Sarah is on to something when she said that second generation immigrants tend to go "super-woke", although I'd refine the claim to be specifically about the South and East Asian females. The American born daughters of Asian immigrants are highly susceptible to victimhood narratives. I think it has something to do with the fact that they have been exposed to genuine patriarchies (the old culture).
But they don't want to attack their in-group, and so instead they project their aggrievement onto American culture and look for evidence of patriarchy here. And because they tend to be highly educated, they are good at coming up with rationalizations for feeling oppressed. They often turn bitter towards the supposed American patriarchy and sometimes even become boldly misandrist.
What's frustrating about it is that they completely ignore the fact that they are some of the most privileged people in the country. Most of them are doctors, scientists, lawyers, or in mid-to-upper management in the corporate world. I don't understand how they manage to convince themselves that they are oppressed while simultaneously securing mountains of educations, wealth, and power. I guess women really can do it all :)
One explanation might be a lack of cynicism. I think that old money Americans know that this stuff is bullshit because there has always been elitist bullshit. The first gen immigrants have their own culture, but the second gen have our culture with an unrealistically rosy-eyed view.
I agree-- any other thoughts on why? I know that second generation East Asian have immense pressure at home to succeed in school and go into "respectable" fields, often against their own wishes-- is their victim hood narrative a backlash to suppressed emotions that seem to impede emotional development?
I agree that high intelligence can often lead to good "logical" rationalizations that don't reflect reality.
Gould's piece is painfully self-pitying and self absorbed, and I agree with Sarah that I don't really get what value we're supposed to be getting out of reading it, but this is not a new take.
What I find interesting (in a sad way) is that I don't think her husband is all that unique. There is an epidemic of men willing to put up with any amount of shittiness from their wives/partners. I think that if more men actually had any self respect and didn't put up with this then the actual behavior would be greatly reduced.
I know that her husband is a public intellectual as well and we can make excuses like "he does the same thing with his memoir," but again I don't think that his situation is as unique as he is.
I think it has become such a large male problem to be devoid of any self respect as to put up with this that it has become a female problem that they don't have any available partners who can help counterbalance them when they get just a little bit crazy, much less Gould level batshit crazy.
I think it's tough when you have kids together. It's easy to be glib but I think it's a good idea to do everything possible to stay together. Having said that, the fact she admitted to an affair...publicly. That'd be extraordinarily hard to get over for me. Maybe if it stayed private. Maybe.
I think "staying together for the kids" is a great reason to stay together, but this goes past that even without the affair. She's a substance abuser who has very real mental health problems and does not seem like she's all that serious about confronting her issues, even if she can admit that she has them. This is an extremely stressful environment for kids. How many times did they walk in on her when she was stoned/drunk off her ass?
Also, they have a son. The husband is modeling for his son that this kind of behavior is ok and acceptable for a long term partner to have kids with. The son will very likely repeat the pattern.
Honestly, and I'm not trying to be glib, the fact that the publicity of the affair is the biggest thing that gets you tells me that the Overton window of craziness for women is way too large. She was not wife and mother material long before that. Yes, divorce is terrible for kids, but I think a completely dysfunctional marriage with a substance abuser is worse. They should not have to see their mother like that.
(I know, the husband is probably not all that much better, but in this situation he's a proxy for a lot of men who put up with this kind of stuff).
In large part I agree with you. Specifically with the comment about the Overton window.
Unfortunately I don’t think it will change. Just as women can justifiably say that women don’t know what it’s like to live as a woman, I don’t think they’ll ever know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of some of their behaviour as a man. This encompasses things like pretty-privelage all the way to the frequency with which people say “happy wife, happy life”. Attractive people often get better treatment but attractive women are often treated with an absurd amount of deference in daily life, especially from men. Many are aware of this but just as many have only experienced the world in this way so it’s not surprising that they don’t acknowledge it.
Happy wife, happy life is a tongue-in-cheek admission that wives get away with a lot of emotional manipulation. This is a tale as old as time so it can be difficult to actually recognize how often it happens, it’s done so often on small stupid irrelevant things that it becomes the norm in some situations.
Rant over. Obvious reminder that not every woman is like this. Or husband, as It can in fact go both ways.
Lack of self-respect is one way of describing it. I think the male psychology is triggered into such an overwhelming protective response upon the sight of a woman that it’s difficult to do anything that might inflict a negative emotional state.
The other side of it is that I think it does women a great disservice to enable them in the way that we do. A life without criticism, without consequences might seem utopian, but what we are seeing is that the first world professional class woman is not living in utopia despite this.
I try to be fair — after all, anyone who really struggles can look at my life as indulgent and gross too. But the wallowing self-loathing trip just seems like a bottomless pit.
Maybe the shrill insanity of the last decade — all the "white, cis hetero-normative privilege" rhetoric — is just the logical extension of a group of people hating themselves so thoroughly that they begged for everyone around them to act on it. And it worked. And now they're enabled into self-loathing their way into oblivion.
A compassionate way to look at it is to see it as a form of survivor's guilt. But Gould, Gessen, and the rest of their class stratosphere seem afflicted by something far uglier than that.
You talk about the "first world professional class woman" — I remember someone I know telling me with pride how she marched in the NYC George Floyd protest, marching on the outside of the crowd "because we knew we had to protect black bodies."
