that love is not finite. I have read The Ethical Slut, Mating in Captivity, and Sex at Dawn, and have heard every explanation and reframing for non-monogamy under the sun: the idea that one person can’t meet all of your needs, that polyamory is a more evolved way of moving through the world, that it dismantles patriarchal structures. I think all of this can be true. I think non-monogamy is a genuinely preferred setup for a portion of the population. And it’s okay to simply not want it. It should not be something you are trying to talk yourself into. It is not necessarily preferable to divorce. Wanting monogamy does not make you codependent.

While Lindy does all of this work, Aham does not appear to have done any. He does what he wants, because he wants to, because he is “true to himself.” He doesn’t meet her halfway. And that, to me, is the crux of the whole issue — the imbalance that surfaces in this book again and again. She is terrified of losing him. He does not seem to share her fear.

I wonder if her inability to simply say, “This is not the relationship I want,” comes from the fear that doing so would prove her detractors right. That she is not lovable. That she will always be replaced by someone younger, hotter, thinner. That she’d have to eat the embarrassment of publicly declaring that everyone could go fuck themselves, the fat girl got the hot guy — only to return a few years later and say, “So, about that...”

What kills me is that despite the negative commentary surrounding this book, Lindy is clearly beloved. She is brilliant and funny and talented. She deserves to be loved fully for who she is. And I wish she would notice that she is always the one compromising, always the one changing. Instead, she seems most focused on how her marriage is perceived rather than how it actually feels. Despite an outpouring from fans saying, “We love you, but we are concerned you are abandoning yourself,” she frames her critics as people who simply don’t believe she can be truly loved by Aham — because of her weight, or for bigoted reasons that seem to shift by the day.

Lindy is loyal to her fans and loyal to her partner, and she is struggling with those two loyalties failing to coalesce. I just wish she were loyal to herself first.

She devotes nearly 300 pages to how difficult all of this has been, and then wraps everything up in a measly seven pages to tell us she’s happy. Maybe she is. I hope she is. But happiness that costs this much — that requires this relentless renegotiation of your own needs, this constant shrinking in the name of keeping the peace — isn’t really the kind of happiness she spent her whole career fighting for. Lindy West built a following by telling fat women they didn’t have to earn their place in the world. She argued, brilliantly, that they were allowed to take up space. It’s painful to watch her apply that generosity so freely to everyone in her life except herself.

She is the one who has to live with her relationship decisions, not us. I just hope that one day, the version of her she’s fighting hardest to protect is her own.

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Most fashion advice that I had been subjected to was all about how to look skinny in everything. Slim your waist. Make your legs look slim. Wear black to look slim. I was always chasing an hourglass figure, and if I wasn’t at my thinnest, then I just wanted to wear as loose of clothing as possible to hide that fact. I have also never been one of those people that just knew how to dress themselves, even though I have always loved clothes and fashion. I didn't understand why my friend Kaitlin could wear birkenstocks and flannels and look like a cute feminine granola girl, while I just looked like a lesbian. Or why my best friend Sam looked amazing in jumpsuits, and even though we wore the same size, I looked like a giant toddler.

Enter: The Kibbe System

I first heard of Kibbe (pronounced “kibbie”) through TikTok when a woman named Ellie-Jean Royden was going through the different Kibbe body types and what they meant. Her first explanation intrigued me because she used Gossip Girl characters and the way they styled their prep school uniforms to explain how it harmonized with the different body types. Blake Lively’s character, Serena, always had her button down shirt untucked, her tie as loose as possible, her hair untamed. Blake is what kibbe would call a “flamboyant natural,”1 which means many things, but one of them is that she had width in her shoulders and is frame dominant. Clothing “hangs” on her shoulders. This is why when her shirt is unbuttoned and her tie is loose, she looks chic and put together. It looks purposeful instead of sloppy.

Leighton Meester’s character, Blair, on the other hand always looks perfectly buttoned up. Her uniform is tailored to fit her perfectly. She doesn’t have a hair out of place, it’s sleek and shiny. Blair is what David Kibbe would call a “soft classic,” soft classics look their best in clean, minimal lines and clothing that has balanced shape. Because they don’t have that width in their frame, oversized clothing swallows them and looks “frumpy” instead of effortless. Blair’s prep school uniform is worn completely differently, and it looks correct on her.

David Kibbe is a stylist from Manhattan who came up with his body typing system in the 1980s, culminating in his book Metamorphosis, which is now out of print and you can purchase for a few hundred dollars on Amazon or eBay. He grouped body types into five “families”: dramatics, naturals, classics, gamines, and romantics, and then there are subtypes within each of them.

There are online quizzes you can take to find your image identity, but they are pretty unreliable, and its a widely held belief among the Kibbe communities that its on average a six month journey to land on your type. I spent months going down the Kibbe rabbit hole, taking various quizzes, and noticing what outfits felt like they worked for me, and finally landed on “soft natural” for myself. And once I started learning about my type, it explained a lot. Soft naturals also have width in their frame, which has nothing to do with weight, but it means that no matter how thin you are you won’t ever look narrow. Although not verified by David Kibbe himself, Hilary Duff is thought to be a soft natural, which made my Lizzie McGuire fangirl heart happy.

