Women
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What Women Want January 28, 2025
A few days ago, Vice President Vance argued that the “benchmark of national success is not our GDP number or stock market but whether people feel they can raise thriving and healthy families in our country.” He’s got the right philosophy, and more of...
Women in Trouble January 23, 2025
The first film David Lynch ever saw, when he was six years old, was a 1952 melodrama by the director Henry King called Wait Till the Sun Shines, Nellie. Shot in bright orange candlelight and deep nocturnal blues, it offers a prehistory for the kind o...
The End of the End of Men January 17, 2025
The patriarchy died in its sleep sometime during Obama’s first term. Or so goes the argument of The End of Men, a 2012 polemic that’s being revisited in the wake of the election. As Donald Trump aggressively courted young men on his way to victory, t...
Two Dad Memoirs and the End of Fatherhood January 16, 2025
In 2005 I married a man whose detailed thoughts about parenting, childcare and family life I knew very little about. We’d agreed that we wanted children—or, rather, I’d said I wanted a large family and he’d said, “well maybe not too large,” and we’d ...
Mr. Lonely January 14, 2025
When asked in 2023 what “men want in women,” the notorious influencer, professional kickboxer, and accused human trafficker Andrew Tate gave a predictable answer: “No one’s going to respect the man who’s with an ultra-promiscuous woman. No one is goi...
Bob Dylan Is Having a Moment. His No. 1 Hater Is Ready. January 13, 2025
At a recent showing of “A Complete Unknown,” the new Bob Dylan biopic, a cheerful group of young women settled in to watch the delicately handsome Timothée Chalamet impersonate the singer.They barely noticed the 80-year-old man sitting next to them, ...
Elizabeth Strout’s Plunge Into Sentimentality January 10, 2025
Early in Tell Me Everything, Elizabeth Strout’s latest novel, the retired teacher Olive Kitteridge reads all of the memoirs by Lucy Barton, a New York City writer who arrived in her coastal Maine town during the pandemic. At Olive’s request, an acqua...
Bang the World January 08, 2025
One in a thousand people has six toes or fingers. Twenty-six percent of young people lack a gag reflex. And about two in seven dudes, according to my own research as a participant observer, will say something skeevy about women in exclusively male co...
The New York City Subway Is a Madhouse. And a Miracle. January 07, 2025
I travel frequently between Los Angeles and New York City, often taking a redeye flight into JFK. The final leg of this journey is nearly always the subway, specifically the A train, which runs the longest subway route in the city, spanning 31 miles ...
Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone December 09, 2024
Over the past two decades, literary fiction has become a largely female pursuit. Novels are increasingly written by women and read by women. In 2004, about half the authors on the New York Times fiction best-seller list were women and about half men;...
Pretty Women December 09, 2024
Beauty’s only skin deep. But as the humorist and playwright Jean Kerr sagely pointed out, skin deep is plenty deep enough: “What do you want: an adorable pancreas?”In Perfection: 400 Years of Women’s Quest for Beauty, British historian Margarette Lin...
'Hardly Working' Brews Up Millennial Malaise December 05, 2024
On the occasion I decide to spend $4.50 on a drip coffee from an artisanal shop, the barista serving me is usually a bubbly woman with a septum piercing and a tasteful forearm tattoo—or, if male, a pasty environmentalist with flabby arms. Obedient an...
Whose Weil? December 04, 2024
During the First World War, a six-year-old Simone Weil learned that soldiers on the Western Front were not rationed sugar, so she refused to eat it until conditions improved. But whereas most leave such zealous empathy in childhood, Weil’s commitment...
Break the Sex Strike December 03, 2024
In the wake of Donald Trump’s re-election, American women horrified by the prospect of lost reproductive rights and the apparent triumph of hegemonic masculinity have taken to social media to announce their intention to swear off men. “All I have to ...
The Election Story Nobody Is Talking About November 28, 2024
Last year, I published a book that diagnosed a major problem in society, and offered a solution. The problem is growing numbers of young women choosing to forgo or delay marriage and motherhood, in favor of “living their best lives” as atomized caree...
The Only Thing Men Are Allowed to Be November 27, 2024
Hello and welcome to Many Such Cases.I’ve been firing off essay after essay on here with more to come, and it has been paying off. I am learning, for better or worse, that conversations about the animosity between genders right now are resonating wit...
Life Lessons From My Correspondence with Lee McCarthy November 22, 2024
Like many middle-aged women I know, I spent my summer parsing the rallying calls of personhood and artmaking ringing out from the new roster of divorce books—books like All Fours by Miranda July, Liars by Sarah Manguso, and Splinters by Leslie Jamiso...
A Novel of India’s Identity Crisis November 22, 2024
In 2011, an anti-corruption activist began a hunger strike in Delhi, inspiring protests all over the country to pressure the central government into accountability. The following year, a twenty-three-year-old woman was raped and murdered by several m...
James Baldwin’s Fraught Relationship With His Stepfather November 21, 2024
Baldwin describes how his father’s illness led to him “hating and fearing every living soul including his children who had betrayed him, too, by reaching towards the world which had despised him.” As my father’s illness took over his brain, he would ...
Reclaiming Ted Hughes November 19, 2024
Before preparing this essay, I began where many Americans seem hesitant to tread: with the poetry. I read and reread every poem I could find by Ted Hughes, as well as the slender oeuvre of Sylvia Plath, taking notes and contemplating both deeply. I r...
Meet the Women with AI Boyfriends November 18, 2024
When Karolina Pomian, 28, met her boyfriend, she had sworn off men. A nightmare date in college had left her fearful for her safety. But she got chatting to a guy online, and felt irresistibly drawn to him, eventually getting to the point where she w...
Everyone Still Wants to Believe in Mike Tyson November 18, 2024
Mike Tyson stands alone in an empty ring, throwing punches at ghosts. The crowd screams his name, but he doesn't hear them anymore. At fifty-eight, his muscles still ripple beneath flabby, weathered skin, but the speed and movement that actually made...
The Gender War Wants to Divide You November 15, 2024
“Your body, my choice. Forever.”It’s a line intended to infuriate, and it did. It’s a line that the men who said it — Nick Fuentes, anonymous troll accounts — want women to think is indicative of the broader culture that won the election. They want y...
The History of Wokeness November 14, 2024
Over the summer, I drove down to one of the numerous beach towns in Ocean County, New Jersey with two friends: one is a cop, the other a special ed teacher and athletic coach; both are black Americans in their late 20s. Over a dinner of chicken franc...
Love in the Time of Menopause November 14, 2024
Two novels of the moment—the film director and screenwriter Miranda July’s sparkly and funny All Fours; and the moody and emotional Don’t Be A Stranger, by Susan Minot—present middle-aged women sexually obsessed with unavailable younger men. The setu...
