I would not make this move if I didn’t feel like it was the right thing for this newsletter and the community. So I know it’s a pain, but it will be worth it.

And now, here is a preview of this week’s Wednesday newsletter.

You can read the full thing FOR FREE on Patreon.

What do you do in a country where facts don’t matter?

What do you do in an America where reality is fake and the lie is the reality? What do you do when an authoritarian government insists that they and they alone know the truth? What do you do when people want to believe their own lies so much they lie to themselves?

There are a lot of things you can do. Fact-checking feels futile, but it is a necessary step. Supporting the voices that do tell the truth doesn’t hurt, either.

But also, sometimes the best way to counteract a false narrative is to put on a frog costume, get out in the streets, and dance.

In the face of the president’s lies, protesters in Portland have donned inflatable costumes and held dance parties. It’s hard to manipulate images of a person dancing in a puffy unicorn outfit into something fearsome and scary…

Read on Patreon

You can read the rest of this week’s Wednesday newsletter for free on Patreon.

I am leaving Substack for Patreon.

Why?

➡️ Well, go over to Patreon to read all about it. My first Patreon newsletter is a reflection on my 20-year career in media and how I got here. It’s also about why I didn’t move from Substack before, as so many of you have asked me to do. And why I’m moving now. It is also why I don’t think just abandoning spaces is the right answer all the time.

Read MYAM on Patreon

And now for a little business

If you’re a paid subscriber: As of Monday, October 12, I’ve paused your billing on Substack, so going forward you won’t be charged.

But we do need you to come re-join us on Patreon to keep your paid access going. So, check your email for the link.

And as a thank you for all your support, I am gifting all current Substack subscribers FREE ACCESS on Patreon.

⚠️ Important note:

• Check your email for details on claiming your access

• Having an issue redeeming your free access? → Submit Here

Let me assure you, this newsletter will always continue to be a political newsletter written with a feminist slant that sits at the intersection of patriarchy and politics in red state America.

This place will always feel like sitting down on a porch with your best friend over a glass of whiskey and ranting about the state of the world and finding joy in the fight. It will continue to be personal, political, sometimes funny, and will always raise hell.

And it will always have the best community on the internet. Because you are here.

But what is changing is that there will be new features, more content, a new podcast, new premium content, and so much more.

My first premium newsletter for subscribers at the $10/month level will be about Josh Hawley and manhood and will be published on Thursday. So make sure you are signed up!

So, head over to Patreon!

My Patreon will offer newer, more affordable content tiers. And also tech support! If you need help, you can fill out this form and, I, or someone from the Patreon team, will get back to you.

What’s included on Patreon?

The membership includes two paid tiers, plus a free membership option.

Free Membership

• 2 x Newsletters (per week): Wednesdays + Fridays

• 1 x Dingus of the Week Podcast Episode (per week): My brand new podcast!

👑Not a Dingus ($5/month)

• 3 x Newsletters (per week): Get ONE extra newsletter per week (2 free + 1 paid member-only). Access my weekly Sunday paid subscriber newsletter.

• 1 x Dingus of the Week Podcast Episode (per week): My brand new podcast!

• Comment Access: Ability to comment on all content

• Access to all past newsletters

👑👑Definitely not a Dingus ($10/month)

• 3 x Newsletters (per week): Get ONE extra newsletter per week (2 free + 1 paid member-only). Access my weekly Sunday paid subscriber newsletter.

• 2 x Special Newsletter (per month): Deeper reporting and personal essays. The format and content may shift over time as I experiment with different ideas.

• 1 x Dingus of the Week Podcast Episode (per week): My brand new podcast!

• Exclusive Content Extra: A mix of special content that might include Q&As, recommendations, and more. I’ll use this space to try out different formats and ideas

• Polls & Topic Submissions: Help shape upcoming content — nominate Dingus of the Week candidates, suggest topics for the podcast and newsletter, vote on ideas, and more.

• Chat Communities: Access my new Patreon chat rooms, Flyover Discord. Connect with other members and discuss your favorite topics.

• Weekly Discussion Topic: A place to talk about the news and other burning topics with the best community on the internet (no Nazi’s allowed)

• Comment Access: Ability to comment on all content

• Access to all past newsletters

Questions?