Once I started to understand my image identity, dressing myself became significantly easier. My frame and bone structure was not something that I was going to be able to change (although there are women who get their clavicles shortened to lessen the appearance of broad shoulders), and having a wider frame was not a bad thing. In fact, I was in good company (Scarlett Johansson and Jennifer Lopez are also soft naturals), all I needed to do was find styles that harmonized with my natural features. Restrictive material, including skin tight dresses or jeans, neither looked nor felt right - but a halter top or one shoulder dress felt and looked great on me. Floor length dresses made me look short and stumpy, but if I had a maxi dress with a slit up the leg, it became sexy and elegant.

Kibbe uses a lot of terms that can be triggering to those of us who came of age in a culture that told us Jessica Simpson at a size 6 was the worst case scenario, but I’ve come to appreciate his terminology as a neutral descriptor. When he talks about “width,” that has nothing to do with whatever weight you happen to be at the time. I could be 95 lbs and I would still have width. When he talks about being “fleshy” or “soft” he is not talking about weight, he is observing how flesh sits on our frame differently depending on our body composition. There are folks who are angular and taut (leaning towards the “yang” end of the Kibbe spectrum) and there are folks who have primarily round and soft features (leaning towards the “yin” end of the kibbe spectrum). Pure romantics, known for double curve and “softness,” include Marilyn Monroe and Beyoncé. There is no “bad” body type, no “bad” image identity, and your bone structure and core features don’t change based on your weight.

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There are valid criticisms of the Kibbe system, mostly that his original typing was majority thin white women, it was mostly old Hollywood celebrities and so it originally included very few women of color or plus sized women. I think it is much like anything else, there are people who have no interest in constant self-categorization (could never be me unfortunately), but I have found it to be an incredibly helpful tool as someone who has a very hard time conceptualizing myself and always felt about ten steps behind when it came to fashion, hair, and makeup. Kibbe gave me the freedom to stop chasing body types that have a rib cage that will never be mine, and to embrace my “wide and blunt” bone structure, no matter the number on the scale.

I was raised in the Bible Belt in the 1990s on a steady diet of James Dobson, the moral majority, and "I Kissed Dating Goodbye." My highest calling was to get married, preferably young, have babies and raise them to love Jesus (and America, too). I was immersed in the more "relevant" part of the evangelical church, so women could wear pants and go to college, but our aim as a gender was very different. I was not the main character, I was in search of a man to be the main character so I could take my role as supporting actor.

This actually all sounded great to me at the time, the families around me seemed happy and thriving, men were encouraged to be "strong leaders" and women were encouraged to have "quiet and gentle spirits" (this part of it was predictably challenging for me). Going to college was important because I was a millennial in a relatively privileged family, but the main focus was to meet a husband.

In college, I studied psychology and sociology and learned about feminist theory for the first time. I had previously fallen into the camp that feminism was unnecessary, women had plenty of rights now, and that traditional gender roles would make most people happiest. But the more I learned about the ways women had been oppressed throughout history, the ways our bodies had been depicted in media and advertising, how we subtly accuse women of being complicit in sexual violence done to them, the sheer amount of sexual violence that exists, and the more I examined my life and upbringing, my worldview began to slowly unravel.

My understanding of systems of oppression and feminism being intersectional was extremely rudimentary. I had just discovered that women could work outside the home or not get married and have children and that choice was valid. They weren't worse people than me or making bad choices for their lives, they were just women who made different choices. This concept alone was groundbreaking to me. Gender roles were stupid and assigned arbitrarily, men and women weren't all that different, women can do anything men can do and vice versa! I was a choice feminist, even though I didn't know that term yet. I supported women's rights and wrongs, and if women wanted to live their lives in service to the patriarchy, feminism gave them the choice to do that without judgement or criticism.

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So, what is choice feminism? At its core, it's a form of feminism that prioritizes individual freedom and choice and validates any choice that a woman makes of her own free will. But it assumes that we are able to make those choices outside of the influence of patriarchy, which is virtually impossible. It's the air we breathe and the water we swim in. Similar to "there is no ethical consumption under capitalism" there is only an illusion of choice under patriarchy, and that illusion is truly only afforded to women at the top. It allows women with privilege (cis, white, thin, wealthy) to participate in patriarchal norms that have historically harmed women without any accountability, because they are women and any life they choose is the feminist one.

For example, a common double-bind that white women who become mothers find themselves in, “Should I go back to work or should I stay home with my children?” Stay at home mothers put themselves in financially vulnerable positions and can be exploited, working mothers face penalties in the workforce and judgment about their commitment to their children and their work. But women of color are never given this choice or asked this question. Women of color have always worked, and a good portion of that work has been the care of white children and underpaid domestic labor. The “choice” of how to best express your womanhood is a choice that is really only afforded to white women. We don’t seem to particularly care as a society if Black mothers or Hispanic mothers are able to be home with their children, or if they want to enter the workforce because it’s “empowering.” This doesn’t invalidate the difficulties that white mothers face in the workforce or the imbalances of mental load and domestic labor in the home, but intersectionality requires that we acknowledge that we are insulated from struggles that women of color face. Another example is Sabrina Carpenter’s new album cover, we can’t decide if she’s being inappropriate, catering to the male gaze, or if it’s empowering…but Black female artists don’t get those options. White women can be sexual and call it empowering, Black women cannot. That is privilege. And of course, all the while, men can just exist, and we would find it ridiculous to hear a man talk about his sexuality being “empowering.” Even though it’s not fair that women’s choices are so scrutinized, having the choices at all is still a privilege.

