Are these drugs too strong or are they not strong enough?

Earlier this week, Donald Trump threatened to annihilate the civilian population of Iran in a tweet that, even for him, was remarkably unhinged. Like a lot of American politics-watchers I’ve grown somewhat inured to our childish president’s social media outbursts and bizarre rambling tangents. But the president publicly proclaiming that “a whole civilization will die tonight” is such shocking behavior I still can’t believe that it’s now been several days and there have been no real efforts to remove him from office.

I mean, I can believe it. But I guess I had hoped that “almost nukes Iran” would have been, finally, the crossing of a red line that made Republicans act.

Subscribe now

You probably saw the tweets. But many news outlets have been (infuriatingly, irresponsibly) just publishing pieces of them, which make them sound somewhat more… well, not stable, but at least not like the rantings of a mentally unwell man screaming at the sun. On Easter Monday he tweeted:

Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.

And on Tuesday he wrote:

A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!

If I think a people are so great I am asking God to bless them, I also don’t tend to threaten to commit a genocide against them. But I guess that’s where Donald Trump and I differ.

In any sane and stable democracy, the hundreds of other elected officials charged with protecting the constitution and keeping their constituents safe would be using the constitutional mechanisms our founders thoughtfully created to remove this deranged and bloodthirsty madman from the White House.

Subscribe now

Instead, Republicans — the party affiliation of Trump’s cabinet members and with the majority in the House and Senate necessary to remove a president from office — are simply doing other things. Senate Majority Leader John Thune hasn’t said anything since Easter. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise is tweeting about trans women in sports. The chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee is celebrating a bald eagle hatchling. The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is celebrating “fourth-grader Betty Grandy for leading the effort to make hunting Idaho’s official state sport!”

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is one of the few Republicans who is actually talking about Iran, except of course he’s only parroting Trump’s words touting the ceasefire he only achieved by threatening to nuke Iran, torching America’s credibility and reputation in the process (and the ceasefire, unfortunately, doesn’t seem long for this world).

This is not normal. This is not sane.

Lots of liberals are jumping up and down screaming at Democrats to do something. And I too would love Democrats to do something. But it’s hard to do something when you’re a party out of power. There is simply nothing Democrats can do without Republican participation. The GOP has sustained and supported Donald Trump. They’re the ones who are responsible for him. They’re the ones with the obligation to rein him in or push him out. And they’re unfortunately the only ones who actually have the power to do what needs to be done.

The general uselessness and timidity of the Democratic Party is annoying to me, too. But there’s a world of difference between people who want the right outcome but are flailing around because they don’t have the power to execute it, and people who can see a giant glaring dangerous problem and simply decide to ignore or enable it. The many politicians who make up the Republican Party are the villains here. They are the one leaving a madman in charge — the ones who are giving him continued access to the nuclear codes. And they deserve to be on the receiving end of every American’s rage over this pointless, expensive, world-disrupting self-own of a war.

xx Jill

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

On Monday, President Donald Trump issued a stark warning to the journalist who broke the story that one of the American fighter jet pilots whose plane was downed in Iran was still missing: “We’re going to go to the media company that released it and we’re going to say, ‘national security, give it up or go to jail,’” Trump …

Read more

Hello readers! I’m writing to invite you to my writing + yoga retreat in beautiful Vietnam this fall.

(And if Vietnam isn’t your thing, there are still spaces available in my writing + yoga retreat on the Greek island of Folegandros this June).

The Vietnam retreat was originally scheduled for this spring, but we got some feedback that spring was just too soon. So we’ve rescheduled, and the retreat will be held from Sept 27 - Oct. 3, 2026. I co-host the retreat with my friend and yoga teacher Emily Shapiro, whose classes are simply incredible (and appropriate for all levels of yogis, so all are welcome). We will start in Hanoi, Vietnam’s dynamic capital city and my current home, where we’ll eat our way through one of the world’s best food towns. Then we’ll head up to Sapa, Vietnam’s northern hills. Sapa is gorgeous, and in the fall, the weather is cooling down, the rains have subsided, and the rice fields are just beginning to glow golden.

Share

You can trek and bike, or choose to hang by the pool and get a massage at the spa. We’ll be staying in a luxury hilltop resort, and we’ll get you there from Hanoi. Daily yoga, daily writing workshops, transport from and back to Hanoi, and all your meals are included. You do not need to be a writer or a yogi to attend these retreats, just someone who is interested in either or both.

I hope you can come! Vietnam is a truly extraordinary country, Hanoi is so much fun, and Sapa is one of the nation’s crown jewels. I’m also unlikely to do this retreat again next year, so if you’re tempted, now is the time.

Please don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions — just hit rely to this email. Hope to see you in Vietnam! More info here:

https://onthegroundretreats.com/retreat/vietnam

xx Jill

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

Happy Monday and welcome to Monday Reads!