If you have any questions → Submit here

I’ll get back to you shortly!

Thank you for being here. I’m so grateful for your support, and can’t wait for the next five years.

But seriously, go over to Patreon now.

By now, maybe you know the story. I was a broke single mom, working for my local paper, making below the poverty line. In 2020, the editor-in-chief fired me after GOP leaders in the state complained about my writing and I opposed the publication of a really bad op-ed.

You can read the full story here.

In the days that followed, I was terrified about how I would pay my mortgage and buy groceries. But Substack reached out and offered to ensure that I would make a decent income if I focused on writing my newsletter full-time. And that is what I did.

Now the newsletter has more than 72,000 subscribers. And together we laugh about dinguses and take on the hot garbage strewn waste of this America. In the years since it launched, I’ve published a NYT bestseller and put out two seasons of a podcast that has over 200k downloads.

So many of you all write to tell me that this newsletter challenges you, or helps you see things a little clearer, and gives you hope. Or sometimes it just gives you a laugh that helps you think that we can make it through all of this. And we can.

It’s important for this newsletter that I write from a red state where there are no media jobs, not really. It’s important that I’m a single mom, a journalist and an activist. Voices like mine are rarely represented in newspapers or opinion columns.

And it’s important that I have 20 years of experience living in and reporting on the Midwest. In the aftermath of my firing, every potential new employer told me I would eventually need to move — away from the place and perspective that makes this newsletter unique.

Thank you for continuing to be here. Thank you for supporting this newsletter and the voice of a fierce, unapologetic feminist in red-state America.

Subscribe now

Tilly Norwood isn’t a real actress. She’s an AI puppet conceived of by AI production house Particle6 and its subsidiary talent studio Xicoia. She can’t think or feel or even talk without human guidance. But Particle6 CEO Eline Van der Velden has a vision that Norwood will be the first of many AI actresses, stating that she wants Tilly “to be the next Scarlett Johansson or Natalie Portman.”

In response to the news about the creation of an actress so fake and so pliable, the Free Press published an essay by Tyler Cowen, a professor of economics at George Mason University, thirstily declaring that, “Tilly Norwood doesn’t need a hairstylist, has no regrettable posts, and if you wish to see a virgin on-screen, this is one of your better chances.”

It’s not likely Norwood’s career will extend much beyond the horny imaginations of AI slop creators and the libidinal minds of sweaty economics professors. But it matters that one of the first AI bots forced upon us as a new vision of the future is a woman. It matters that in the cultural imaginings of men, she’s a pliable virgin.

Society doesn’t want real human women.

Our administration is staffed by the human equivalent of Norwood. Women who have contorted themselves into a Fox News fever dream of perfection. The internet is filled with women who perfectly perform motherhood and marriage, while wearing aprons and feeding chickens. GLP-1s have greatly increased access to thinness, making it easier for women to shrink and sculpt themselves into yassified models of perfection. All my ads on social media are about weight loss or beauty or how to self-optimize. Everything is designed to keep me in constant search of perfection, never once resting, never once being satisfied.

America doesn’t want to see real women.

Real women are being forced out of the workforce and, as a result, are losing access to economic freedom and agency. Women are losing reproductive rights and, as a result, are losing their ability to choose the lives they want to live. SNAP benefits are being cut, which hurts women the most, as they’re the ones most likely to stay and raise their children; they are the ones who earn less, because the gender pay gap is growing. Access to health care is also getting more and more restricted. This, too, impacts women the most, because they’re more likely to stay home to help aging parents, sick kids, disabled kids?

Tilly Norwood’s company heralds her as a problem-solver. But this robot only solves a problem if you see humans as a problem. If you see people with full lives and sexual agency as a problem. And her debut comes at a time when women — especially Black, queer, trans, and immigrant women — are being pushed out of public life, not through culture wars or jeans ads, but through laws and policies designed to make existing that much harder.

And it is harder. Things are harder now than they were five years ago when I started this newsletter and even one year ago, when I published my feminist manifesto about equality and relationships. People are less likely now to subscribe to a feminist newsletter that looks at how we build inequality into our daily lives and how oppression happens, personally and politically.