Also, none of us are an island. My choices affect others and their choices affect me. All choices are not created equal. Women face social consequences for their choices that men do not. No one asks men who are getting married if they plan on changing their last name, nor would they assume they were bad spouses if they didn't. Taking your husband’s last name in our current structure is not an inherently feminist choice just because a woman decides it’s right for her. And also, taking your husband's name, particularly when you have children, can make it easier to move through the world. Both can be true. Being a married woman gives you status, social and financial. And marriage is an inherently patriarchal structure that has benefited men at the expense of women. Getting married or not are not two options that are viewed the same or have the same consequences. Marriage is patriarchal and bad for women in a broad sense, even if your individual marriage is good. Indulging in beauty standards or not are not two equally valid options, you are treated differently depending on which you choose. Mass use of Botox will change the standards for how women are expected to appear at a certain age. Widespread plastic surgery after giving birth will alter how we expect the post partum body to appear. In general, our social traditions and pressures are as a whole more dangerous for women than they are for men. None of these statements are even meant as judgements, but neutral facts.

”So just because the patriarchy likes it, I can’t do it?” - no, not exactly.

White women can get defensive when this is brought to their attention. I was defensive about this. We will say that we can't be perpetuating the patriarchy because we are part of the oppressed class! We want to enjoy our liberation! And yes, we do experience marginalization because of our gender, but when it comes to our oppression, we are at the top of the food chain. Especially if we are cis, straight, thin, nondisabled. The point is that our choices have consequences, and we are insulated from many of them because of our position. Choice feminism is a very comfortable place to be for us, we can align with exactly how the world expects women to be and slap a feminist label on it without critically examining it or thinking about how our collective societal attitudes would perceive this if we weren’t in our position of privilege. And then we can tell others that we are immune from judgement because it was our choice. It’s hyper individualist, convenient, and lazy.

Folks seem to get really frustrated with this because they don’t understand what they are supposed to do about all of this. They will ask if their individual choice of getting married, being a stay at home mom, or expressing their sexuality in a way that caters to the male gaze is specifically holding up the patriarchy. This is like asking if you shopping at Amazon is specifically holding up capitalism. This is much bigger and more complex than any individual woman making decisions that are right for her, and collectively, those decisions do have an impact. Nobody is asking you to not marry a man you love or to stop shaving your legs, but they are asking you to sit in the discomfort of acknowledging that when we do these things, we are perpetuating patriarchal ideals. Making you feel like a “bad feminist” is not the point. Understanding that feminism is not an individual pursuit, but a social movement intended to liberate all women, not just elite women, is the point. The point is an awareness that when you hold the most privilege in a marginalized group, you do having to contend with your own privilege even if you experience oppression because of an immutable characteristic.

Most folks have not read feminist theory and their understanding of feminism comes from the mainstream and pop culture. Which is totally fine and pretty normal. But if you are entering this conversation blind as a straight white woman, your aim should be to listen to women who hold less privilege than you, be curious and thoughtful, and to educate yourself1 on these topics instead of centering yourself and your personal, individual experience. That is arrogance. Not a single one of us has “arrived.” I did not realize I was a choice feminist until it was pointed out to me, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to understand and for it to sink in. It probably has not fully sunk in.

Critiquing choice feminism is not pointing fingers at women who take on traditional roles. It is critiquing a movement that does not take into account that our decisions have ramifications beyond us. It’s acknowledgement that having options is a privilege, and a privilege that we should be looking to afford to more women. It’s understanding that our agency can be limited and our choices being framed as “equal” is an intentional deception.

Choice feminism is an almost unavoidable step in the journey if you come from a world where you were given one specific script for how to be a woman, regardless of what that script was.

But it’s really only the first layer. And we will do a disservice to everyone if we stop there.