From around the web:

Someday in Tehran by Laura Secor in the Atlantic

In Syria, Kidnappings of Women and Girls Fuel a Minority Group’s Fears by Ben Hubbard in the New York Times

The Nonsense Case Against Birthright Citizenship by Pema Levy and Isabela Dias in Mother Jones

The State Of Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights: A 50 State Report Card by rePROs Fight Back

The Horrors That Could Lie Ahead if Vaccines Vanish by Lucas Waldron and Patricia Callahan in ProPublica

The Anti-Intellectualism of the Silicon Valley Elite by Elizabeth Spiers in the Nation

Subscribe now

From here and there:

There’s a Clear Pattern to Who Trump Throws Under the Bus (Slate)

In Defense of Millennial Feminism (Slate)

No Country for Young Men

Happy reading!

xx Jill + Tamar

Nothing in my lifetime has changed journalism and writing as radically and rapidly as AI. The technology is in many ways exciting. But for creative fields, it’s also potentially devastating.

So I wanted to be transparent about how we here at Throughline use (and will use) AI.

Subscribe now

The first thing to know is that this newsletter is and will always be written by a human. I do not use AI to draft, edit, or otherwise touch the prose that you see here, and I expect other Throughline contributors to do the same.

To the best of my knowledge, I use real photographs to illustrate these posts. I do not use AI-generated images. The exception here is if an AI-generated image is included in the photo sites I use for images (Unsplash and Wiki Commons) and isn’t labeled as such. But I will not intentionally use AI-generated images here.

I do not use AI to create our social media content. I do use Canva, which has AI functionality that as far as I know I don’t utilize. I had a real person design Throughline’s logo and social media templates; I have a real person who helps me translate the posts I write into those social media templates (I also do it myself a lot of the time). I post Throughline-related tweets, YouTube videos, and Instagram and Facebook posts myself. The same holds true for my writing retreat business: A real person did the branding and design; a real person inputs the images and posts on Instagram.

I do not use AI to replace any of the human creation that makes writing and other creative work good and interesting.

I do occasionally use AI for research. But here is specifically what that means: I do not tell Chat GPT to “find the research I need for a post on young men and sports betting” — that is the kind of broad delegation of cognition that I am just not going to do. Instead, my primary use of AI for research is that I admittedly look at the little Google AI box that pops up when you do a Google search now. A handful of times I have used AI to try to find a very specific fact or study that numerous Google searches failed to turn up (this is only successful about 25% of the time). I would estimate that I’ve done this a grand total of roughly a dozen times in the past year.

And that’s it.

I am sure this makes me sound like a dinosaur. I’m ok with that. AI is a transformative technology and I have no doubt that a lot of good will come from it — but it also threatens to transform us into people who simply don’t use the brains in our heads as often as we should. I do not want to read words generated by AI, and I sure do not want them published anywhere near my name.

The human brain is a beautiful thing, and I’d prefer to not to contribute to my own atrophying. Human creation is a beautiful thing, and I don’t want to turn any more of it over to the robots.

xx Jill

Leave a comment

Share Throughline by Jill Filipovic

Welcome to The Week in Women, a rundown of this week’s major women’s rights stories from around the world.

Bank of American will pay $72.5 million to settle a lawsuit representing hundreds of Jeffrey Epstein sexual abuse survivors.

President Trump fired Pam Bondi as Attorney General over her handling of the Epstein files.

Pete Hegseth blocked the promotion of two women and two Black officers, spurring allegations of gender and racial discrimination.

The Supreme Court ruled that Colorado cannot ban conversion therapy for LGBTQ+ youth.

A Texas court dismissed a wrongful arrest lawsuit of a woman who was prosecuted for a self-managed abortion.

…and that’s it for now. Have a great week ahead!

xx Tamar + Jill

Donate Subscriptions

The Week in Women comes to you thanks to research from Tamar Eisen (she/her/hers), an advocate for reproductive justice and gender equity.

It is not exactly novel to point out that there is something very wrong with American men. They’re lonely. They’re aimless. They’re sexist.

“What about men?” can be an exhausting conversation, because in truth, women and girls have worse off on a whole variety of measures, from wealth to pay to basic rights (men’s rights to make choices about their own bodies in America don’t change when they cross state lines; women’s do). If you’re a regular reader of this newsletter, though, you know that I cover women’s issues to men’s at a ratio of roughly 100:1. And it’s also true that women and men don’t live in cordoned gender bubbles; we are each other’s partners, parents, children, siblings, neighbors, friends. Our lives are indelibly intertwined. Just as all of the discrimination and unfair treatment women face impacts men, too, when men suffer, many women do as well.

