{"id":129762,"date":"2024-06-07T12:29:00","date_gmt":"2024-06-07T16:29:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=129762"},"modified":"2024-06-07T17:54:01","modified_gmt":"2024-06-07T21:54:01","slug":"fp-kat-rosenfield-is-divorce-really-something-to-celebrate-glamorizing-a-marital-split-is-narcissism-disguised-as-feminism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=129762","title":{"rendered":"(FP) Kat Rosenfield–Is Divorce really something to celebrate? Glamorizing a marital split is narcissism disguised as feminism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I\u2019ve been thinking lately of that party, those women, the husbands they jettisoned like so much dead weight in a mimetic frenzy of best-life-living. Maybe the men were bad and deserved it, but it strikes me that nobody ever said so. My friends didn\u2019t talk about being unhappily married; they just thought they\u2019d be happier divorced, and no wonder. Even as divorce has retreated<\/a> from the oft-cited peak rate of 50 percent, its place in the culture has all the urgency and incandescence of a current thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This year, we\u2019ve already had a glut<\/a> of divorce<\/a> memoirs from authors celebrity and non; a much-hyped \u201cdivorce album<\/a>\u201d from Ariana Grande; a buzzy debut novel called The Divorc\u00e9es<\/a><\/em>, which is set on a \u201950s \u201cdivorce ranch\u201d in Reno; a piece in The Cut<\/em>, on Valentine\u2019s Day no less, entitled \u201cThe Lure of Divorce<\/a>\u201d; and a New York Times<\/em> feature<\/a> about how Emily Ratajkowski has set off a booming new market for \u201cdivorce rings,\u201d refashioned from the wearer\u2019s old wedding band. One of them is engraved with the word badass<\/em>, a detail I would have found absolutely impossible to believe had it not been accompanied by photographic evidence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is it ^%$%$# to get divorced? Perhaps it was in the \u201950s, when women had to schlep to Nevada to free themselves of their abusive husbands\u2014or the \u201970s, when women fought for the liberatory institution of no-fault divorce. And perhaps this history explains the current narrative, epitomized by a recent\u00a0Guardian<\/em>\u00a0piece<\/a>\u00a0that portrays divorce as not just a path to empowerment but an exclusive sisterhood (the one I glimpsed among my newly single friends as they downed Jell-O shots and mimed intercourse on the kitchen countertop with a life-size plastic skeleton). Learning of the writer\u2019s divorce, her hairdresser said, \u201call the coolest women she knew were divorced and sighed almost wistfully at the thought of it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, these stories suffer from selection bias, in that they are created by and for the type of woman who sighs wistfully at the thought of divorce\u2014as opposed to those of us who sometimes wake up sweating from nightmares in which we have inexplicably dumped our very good husbands. But they\u2019re also a product of a popular \u201cwoman empowered by everything woman does\u201d paradigm, where all choices made by women are a product of liberation, hence feminist, hence good. There is no error or disappointment that can\u2019t be ^%$%$#@# away.<\/p>Read it all<\/a>.

\u201cIs it badass to get divorced? Perhaps it was in the \u201950s, when women had to schlep to Nevada to free themselves of their abusive husbands.\u201d@KatRosenfield<\/a> on why glamorizing a trendy marital split in 2024 is merely \u201cnarcissism disguised as feminism.\u201d https:\/\/t.co\/THigCS8x59<\/a><\/p>— The Free Press (@TheFP) June 1, 2024<\/a><\/blockquote>