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Eugenics, the practice of attempting to improve the genetic quality of a population, was once popular in both Europe and the United States. That changed, of course, when Hitler used it to justify breeding an Aryan race, and more people came to recognize that government-forced sterilization is, to put it mildly, a horrifying idea.
But prior to World War II, the United States was also forcibly sterilizing disabled people. This isn’t a practice any mainstream American would defend today, yet there remains an uncomfortable gray area when it comes to discussing disabilities that severely limit a person’s quality of life.
Most of us would agree, without hesitation, that the government deciding who gets to reproduce based on a set of so-called “desirable” traits is terrifying and fascist. But when parents make deeply personal choices about reproduction in the face of significant disability—does that make them eugenicists too?
Recently, a couple on TikTok with osteogenesis imperfecta, also known as brittle bone disease, came under fire for choosing to have a baby. Their child, who was born with the same condition, has been in the NICU for six months. Critics called the couple selfish and short-sighted. Others defended them, arguing that the ability to have children shouldn’t be reserved only for non-disabled people.
My favorite comment was: “Saying they shouldn’t have a baby is implying that people with their condition shouldn’t exist.” Some videos with 100k+ likes went so far as to claim that simply questioning the ethics of their decision was an act of eugenics.
One piece of context that often seemed to get lost in the discussion is that the parents in question require full-time caregiving themselves, and it’s still unclear how they would be able to care for a child. That introduces several layers to the conversation: Can disabled parents who know they may pass on a serious condition ethically decide that, while life with a disability is difficult, they are still grateful to be alive and are comfortable with the possibility of passing that condition on? And separately: Should people—disabled or not—who are unable to care for a child on their own have children? The first question feels very nuanced, although I would argue that choosing to live a full and happy life even though you were dealt cards that inherently make your life more challenging is different than intentionally passing those challenges on to a child. The degree to which you feel like your own quality of life has been compromised is deeply personal, which is why you see folks who are depressed or have ADHD say its why they won’t have children, even though there are folks all around us with those conditions raising children. As for the second question: personally, I believe that if someone—regardless of ability—is not able to care for a child, they probably shouldn’t have one. But when I’ve said this publicly, it has sparked strong reactions. On platforms like TikTok, commenters have argued: “Everyone needs support in parenting; none of us can do it alone,” or, when someone voiced concern about bringing a child into the world to suffer, others shot back: “We’re all suffering. If you were ideologically consistent, you’d be an anti-natalist.”
It reminded me so much of the comments I’ve received about my daughter, who is seven years old and nonspeaking, comments that often feel like a form of emotional gaslighting. I’ve had people ask if I’m even sure she wants to talk, suggesting that maybe she prefers to be nonverbal. Others have said things like, “If you didn’t want a disabled child, you shouldn’t have had a child at all.” Why? Because holding multiple truths makes people uncomfortable. You love your children and that’s why the disability is hard—because it’s hard on them! It’s like telling someone your child has a life-limiting condition and them replying, “all of our lives have limits!” It starts to sound like the “all lives matter” of the disability movement, the outright denial that there are folks who experience disability in a much less palatable way.
When your child’s disability severely impacts their quality of life, the natural instinct is not to reject them, but to wish they didn’t have to suffer. I want the world to be more inclusive for her—but no amount of inclusion will fix some of the things she wrestles with. A dear friend of mine, whose daughter has lissencephaly—a rare, life-limiting neurological condition in which the brain lacks the folds that allow for typical development—spoke bravely about why she and her husband are choosing IVF to have another baby:

I especially appreciated her comment that IVF is not parents choosing between brown and blue eyes, but parents making difficult decisions that come from the devastation of knowing the suffering certain disabilities can bring. While there is a small subset of people who want "designer babies" , wanting your child to be less disabled isn’t treating your child like an accessory. It’s not about aesthetics or perfection. It’s about the reality that parenting a profoundly disabled child is a different and often overwhelming experience—especially when your child may never reach the milestone of independence. For those of us who have experienced “typical” parenthood alongside disability parenting, there are parts of it that are almost incomparable. Especially for folks with medically complex children, many of whom have in-home nursing care, or the parents have to become proficient in skills to keep their child alive that the average parent never considers.
The problem with using the term eugenics to describe both the systematic murder of disabled children in Nazi Germany and parents who use embryo selection to avoid fatal conditions is that it draws a false moral equivalence between genocide and grieving parents trying to prevent future suffering. It flattens complex ethical terrain, shuts down nuance, and dismisses the lived realities of families making deeply personal, often heartbreaking choices. It also dehumanizes those parents by casting them as ideologues rather than individuals wrestling with love, loss, and fear.
So we’re left with a question: is eugenics a moral spectrum, with some actions more ethically defensible than others, or do we need an entirely different vocabulary to describe these vastly different intentions and outcomes?
What’s clear to me is that these issues aren’t black and white, and tribalism that ignores realities on both sides of this argument will ultimately undermine advocacy and the disability community as a whole. My daughter deserves to exist and have the best life I am able to give her. I wish life was easier for her. These two things are not in opposition.