I remember being so horrified, wondering what it takes for someone to devalue themselves to such a degree that they see their body as the blank-canvas repository for someone else's suffering.
It's one thing to march side-by-side in solidarity with people. It's another to almost lust for self-sacrifice and >want< to turn yourself into a disfigured trophy.
If you think about it, being brutalized — maybe even mortally wounded — by the police as a ritual gesture is just one step removed from self-cutting or self-starvation.
This is an entire social sphere of people who yearn for meaning with such high-pitched desperation that if you don't give them a suicide-bomber option (i.e: pummeling by cop), they'll just eat themselves alive in their own home — and write about it — like Emily Gould.
It's like a form of spiritual leprosy. And they >crave< for everyone else to be contaminated by it. The bait-and-switch magic trick of the culture war is that upper-class malaise was successfully exported to everyone else.
The culture war, in a sense, was won when the upper/intellectual-classes convinced people who hadn't previously viewed themselves as victims to start talking and acting as helpless as the wealthy.
It was like a covert form of neo-colonialization, only on a psychological/emotional level — and all while everyone punished them for being colonizers in the first place. Wow.
Serious shit: somebody find something for these people to DO. Otherwise there will be more double-barrel memoirs blocking the path like roadkill with splayed, rotting guts. Blech.
HO. LY. SHIT. Check out the first few paragraphs of this May '22 piece, also from The Cut, titled "The Sad Young Literary Man Is Now a Middle-Aged Dad — Keith Gessen wrote a memoir about family life. His wife, Emily Gould, is mostly okay with that."
(It really does read like the literary world's answer to OnlyFans. Now I'm glad Gould publicly humiliated Gessen. They deserve each other. Their life story should be titled: "When Gawker and n+1 had a baby., it wasn't pretty. Too bad we all have to suffer because they won't do the decent thing and keep it to themselves.")
Raffi Gessen-Gould, age 6, is an expert on these topics: Greek gods, international currency exchange, sharks, geology, when his father will go bald (when Raffi is a teenager), invisibility cloaks, waffles, slingshotting stretchy rubber snakes across the living room, making slime without his mom, and the benefits of getting slime stains on the couch (they feel good to touch). He is the second-tallest kid in his class. He can jump the farthest. He sleeps on the top bunk. The longest book he has ever read is 199 pages. He has not read his father’s new book, Raising Raffi: The First Five Years, which is 241 pages, and he does not seem in any hurry to do so. He did ask if he was responsible for the bad crayon drawing on the cover. (No.)
This Raffi — the real-life Raffi — will turn 7 in early June. The character Raffi in Raising Raffi will never be that mature. That Raffi is a creation of his father, Keith Gessen, a device through which Gessen explores his parental fixations: the pros and cons of teaching a child Russian or making a child play hockey, the problem of gentrifying schools, and conflicting camps of parenting advice. Raffi the literary creation is a bit of a hooligan — or, as his father puts it, a collection of “pain points.” That Raffi spends a lot of time doing stuff like punching his father in the nose and breaking down toddler gates to get into his parents’ bed at 2 a.m. That Raffi wonders what it’s like to sit on his infant brother Ilya’s head and follows through. Raffi the real person has outgrown all that now.
One recent Saturday evening, after his father opened the door to the 990-square-foot Brooklyn apartment Raffi and Keith share with the writer Emily Gould (Raffi’s mother and Keith’s wife) and Ilya, now 3, I asked Raffi how he felt about a book coming out with his name in the title.
He’s not a kid who limits his answers to areas in which he possesses expertise. “I don’t know,” he said.
Words are the family business. Gessen, 47, was a co-founder of the literary magazine n+1 and has published two novels. Thirteen years ago, Vanity Fair called him the “red-hot center to the Brooklyn literary scene,” or “at least close to it.” Gould, 40, has published two novels and a book of nonfiction, though she’s best known for her work at the media-gossip website Gawker, where her funny, confessional writing helped define the voice of the early-aughts internet. The two very publicly hooked up in 2007, not long after Gould described for Gawker’s audience Gessen bartending at an n+1 party with “tufts of black chest hair peeking from the unbuttoned collar of his American Apparel polo.”
Putting up with the behavior is one thing, but I can't believe he aided and abetted her pimping out their dirty laundry for attention. It's like the literary equivalent of OnlyFans. Then again, he wrote a family memoir too.
On first glance, it's like it's never occurred to Gould and Gessen that writing about oneself is just solipsistic indulgence if you're not doing it with the intention of giving some meaning to >other< people's experience. It's like all they know how to do is indulge. "Well, we're writers, so... um, okay, let's talk about ourselves!"
I didn't read his memoir, and I won't now that she's revealed their family dynamic to be this giant abscess. But I wonder if she was jealous of his literary success so all she could do to even the score was to knock him down a peg and cuck him publicly.
I also wonder: what makes these people so certain their own lives even make for the best material? By her own description, Gould sounds like so many other unremarkable purpose-less creatures drowning in the malaise that their class surroundings breed. All she knows how to resort to is to become a hungry ghost ravenous for attention. It's loathsome.