And I’ve been struck lately by just how determined our tech titans, corporate heads, and political leaders seem to be when it comes to exploiting — and eventually immiserating — young men.

Subscribe now

I read this Atlantic piece (gift link) by McKay Coppins with growing alarm, as Coppins, a practicing Mormon who believes he simply does not have an addictive personality and agrees to try out sports betting for this exact magazine assignment, finds himself pulled further and further into the world of online gambling. You really should read the piece yourself, but what struck me the most was less the usual hook ‘em tactics we’ve long seen from industries from gambling to cigarettes to junk food to social media, but how phone-based sports betting has taken something that was previously one of fairly extremely popular few male-coded social activities — watching sports — and made it insular and atomized.

Coppins writes about going to a real-life sportsbook with two friends:

We settled into recliners facing a wall of massive TV screens. I had expected the sportsbook lounge to be more glamorous, more fun, than the apps I’d been using—a classic sports bar on steroids. But the communal experience I craved was curiously absent. Everyone seemed to be paying attention to different games, or rooting for different sub-outcomes within the games. I tried to bond with some guys nearby who, like me, had money on the Chargers. But they were preoccupied with a prop bet, and barely noticed when Justin Herbert completed a perfect 27-yard touchdown pass to Ladd McConkey with 45 seconds left in the first half.

Gambling had made us all care much more about the games, but it had also atomized us—taking the last and purest expression of American monoculture and turning it into a hyper-individualized, every-man-for-himself portfolio of micro-bets.

And it really is every man for himself. Sports bettors are overwhelmingly male. Compulsive sports betters are almost universally male. “Neuroscientists have sought to explain this phenomenon,” Coppins writes. “Men are, on average, less psychologically affected by financial loss than women, and more prone to optimism (rational or otherwise) about their financial future; this combination naturally leads to more risk-taking. There are complicated brain-chemistry factors involved that have to do with testosterone, and dopaminergic systems, and kappa-opioid receptors, all of which seem to add up to a Jim Gaffigan joke about how men are morons compared with their wives. Whatever the reason, the gender split is undeniable: Men make up about 70 percent of sports bettors in America and, according to one study, 98 percent of online sports bettors who qualify as ‘problem gamblers.’”

Betting platforms know this. I see virtually no ads for sports betting platforms on my social media pages. My husband, who like me is not a gambler nor much of a sports-watcher, gets them with regularity. And when you watch ads for sports betting, they’re strongly male-coded. They know the audience they’re trying to bring in, and it’s young men — and particularly less-educated young men, who may not be as savvy or sophisticated, and who may be looking for an easy fix to their financial problems. Nearly half of men believe they could land a passenger jet with zero training. Of course a lot of them also believe that they can beat the house.

Subscribe now

Men are also significantly more likely than women to use generative AI, and male students significantly more likely to use it than female students. There are a few ways of interpreting this data. One working paper notes that “If this global disparity persists, it risks creating a self-reinforcing cycle: women’s underrepresentation in generative AI usage would lead to systems trained on data that inadequately sample women’s preferences and needs, ultimately widening existing gender disparities in technology adoption and economic opportunity.” From this vantage point, more men using AI than women affords those men a competitive edge, and trains AI toward a male default. That second concern — AI defaulting to how men experience the world — is a concern I share.

But I actually take the opposite view on the question of who is gaining (or maintaining) a competitive edge: By outsourcing more and more of their cognition and creativity to AI, men may be making themselves less functional, literally de-equipping themselves from competing in the future. They may be saving a little bit of time now (or, more likely, just taking on more and more tasks and they hand more over to the robot). But in the long run, they’re training themselves out of complex cognition and the critical, creative, and logical thinking skills that make for great human creation.

Read more

Happy Monday and welcome to Monday Reads!

From around the web:

The Manosphere Turns on Trump by Elaine Godfrey in the Atlantic

Exposing a global ‘rape academy’ by Saskya Vandoorne, Kara Fox, Niamh Kennedy, Eleanor Stubbs and Marco Chacon in CNN

Trump Has Detained the Parents of More Than 11,000 U.S. Citizen Kids by Jeff Ernsthausen, Mario Ariza, McKenzie Funk, Mica Rosenberg and Gabriel Sandoval in ProPublica

The Rapid and “Unprecedented” Collapse of American Democracy by Sasha Abramsky in the Nation

My Childhood in the Weather Underground by Zayd Ayers Dohrn in the New Yorker

Subscribe now

From here and there:

Social Media Is to Blame for Mental Health Harms, a Jury Finds

It Turns Out Running a Government is Hard

Happy reading!

xx Jill + Tamar

Happy Women’s History Month and Welcome to The Week in Women, a rundown of this week’s major women’s rights stories from around the world.

The Olympic Committee barred transgender athletes from participating in women’s sporting events.

Canterbury enthroned its first ever female archbishop in the church’s 1400 year history.

