Lindy West Was Gaslit By Her Own Ideology
Pathologizing normal straight-woman desires can turn you into a sister wife, many such cases.
Some of you may just be hearing about Lindy West and her now-infamous throuple since her recent interview with the NYT about her “healthy” (but actually, very obviously toxic to literally anyone who listens to the interview) polyamorous marriage. If you’re asking “Who? What? Why would you force me to look at three random people in their underwear?” don’t worry, I’ll explain it.
This article gets into everything in more detail—including the very unintentionally unflattering portrayals of this triad in West’s memoirs, but TLDR for all of you: 2010s-era feminist writer Lindy West was dating her boyfriend, Aham (twice-divorced by his late twenties because both his previous marriages had issues with “insecurity and jealousy,” lol) and he broke up with her, then said he would only get back together and marry her if she agreed to be polyamorous. His logic was that she wouldn’t get it because she’s white and monogamy is lowkey racist. (Sounds legit.)
West reluctantly agreed to this arrangement through tears (good to see a white woman #doingthework). They got married, and she later suffered the indignity of discovering he was sleeping with other people after a random fan told her on Instagram. Then, although she’s always described herself as heterosexual, she got herself into a throuple with her husband and his more “conventionally hot” girlfriend. It’s unclear if she and this other woman are actually having sex with each other, although they imply that it’s happening—something Aham apparently pressured them to do in a way that was totally progressive and queer and not at all male-gazey. The fact that the sex (or lackthereof) between Lindy West and her husband’s girlfriend hasn’t been addressed makes me think it isn’t really happening in any major way. (To quote fellow 2010s feminist icon Liz Lemon, “And even though I am not into the sex stuff, if it helps you, I would let you do stuff to me.”)
Now, while I find polyamory personally unappealing for a variety of reasons, I think it can work for some people. I think those people are wired in such a way that they don’t have the same negative or anxious gut reaction to non-monogamy that most of us do. I also think Lindy West is a very bad example of polyamory “working” because the only thing it appears to be doing is fulfilling a humiliation kink, which I don’t think she actually has.
But for many of you, this drama might be the first you’ve heard of Lindy West, and therefore the whole deal just seems like some Portlandia skit. The fact that this happened to Lindy West specifically is why it’s so sticky. As a millennial liberal woman who read a lot of blog posts in the 2010s while pretending to work, it actually made me feel really sad to see Lindy West like this. I didn’t always agree with her, but something I could have said about her in the 2010s was that she seemed incredibly self-assured, confident and indifferent to the male gaze. In my early twenties, she occasionally made me question if there was something wrong with me for wanting men to find me attractive. As deliberately abrasive as she was sometimes, she was funny and, dare I say, likable. When I thought about someone who would loudly declare, “Women do not exist to decorate your world,” I would have thought of Lindy West. As a young woman, Lindy West personified the “fuck your male gaze” attitude that I saw so often among other liberal women, where there was absolutely nothing more degrading than admitting you wanted a man’s attention. And I genuinely thought she believed it.
Of course, it wasn’t really true for her (or dare I say, for any other straight woman.) West has since been very vocal about her insecurities in her marriage and her “codependent” desire to please Aham, which she believes she overcame by becoming his sister wife. But that’s exactly the problem—if Lindy West had been honest with herself from the beginning about the fact that liking men, and wanting men to be attracted to you, plus wanting commitment and monogamy, is actually a perfectly normal part of being a straight woman (just as it’s normal for a straight man to want women to like him) she wouldn’t have contorted herself into this unfortunate arrangement.
