I'm Calling For A Total Shutdown of NYT Articles About The Emotional Labor of Dealing with Men

Until we can figure out what the hell is going on

Photo by Alfonso Sanzone on Unsplash

Another day, another article attempting to intellectualize what is essentially the straight woman version of “ugh, my bitch wife.”

Okay, let me back up for a moment. I actually wasn’t going to write this today. I had, if you can imagine it, a big, beautiful article defending feminism. No, really, it’s in drafts! My feminism article doesn’t go to another school in Canada. Anyway, I’ll publish it tomorrow, because the New York Times had other plans. Yesterday, they published a new article describing an epidemic of “mankeeping” wherein women undertake emotional labor to meet the social and emotional needs of men in their life—not their unreasonable bosses and obnoxious men on the street, but their husbands—who don’t have enough socialization outside of the marriage.

Look, there are many reasons that this article was published. One of them, I assume, is that the New York Times is seeing how popular other content sources are (like, ahem, Substack) and deciding they have to go full Samantha Brick to stay relevant. For those fortunate enough not to remember Samantha Brick, she was a woman who bestowed countless clicks upon The Daily Mail in the late 2000s by repeatedly writing about how women hated her for being hot, despite actually being fairly average-looking. And hey, if they’re doing that, it’s working! I’m writing about them, aren’t I?

But I think it’s more than that. I think that normal gripes between men and women (specifically about specific men, by specific women) are being twisted and molded into intellectual arguments about The State of Heterosexuality at large, every week a new term I learn that boils down to “nagging broads, amirite?” but for ladies.