Women won a record 48% of seats in Denmark’s parliament, reaching near gender parity.

Senate Republicans launched an investigation into abortion pill manufacturers and called on the FDA to crack down on online sales of mifepristone.

A woman in Georgia arrested for murder charges in an alleged illegal abortion was released on bond.

…and that’s it for now. Have a great week ahead!

xx Tamar + Jill

Donate Subscriptions

The Week in Women comes to you thanks to research from Tamar Eisen (she/her/hers), an advocate for reproductive justice and gender equity.

On Wednesday, a jury found Meta and YouTube liable for the mental health harms experienced by a young woman who says she was addicted to their products. The $6 million in damages is small given the size and profitability of these companies, but this is just one case. Its success virtually guarantees that there will be many more.

The truth is that this was a very hard case to prove, and I think it’s unlikely that the jury made their decision based only on the facts in evidence. The plaintiff, a young woman who started using social media when she was just 6, had a tumultuous life, something Meta’s lawyers pointed to in arguing that it was impossible to claim their product was the determinative cause of her mental health issues. The research on social media and mental health is still emerging, but it’s not as clearly and nearly universally harmful as, say, cigarettes. I suspect that Meta and YouTube went into this case believing they would easily win.

Subscribe now

They did not read the room.

This decision is as much about the specific life of this young woman as it is a growing social consensus that these companies have too much power and are wielding it to our collective detriment. At trial, the plaintiffs presented evidence that Meta and YouTube designed their products to be addictive — to keep users infinitely scrolling and compulsively clicking — and knew that their products were harmful, especially to young people. And there is significant evidence of this, including internal Meta emails and discussions.

We’ve spent 20 years running an almost totally unfettered social experiment on the public. The potential harms really were not clear, at least in the beginning. But social media companies seem to have known well before the rest of us that their products weren’t opening up new worlds for their users, but keeping them from living in the real one — tethering them to their devices, affirming their worst impulses. The didn’t design their products to give girls body dysmorphia or pitch boys down the misogynist rabbit hole of the manosphere anymore than Round-Up was designed to give people cancer, but they did design their products to keep users of all ages scrolling and scrolling and scrolling and watching and watching and watching — and when they learned that what they were scrolling through and watching was doing enormous damage, they largely shrugged. Social media isn’t the same as cigarettes, but it’s also true that tobacco companies didn’t design their products to kill people. When they realized they did — long before the general public — they had a similar reaction as these social media companies: The profits matter more. And they offered a similar defense: Don’t blame us for your lack of self control; it’s every individual’s personal responsibility to make healthy choices.

Subscribe now

In the wake of the Meta/YouTube lawsuit, I keep hearing that phrase, “personal responsibility.” The whole point, though, is that these companies designed their products to override one’s ability to exercise personal responsibility. Some of the smartest people in the world have toiled for years to keep your attention glued on Meta and YouTube. Of course you can close the app. But most of us, I would guess, have had the experience of thinking “I should close this app” only to look up 30 minutes later and realize we’ve been mindlessly scrolling away. That isn’t a personal failure; that is by design. And most of us are not children who have under-developed abilities to regulate our own impulses.

Frankly, I would like to see more companies held accountable for the harms they cause in pursuit of profit (ideally I’d like our government to impose reasonable restrictions and guardrails, but I’m not holding my breath on that). The betting apps that put a little casino in every user’s pocket, and have caused a spike in debt and personal bankruptcies particularly among young men? I would love to see what a legal discovery process might find about their strategies for drawing in new users and keeping them engaged. The big food companies that spend millions to figure out the exact taste and texture points that will keep consumers eating endless — pleased but not quite satiated, always wanting more — and that spend any more millions figuring out what kids crave and then advertising to them? They absolutely deserve to answer for their actions in court.

Subscribe now

We can quibble over the definition of the word “addiction,” but these companies, like cigarette makers, all intentionally seek to create products that users will consume compulsively — products that users will have a very hard time saying no to. These companies have invested hundreds of millions of dollars to figure out how to get more of their food in your mouth (and your kids’ mouths), and more of your time on their apps (and more of your kids’ time). Then they have the audacity to tell you it’s a personal failing when their carefully-honed strategies work.

Others are asking, “where are the parents?” And that’s a good question. Parents should absolutely keep smartphones and tablets out of their kids’ hands for as long as possible. It is absolutely an abdication of parental responsibility to let a six-year-old scroll freely on YouTube or give an Instagram account to a nine-year-old.

But some parents don’t do their jobs. Some parents try really hard to do their jobs but are busy or overwhelmed or simply imperfect. Others are utterly neglectful. Others, like of a child who started using social media 14 years ago, did not have the same information about social media’s potential harms as we have today. But their kids shouldn’t suffer additionally because social media companies can make more money drawing in the eyeballs and attention of the country’s most vulnerable children. Good parents also don’t buy their kids cigarettes. But one of the outcomes of the tobacco litigation of the 1990s was the tobacco companies were barred from advertising to kids — something I would hope we can all agree was righteous and right.