But this newsletter has given us the space and platform to raise money for trans rights and abortion access in Iowa. Together, we’ve built a community that doesn’t always agree, but we do know that we will all be in the same Mad Max truck together in the end. And what we are fighting for is the value of our lives, our voices, and our homes.

This community is a reminder that every voice matters, especially in the face of a government and a movement that want us to be quieter, nicer, more put together, with a bit more lip filler, and could we just be more demure, focus on our protein goals, and enter our soft girl era. And I will be doing none of those things.

I am looking forward to the next five years. Unless Tilly Norwood develops a real talent for making long-form jokes about Pete Hegseth.

Subscribe now

🏠 So this newsletter is about all of that.

Subscribe now

This week, two men with saws came and cut down my children’s playset and hauled it away.

I had tried to give away the playset for free to anyone who wanted it. I posted pictures online and had family after family come look at it and ask me skeptical questions about its safety, would it fall? Would it give their kids splinters? Was it sturdy? Was it right for a 5-year-old? What about a 10-year-old? What was the weight limit? What was the age of the playset?

I didn’t know the answers to those questions. The playset was here when we moved in, and I couldn’t find its equivalent online. I told them how my kids loved it when we moved in in 2019, how it was their hideout in 2020, how we painted the inside with stars and tree branches, how they made broomsticks out of old branches and duct tape and rode on the swings with their sticks and pretended like they were witches. How it held together when my daughter ran up there crying after her birthday party was canceled in 2020 and then again in 2021. How it held me when I sat in the swing after being fired, and I had days of emptiness and fear. How it had survived the inland hurricane of 2020, and the neighbor’s tree just missed smashing it into pieces, and how it sheltered the fairy world we’d built underneath it, and how that, too, had survived. And look, there were still little fairy people hiding in the dirt, although they were fading and worn.

None of these were assurances enough for parents who wanted facts, statistics, schematics, and weight limits.

I heard one woman whisper to her father, who had come to test the playset with her, “It’s not worth the risk.”

It’s ironic, I think, in a state that overwhelmingly votes to preserve gun rights and takes away food assistance for kids, that everyone who comes here is so worried about the safety of the playset. And I am a little angry because of course, it’s safe; it has been for us! But also, I know she’s right: Things that are safe for a moment aren’t always safe forever.

The playset was here before I bought this house. I don’t know how old it was, and maybe it wouldn’t have been safe for another family. Maybe it would have been a risk rather than a rescue.

So I paid those men to chop it down and haul it away.

I bought my house in 2019. I’d walked through it with my realtor and immediately wanted it because of the back porch, the trees, and the oak floors, and how, when my daughter saw it, she said it looked like a witch’s cottage. But I was a single mom, living off freelance work and books, and even though I had been paying a rent much higher than my mortgage would be, and had two years of tax returns showing I was stable, I couldn’t get a loan unless I had a job offer. I’d been interviewing for jobs for over a year because I needed health insurance. And two places assured me they were going to make me an offer — soon. But those offers hadn’t come through yet. So I didn’t have the loan, and I couldn’t make an offer. The house was soon listed as sold.

Four weeks later, it was back on the market again. The prospective buyers hadn’t really wanted an old house after all. I went back to the bank; this time, I was employed. My local newspaper had given me an offer to work full-time for $49,000, which put me just under the poverty line for a family of three. But it was what the bank needed, so I got the loan. And I got the house.

Six months later, when the world shut down, this house became our refuge.

The first thing I did when I heard about the shutdowns happening across America was to buy a trampoline for my kids. I did not have the money for it. But I bought it anyway. If our world was going to shrink to the size of this house, I wanted us to have some fun.

And how many days that year did I sit at the kitchen table trying to work while my kids played outside? Watching them jump on the trampoline and climb in the playset. My daughter took old curtains from the basement and hung them in the playhouse. She took blankets up there and made nests for herself and her brother, and they sat there in a world where they felt safe, while I watched from a world that felt out of control.

