Can We Stop Negging Our Husbands?

PLUS: How to Reconcile Trans Rights With Women's Rights

April 2022

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“Mortimer, Are You Listening?” Cartoon by Ervine Metzl

In her new book, Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage, Havrilesky also refers to Bill as “snoring heap of meat,” when she is not minutely ticking off his annoying habits. On these, she is franker than Madame Bovary ever allowed herself to be, even in her own thoughts. When Bill sneezes, for example,

no matter how far away he is, it’s like a blast from an air horn aimed at your face. Somehow there are two notes involved, a screechy high one and a shouty low one. Every sneeze is an emergency. I don’t think I’ve ever not said ‘Jesus Christ’ out loud upon hearing one.

Or when Bill holds forth on a topic that interests him,

he quickly wilts before my eyes into a cursed academic, a cross between a lonely nerd speaking some archaic language only five other people on earth understand and a haunted ice cream man, circling his truck through the neighborhood in the dead of winter, searching for children.

What is the point of Havrilesky subjecting her husband to such public humiliation (as opposed to simply, and mercifully, divorcing him)? As the book title suggests, Havrilesky sees herself as something of a guru on marriage. She assumes that her negative feelings about her spouse are universal to all married couples — in the way that Tolstoy famously, and wrongly, observed that “all happy families are alike.”

I see Bill with a scorching clarity that pains me. This is why surviving a marriage requires turning down the volume on your spouse so you can barely hear what they’re saying.

Her research backs her up, if asking friends what they think can count as research:

‘Everyone is unhappy in their marriages,’ a divorced friend once told me. ‘You just don’t realize it until you’re divorced, and then other divorced people finally tell you the truth.’

Thus, Havrilesky believes she is doing something courageous by being openly and mercilessly cruel towards someone whom she expects (still) to spend the rest of her life with. And if you are shocked by this cruelty, you are likely “solemn and moralistic,” or naively “fearful … that a married person could never — should never — land in a gray area,” or you simply don’t get that this is humor, people: “Trying to tolerate the same flawed person until you’re dead is funny!”

If Havrilesky’s ha-ha-not-really confessional were just that, an opportunity for the reader to rubberneck a gory marital crash, we might even be grateful to her for writing an inadvertent manual on How Not To Be Married. But what has been strange about the reaction to the book (and this explosive excerpt in the New York Times, published last Christmas Eve, of all dates) is the positive feedback she’s received.

Writing in the New Yorker, reviewer Becca Rothfeld acknowledges Havrilesky’s is not an “especially likable” narrator. She also notes that Havrilesky’s bile is not singularly directed at hapless Bill, but also towards her own daughters, and — maybe most unconscionably — her stepson: When she first meets the unfortunate 9-year-old baggage from a previous marriage, Havrilesky’s immediate reaction is: “Here is a human who will be in my life forever and ever. It made me feel heavy, like I should try to sneak out the back door and maybe go have a drink somewhere.”

Rothfeld writes,

Unsure of what to say to each other, she and Bill’s son take to playing game after game of Monopoly, but Havrilesky is so incorrigibly competitive that she devastates the child, defeating him over and over. ‘Let the kid win, stupid,’ she tells herself, yet she cannot bring herself to concede.

But, in the end, it’s humor everyone! The reviewer concludes,

Foreverland displays a formidable emotional intelligence despite its chatty tone—and because, in part, of its extravagant rhetoric. How could an ordeal as insane and heroic as marriage merit anything less than the most baroque emotions, and how could anyone withstand another person for decades without finding much to dislike? If Havrilesky’s descriptions of marital exasperation are extreme, it is because choosing to remain in close quarters with another person for a lifetime is extreme.

Indeed! And of course we can assume that Rothfeld would offer similar praise to a memoir told in this vein from a husband’s point of view. Let me try my hand at a what that might sound like, adapting from Havrilesky’s own words.

After 15 years of marriage, you start to see your mate clearly, free of your own projections and misperceptions. This is not necessarily a good thing.

When encountering my wife, Heather, in our shared habitat, I sometimes experience her as a heavy, obstinate mule, always braying at me to pick up my things. “Who left this here?” she demands, as if this was a mystery needing the skills of an Inspector Poirot to solve (and a far cry from the cute bimbo act she put on when we were dating).

This is not an illusion; it’s clarity. Until Heather has gone through the entire house yelling at everyone for things they’ve left lying around, there can be no morning coffee. By the time I finally get to pour myself a cup, she is still going at me. Then she begins to hold forth on the day’s schedule — who’s doing drop off, what I need to pick up from the store, whose turn it is to unload the dishwasher and sort the laundry, etc. etc. — and she quickly wilts before my eyes into a cursed shrew, a cross between a lonely despot in need of more flunkies and a haunted former screen siren, wondering why I no longer find her deflated breasts and double-wide hips as intoxicating as I did twenty years ago when she still had a presentable ass. I see Heather with a scorching clarity that pains me.