Some have raised free speech questions about this lawsuit, and I do think it’s worth pausing any time we’re potentially constraining speech and expression. But I’m also not convinced that’s what is happening here. This lawsuit wasn’t specifically about the content on Meta or YouTube, although as private companies they are under no obligation to host whatever content people post (and they do not do so). It was about the algorithm, the inner workings behind the machine. I am not convinced that design features (infinite scroll) are “speech” in any meaningful way. And the truth is that these companies make content moderation decisions all the time. OnlyFans is (in theory) not available to minors. Instagram is not a platform that features torture videos or explicit porn. I’m sympathetic to free speech concerns when it comes to social media bans and government regulations, but in social media product liability and personal injury cases, the free speech case feels pretty half-baked.

I think product liability and personal injury lawsuits are really imperfect vehicles through which to regulate big companies, whether it’s Big Tobacco, Big Food, or Big Tech. But under-regulation at the federal level, and elected politicians who frankly wouldn’t know how to wisely regulate Big Tech even if they had the desire to, has left the public with few options. And those who defend Big Tech seem to argue that the answer is… do nothing. Take personal responsibility. Leave it to the parents. We’ve tried that. It’s been a disaster. Don’t like the results of this case? Come up with something better — because the status quo is not working, and the public is using whatever tools are out their disposal to fight back.

xx Jill

Share

Leave a comment

Starting this week, ICE will be deployed to US airports to assist (“assist”) an overworked and under-staffed TSA. It’s unclear how in the world ICE agents are going to be help, given that they aren’t trained in, say, reading x-ray machines or conducting security searches; they are barely trained in being ICE agents. This is after ICE agents have killed several people on America’s streets. It is after a jet crashed into a firetruck and killed both pilots at New York’s LaGuardia Airport. It is after hours-long security lines have snaked through some of America’s busiest air travel hubs. It is after those hours-long security lines delayed investigators getting to the LaGuardia crash site — they had to call and “beg” to be let through.

Do you feel safer? Is America greater yet?

Share

The TSA slowdowns are because of the ongoing partial government shutdown. Democrats are demanding more accountability for ICE, as they should. Republicans don’t want that. Republicans currently control the House, the Senate, and the White House. The fact that 50,000 TSA employees have been working without pay since mid-February, and that hundreds are quitting or not showing up at work in response, is a problem the GOP could solve tomorrow — it would just require them creating some accountability mechanisms for their over-funded under-trained out-of-control pet agency.

ICE receives more funding than any other law enforcement agency, by many magnitudes. The fact that ICE agents are free, paid, and available to show up at American airports to kinda-sorta-not-really do TSA’s job suggests that maybe the agency doesn’t need quite the largesse it currently enjoys.

Share

This week, a judge also ruled that the federal government must release the deposition tapes of two very young DOGE employees, and that concerns about reputational harm were not sufficient to keep the tapes sealed. It is embarrassing, for sure, that these young and arrogant staffers had no idea what they were doing, and had to admit under oath that they did widespread damage while saving the government no money. Their reputations, I would argue, deserve to be damaged.

DOGE is the Trump administration in a nutshell.

Read more

Happy Monday and welcome to Monday Reads!

From around the web:

The women leading the farmworker movement won’t let it be defined by Cesar Chavez by Chabeli Carrazana, Shefali Luthra, and Marissa Martinez in the 19th

How Hospitals Helped Erode Reproductive Rights by Shoshana Walter in the Marshall Project

One Weird Trick for Being a Better Man by Kate Manne in More to Hate (Substack)

The Pentagon Went to War with Anthropic. What’s Really at Stake? by Gideon Lewis-Kraus in the New Yorker

From Foreign Correspondent to Uber Driver by Steve Scherer in the Nation

The Death of Millennial Feminism by Helen Lewis in the Atlantic

Subscribe now

From here and there:

Cesar Chavez and the Lie of Feminine Power

The Emptiness of Happy Endings

Happy reading!

xx Jill + Tamar

Happy Women’s History Month and Welcome to The Week in Women, a rundown of this week’s major women’s rights stories from around the world.

Farm labor leader César Chávez was accused of sexually abusing girls for years, including fellow activist, Dolores Huerta.

The Faroe Islands passed a law allowing abortion up to 12 weeks, reversing a near total ban that was one of the strictest in Europe.

The US Department of Health announced an investigation into 13 states that require health insurance plans to cover abortion.

The Trump Administration is withholding family planning funds from states, which may cause millions of Americans to lose access to birth control by the end of the month.