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So now we have a generation of people who have been married for decades to someone they may not even like—and they need to cope. The other day I saw that Scary Mommy had made an instagram post about “normal marital hatred,” a term coined by Terry Real, who is nationally recognized as one of the best couple’s counselors in America. Real says, “There are going to be moments when you look at your partner, and at that moment, there is a part of you that just hates their guts, you're trapped with this horrible human being. You hate the flaws that you did not see for so long, and it’s the only thing you can see right now.” Normal marital hatred is the moment when you take the rose colored glasses off and you see your partner as they really are, not the idealized version of them.
But my question is….why would we normalize this as okay? I don’t want to ever think to myself, “I’m trapped with this horrible human being” about my partner. Is this common? Almost certainly. Real says whenever he speaks about this phenomenon at marriage conferences, no one ever comes to him backstage confused about what he meant. People nod along and resonate with feeling hatred for their spouse. And I know that he says “moments,” and we all have bad moments, but for a lot of folks this seems to come up far more regularly than they would like. Matt Chandler, pastor of a massive megachurch in Dallas (where I briefly attended in my early 20s) would often talk about how the first seven years of his marriage were dark and awful and that he would say cruel things to his wife, intending to hurt her. He goes on to say, “In fact, the person you’re married to will likely be responsible for your deepest hurts.” Now, he and his wife have apparently worked things out and are happy now(?), but this is a terrible blueprint to be touted as typical. If someone has been in a relationship for nearly a decade with someone who regularly hurts them, the message that if they simply endure for long enough their partner will change is destructive. In the culture of my people (the evangelicals), this was a common story, and it usually centered around the man finally discovering that he was immature and selfish. Which, to be fair, is better than a lot of the men in that culture who choose to never discover it, but why should women be expected to simply endure years of emotional neglect and to give disproportionate grace with little accountability?
Obviously, the person you have chosen to spend the majority of your time with for the rest of your life is going to frustrate you, annoy you, upset you, say the wrong thing, and miss the mark. But that should not be the theme. It is both true that a romantic partner cannot be your sole source of happiness and that the person you have chosen to spend your life with should be one of your consistent sources of happiness. The theme should be that they pull the car in the driveway and you feel joy instead of dread. Now, lest people say that I am saying that someone else is responsible for your happiness, we are of course all responsible for ourselves. But your spouse’s presence in your life should be a consistent source of joy, you should like being with them, and marriage should feel good far more often than it feels bad. I don’t want to give my life to someone who will be responsible for my greatest hurts, I want to be with someone who I can trust will be there for me during life’s greatest hurts. I don’t want to have to endure a bad relationship, or for a partner to feel like they are constantly enduring being with me. I want my relationship to help me endure life’s brutality.
Don’t get me wrong, marriage will not make an unhappy person happy, but if the person you chose doesn’t add real joy, it can make a previously happy person miserable. And none of us need it for survival anymore. Perhaps we should only be doing it if we set our expectations higher than “normal marital hatred.”

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She calls it the “Good Husband Conundrum,” but why are we calling it that? For a man to be labeled a “good guy” that a woman should feel lucky to be married to, he typically just needs to have a job, not abuse her, not cheat, and maybe do a few bedtimes a week. And if women have that, they’re told to be grateful. There’s constant talk on social media, and in real-life conversations, about “reframing” frustrations with your husband. I constantly see moms talking about how their husband dropped the ball (again!) and how they were tempted to get frustrated, but instead chose to focus on how lucky they are to be married to a “good guy” and have this beautiful life. After all, no one’s perfect!

The New York Times ran an opinion piece, At 66, He's Finally The Husband of My Dreams and the writer chronicles decades of managing the full load of motherhood and working full time in New York City, and even in this progressive environment, her husband is essentially useless. She says she was on the edge of a nervous breakdown trying to manage it all. In his 60s, he apparently learns to cook and pick up some slack around the house, and she now “hates him less.” She finishes the essay with the question, “Why did we have to wait this long?” And her conclusion is….”it’s all too much for two people, and we were so lucky to have what we had, tumult and all.”

They are, in my humble opinion, gaslighting themselves.

I don't think that their husbands are bad people, but if they are not active contributors to the daily lives of their families, they are not good husbands or good dads. Are they “bad husbands” or “bad dads” in an awful, malicious way? Probably not. But that does not make them good!

The role that women play in this dynamic is that we keep softening our language. We try to approach it with empathy. We lead with a compliment. But it's producing confusion and frustration in men, because all they hear is, “I’m a good dad and a good husband” -and they don’t understand why that isn’t enough. It’s a mixed message. When in reality, they are not being good partners or parents! But that’s a difficult thing to say to someone you love.

Women will also, rightly, observe that men are not socialized to notice these things. That men don't have these expectations placed on them. And they are correct, our society socializes women to pay close attention to the people around them, to anticipate needs, and to put others first. This is also part of maturing and being an adult.

The socialization piece matters, especially as we raise the next generation. It might help women take it less personally when their husband forgets their birthday (again), but ultimately, it’s an explanation, not an excuse. And in this day and age, men do not have an excuse for not knowing that this is a major issue. If they want to show up in their relationships as good partners, they need to care. And they need to act.

Women want to feel like their spouse has their back. They want their spouse to use their thinking cap when they walk into a room and just….do something, anything, to be helpful. To move things along toward dinner or bedtime or school drop off. They want to know that if they aren’t able to get to the dishes, that they will get done in time for the toddler to have a clean sippy cup for preschool. They don't want to be the sole project manager for their lives, they want a partner who is equally invested in building a shared life.

It’s not easy to be a good partner, but it is simple. And if it doesn’t feel simple, men can ask these questions:

“I was going to start dishes, but is there something that would be more helpful in this moment?”

“I was thinking for our anniversary we could do a quick trip up to the mountains, but would you prefer a different location? Or do you just want me to make the decisions and book it?”

“Is there anything you need from me that you're not getting?”

Women need to stop saying that they are married to “amazing men,” because it just reinforces that the bare minimum is amazing. The “conundrum” is that a lot of women are married to men who are subpar husbands and dads. A partnership requires attentiveness, effort, curiosity, humility, and the desire to learn what love looks like to your partner. Until we demand more, we will continue to raise generations who believe that female exhaustion and burnout is the norm, and men who are satisfied with never raising the bar.