Hmm, I see the ladies aren’t laughing quite so hard. Even if I were to throw in the odd, condescending compliment here and there — as Havrilesky does — it would simply sound like gaslighting. Especially when the rare bit of appreciation is followed by another litany of insults. Again, Havrilesky:

I can almost get away with being this mean about him because he has remained the same amount of smart and kind and extremely attractive that he was when I met him 17 years ago. This is just how it feels to be doomed to live and eat and sleep next to the same person until you’re dead.

So if we wouldn’t tolerate this kind of writing from a man, why do so many accept it — applaud it! — when it’s done by a woman?

Cartoon by Charles Jaffé

PERHAPS IT’S BECAUSE — even after nearly a half century of modern feminism — the idea that men still rule over us remains a default setting for many women, no matter how kind, thoughtful, supportive, and egalitarian their partners might actually be. This way of thinking was occasionally exploited in the #MeToo era: For all the heartening cases of past monstrous acts of male behavior being brought to justice, others used the opportunity to issue social death penalties to men guilty of mere slights, gaffes, and boorishness.

It created (or revived) an atmosphere of no-matter-what-the-man-does-he-is-wrong, and provided convenient cover for the more nightmarish amongst us to claim victimhood — even while bashing our “oppressors” with our metaphorical rolling pins. It reminds me of the time I was mugged, but managed to flag down a police cruiser only minutes later. I hopped in the car and we tracked down my mugger in the next block. As one of the police officers handcuffed him, the man began bashing his own head on the hood of the cruiser, yelling “Police brutality! Look! Police brutality!” Once cuffed, the officer stood back and watched with bemusement as the man continued to punish himself. A small crowd gathered and was equally entertained until the mugger finally stopped and meekly got in the back seat.

Heather Havrilesky is not by any means alone in her contempt for her husband coupled with a raging, narcissistic view of herself as victim — but her book maybe the most perfect expression of this type of female thinking. It’s certainly not the lesson she wants you to draw from it. Her message, it seems, is that everyone must be as miserable and poisonous as herself. You go, girl.

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WITH CONTROVERSY RAGING over UPenn swimmer and transfemale Lia Thomas besting competitors in women’s freestyle championships, I thought it would be timely to re-up attention to Dr. Carole Hooven’s excellent book, T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us. Dr. Hooven, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, reveals the far-reaching effects of testosterone on gender, sex, sports, relationships, and many more aspects of our everyday lives. One of her points relating to sports: Any transfemale who has gone through adolescence as a male will have a slam-dunk, irreversible advantage over a biological female because of the effect of “T” in developing strength, muscles, endurance, etc. during this critical growth period.

To make a competition fair from a biological standpoint, a boy aspiring to compete against women one day would have to have his development arrested before he hit puberty — much like a 16th-18th-century castrato, or choirboy who was castrated by the Catholic church to keep his voice permanently at a pleasingly high pitch. (This intervention was usually done around the age of 9 by a barber using a very crude-looking iron-clamp-cum-garden-shear). Today, boys speculating they might be girls are offered the modern version of the barber’s tool, in the form of “puberty-blockers.”

But Lia Thomas, who up until 2019 swam for UPenn’s men’s team, underwent no such pre-pubescent transformation, as this recent photo below suggests. Aside from a longer hairstyle and a smooth, all-over-shave, Lia has made no further efforts to transform herself into a biological female (except for belated hormone replacement therapy). She still packs the “junk” of her former male identity, including the all-important, T-producing testes. In a musical contest, she would be unable to compete as a soprano. So why is it seen as prejudice — and not an acknowledgment of biological advantage — when women protest her inclusion as a basso in the athletic equivalent of a soprano section?

For a thoughtful, compassionate, and wise meditation on trans-rights and extremism, one of my favorite mansplainers, Jonathan Rauch, has written this essay. Rauch was a pioneer in the fight for gay marriage, and gay rights in general. Then, as now, he notes how “today's radical gender ideologues are harming the transgender community the same way left-leaning activists harmed the gay and lesbian rights movement in the early 1990s.”

And: Watch this short take of Dr. Carole Hooven discussing the issue with me on a previous episode of the Femsplainers podcast. Click on the button below for the full interview.

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Emerald Yevhenia was a successful entrepreneur — owner of a jewelry business and two clubs. Now she is a combat officer of the Special Operations Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, according to this bio.

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Have a happy April everyone and we will see you again in May!