My son began having nightmares in March of 2020 and stopped sleeping in his bed. He told me he dreamed of evil red balloons that flew in the sky and hovered over him and his sister. He said he didn’t know what the balloons would do, but he was scared. And I asked him, where was he safe in the dream? And he said in his playhouse. So I told him to dream about the playhouse.

For centuries, women could not own property. And even once they could, it was hard. Hard to get a line of credit at a bank without a man’s signature. Impossible to get a loan without some approval, some backing, some signoff from a man. When I told a friend who owns his own business how hard it had been to get the loan, he was confused. He’d gotten his home loan when he was in debt up to his eyeballs with his first restaurant. Maybe I’d done something wrong?

When I left my marriage, my husband accused me of ruining the home. But hadn’t I been the one who’d painted it; cleaned it; organized and arranged it? That home still stood and still does. Another wife now arranges pillows and vacuums rugs. Most of the walls are still the same color I painted them 20 years ago.

Homemaking is the domain of women, a service we are supposed to render in service of men. Something I am reminded of every time I try to fix something in my home. “Is it just you?” They’ll ask. “Is there a husband who needs to sign off on these decisions?”

Just us, is the answer. Just the three of us. This is our home; this is where we feel safe.

The homes women share with men are not safe. Thirty percent of marriages involve intimate partner violence. This doesn’t count the instances of emotional and financial and verbal abuse.

But making your home on your own isn’t easy. Women still face discrimination when buying homes. Despite the fact that single female homeownership eclipses men, we pay more for our mortgages and often sell our homes for less.

I wasn’t ruining a home, as my husband had said. I was making a new one. And what I had done wrong was imagine that instead of trapping me, this house could be my freedom. That instead of hiding me away, it could be my harbor.

And it has been. In a state people leave, in an America destroyed by violence, I have created something beautiful.

But every act of creation is an act of demolition.

So the playset is gone, making room for what I hope will be a fire pit where my children and their friends will sit on summer nights surrounded by all the flowers I hope to grow. And I know demolition means loss, but it also means creating space for possibility. I am so happy my kids have lived long enough to outgrow a playset. What a gift to watch children age in a country that criminalizes their identities and watches them die in school shootings. If I can imagine a future here in this backyard, I can build it.

The day had been prophesied by a New York farmer turned Baptist minister, William Miller. Miller fought for the Americans during the War of 1812 and was present at the Battle of Plattsburgh, where the Americans, who were severely outnumbered, defeated the British. After witnessing the horrific devastation and loss of that battle, Miller concluded that the Americans had won only due to the mighty hand of God.

After the war, Miller returned home and faced even more loss — the deaths of his father and sister. In despair, he spent years researching, trying to calculate the coming of the Lord, who would save him and his followers from the misery of war and disease. At first, Miller determined Christ would come on March 21, 1844 — but then, no, he apologized; he’d gotten it wrong. It would be in April — nope, sorry, more apologies. He finally settled on October.

But Jesus never came. The Millerites were devastated. As one faithful follower, Hiram Edson, explained, “Our fondest hopes and expectations were blasted, and such a spirit of weeping came over us as I never experienced before. We wept, and wept, till the day dawn.”

The day is known as the Great Disappointment. No one was saved from the misery of their lives.

Miller, the father of the Seventh-day Adventists, was not the first nor the last minister to declare, in a time of social and political upheaval, that now is the time when Jesus will rescue the faithful.

I grew up in fear of the rapture. In the red-brick Baptist churches of Texas, where fans stirred the thick, hot air, our voices rang over the chords of the piano as we sang, “People get ready, Jesus is coming.”

It was the 1990s, and the siege on Waco had happened only an hour away. It was a sign, our pastor preached, of a world in which the government would take up arms against its citizens. A time in which no one who believed was safe. The governments of the world were hostile to Christians; we were hunted and persecuted across the world. We were surely in the end times.

In this period of millennial panic, between 1995 and 2007, Tim Lahaye and Jerry B. Jenkins published their breakout series, the Left Behind books, which gave a vivid narrative to the supposed end of the world. In that series, persecuted white male Christians were the heroes — aided, of course, by converted women who also happened to be hot.