Our conversation gravitated towards Taylor Swift, a recurring topic for me. I launched into an impassioned discourse about how she has tapped into something in a huge swath of women. There is a significant cohort of us who feel like she is putting words to our interior experience, giving us language for feelings that we know exist but can’t quite articulate. We then moved to the topic of masculinity, another favorite discussion, and how men in our culture often miss out on the connectedness that comes far more easily in female friendships. In between oat milk latte sips, I asked him, “Do men have an equivalent to Taylor Swift?"

He paused thoughtfully. He is a new Swiftie. A musician and songwriter by trade, but a generation ahead, and was certainly not "feeling 22" in 2012 like the millennials who felt like she was writing the soundtrack to our adolescent lives. But, like so many, he got swept up in the Swiftdom in the last few years and heard "All too Well" and said it was "pure poetry." Despite my decade-long fandom, I still get some kind of validation when folks who aren't millennial white women confirm she's talented (but that's a topic for a different essay).

"I don't think we do. Not in the way you're talking about. You should tweet that, it's an insightful question."

Famous last words.

Late that night in my hotel room, I fired it off, thinking that maybe a few hundred people who regularly interact with what I write would see it and comment. I was perhaps overconfident that I would be understood. Instead, I became a new meme.

If I had thought it would have this level of reach, I certainly would have written it with less…absolute language, but alas. The question I was really asking was: Who is a male music artist who has a similar reach and impact as Taylor, who has a majority male fan base, and who cultivates connection between men? Which current artist could fill a stadium with mostly men and chart on the top 10? Where do men gather and talk or sing about the unique pain that comes from being raised male in a patriarchal society? How the privilege most certainly exists, but it comes at a cost? The things they feel that are deemed too shameful to say out loud? If male pop artists sing primarily about their inner lives and love and loss, they often still have a majority female fan base (think Ed Sheeran).

Some people did attempt to answer the question and a lot of folks said Dylan, Springsteen, and Johnny Cash. Which are all good answers in terms of stardom, impact, and drawing lots of male listeners. But with Johnny Cash dead and Dylan and Springsteen in their final chapters, who is the millennial or Gen Z Springsteen?

Twitter did what it does best: misunderstand people. But something I noticed was how embarrassed I felt for saying I loved Taylor. It was embarrassing to say that she was giving me language to process emotions that made me feel "crazy" and had only ever been expressed in my journals. Even though "22" is a fun bop, I was indeed feeling "happy, free, confused, and lonely at the same time" at age 22…and it was both miserable and magical! And it was because Taylor was never afraid to embrace "cringe," but her words were so earnest.

When Taylor sings, "I hosted parties and starved my body like I'd be saved by a perfect kiss" - she is tapping into a collective consciousness of the women raised to be terrified of weighing more than 100 lbs on our wedding day, who felt the heaviness of the status symbol of being able to fit into 00 low rise jeans, and who had been conditioned to believe (and for some of us, hope) that male validation would ultimately rescue us. It was rare, we were there.

When Taylor pleads, "give me back my girlhood, it was mine first" too many of us remember when someone who was a "promising grown man" stripped us of our innocence. We were children when we were catcalled or had our bras snapped and were told that "boys will be boys," or told that we bore responsibility for the behavior of men who might view our exposed adolescent shoulders in spaghetti straps. We were children when we first felt the weight of the responsibility of existing in the female body. The wound won’t close. It was not rare, we were there.

When Taylor admits to the humiliating things that so many of us have done or thought. Canceling plans just in case he’d call. Thinking about jumping off of very tall somethings, just to see if he’d come running. Eyeing their location that they forgot to turn off. Crying at the gym about someone who avoids you like the plague. Keeping someone like an oath who kept you like a secret. When you would have died for the sins of someone who your friends always hated and who wouldn’t return your texts. Making someone your “temple, mural, and sky” who will barely let you be a footnote in their life story. When you just don’t understand how someone doesn't miss you when that song by The Starting Line comes on.

Taylor makes me love being a woman in a culture that routinely deems feminine things as unserious, shallow, and mock-worthy. She also poignantly describes the shame and confusion and self-betrayal that many of us have uniquely experienced because of our womanhood. She gives voice to the insecurities and fears we often bury, but when she says them, we realize how many of us were feeling them. We were never alone.

She has an unreleased and unrecorded song called "your anything" that somehow made it onto my ipod in 2005 and even though I could barely hear the crappy audio from the live acoustic performance, i still remember the chorus she wrote in probably ninth grade:

I could be your favorite blue jeans
with the holes in the knees
in the bottom of the top drawer
I could be your little beauty queen
just a little outta reach
or the girl living next door
I’ll be your angel giving up her wings
if that’s what you need
I’d give everything to be your anything

That song in my opinion is what came before “mirrorball,’ which she wrote almost 20 years later:

I want you to know
I'm a mirrorball
I can change everything about me to fit in
You are not like the regulars
The masquerade revelers
Drunk as they watch my shattered edges glisten

"I became the person everyone wanted me to be" - she shares about the endless self-curation to make herself palatable, how she would abandon herself and reinvent herself into the version of her that someone else wanted. A “pathological people pleaser.” We remember the obvious, cringey ways that we did it as a fourteen year old, but for me personally it's a lifelong struggle to have a strong sense of self that I refuse to give up in order to get other people to like me.