FIFA, the world soccer governing body, mandated a woman coach for women’s competitions.

A woman was charged with attempted murder under Georgia’s restrictive abortion law.

A judge ruled that RFK Jr. overstepped by ending federal funding to hospitals providing gender affirming care.

…and that’s it for now. Have a great week ahead!

xx Tamar + Jill

Donate Subscriptions

The Week in Women comes to you thanks to research from Tamar Eisen (she/her/hers), an advocate for reproductive justice and gender equity.

The story is now a familiar one: Famous and beloved man was, it turns out, a rapist and misogynist. No one knew; everyone knew. Cue big public conversation about what it means for that man’s work and legacy. “People are complicated,” someone will write. “He was a monster and there’s nothing complicated about that,” will come the retort. This time, the man is Cesar Chavez; the work is the farm labor movement. The story is a horror: Raping children, raping his most famous collaborator Dolores Huerta — who became pregnant, twice, and placed her children to be raised in other families.

Huerta’s statement and the write-up of her story are both worth a read. She makes the point that it wasn’t just (“just”) the sexual violence that was the problem; it was a pervasive culture of misogyny that infused every aspect of the organization, and helped to build the wall of silence around Chavez’s abuses.

Subscribe now

This part of the Times write-up of her story particularly struck me:

Ms. Huerta said she viewed Mr. Chavez as a contradictory figure when it came to women. He believed in promoting them, she said, but only so far.

Women ran the credit union, the clinic, the field offices. They were trusted with the operational machinery of the movement. But making the decisions that shaped the union’s direction, she said, remained out of reach. “Cesar believed in promoting women as leadership, not at the policy level, but at the work level,” she said.

It was, she suggested, a reflection of something deeper. “Women are not seen as human beings. We’re just seen as sex objects. I think it’s an illness.”

This section struck me because it sounded so familiar — not just about various movements, but about traditional family life and the lies we tell ourselves about power.

I cannot tell you how many times I’ve heard people reframe women’s oppression as some sort of “real” but unrecognized power. Most of the time this comes when talking about women who are stay-at-home wives and mothers in traditional families. The claim, inevitably, is that Dad may be the one with the paycheck, but Mom is really in charge: She makes decisions for the family, is its emotional center, is the Chief Operating Officer. “She’s the boss!” husbands smirk. My mom was the one who was really in charge, adult children assure themselves.

It’s bullshit. And this insistence on eclipsing where real power lies and how real power manifests is precisely why men like Chavez got away with horrific crimes, and with many smaller indignities and acts of misogyny. This denial of small-time interpersonal misogyny is how we get denials of horrific abuses — a good man would never believe himself to be more powerful than his wife; a good man would never harm the girls and women around him; being honest about what we see in front of us would create a fissure in a good family, bring down a good movement.

Read more

The internet’s main character this week is writer Lindy West, whose new memoir Adult Braces is about being coerced into a polyamorous relationship by a chaotic partner but then going on a journey of personal discovery (solo US road trip) and finding that, actually, being in a romantic triad with her husband and his girlfriend works surprisingly well and makes her pretty happy. She did an interview with the New York Times that went quickly viral, mostly because her relationship did not, in fact, come across as particularly happy, fulfilling, or personally empowering. That piece is worth a read if you haven’t seen it yet.

There are obviously more than a few red flags waving in West’s telling of her relationship(s); her husband very much does not seem on the level, to put it mildly. But it’s also the case that none of us are inside of West’s marriage, and none of us — not even West — see the whole picture. I should also say here that I am a Lindy West fan: I think she’s funny and perceptive, I think her work very much changed American culture for the better, and I always read her with delight and respect. I can also imagine just how invasive and destabilizing it must feel to have the internet opining on your marriage and intimate choices, even if you have chosen to put the story of your marriage and intimate choices in the public square, and even if you have been — as Lindy has been, as I have been — a person who has for decades publicly criticized the semi-private lives of public figures, because the personal is political and so on. I think there is good reason to criticize men who dress up their desires for non-monogamy in the language of feminist anti-racist progressivism, when it’s really just about getting women to do stuff those women really don’t seem like they want to do. I think the feminist movement is long overdue for a critique of the “consent” model of sex and relationships, where ethical boundaries are not drawn according to any moral code beyond request and permission. I think we’re even longer overdue for questioning whether agency and personal choice are useful frameworks for analyzing the interpersonal relationships molded by sex and sexism.

But also: The villain / victim narrative seems far too simple here. We don’t have to believe that West’s claims of personal happiness are objectively and permanently true to see that they are the story of her life right now — and what more do we really know?

Subscribe now

And so I have very little interest in (publicly) psychoanalyzing West or opining on polyamory or her relationship; you can find plenty of that elsewhere. West is a person, not an internet figure to be picked apart. Like I said, I like and respect her; I’m troubled by the treatment of her as more character than human, an avatar for something else (the failures of 2010s feminism?). Much of the conversation just feels mean, and I feel for her in this moment.