And I disagree that she's "self-aware." There's >such< a massive difference between wallowing in "I'm a terrible person" and good-faith introspection. It's why Woody Allen said the same shit about himself over and over for decades without actually >trying< to grow. (I'm not even talking about the allegations, which I don't judge one way or the other.)
But outlets like New York Magazine >love< slinging this shit because they know it's like crack for people who want their fix of self-loathing, navel-gazing paralysis-porn. Ugh, no thanks!
It's a gender non-discriminatory epidemic of men and women, willing to put up with way more than what should be put up with. Too much Bride Guide and Hallmark movies or something more endemic to human nature, who knows. But wouldn't life be a bit too boring without all the personal drama?
With Sarah on the essay, it's not enough to just be winkingly "aware" that you are behaving badly, there's something odd about our current zeitgest that seems to see awareness as absolution. "Ethical" self-absorption
Totally agree. It's "self aware" only in the most superficial sense. You could just as easily describe a demanding spoiled child is "self aware" because they are vocalising their desires, a.k.a. screaming out what they want right now.
True self-awareness requires a deeper understanding of how being the way that you are impacts people around you. That was sadly lacking from Gould's essay.
I read Gould's essay b/c of the podcast. I know it's not for everyone, but I liked it. There seems to be a lot of interest in writers' marriages these days. In addition to the books Gould mentions, there's also the movie Anatomy of a Fall (a pretty good movie nominated for an Academy Award).
I like the objective style of the beginning of the essay (just reporting the facts w/o evaluation). Towards the end, when talking about how things get better, she does slip into unconvincing self-justification (especially when talking about the affair & what she and her husband need to apologize about).
Yes! I didn't know the "The Coddling" called it out, but I was long ago struck by the fact that the extreme left, in the form of DEI/CRT/AntiRacism, is pushing essentially anti-Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Almost every mode of distorted thinking CBT works to help people recognize that are a) unreasonable and b) making them miserable are modes encouraged by "Wokeness." It's such a one-to-one correlation that I find it hard to believe it isn't more than just an indulgence of followers' worst instincts, but a deliberate attempt to spread the more common forms of mental illness (depression, anxiety, loneliness, etc.). And also to exacerbate, not mitigate, the effects of many personality disorders.
1. I don't know the how the Coddling filmmakers chose the student interviewees but I suspect that Meghan is correct in speculating that American students "of color" wanted nothing to do with the project so international students were then chosen. It would be great if you could interview the filmmakers.
2. As to whether Emily Gould's husband "knew what he was getting into" - I have one piece of anecdata about a person in my family who didn't exhibit signs of mental illness until well into their 40's (paranoid delusion disorder).
3. On Sam Harris' reluctance to speak about trans issues. I sensed a bit of "trans fatigue" in Sam's voice and commentary. To be fair, I have severe trans fatigue so it's very possible that I'm projecting my own feelings onto a stranger I heard on a podcast. But Sam did ask a pertinent question the answer to which seems to be elusive: how did a problem that affects 1% of the American population start sucking up so much oxygen from the heterodox intellectual room? I don't want to minimize the pain and suffering of people with gender dysphoria and their families - it's very real for therm. But if a Martian landed here and spent a month immersed in online spaces occupied by very intelligent people, the Martian would swear that 25-30 percent of the population was trans. There's got to be a more productive use of all this brain power.
In my daughter's graduating high school class, three girls were trans identifying. That was 3.75% of her class- or 7.5% of the girls. That is not negligible. I suspect that parents of tweens and teens are getting a ring side seat of this insanity and it's a lot more common than people think.
I also have to ask: how many 13 year girls getting cosmetic double mastectomies is too many? We aren't allowed to give a shit if it's just one or two? How about 40? How about hundreds? Is it a big enough problem now? What about the girls injured by trans identified boys playing sports with them? I guess the girl who was partially paralyzed by a boy spiking a volleyball at her is just a fluke. Nothing to see here, folks.
I'm not meaning to snark too much at you. I just think medical abuse of children is important, no matter how many it affects. And I think it affects more people than you think.
If I recall correctly, you are/were a K-12 school nurse so you're going to have more first-hand information than a guy whose children graduated high school in 2017.
As I clearly stated, I don't want to minimize anyone's pain and suffering. One child with rapid onset gender dysphoria is too many. And even though it's been three years, I still want to grab my alma mater's swim coach and athletic director by the collar and ask why they allowed our swimmers in a pool with the man formerly known as Will Thomas- that one made my blood boil. I'm even more outraged by the injured female volleyball and basketball players. And I certainly don't want a man sidling up next to my daughter in a public restroom.
Trans issues are important but the question is how much of our finite intellectual resources should be devoted to them? I had a wakeup call a few months ago when the college affirmative action Supreme Court decision was announced. That's an issue that directly impacted me and I could talk about it for hours on end. But then I saw more than one commenter say: "why are we spilling so much ink on an admissions practice that affects 1-2% of all US colleges and universities. There are far more prevalent issues in higher education (attrition rates) and K-12 education (poor test scores) that need our attention."
I don't profess to have a definitive answer to the question of how many is enough. Sam Harris' thoughts just seemed to resonate with me.
I guess I would say that people can care about what they want to care about.
And it's frustrating that we go on and on about so many issues but never tell the truth about them. Like the achievement gap in schools. That's a home problem that becomes a school problem. We all go on endlessly about how to come up with magical interventions at school when the problem is the culture at home. But it's considered taboo to actually come out and say it.