The books were published by Tyndale House Publishers, a niche Christian publishing company, but they captured the American imagination beginning in the Clinton administration and lasting through two wars in Iraq, Y2K panic, and the attacks of September 11, 2001.

That end, also, never came.

This year, after the murder of Charlie Kirk, my kids’ private school sent an email to all the parents, urging us in this “dificult time” to seek Christ, our only hope and refuge, noting, “At the same time, we should not be surprised by hardship. Paul reminds Timothy that ‘there will be terrible times in the last days’ (2 Timothy 3:1).”

Kirk’s death, the school administrators believe, was a portent of the end times.

Over the weekend, I saw TikTok videos and Instagram reels of people obsessing over the end, desperate for Jesus to come save them. And of other people desperate for Jesus to come collect his mess. The rapture was supposed to happen on September 23, 2025.

This obscure prophecy of South African Pastor Joshua Mhlakela gained a foothold in an America blind with panic. A nation in which the victors declare themselves the victims and the victims are afraid to say much of anything. It’s a world in which facts do not matter. Conspiracies have permeated our everyday lives. And we all feel hopeless. A type of end-times theology has even seeped into the liberal worldview, where people are prepping for a climate apocalypse.

As easy and as fun as it is to mock the idea of the rapture, especially for people who aren’t Evangelicals, apocalypse theology affects us all. An apocalypse theology is not only used among the faithful to justify abandoning the wicked to their own fates; it’s also used to justify abandoning red states, or relinquishing our power to authoritarian forces rather than fighting them.

The proliferation of the belief in another rapture speaks to the pervasiveness of the politics of pain. It’s a narrative that centers on the grievances of the powerful, while the voices of the vulnerable are muted. “Deliver us,” the faithful cry, while the government whips up a sense of grievance and fear to strip rights away from trans people, immigrants and women. The justification is found in the logic that these are wicked times. The tribulations of Biblical proportion are upon us.

This past Sunday, at the church I used to attend, the pastor preached that Christians ought to seek our hope in Christ and his second coming. The world is a wicked place, he said. We should not trust governments or people, only Christ.

Watching that video this week, I saw a roomful of people who’d primarily voted for Trump washing their hands of the results. They were declaring themselves the victims, although they’d voted for the victimizers. They used the death of Charlie Kirk to claim persecution of men — Christian men who “innocently” chose to speak out. Erased from the narrative were other forms of violence — the racism, the transphobia, the militarization of ICE against Americans.

Because an end-times theology, as tempting as it is to embrace, is a kind of deus ex machina. It’s a belief that a disastrous end or a swift rapture into the heavens helps us escape our responsibility to our neighbors and our world. Apocalypse logic argues. What can we do?

While researching God Land, I spoke to a farmer who believed in climate change and climate apocalypse, but saw it as part of God’s plan for the end times. He didn’t feel a responsibility to the earth. It would all end anyway.

The world is ending. So the faithful stand on hills, raise their hands, and await the Lord, while ignoring their neighbors.

This end will not come. We will still have to wake up tomorrow, facing the consequences of the world we created.

Further reading:

A Public Witness

Chris Tomlin’s Worshipwashing of Charlie Kirk

The memorial service for Charlie Kirk on Sunday (Sept. 21) functioned as a stand-in for Sunday worship. The service officially started at 11 a.m. local time, but several Christian worship artists sang hymns and contemporary worship songs for two hours before that as people entered the football stadium that’s home to the Arizona Cardinals. More worship s…

Read more

a year ago · 395 likes · 13 comments · Brian Kaylor

The ad shows black and white footage of women on the subway, as Nancy Sliwa, a lawyer, says, “Rapes are up by 40 percent. Felony assaults are at an all-time high… Every day women risk harassment and assault just going to school, to work, just living our lives.”

Nancy Sliwa then appears beside her husband. “Curtis and I have always fought for women,” she says. “And we will keep defending them, because no one has to choose between supporting their family and protecting their life.”

Nancy Sliwa is blond and white, and her invocation of the specter of violence that haunts the good white women of America is a tried and true political tactic.

