Kontextmaschine

11th September 2017

Link with 18 notes

This Is What Happens to Ambition in Your 30s →

The way this piece starts is startling precisely because it’s so predictable.

“This women’s 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’t that satisfying and they’re coming unhinged. Now some are thinking of dropping out. Several of the author’s professional class friends are dreaming of leaving the city to live a more domestic life.”

These were exactly the Atlantic articles Jezebel was rolling eyes at in the 2000s, Susan Faludi placed them central to the “backlash” of the ‘80s. Adapted as a movie, they were 1987’s Baby Boom, with Diane Keaton.

But I haven’t 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’ve noticed enough examples I count it settled that NY Mag is trying to own the wokeness hangover and be the pre-2010 “liberal, not loopy” you loved and miss. So it’s significant exactly how they’re walking it back here.

Just like their “haha guess we fucked up with all the mocking misandry” piece it’s 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’re unsatisfied at work because of the sexisms! The wage gap! Women feeling undervalued! But these bits aren’t 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: “the unsatisfied careerist is the new unsatisfied housewife!” One wonders what Faludi or 2000s Jezebel would say.

At 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’t fill the hole, nominates kids (and dogs! and sex! and activism!), “jokes” 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.

So maybe there’s still too much anti-natalist headwind to come out and say it just now, but they’re tacking pretty close. Baby steps. ::rimshot::

The one striking thing, there’s no “biological clock” 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’s finally been priced in to people’s expectations.

Oh 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?

Tagged: it's mediasame as it ever was2017