Regarding the lack of US minority students in the Coddling film compared to international students of color - I think it’s because the relevant Americans have more to lose. I have many Latino and Black (and some Asian) friends and acquaintances who are well entrenched in the woke world, and I don’t think they see an exit as possible. Everyone hates a heretic and cancellation works most powerfully within groups. I think they have legitimate (but possibly subconscious) fears about publicly questioning the orthodoxy because of the possibility of being cast out and vilified and losing both status and relationships. By contrast, international students have identities that are not limited to how they are perceived in the US. Someone from Nigeria is always Nigerian - even if they are dissed or excluded from a Black US community because of some transgression, they are still Nigerian.
but sam harris is using out-of-date stats. trans numbers are rising. everywhere. I'm just going to refer to the most recent article I've read whereby the number of UK prisoners identifying as trans has increased by 17% in ONE YEAR
As to #2, the old adage is that women marry men hoping they will change and men marry women hoping that they won’t.
I think there are many women who seem normal and turn out to have serious mental illness that either develops over time or that they are very good at hiding.
Sorry for going off-topic but there''s no open thread for us folks with XY chromosomes.
I would love to hear your thoughts on American Fiction, the new(ish) movie satirizing the publishing industry and its DEI obsession. I'm particularly interested in the accuracy of the caricature of earnest white liberal publishing execs.
LOVED it. I burst out laughing at "Pafology" and was the only one in the theater doing so. This happened a few more times until the rest of the audience seemed to catch on.... Thanks to you and Sam Harris's conversation for priming me for the funny moments.
That was funny. While you can certainly stop being a wife, you're always a mother. I think this is the second time in a few weeks that Meghan suggested Sarah pull an Eat Pray Love scheme.
I read the Gould piece just once last week and then listened to too much commentary on it...and I may be off base because I haven't read much of her other work.
But maybe she's actually admitting that her marriage problems are what she's introduced specifically as the female partner? That we live in a time where it's easily justifiable to leave a man because he's useless or cruel. She noted all the books, memoirs, etc she was reading about divorce.
In this case she was the shitty and ultimately couldn't justify herself. It's not her husband's fault she couldn't be more ambitious. She put herself in that avenue and then justified her career sidelining because she had to mother. But also admitted to just being lazy.
I dunno, I just finished Perfect Madness which somehow came out almost 20 years ago. Women have been justifying men not doing comparatively enough when it comes to home and kids for a long time, but again Gould admits she wouldn't let him do certain things or resented his involvement. He could argue with her, sure, but she chose to put herself in the submissive position, not "patriarchy."
Women can stand equivalent to their male spouses, but it's a lot of work. I have to wonder if Gould is pointing to that an acknowledgement of that.
I mean, otherwise the essay wasn't an acknowledgement of much of anything!
I think it's enlightening that much of the vocal support of Gould's essay, including Meghan's, involves a lot of wish casting into what isn't there in the actual essay, e.g. "maybe she was trying to do X or Y"
I mean if she was "trying to" do something but it didn't come through in the writing it's not a very good essay is it?
I was put off by Emily Gould's piece. While it may seem "brave" to share this piece with the general public, it seems more like a lack of courage to internalize and reflect on her struggles with money, drink, bipolar disease, and marriage, etc. and instead write a piece that seems embarrassing. I feel sad for her because she seems so self-absorbed, and she can't seem to manage her ego and... there is a child involved. It seems she needs good friends or family members to tell her to get her shit together-- and to consider divorce in her apparent emotional state just seems ill advised. And the admission that she does not want to work hard....OK, but then what are you going to do- depend on husband to work, who you then resent because he works?? I hope she finds something meaningful in her life that takes focus off herself, and she gets the mood stabilizers she needs for her bipolar.
1. I read The Cut article after listening to the podcast (very entertaining) and liked the essay much more than I expected. I hadn’t realized it was like a long-form book review about memoirs on divorce with the author’s own weird experience tied in.
2. What I found most disturbing was the narrator’s financial irresponsibility. She has apparently never had a regular income but never opens a bill. Hmmm. And yet in the end they will have a three bedroom apartment in Brooklyn and I doubt they live next to JFK.
3. Agree with Meghan that when literature tells the truth it’s not necessarily beautiful. Not all narrators or main characters are appealing. “Tropic of Cancer” and “Madame Bovary” come to mind.
Not only is there a tradition of this kind of essay, it seems to be having another moment now. Leslie Jamison just published, "The birth of my daughter. The death of my marriage." I agree with Sarah. It starts to feel like kale chips. Am I wrong to wish for some acquired worldliness and wisdom after reading all this? So Emily doesn't blame the patriarchy. Nor should she. And yes, writers should not marry writers! Nora Ephron's book was much better because of the perspective she'd gained, (and her incredible sense of humor), as Meghan noted.
The comparison to Heartburn was a bit odd. Totally different dynamic.
On the other hand, if Bernstein had written a self-justifying essay right after cheating on a heavily pregnant Ephron, who he merely, and repetitively, described as just an object of his resentment ...