The thing about Taylor is that she doesn't just write about her inner life, she evokes something in us that makes us want to talk about it. She is connecting us to each other, helping us look inward and undo all of the shitty things we have been taught to believe about ourselves. For me, when I listen to her, I am processing and undoing my deep need for approval, my tendency to find my identity solely in what I can do for others, and of course, the constant anxiety of wondering if I am too much.

Taylor isn’t universal. There are plenty of women who don’t resonate with her songs (this was made abundantly clear in my thousands of QTs!) but when I hear words like “basic, vapid, shallow, narcissistic, juvenile, generic, mediocre” I just wonder if people legitimately think that describes the hundreds of millions of women globally for whom her music resonates?

If a Taylor Swift concert is a form of catharsis for so many women, where do men go to process emotions communally? Many men are disconnected from each other and disconnected from themselves. I have had men say to me that they feel as though their inner lives must be guarded, that the inherent trust that lots of women have between each other doesn’t come quite as easily. Anger is an appropriate emotion, crushing fear about your inadequacy is not.

Lots of folks mentioned alternative music or the entire emo genre, but the thing is…it was alternative. Boys who liked emo music were mocked by the “mainstream.” They were the ones wearing skinny jeans and eyeliner, and the fan base was still at least half women (myself included, as a Chris Carrabba and Andrew McMahon lover). Drake and Eminem were the two answers that I think came the closest, but the best answer according to the limited sample of men I asked was….sports. Sports is the place where they said they are able to exhibit a full range of emotions. The overwhelming joy of victory, the agony of defeat. There is community and camaraderie. Tears and grief are understood and completely appropriate. It may not be screaming the bridge from “illicit affairs,” but it is providing an outlet that is otherwise rarely accessed.

Amongst the thousands of quote tweets and replies calling me the dumbest bitch alive were a couple of other overwhelming themes. Namely, “men don’t need music to validate their emotions because we are men.” “Men don’t wallow in their feelings.” “Men don’t look to others to find their purpose, we act on logic and independently of how others feel” but with male suicide rates outpacing women by miles and when the majority of physical violence is committed by men, I’m not convinced the men are all right.

When I have asked men this question at cafe tables or dive bars, they have all had the same reaction. “That’s a good question. I can’t think of a comparable artist. I don’t know why.” I asked one friend if he had a song that made him have a visceral reaction specifically from a male perspective, the equivalent to when I heard “I hosted parties and starved my body.” He sent me this song called, “Don’t tell the boys.”

I’m trying to picture a stadium filled with 75,000+ people who are mostly men, night after night, scream-singing a song like this. And I can’t. And maybe lots of men feel fine with that. All I know is screaming: “and there we are again when nobody had to know, you kept me like a secret, but I kept you like an oath” with a chorus of thousands of women healed something in me. Something about letting out those mortifying words and hearing them echoed around you. We are cringe, but we are free.

"Boys think about sex every 27 seconds" - or something to this effect.

“How can we help them not think about sex so much? How can we make sure we don’t cause them to stumble?”

Of course at twelve, my thought was not, "Why does it matter if they think about sex a lot?" or "Even if we think that's bad, why is that my responsibility as a middle school girl?”

I am petite and small chested so i get to dodge most of the guidelines around cleavage, but i do need to make sure my bra strap isn’t showing (as an ADHD girl, this seems to be a constant struggle). We don’t want to remind the boys that i wear a bra, even if it’s a 32A. The message is clear: how you dress is in direct alignment with your value. Your clothes are an expression of how much you value yourself. Would you dress like that in front of your future husband?

I'm fifteen and at a charismatic, evangelical youth group. i'm wearing a fitted white t-shirt and low rise jeans, held up precariously with a belt on the tightest notch, because it's 2006. A female youth leader, whose name i barely know, takes me aside. She reminds me to be mindful of the boys and their "thought life." There is about an inch of my midriff showing after i raise my hands in worship. I forgot that was the guideline. Is your stomach showing when you lift your hands in praise? Were we worshipping just so we could be sneakily slutty? I check my motives constantly. The thing is, deep down, i do want the boys to notice me. Being jesus-obsessed is not drawing the interest from the boys that i was promised, maybe showing a little bit of midriff will help (it does not).

I am twenty-one, in college, and heavily involved in a ministry to “win high school kids for Christ.” I am very conscious of how i dress, I want to lead by example. Except for one night, i'm meeting up with a guy friend in a different city where he attends college. He's involved in the same ministry. I have a huge crush on him. I wear a dress that pushes my entrenched modesty boundaries, but would be laughable to be perceived as "revealing" if I walked into a frat party. I wouldn't know, i don't go to frat parties.It’s a black dress from urban outfitters, about an inch of mesh around my rib cage. Very 2010s. He kisses me in his car. Did my immodesty lead to my desired outcome? He begins to push my sexual boundaries. I use my words to say no, but my no is ignored. I feel these conflicting desires: wanting to be wanted, wanting to be heard, fear of crossing any lines that i may have to tell my future husband later. Pretty sure this guy is not my future husband, as he ghosts me after this incident. But he does apologize for "giving into lust." I apologize too. For the dress. I sell the dress to Buffalo Exchange for $7 as a symbol of my recommitment to modesty.