There is an insidious logic to the ad. Life for women certainly feels more dangerous than it did before. As I write this, the right-wing media cycle has been dominated by the murder last month of Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee, in Charlotte, North Carolina. (This is during a week that has otherwise featured the publication of several quite grim economic reports; the release of more Epstein documents; an Israeli strike in Qatar, a U.S. ally — oh, and Politico ran a story about the Treasury secretary threatening to punch out the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency. But I digress.)

The ad sort of has a point. Reports of rape are on the rise in NYC, but not by 40 percent. The real number is closer to 20 percent, and this is primarily because last year, New York passed a law expanding its definition of rape. A CBS report notes that, even accounting for that change, there is a small percentage increase in reported rapes, but this could be because more people are reporting them.

In any case, you should look hard at any crime statistics coming from a man who faked crimes in the 1990s to make himself look like a hero.

But the Sliwas’ ad feels effective because it can, in fact, be quite scary to be a woman in America. The raw pain of gendered grievance oozes out of every social platform — TikTok videos where people describe awful dates and Facebook groups where women ask, “Are We Dating the Same Man?” Even the few conservative influencers I follow post memes about men being bad. It is bad.

But the violence that women have to fear is rarely coming from unhoused people or immigrants. The bulk of it is coming from the people in charge. Women have fewer rights, and they’re being forced from their jobs. Rising prices, the reduction of the Child Care Tax Credit, stagnant wages and never-ending cuts to the social safety net make it harder to support a family now than it was even five years ago. Women and mothers are being violently yanked off the street, not by immigrants, but because they are immigrants. (Or because they look like maybe they might be immigrants. The Supreme Court said that was fine.)

This week, the president made comments suggesting he doesn’t think domestic violence is a crime. The newly rebranded Department of War is run by a man who may or may not believe women should be allowed to vote.

The actions of the GOP are branded as protecting women. (As was the Clinton-era crime bill.) Even the logic of depriving married women of the vote is pitched as a sort of benevolent protectorship.

But that protectorship is coming at the loss of our rights; the scapegoating of trans people; violence toward immigrants and the unhoused. In this world, only white women get to feel protected — and only then if it’s not their husbands they need protecting from.

And despite the PR campaigns of trad wife influencers, this bargain is never what it says it is. Give me public transportation and a weird boss over an overbearing husband any day. At least with the boss, I have money, and with that money, some freedom.

Yes, there is violence being done to women. But despite a handful of cherry-picked and well-publicized stories, the threat to cis women is not from trans people or immigrants. It’s the state-sanctioned violence that strips us of our right to a safe and legal abortion. It’s the destruction of the social safety net. It’s the violence of the National Guard patrolling our streets and ICE deporting people without due process.

Patriarchy and power rely on stoking the flames of our fears of the other. Fear is intended to make us compliant. But what we should fear the most is the men who use our bodies as a cover for their violence.

🔗Further reading

✍️Moira Donegan wrote about Trump’s comments about domestic violence.

📖 My friend Sarah Weinman has an incredible book about the history of marital rape in America that will be published in November. You can hear us chat about the book on my This American Ex-Wife podcast.

✍️Also, as points out with this story about the Epstein files, the real violence against women is being done by the men who are claiming to protect them.

📈 300,000 Black women losing their jobs is also a kind of violence.

Subscribe now

Where were you when you heard the news that one of the most talented and wealthy single women in America was getting married? Me? I was trying to read a book, just 24 hours after getting dumped by a guy who was uncomfortable with my career.

The deluge of posts, hot takes, videos, and memes already beginning to flood the internet have little to do with Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce themselves. Grown women posted that they were crying. The Wendy’s account on Threads posted, “I can’t believe we got Travis Swift before we got gta6.” The New York Times did a push alert; so did ESPN. The president wished the couple “a lot of luck” during a Cabinet meeting at the White House.

From the wedding of Isabella and Ferdinand to the union of Mr. and Mrs. Swift, every highly publicized union is idealized because it makes a fairy tale feel like it’s within reach. Sometimes that fantasy is wealth, beauty, glamour, or a distraction from poverty. In this case, what resonates for many women — who will undoubtedly be scolded for fawning over this royal American wedding — is that this fairy tale features an ambitious and successful woman actually finding a supportive partner.