Sarah is on to something when she said that second generation immigrants tend to go "super-woke", although I'd refine the claim to be specifically about the South and East Asian females. The American born daughters of Asian immigrants are highly susceptible to victimhood narratives. I think it has something to do with the fact that they have been exposed to genuine patriarchies (the old culture).
But they don't want to attack their in-group, and so instead they project their aggrievement onto American culture and look for evidence of patriarchy here. And because they tend to be highly educated, they are good at coming up with rationalizations for feeling oppressed. They often turn bitter towards the supposed American patriarchy and sometimes even become boldly misandrist.
What's frustrating about it is that they completely ignore the fact that they are some of the most privileged people in the country. Most of them are doctors, scientists, lawyers, or in mid-to-upper management in the corporate world. I don't understand how they manage to convince themselves that they are oppressed while simultaneously securing mountains of educations, wealth, and power. I guess women really can do it all :)
I have observed this phenomenon as well.
One explanation might be a lack of cynicism. I think that old money Americans know that this stuff is bullshit because there has always been elitist bullshit. The first gen immigrants have their own culture, but the second gen have our culture with an unrealistically rosy-eyed view.
I agree-- any other thoughts on why? I know that second generation East Asian have immense pressure at home to succeed in school and go into "respectable" fields, often against their own wishes-- is their victim hood narrative a backlash to suppressed emotions that seem to impede emotional development?
I agree that high intelligence can often lead to good "logical" rationalizations that don't reflect reality.
Gould's piece is painfully self-pitying and self absorbed, and I agree with Sarah that I don't really get what value we're supposed to be getting out of reading it, but this is not a new take.
What I find interesting (in a sad way) is that I don't think her husband is all that unique. There is an epidemic of men willing to put up with any amount of shittiness from their wives/partners. I think that if more men actually had any self respect and didn't put up with this then the actual behavior would be greatly reduced.
I know that her husband is a public intellectual as well and we can make excuses like "he does the same thing with his memoir," but again I don't think that his situation is as unique as he is.
I think it has become such a large male problem to be devoid of any self respect as to put up with this that it has become a female problem that they don't have any available partners who can help counterbalance them when they get just a little bit crazy, much less Gould level batshit crazy.
I think it's tough when you have kids together. It's easy to be glib but I think it's a good idea to do everything possible to stay together. Having said that, the fact she admitted to an affair...publicly. That'd be extraordinarily hard to get over for me. Maybe if it stayed private. Maybe.
I think "staying together for the kids" is a great reason to stay together, but this goes past that even without the affair. She's a substance abuser who has very real mental health problems and does not seem like she's all that serious about confronting her issues, even if she can admit that she has them. This is an extremely stressful environment for kids. How many times did they walk in on her when she was stoned/drunk off her ass?
Also, they have a son. The husband is modeling for his son that this kind of behavior is ok and acceptable for a long term partner to have kids with. The son will very likely repeat the pattern.
Honestly, and I'm not trying to be glib, the fact that the publicity of the affair is the biggest thing that gets you tells me that the Overton window of craziness for women is way too large. She was not wife and mother material long before that. Yes, divorce is terrible for kids, but I think a completely dysfunctional marriage with a substance abuser is worse. They should not have to see their mother like that.
(I know, the husband is probably not all that much better, but in this situation he's a proxy for a lot of men who put up with this kind of stuff).
In large part I agree with you. Specifically with the comment about the Overton window.
Unfortunately I don’t think it will change. Just as women can justifiably say that women don’t know what it’s like to live as a woman, I don’t think they’ll ever know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of some of their behaviour as a man. This encompasses things like pretty-privelage all the way to the frequency with which people say “happy wife, happy life”. Attractive people often get better treatment but attractive women are often treated with an absurd amount of deference in daily life, especially from men. Many are aware of this but just as many have only experienced the world in this way so it’s not surprising that they don’t acknowledge it.
Happy wife, happy life is a tongue-in-cheek admission that wives get away with a lot of emotional manipulation. This is a tale as old as time so it can be difficult to actually recognize how often it happens, it’s done so often on small stupid irrelevant things that it becomes the norm in some situations.
Rant over. Obvious reminder that not every woman is like this. Or husband, as It can in fact go both ways.
I like to say "happy hub, happy wub dub." That means when my husband is happy, my heart is happy.
Lack of self-respect is one way of describing it. I think the male psychology is triggered into such an overwhelming protective response upon the sight of a woman that it’s difficult to do anything that might inflict a negative emotional state.
The other side of it is that I think it does women a great disservice to enable them in the way that we do. A life without criticism, without consequences might seem utopian, but what we are seeing is that the first world professional class woman is not living in utopia despite this.
Light bulb: This comes back full-circle to wokeness...
Reading the 2022 precursor article (also from The Cut https://www.thecut.com/article/keith-gessen-emily-gould-books-raising-raffi.html), I was reminded of why, whenever revolutions occur, there's such extreme, violent hatred for the intellectual class.
I try to be fair — after all, anyone who really struggles can look at my life as indulgent and gross too. But the wallowing self-loathing trip just seems like a bottomless pit.
Maybe the shrill insanity of the last decade — all the "white, cis hetero-normative privilege" rhetoric — is just the logical extension of a group of people hating themselves so thoroughly that they begged for everyone around them to act on it. And it worked. And now they're enabled into self-loathing their way into oblivion.
