#14
Two times in one week to celebrate the impulsive choices of the naive mind!
Hi! I'm coming in twice this week because I feel the need to comment on the recent article published in The Cut. But first-
Unfitting to the actual content of the article, Grazie Sophia Christie offers us The Case for Marrying an Older Man: A woman’s life is all work and little rest- an age gap relationship can help. The essay is long, but despite the critique of the actual work, she is a phenomenal writer, in my opinion. To summarize, Christie went to Harvard undergrad and secured her now husband who was a HBS student at the time they met. She makes the case that marrying someone with more maturity, life experience, and financial security under his belt would allow her to forgo the dreaded worries of womanhood- competitive hustle, aging aesthetics, the duty of training a man how to exist, etc. While I think her point is clear, I would argue that this has more to do with a man's financial security and stability than a large age gap- they are only ten years apart.
Accordingly, opinionated readers went offfff in the comments and blasted the essay on Twitter. For some, the points made were spot on- Christie is speaking from a place of extreme privilege, and her scenario is not relatable to most. However, I am here to offer a fresh take: while her argument is a bit far-reaching, I enjoyed the chance to read her personal narrative piece, which let us peek into her thoughts and glimpse her diary-like mind. With content now extremely commercialized, politicized, and boring, reading a young writer's somewhat naive but confident thoughts is pretty refreshing. While she is still in her early adulthood, she appears very assured that she has cracked the code to life, which I think we can relate to occasionally. No doubt she will evolve and develop new outlooks on life and will probably come back to this piece in a few years and laugh (hopefully) at how naive or hopeful she was about her decisions. But, in my (potentially hot-take) opinion, I think diving into the wirings of her impulsive behavior is what’s so fun about reading her piece. We get to explore the reckless internal dialogue of someone without the manicured fluff of protection. Maybe I just love Eve Babitz and Joan Didion too much, but there’s nothing like escaping your own mind and entering the impulse-driven choices of someone else’s reality!
Regardless of it all- this section speaks volumes:
And men are too skilled at taking.
There is a boy out there who knows how to floss because my friend taught him. Now he kisses college girls with fresh breath. A boy married to my friend who doesn’t know how to pack his own suitcase. She “likes to do it for him.” A million boys who know how to touch a woman, who go to therapy because they were pushed, who learned fidelity, boundaries, decency, manners, to use a top sheet and act humanely beneath it, to call their mothers, match colors, bring flowers to a funeral and inhale, exhale in the face of rage, because some girl, some girl we know, some girl they probably don’t speak to and will never, ever credit, took the time to teach him. All while she was working, raising herself, clawing up the cliff-face of adulthood. Hauling him at her own expense.
Can we also talk about the fall of TikTok marketing for consumer brands? I have noticed fewer and fewer extravagant attempts from the social teams to follow the latest trend and push it out. Or they are doing so, and nothing is clicking enough to crack my algorithm. We can all agree that style of attempting to humanize a product through showcasing their employees doing TikTok trends is pretty brutal to watch, I think there’s two reasons for its death.
1. TikTok shop- think back to when I talked about enshittification. (“platform decay and the decreasing quality of online platforms that acted as a two-sided market.”)
2. As consumers, we might finally see beyond the branding and are less likely to follow through on a purchase just because its social team is creative (or not).
What are your thoughts on this take? Am I just in my own deep personalized algorithmic hole?
SUUUUPER SICK OF BIG JACKET SZN! Thank you for bearing with me through these rants.