I’m more interested in the stories we tell about our lives: the pressure to package our lows into a narrative of past pain transcended by personal and emotional leveling-up; the difficulty and freedom in realizing we’re often in the good parts and the hard parts all at once. I’m interested in the truth that there is no single truth — that the story of all of our lives is less in what actually happened than in the writing and re-writing.

Subscribe now

In this, I think West’s memoir may wind up more useful in hindsight than in the moment: I am curious to see how this story gets re-written in later years. This memoir comes nearly a decade after West’s runaway hit Shrill, which is all about her rejection of the male gaze, her work to feel confident in a larger body, and her repudiation of traditional stories about how women should be and how women’s bodies should look. In Adult Braces, we learn that the confidence infusing Shrill wasn’t quite so unshakeable. Getting together with Aham, her now-husband, felt affirming in part because West had bought into the story that bigger women would never draw in attractive men men; marrying Aham in a big celebratory wedding felt affirming because the brides we see in magazine spreads of big celebratory weddings are usually skinny. Through it all, though, West never doubted that she deserved life-changing love.

The truth, in West’s telling now, is that insecurity plagued her relationship, and that she clung tightly to Aham even when she was being manipulated and profoundly emotionally neglected in part because of her fears that no one else would love her. Adult Braces is an edit to the Lindy we meet in Shrill, whose insecurities had been conquered.

And of course it is. The stories we tell about ourselves always evolve. We shift and change, but we are rarely so fully reborn as to permanently escape old habits and forget old beliefs. The difference is that most of us don’t commit a version of our previous selves to paper the public can buy on Amazon.

Elizabeth Gilbert is another memoirist I like, whose own narratives have also proven less permanent than the ink they’re printed on. Her breakthrough hit was Eat, Pray, Love, which begins with her escaping a dysfunctional marriage to eat her way through Italy, meditate her way through India, and eventually find herself in Bali — and ends with her meeting a Brazilian hottie who she subsequently marries to the tune of Harvest Moon. First-chapter Elizabeth is impulsive, love-chasing, emotionally strung out. End-of-book Elizabeth is fully realized, contented, in balance.

Except, of course, she wasn’t. That marriage ended, too; she fell in love with her best friend who was dying of cancer, and “dysfunctional” doesn’t even begin to do their relationship justice (there were benders and relapses and so many drugs and eventually Gilbert tries to murder her dying girlfriend). And then, on the other side (and printed on the pages of a new book), a new narrative, one about the dissonance between her private life and her public one; sobriety and a 12-step program for sex addiction; a Botox-free face and the shaved head of a monk.

I once was lost, but now I’m found — these are the stories we hear. They’re the stories we tell, and tell again. They’re usually true, even when, later, we realize we were lying.

Subscribe now

I actually think there’s something quite beautiful about this. The human capacity to change, and also to believe we’ve changed perhaps more profoundly than we have, is part of what makes us good, or at least interesting.

I just wish there wasn’t the pressure — culturally, in the publishing world, in our own minds — to wrap our stories up with a neat and satisfying conclusion. I wish I once was lost, I am still wandering was an ok place to be, an ending a reader might accept.

Subscribe now

I am fresh off of a week of teaching a writing retreat in Kenya, and in my writing classes, there are always questions not just of how to end a story, but when to tell a story. Does the story need resolution? Do you need space from difficult events before writing about them? How far away do we have to be in order to share a story’s truest telling? I often use the example of your first big relationship and first really painful breakup: The story of that relationship will be very different five minutes after the breakup, five weeks after the breakup, and five years after the breakup. The events won’t change, but you will. Your memory of them will. Your story of what they mean will. All of those stories will be true, even if they conflict.

One question is how your write that story. Another question is when you write it.

Some of the pieces I’m reading about West suggest that perhaps she shouldn’t have written this book, at least not now, because she is still in the middle of this story. And that critique seems fair, not just to protect her audience, but to protect her: The stories we tell are powerful, and when we tell them to the world, we may also commit to them more deeply, and that might actually be bad for us. They may suggest to readers that maladaptive behaviors are find and normal, which is bad for society.

But also: We rarely truly find absolution. The end of the story is almost never really the end. So what if we write in the middle?

Committing your story to a journal is of course a different thing than publishing it, which suggests some lesson not just learned but worth sharing with a broader audience. Criticizing the relationship of someone who chooses to publish a memoir about their relationship is fair game. But better questions might be: Why are we so hungry for resolution and a happier-by-the-end narrator? Would we be better at processing and understanding our own individual stories if our cultural storytellers weren’t so pressured to write resolution where there may be none, and to claim personal evolution when reality feels more like churning?