A compassionate way to look at it is to see it as a form of survivor's guilt. But Gould, Gessen, and the rest of their class stratosphere seem afflicted by something far uglier than that.
You talk about the "first world professional class woman" — I remember someone I know telling me with pride how she marched in the NYC George Floyd protest, marching on the outside of the crowd "because we knew we had to protect black bodies."
I remember being so horrified, wondering what it takes for someone to devalue themselves to such a degree that they see their body as the blank-canvas repository for someone else's suffering.
It's one thing to march side-by-side in solidarity with people. It's another to almost lust for self-sacrifice and >want< to turn yourself into a disfigured trophy.
If you think about it, being brutalized — maybe even mortally wounded — by the police as a ritual gesture is just one step removed from self-cutting or self-starvation.
This is an entire social sphere of people who yearn for meaning with such high-pitched desperation that if you don't give them a suicide-bomber option (i.e: pummeling by cop), they'll just eat themselves alive in their own home — and write about it — like Emily Gould.
It's like a form of spiritual leprosy. And they >crave< for everyone else to be contaminated by it. The bait-and-switch magic trick of the culture war is that upper-class malaise was successfully exported to everyone else.
The culture war, in a sense, was won when the upper/intellectual-classes convinced people who hadn't previously viewed themselves as victims to start talking and acting as helpless as the wealthy.
It was like a covert form of neo-colonialization, only on a psychological/emotional level — and all while everyone punished them for being colonizers in the first place. Wow.
Serious shit: somebody find something for these people to DO. Otherwise there will be more double-barrel memoirs blocking the path like roadkill with splayed, rotting guts. Blech.
HO. LY. SHIT. Check out the first few paragraphs of this May '22 piece, also from The Cut, titled "The Sad Young Literary Man Is Now a Middle-Aged Dad — Keith Gessen wrote a memoir about family life. His wife, Emily Gould, is mostly okay with that."
(It really does read like the literary world's answer to OnlyFans. Now I'm glad Gould publicly humiliated Gessen. They deserve each other. Their life story should be titled: "When Gawker and n+1 had a baby., it wasn't pretty. Too bad we all have to suffer because they won't do the decent thing and keep it to themselves.")
from the piece:
https://www.thecut.com/article/keith-gessen-emily-gould-books-raising-raffi.html
Raffi Gessen-Gould, age 6, is an expert on these topics: Greek gods, international currency exchange, sharks, geology, when his father will go bald (when Raffi is a teenager), invisibility cloaks, waffles, slingshotting stretchy rubber snakes across the living room, making slime without his mom, and the benefits of getting slime stains on the couch (they feel good to touch). He is the second-tallest kid in his class. He can jump the farthest. He sleeps on the top bunk. The longest book he has ever read is 199 pages. He has not read his father’s new book, Raising Raffi: The First Five Years, which is 241 pages, and he does not seem in any hurry to do so. He did ask if he was responsible for the bad crayon drawing on the cover. (No.)
This Raffi — the real-life Raffi — will turn 7 in early June. The character Raffi in Raising Raffi will never be that mature. That Raffi is a creation of his father, Keith Gessen, a device through which Gessen explores his parental fixations: the pros and cons of teaching a child Russian or making a child play hockey, the problem of gentrifying schools, and conflicting camps of parenting advice. Raffi the literary creation is a bit of a hooligan — or, as his father puts it, a collection of “pain points.” That Raffi spends a lot of time doing stuff like punching his father in the nose and breaking down toddler gates to get into his parents’ bed at 2 a.m. That Raffi wonders what it’s like to sit on his infant brother Ilya’s head and follows through. Raffi the real person has outgrown all that now.
One recent Saturday evening, after his father opened the door to the 990-square-foot Brooklyn apartment Raffi and Keith share with the writer Emily Gould (Raffi’s mother and Keith’s wife) and Ilya, now 3, I asked Raffi how he felt about a book coming out with his name in the title.
He’s not a kid who limits his answers to areas in which he possesses expertise. “I don’t know,” he said.
Words are the family business. Gessen, 47, was a co-founder of the literary magazine n+1 and has published two novels. Thirteen years ago, Vanity Fair called him the “red-hot center to the Brooklyn literary scene,” or “at least close to it.” Gould, 40, has published two novels and a book of nonfiction, though she’s best known for her work at the media-gossip website Gawker, where her funny, confessional writing helped define the voice of the early-aughts internet. The two very publicly hooked up in 2007, not long after Gould described for Gawker’s audience Gessen bartending at an n+1 party with “tufts of black chest hair peeking from the unbuttoned collar of his American Apparel polo.”
Putting up with the behavior is one thing, but I can't believe he aided and abetted her pimping out their dirty laundry for attention. It's like the literary equivalent of OnlyFans. Then again, he wrote a family memoir too.
On first glance, it's like it's never occurred to Gould and Gessen that writing about oneself is just solipsistic indulgence if you're not doing it with the intention of giving some meaning to >other< people's experience. It's like all they know how to do is indulge. "Well, we're writers, so... um, okay, let's talk about ourselves!"
I didn't read his memoir, and I won't now that she's revealed their family dynamic to be this giant abscess. But I wonder if she was jealous of his literary success so all she could do to even the score was to knock him down a peg and cuck him publicly.
