Do White Dudes Think Before They Say Stuff?

Last week, the Washington Post editorial board wrote an op-ed basically saying that if young single liberal women didn’t start marrying young single conservative men, marriage would die. I mean, there was a lot of equivocating in there — like when they said, “marriage isn’t for everyone. Nor is staying in a physically or emotionally abusive marriage ever the right choice,” which sounds kind of like one of those drug commercial disclaimers that they speed-read, like “Side effects may include heart attack and stroke and spontaneous human combustion” — but that was the main thrust (and yeah, let’s say pun intended). The piece says, “someone will need to compromise,” but we all know by “someone” they mean women, which means they should marry people with whom they disagree politically, which given the current Republican Party, is some pretty fundamental shit: abortion rights, gay rights, voting rights, immigration, the role of religion in people’s lives, who won the last election even though there was no evidence of fraud (so basically reality), and, often, the roles of men and women in general, which also naturally connects with how they should raise their children. Basically, they’re saying that women should marry people who probably have entirely different views on not just the world, but their very personhood.

What the fuck, WaPo? And by “WaPo,” in this instance, clearly I mean the three people who are the Washington Post’s opinion editors. If you look at their pictures above, something will stick out to you, hmm, what it could it be? Not that one of them used to be married to normal-feminist-turned-conspiracy-nutball Naomi Wolf, although that is frightening (to be fair, they divorced in 2005, when she was probably still mostly sane). Not that a different one is married to the brilliant WaPo humor columnist Alexandra Petri, although, Petri, does he run this shit by you before publication? Not that I, as a woman married to a man, think that women should be responsible for the dumb shit their husbands do and say, oh hell no, but as a writer, maybe you could have given him a heads up that this piece needed some work? Unless this is an autobiographical piece for him, as in, “You, too, should convince a brainy and hilarious woman to marry you and then surprise her by writing an op-ed that’s pretty fucking embarrassing!”

No, duh! It’s that they’re all white dudes. There are women and POC who are writers on the editorial board, yes, and I don’t want to disempower them by suggesting that they didn’t have a major hand in this op-ed, so maybe they did. But whereas I’m sure the three editors all have to give these columns a thumbs up, I doubt everyone on the board has an equal amount of involvement (in particular, I have a hard time picturing the woman who wrote this book reading this column before publication and saying, “Cool! 100% put my name on that!”)

Now, a few people (Amanda Marcotte at Salon, Lyz Lenz of Men Yell at Me here on Substack) have written great commentary about this piece already, which you should read. Especially the points they make about how the end of marriage might be no great tragedy for women, how it’s not the job of women to fix men and the problems they’ve created for themselves, or how the evidence cited here for the argument that marriage makes people happier all comes from the same guy who works at two conservative marriage think tanks, one of which has made him a Future of Freedom Fellow, a title that should tell you everything you need to know about both him and those institutions  — and if it hasn’t, Jezebel (sob!) did an amazing takedown of the guy in its response to his own appalling WaPo op-ed concluding that women should get married to help men “settle down” and be less prone to violence?!?! in 2014. Didja not read that one, opinion editors, or in any other way research the man before deciding to cite his “studies” as the only “facts” about marriage in your piece? Come on, I know at least one of you has a Pulitzer!

But in the interest of making you read these other takes, I will move on to my main point, which is how much this reminds me of all the white dudes on the left who I talked to before and after the 2016 election. The Bernie Bro who called Hillary a cunt, the one who said that Trump and Hillary were basically the same, the one who said he couldn’t vote for Hillary and that it was our fault for nominating her, the one who said that the next four years were going to be no big deal. To them, it probably wasn’t — because they were white guys, meaning that they themselves were not under threat. One of them seemed sufficiently cowed after I pointed out how important this election had been for me and my mother, who’d been on the front lines of the feminist movement, getting to vote for the first woman candidate for president — because, apparently, despite that he had a mom and was married to a woman, he’d just never thought about that. Apparently, he’d also never thought about what was going to happen to the Supreme Court, the right to abortion, the right to not be discriminated against if you’re gay, the right to have your vote counted equally if you live in a gerrymandered state, the right not to be banned from entering the U.S. if you’re from certain Muslim countries, or not be jailed if you come here undocumented from Latin America or Africa or Asia or basically anywhere where the majority population is non-white — all of which were campaign promises the man made, out loud, over and over again. I mean none of us wanted to listen to Trump either, but we did, and we also listened to each other, and our concerns, and even if we didn’t love everything about Hillary, we still thought before we said incendiary shit about her, or reposted “oh but her emails” conspiracy theories, or videos of that screw that supposedly fell out of her colostomy bag which proved that she was dying (?!?! Remember that insanity?), because we knew that we couldn’t afford to make her unelectable. “Not all women,” of course, whatever, but I’d say a large majority of adults who aren’t white men have learned to listen, research properly, and think carefully about the things we do and say every day of our lives — because we know that we will often be challenged on them, and that there will be consequences for the them. We might not have earned those consequences, but there will be consequences nevertheless. So we don’t have the luxury of just tossing off bullshit because we can.

Viewpoints like this might be just a little thought experiment for these dudes, but marriage to someone from whom you might be divided ideologically has real consequences for real people. I can’t help but think of this post on Threads from a few days ago.

I feel sorry for her too. I’m not saying this poor woman doesn’t share her husband’s ideological beliefs, because she probably does, but she clearly is justifiably unhappy with how he chose to express them. So, WaPo opinion-editing-white-males-in-triplicate, let’s say the husband is maybe only abusive to strangers and so doesn’t fall under your pharmaceutical-style disclaimer about domestic violence. Would you still seriously tell this woman she’s better off married to him, or would you tell her to grab all of her children, not just the girls, and run screaming?

I hope the backlash to this op-ed creates some change. Because while it’s far from the worst thing I’ve ever read, these three guys clearly need to learn this seminal lesson: think twice before just assuming that what you’re putting out there as “an interesting idea” isn’t 1) stupid, 2) harmful, and 3) based on bullshit. Oh, and the Washington Post needs to diversify more, all the way up to the top. Duh.