Wouldn’t it be more interesting, and certainly more honest, if we resisted the urge for a neat narrative arc that concludes with our hero walking into the sunshine and admitted, instead, that sometimes we’re writing from inside the dark of the woods?

xx Jill

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Happy Monday and welcome to Monday Reads!

From around the web:

The Women Leaving the New Right by Sam Adler-Bell in New York Magazine

MAGA’s Baby Boom and Me by Inae Oh in Mother Jones

The President of the United States is afraid by Heather Delaney Reese on Substack

They Didn’t Want to Have C-Sections. A Judge Would Decide How They Gave Birth. by Amy Yurkanin in ProPublica

Trump Has Brought American Paramilitary Violence Home by Caleb Brennan in the New Republic

Gen Z Men Will Never Be Breadwinners by Katie Jagielnicka in The Noösphere (Substack)

Subscribe now

From here and there:

For Millennials Like Me, the Iran War Feels Horribly Familiar

The Lesson From the McDonald’s CEO Who Couldn’t Eat His Own Burger

Happy reading!

xx Jill + Tamar

Happy Women’s History Month and Welcome to The Week in Women, a rundown of this week’s major women’s rights stories from around the world.

Australia granted asylum to seven members of Iran’s women’s soccer team, after Iran labeled them as “traitors” for not singing the national anthem.

The Alexander brothers, top real estate brokers in NYC, were convicted of sex trafficking dozens of women over the course of decades.

Uber launched a feature to allow both women riders and drivers be matched with other women, in an effort to increase women’s safety.

The US cast the only “no” vote on a landmark gender equality agreement at the UN’s Commission on the Status of Women.

India’s top court rejected a petition seeking menstrual leave for working women and female students.

Representative Tony Gonzales dropped his reelection bid as the House began an investigation into his affair with an aide who later died by suicide.

…and that’s it for now. Have a great week ahead!

xx Tamar + Jill

Donate Subscriptions

The Week in Women comes to you thanks to research from Tamar Eisen (she/her/hers), an advocate for reproductive justice and gender equity.

It was the bite heard round the world: McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski posted a video to Instagram of him trying his company’s new offering, the Big Arch, an ultra-processed sandwich he aptly described as “the product.” He was not lovin’ it. The bite was barely a bite — more of a tentative nibble. “That is so good,” he said — but it did not look so good.

Subscribe now

@chrisk_mcd

Chris Kempczinski on Instagram: "The Big Arch might be my new g…

The video went viral. Other fast food companies jumped in, showing their CEOs enthusiastically chowing down on their own “products.” But the McDonald’s moment is an informative one, and a good reminder: The very wealthy corporate leaders who sell you things like McDonald’s hamburgers are not eating that stuff themselves The very wealthy tech entrepreneurs who hawk social media apps and AI tools are not giving their own kids unlimited time online. There is an entire class of hyper-elite who are selling you stuff they know is terrible. The McDonald’s CEO just made it obvious.

Read more

Happy Monday and welcome to Monday Reads!

From around the web:

Inside the Latest, and Scariest, Iteration of America’s Endless Abortion Wars by Becca Andrews in Mother Jones

The ‘Crazy’ Plot to Release the Epstein Files by Sarah Fitzpatrick in the Atlantic

Choosing to Become a Single Mom by Choice by Anna Louie Sussman in the Cut

How ICE Enforcement Is Driving Black Domestic Workers Out of Public Spaces by Jenn Stowe in Ms. Magazine

Never eat with women by Anand Giridharadas in The Ink (Substack)

Love in the Time of A.I. Companions by Anna Wiener in the New Yorker

Subscribe now

From here and there:

Texas’ Democratic Primary Is About a Lot More Than Jasmine Crockett versus James Talarico (Slate)

Why Did Donald Trump Start a War With Iran?

Happy reading!

xx Jill + Tamar

Welcome to The Week in Women, a rundown of this week’s major women’s rights stories from around the world.

An airstrike hit a girls elementary school in Iran, killing over 100 children.

Yanar Mohammed, a prominent women’s rights activist in Iraq, was gunned down and killed outside her home.

The Supreme Court ruled to temporarily block California policies that bar teachers from outing transgender students to their parents.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission said that federal agencies can bar employees from using bathrooms that match their gender identity.

Texas Representative Tony Gonzalez admitted to having an affair with a former aide who later died by suicide, following allegations that he coerced her into a sexual relationship.

The New York Attorney General ordered NYU Langone Hospital to resume providing gender affirming care to transgender minors.

…and that’s it for now. Have a great week ahead!

xx Tamar + Jill

Donate Subscriptions

The Week in Women comes to you thanks to research from Tamar Eisen (she/her/hers), an advocate for reproductive justice and gender equity.