I don’t know either of these people. And I am not convinced this isn’t some sort of very successful business deal. But who cares? Taylor Swift writes great songs about shitty men and profits from it; good for her!

Also, most of our parents married for worse reasons than record sales.

I am also not trying to project into the interiority of the lives of these celebrities. But the image they are projecting to us is that a successful woman has found a supportive partner, one who eagerly fawns over her new album cover while interviewing her for his own podcast.

This reality is far from reality for most American women.

Since January, 212,000 women have left the workforce, while 44,000 men have joined it. Women’s participation in the workforce peaked as flexible work-from-home policies allowed them more readily to juggle career and family. But under the Trump administration, those policies are being rescinded. Meanwhile, laws that gut reproductive rights and narrow access to childcare, healthcare, and SNAP benefits will do more to push ambitious, educated women out of the workforce and limit their economic power and personal freedom. And a spiritual leader who opposes women having the right to vote has the ear of the president’s Cabinet.

Women who do succeed are often punished for it. Studies show that women who out-earn their husbands are 33 percent more likely to be victims of domestic violence and 22 percent more likely to be victims of emotional abuse.

Women who out-earn their husbands still do more childcare and domestic labor. And overwhelmingly, studies show that male partners, no matter how much they earn or how little they earn, how much they work, or no matter how flexible or inflexible their jobs are, are still not doing much domestic labor or childcare.

These are all passive forms of punishment for women who seek career success and financial security. Women who speak out are often met with outright misogyny or cutting remarks.

And all of this is happening as social media posts and think pieces declare the end of ambition, from #girlboss to #girlmoss. Author Stefanie O’Connell, who has a new book about ambition coming out in 2026, observed in her newsletter:

As a millennial woman reckoning with my own disillusionment with the 2010s girlboss era, its obsession with hustle culture, and the broken promise that getting what you want is as easy as asking for it, I too became obsessed with this reevaluation of ambition. During the five years I spent researching and writing my own book about it (out in 2026), I watched as these anti-ambition trends took hold… and evolved — from the #softlife to #feminineenergy to the #tradwife (short for “traditional” wife) — each promising to unlock a new layer of leisure, satisfaction and meaning as it limited women’s ambitions to a smaller and smaller window.

I, too, have struggled with ambition. I have a lot of it and it isn’t going away. But I am also exhausted. I’m so sick of succeeding in spite of everything around me. I’m tired of having a job and still doing the majority of the emotional and domestic labor for my kids while my ex, who is remarried, complains about how I maintain the shared calendar.

Every time I succeed, there’s a downside. The hate mail gets worse. The man I am dating backs away. A tabloid publishes a scathing story about me. I’m so, so tired.

The fantasy that Swift and Kelce are selling isn’t romance; it’s not even equality. It’s a fantasy world where a woman can be successful and her partner won’t be mad about it.

The first bite is crisp, warm, and crunchy with a little bit of peppery heat. I look forward to it every year.

When we talk about the foods of American fairs, we talk about exce…

Read more

Share

Read more

Read more

Read more

It was 90 degrees with no shade, on pavement. People were red-faced, red-hatted, and scrabbling over chairs. But still, it was kind of funny.

When a firework went off, everyone in the crowd flinched, including the president. Then he leaned into the mic. “I don’t like that sound,” he said.

The timing wa…

Read more

I’ve been watching as my queer friends who have built beautiful lives and communities wrestle with whether they should stay or go. So many of the articles about these bills focus on the pain and trauma of queer life in a red state. What is missing from…

Read more

Get 20% off for 1 year

Read more

Read more

The game marked a moment when nostalgia for a fictional past was made manifest. But despite the heavily manufactured atmosphere of charming Americana, the game had its moments of uncomfortable reality.

When the players walked out of the corn …

Read more

Read more

During the collapse of Twitter as it devolved into the shit-posting morass of X, I found myself navigating to the dating subreddits — ones for men, ones for women, ones that decry the behavior of men, and especially the ones that bitch about the behaviors of women.

Here anonymous strangers gripe…

Read more

Subscribe now

The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives returned for its second season on May 15. In the first week, the show had over 5 million views, and per Disney the s…

Read more

Read more