I also wonder: what makes these people so certain their own lives even make for the best material? By her own description, Gould sounds like so many other unremarkable purpose-less creatures drowning in the malaise that their class surroundings breed. All she knows how to resort to is to become a hungry ghost ravenous for attention. It's loathsome.
And I disagree that she's "self-aware." There's >such< a massive difference between wallowing in "I'm a terrible person" and good-faith introspection. It's why Woody Allen said the same shit about himself over and over for decades without actually >trying< to grow. (I'm not even talking about the allegations, which I don't judge one way or the other.)
But outlets like New York Magazine >love< slinging this shit because they know it's like crack for people who want their fix of self-loathing, navel-gazing paralysis-porn. Ugh, no thanks!
It's a gender non-discriminatory epidemic of men and women, willing to put up with way more than what should be put up with. Too much Bride Guide and Hallmark movies or something more endemic to human nature, who knows. But wouldn't life be a bit too boring without all the personal drama?
you guys have the best episode titles.
With Sarah on the essay, it's not enough to just be winkingly "aware" that you are behaving badly, there's something odd about our current zeitgest that seems to see awareness as absolution. "Ethical" self-absorption
Totally agree. It's "self aware" only in the most superficial sense. You could just as easily describe a demanding spoiled child is "self aware" because they are vocalising their desires, a.k.a. screaming out what they want right now.
True self-awareness requires a deeper understanding of how being the way that you are impacts people around you. That was sadly lacking from Gould's essay.
I read Gould's essay b/c of the podcast. I know it's not for everyone, but I liked it. There seems to be a lot of interest in writers' marriages these days. In addition to the books Gould mentions, there's also the movie Anatomy of a Fall (a pretty good movie nominated for an Academy Award).
I like the objective style of the beginning of the essay (just reporting the facts w/o evaluation). Towards the end, when talking about how things get better, she does slip into unconvincing self-justification (especially when talking about the affair & what she and her husband need to apologize about).
It reminded me of Noah Baumbach movies
Yes! I didn't know the "The Coddling" called it out, but I was long ago struck by the fact that the extreme left, in the form of DEI/CRT/AntiRacism, is pushing essentially anti-Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Almost every mode of distorted thinking CBT works to help people recognize that are a) unreasonable and b) making them miserable are modes encouraged by "Wokeness." It's such a one-to-one correlation that I find it hard to believe it isn't more than just an indulgence of followers' worst instincts, but a deliberate attempt to spread the more common forms of mental illness (depression, anxiety, loneliness, etc.). And also to exacerbate, not mitigate, the effects of many personality disorders.
Three random thoughts:
1. I don't know the how the Coddling filmmakers chose the student interviewees but I suspect that Meghan is correct in speculating that American students "of color" wanted nothing to do with the project so international students were then chosen. It would be great if you could interview the filmmakers.
2. As to whether Emily Gould's husband "knew what he was getting into" - I have one piece of anecdata about a person in my family who didn't exhibit signs of mental illness until well into their 40's (paranoid delusion disorder).
3. On Sam Harris' reluctance to speak about trans issues. I sensed a bit of "trans fatigue" in Sam's voice and commentary. To be fair, I have severe trans fatigue so it's very possible that I'm projecting my own feelings onto a stranger I heard on a podcast. But Sam did ask a pertinent question the answer to which seems to be elusive: how did a problem that affects 1% of the American population start sucking up so much oxygen from the heterodox intellectual room? I don't want to minimize the pain and suffering of people with gender dysphoria and their families - it's very real for therm. But if a Martian landed here and spent a month immersed in online spaces occupied by very intelligent people, the Martian would swear that 25-30 percent of the population was trans. There's got to be a more productive use of all this brain power.
In my daughter's graduating high school class, three girls were trans identifying. That was 3.75% of her class- or 7.5% of the girls. That is not negligible. I suspect that parents of tweens and teens are getting a ring side seat of this insanity and it's a lot more common than people think.
I also have to ask: how many 13 year girls getting cosmetic double mastectomies is too many? We aren't allowed to give a shit if it's just one or two? How about 40? How about hundreds? Is it a big enough problem now? What about the girls injured by trans identified boys playing sports with them? I guess the girl who was partially paralyzed by a boy spiking a volleyball at her is just a fluke. Nothing to see here, folks.
I'm not meaning to snark too much at you. I just think medical abuse of children is important, no matter how many it affects. And I think it affects more people than you think.
If I recall correctly, you are/were a K-12 school nurse so you're going to have more first-hand information than a guy whose children graduated high school in 2017.
As I clearly stated, I don't want to minimize anyone's pain and suffering. One child with rapid onset gender dysphoria is too many. And even though it's been three years, I still want to grab my alma mater's swim coach and athletic director by the collar and ask why they allowed our swimmers in a pool with the man formerly known as Will Thomas- that one made my blood boil. I'm even more outraged by the injured female volleyball and basketball players. And I certainly don't want a man sidling up next to my daughter in a public restroom.
Trans issues are important but the question is how much of our finite intellectual resources should be devoted to them? I had a wakeup call a few months ago when the college affirmative action Supreme Court decision was announced. That's an issue that directly impacted me and I could talk about it for hours on end. But then I saw more than one commenter say: "why are we spilling so much ink on an admissions practice that affects 1-2% of all US colleges and universities. There are far more prevalent issues in higher education (attrition rates) and K-12 education (poor test scores) that need our attention."
