Some young women see patriarchy as a solution, not a problem. What in ‘The Feminine Mystique’ is going on here?

t’s always inspiring when citizens of the vast and disparate internet find something to unite them, and in late March, the unifying force was hatred for an essay, published in the Cut, called “The Case for Marrying an Older Man.” It was written by a woman who had done just that: Grazie Sophia Christie spent her undergraduate years at Harvard sneaking into receptions for MBA candidates where she hoped to bag a more established male before her “fiercest advantage” — her youth — disappeared and rendered her common. After some trial and error, at the age of 20, she made off with a 30-year-old whose defining characteristics seemed to be that he was French and rich. The essay’s alleged offenses ranged from the kind that would irritate Greta Thunberg — the casual way Christie’s byline notes that she lives in “Miami and London” — to the kind that would irritate Gloria Steinem. “I’ll never forget it,” the author writes, “how he showed me around our first place like he was introducing me to myself: This is the wine you’ll drink, where you’ll keep your clothes, we vacation here, this is the other language we’ll speak, you’ll learn it.” Christie was taking a cosseted, retro archetype — the gold digger — and presenting it as something intellectual and liberated.

That last sentence was the only one in the whole piece that made me stop in my tracks. It was breathtaking in its transparency: I’m not doing this out of principle or based on a worldview. I’m doing this because life seemed hard and this seemed easy.

Perhaps you’ve been seeing the term “tradwife” lately, a modern coinage for a TikTok-fluent married woman who keeps house, extols “traditional” values and yields to her husband. Perhaps you’ve even seen the term “stay-at-home girlfriends,” the influencer community’s true prophets of female ease. Unlike stay-at-home moms, whose days might be filled with school drop-offs and toddler-wrangling, the childless SAHG’s days are filled mostly with home care and self care: elaborate skin, fitness and food routines that keep their bodies beautiful and their lives serene for the boyfriends who are, after all, funding the whole shebang. In one SAHG video, I watched a platinum blonde explain that her boyfriend agreed to pay for all of their travel if she would do all of the packing.

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