Whew. This one was really hard to read and so totally rage inducing. I definitely don’t want to sound like the women that doth protest “not all men” because I entered into a partnership with someone who absolutely respects me, our family, and carries his weight - for real and not statistically inflated. But also… The book starts with her husband being so awful that it’s almost satirical. Hiding her things (such as amusing mugs and artwork) because he doesn’t like them(!?) and being homophobic were the least awful(!), piled on top of the typical gaslighting that many women who come from conservative communities, or get married young, don’t realize is abusive - ‘go make me a sandwich’/‘why don’t you have time to cook and clean’/‘what do you do all day’ kind of ridiculousness, in those early postpartum weeks, no less.
I think most people have heard the statistics of men’s inflated sense of how much housework they do, ‘emotional labor’ has been a term in our lexicon for a while now, Covid exposed how mothers are America’s social safety net, if you spend ANY time on TikTok- you’ll know that young women have absolutely figured out that marriage mainly benefits men, etc. and I think there should be a book pulling all of these threads together. But I don’t know if this is it.
Other than some fascinating history of patriarchy and how it’s baked into our culture, a great deal of the book feels like the author’s unburdening of her trauma - which is ENTIRELY JUSTIFIED. I just feel as if it’s a narrative that is trying to straddle two approaches and they each negate the other: while being a very salient point, arguing ‘marriage and heterosexual men are all mostly awful’ turns off women like myself who truly have a fulfilling partnership, but the text wouldn’t be as emotionally compelling without the rant about the hordes of truly awful and just clueless men she’s had to deal with who need to learn better. So I’m on the fence about it, I guess, but I’m glad I read it.