The way this piece starts is startling precisely because it\u2019s so predictable.\n
\n\u201cThis women\u2019s magazine explores the rough truth: professional women coming out of their youth have it hard. They were promised they could have everything, but under the influence of feminist slogans they threw themselves wholly into their office careers. But it turns out their careers aren\u2019t that satisfying and they\u2019re coming unhinged. Now some are thinking of dropping out. Several of the author\u2019s professional class friends are dreaming of leaving the city to live a more domestic life.\u201d
\n\nThese were exactly the Atlantic articles Jezebel was rolling eyes at in the 2000s, Susan Faludi placed them central to the \u201cbacklash\u201d of the \u201880s. Adapted as a movie, they were 1987\u2019s Baby Boom, with Diane Keaton.
\n\nBut I haven\u2019t really seen one since jeez, 2007 maybe. Certainly not since the media went loopy circa 2010 or so. The Cut is a New York Magazine vertical, and I\u2019ve noticed enough examples I count it settled that NY Mag is trying to own the wokeness hangover and be the pre-2010 \u201cliberal, not loopy\u201d you loved and miss. So it\u2019s significant exactly how they\u2019re walking it back here.
\n\nJust like their \u201chaha guess we fucked up with all the mocking misandry\u201d piece it\u2019s not a full mea culpa but an off-ramp, a way for people to rationalize and narrate standing down without immediately rejecting their felt values.
After that formulaic opening it shifts to some feminist lashing-out: we\u2019re unsatisfied at work because of the sexisms! The wage gap! Women feeling undervalued! But these bits aren\u2019t very well tied to whatever point is being made, feels like a few paragraphs of feminist signaling softening the audience up for a not-terribly-novel inversion of Friedan: \u201cthe unsatisfied careerist is the new unsatisfied housewife!\u201d One wonders what Faludi or 2000s Jezebel would say.
\n\nAt no point does the article SAY you should have a baby but it does say your professional life will be bleakly unsatisfying and single-girl-in-the-city recreation (drinks! vacations! performative satisfaction on Instagram!) won\u2019t fill the hole, nominates kids (and dogs! and sex! and activism!), \u201cjokes\u201d that Rory Gilmore maybe was into something in removing nose from grindstone and getting pregnant, and ends on a note urging you to invest your feminist hopes in the next generation.\n
\nSo maybe there\u2019s still too much anti-natalist headwind to come out and say it just now, but they\u2019re tacking pretty close. Baby steps. ::rimshot:: \n
\nThe one striking thing, there\u2019s no \u201cbiological clock\u201d ticking in the background of this piece specifically about unsatisfied careerist women in their 30s as there absolutely would have been in previous iterations. Technology has bought women of that class another decade of fertility, maybe that\u2019s finally been priced in to people\u2019s expectations.\n
\nOh another thing, you notice how it never makes an aside to showily acknowledge the distinct challenges of brown, or queer, or tbh not executive class women? Pre-2010, what did I say?
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