I am thirty. I am married and have three children, the youngest is approaching 18 months old. I am learning to be at home in my body for the first time in my life. My faith has been shifting for about a decade, but modesty and purity have stayed deep in my bones. I feel freedom for everyone else, but not yet myself. My husband and i are in asheville with some friends. I wear a crop top for the first time ever. I ask my husband a dozen times if he is okay with me wearing this. I desperately need his permission in this moment, which he freely gives. I wear the crop top and no one seems to notice or care. Perhaps no one is thinking about me as much as i was conditioned to believe. This is a tiny exhale.

I am thirty-one and go for a run in my neighborhood in a sports bra for the first time in my life. My neighborhood is not known for its pedestrian traffic, but i run into a friend and her husband on a rare walk. I'm very conscious of what i'm wearing and hug my rib cage in an attempt to cover up. Her husband looks at me in my eyes and i don't sense any discomfort. I let my guard down a little more. Could it be true that the average person simply did not care?

I am thirty two and for the first time in my life, both confident in my body and rarely thinking about it. This is a hard-earned privilege.

I have been going to the gym consistently for the first time. It's been about nine months. I wear the same "uniform" every time. high waisted leggings and a cropped top. A few inches of abdomen exposed that my neural pathways have been rewired to forget matter. Freedom. I am on the stairmaster, twenty minutes in. Dripping with sweat. A blonde female staffer who can't be older than twenty nervously approaches me. She looks as if she would rather be doing anything else. I take out one of my headphones and give a questioning smile.

Her words spill out like scripture you recite but refuse to marinate in.

"We have a policy that everyone must wear a shirt while working out. Can you put your shirt back on?" She motions towards my sweatshirt that i wore on the chilly walk from the parking lot. I'm sweating but my insides have turned to ice.

I feel certain i have misunderstood her. Am i having that dream where i'm naked in the grocery store? Did i forget to put on a shirt today? Is my adhd that bad? I cautiously look down and am relieved to see my uniform. A ribbed teal top, little bit longer than a sports bra, and black high-waisted leggings. I look back at her and say, "I am wearing a shirt? I bought this in the workout wear section at target?" She replies anxiously, "yeah it needs to be a full shirt." I pause. I ask if it's a health code thing. She shakes her head. "We just want to make sure everyone is comfortable."

I instinctively reply, "well i'm feeling pretty uncomfortable."

I can feel my breathing increasing and it's not just because i have climbed 112 floors on the stairmaster. I remember that this twenty year old did not create this rule, she has just been utilized to enforce it on behalf of a man who did. I have seen this movie before. I know how this works. You send out the female staffer to break the news about your sluttiness so that you don't know which man noticed your immodesty. It's less awkward that way. Surely this is not happening.

I don't put my sweatshirt back on. I tell her that i am almost done with my workout. I tell her that I know this is not her rule, and i ask whose rule it is. She gives me the name of a manager. I thank her and jump off the stairmaster and march my slutty self to the front desk. I, for the first time in my life, ask for the manager. I suppose this is 32. They find me a manager, but i can tell pretty quickly that this isn't who i’m looking for. Wrong name and wrong vibe. Deeply uncomfortable to be discussing this with me.  I can tell he has no vested interest in my apparel. I ask him who came up with this rule and he gives me a name, the same name the female staffer gave. I ask to speak with him. I take a deep breath.

The manager, who we will call Rob, walks into the office. Tall, blue eyed, mid fifties. I'm sitting and he's standing. He smiles and asks what he can do for me, but his tone has an arrogance and condescension that is familiar. I ask him for context on the dress code, and why what i am wearing is not acceptable. He uses the same language, but he says it to me like a stern high school principal. "yes, you need to wear a full shirt."

"Why? Is it a health code reason?"

"No, it has nothing to do with that. We have the rule because that's who we are."

I feel myself bristle at this. "That's who we are." Who the fuck is that, exactly? I realize that this guy is about to be a perhaps unfair recipient of built up resentment towards a culture that gave me a complicated relationship with my body from such a young age.

I ask him to clarify. What is a full shirt, exactly? Can i have one inch of abdomen showing? Two inches? I tell him that i am confused. I am wearing a shirt. I am not indecently exposed. I ask him with a biting tone if he would prefer if i came into his office daily for modesty checks. He replies that i can if that would make me more
comfortable. I hold in the "fuck off" that my brain immediately jumps to.

I look at him in his steely eyes and say, "I want you to say what you mean. You aren't actually saying anything, you keep using vague terms. I want you to stop beating around the bush and say that the rule exists because you want women at the gym to dress how you would deem 'modestly.'" He stutters a retort, but agrees with my statement.

I look over at the first manager, the one who did not appear to have a vested interest in the length of my shirt. I ask him to cancel my membership. I thank him for his time. I stand up and walk out, right past Great Value Mike Pence, without a word.

I know that to many people this will feel dramatic and overreacting. Private businesses make their own rules. I'm sure it looks like i am taking this deeply personally....because i am. And maybe someone else wouldn't, they would just move along. Buy some longer shirts. But for someone who spent a lot of her life trying to find a cute one-piece swimsuit or shorts that were the length of my fingertips, it felt important to not agree that two inches of my midriff showing is a moral issue.

Now, to find a new gym where they allow scantily clad moms (and provide childcare).