I don't profess to have a definitive answer to the question of how many is enough. Sam Harris' thoughts just seemed to resonate with me.
I guess I would say that people can care about what they want to care about.
And it's frustrating that we go on and on about so many issues but never tell the truth about them. Like the achievement gap in schools. That's a home problem that becomes a school problem. We all go on endlessly about how to come up with magical interventions at school when the problem is the culture at home. But it's considered taboo to actually come out and say it.
Regarding the lack of US minority students in the Coddling film compared to international students of color - I think it’s because the relevant Americans have more to lose. I have many Latino and Black (and some Asian) friends and acquaintances who are well entrenched in the woke world, and I don’t think they see an exit as possible. Everyone hates a heretic and cancellation works most powerfully within groups. I think they have legitimate (but possibly subconscious) fears about publicly questioning the orthodoxy because of the possibility of being cast out and vilified and losing both status and relationships. By contrast, international students have identities that are not limited to how they are perceived in the US. Someone from Nigeria is always Nigerian - even if they are dissed or excluded from a Black US community because of some transgression, they are still Nigerian.
Rich coming from Sam who has focused so much on terrorism, which kills less than 1% of the population annually
but sam harris is using out-of-date stats. trans numbers are rising. everywhere. I'm just going to refer to the most recent article I've read whereby the number of UK prisoners identifying as trans has increased by 17% in ONE YEAR
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/02/28/prisons-now-housing-record-number-of-transgender-inmates/
As to #2, the old adage is that women marry men hoping they will change and men marry women hoping that they won’t.
I think there are many women who seem normal and turn out to have serious mental illness that either develops over time or that they are very good at hiding.
Dearest Meghan,
Sorry for going off-topic but there''s no open thread for us folks with XY chromosomes.
I would love to hear your thoughts on American Fiction, the new(ish) movie satirizing the publishing industry and its DEI obsession. I'm particularly interested in the accuracy of the caricature of earnest white liberal publishing execs.
Loved it. The publishing stuff was dead on.
LOVED it. I burst out laughing at "Pafology" and was the only one in the theater doing so. This happened a few more times until the rest of the audience seemed to catch on.... Thanks to you and Sam Harris's conversation for priming me for the funny moments.
First?
I was expecting the Khan!
"If the wife and mother thing doesn't work out for you."
I laughed out loud.
That was funny. While you can certainly stop being a wife, you're always a mother. I think this is the second time in a few weeks that Meghan suggested Sarah pull an Eat Pray Love scheme.
I read the Gould piece just once last week and then listened to too much commentary on it...and I may be off base because I haven't read much of her other work.
But maybe she's actually admitting that her marriage problems are what she's introduced specifically as the female partner? That we live in a time where it's easily justifiable to leave a man because he's useless or cruel. She noted all the books, memoirs, etc she was reading about divorce.
In this case she was the shitty and ultimately couldn't justify herself. It's not her husband's fault she couldn't be more ambitious. She put herself in that avenue and then justified her career sidelining because she had to mother. But also admitted to just being lazy.
I dunno, I just finished Perfect Madness which somehow came out almost 20 years ago. Women have been justifying men not doing comparatively enough when it comes to home and kids for a long time, but again Gould admits she wouldn't let him do certain things or resented his involvement. He could argue with her, sure, but she chose to put herself in the submissive position, not "patriarchy."
Women can stand equivalent to their male spouses, but it's a lot of work. I have to wonder if Gould is pointing to that an acknowledgement of that.
I mean, otherwise the essay wasn't an acknowledgement of much of anything!
I think it's enlightening that much of the vocal support of Gould's essay, including Meghan's, involves a lot of wish casting into what isn't there in the actual essay, e.g. "maybe she was trying to do X or Y"
I mean if she was "trying to" do something but it didn't come through in the writing it's not a very good essay is it?
I wrote this in the middle of listening to this episode. Looks like Meghan picked up on similar themes.
I don't know how active Julia Galef has been since publishing "The Scout Mindset," but she'd be a good rationalist guest. https://juliagalef.com/
I was put off by Emily Gould's piece. While it may seem "brave" to share this piece with the general public, it seems more like a lack of courage to internalize and reflect on her struggles with money, drink, bipolar disease, and marriage, etc. and instead write a piece that seems embarrassing. I feel sad for her because she seems so self-absorbed, and she can't seem to manage her ego and... there is a child involved. It seems she needs good friends or family members to tell her to get her shit together-- and to consider divorce in her apparent emotional state just seems ill advised. And the admission that she does not want to work hard....OK, but then what are you going to do- depend on husband to work, who you then resent because he works?? I hope she finds something meaningful in her life that takes focus off herself, and she gets the mood stabilizers she needs for her bipolar.
1. I read The Cut article after listening to the podcast (very entertaining) and liked the essay much more than I expected. I hadn’t realized it was like a long-form book review about memoirs on divorce with the author’s own weird experience tied in.
2. What I found most disturbing was the narrator’s financial irresponsibility. She has apparently never had a regular income but never opens a bill. Hmmm. And yet in the end they will have a three bedroom apartment in Brooklyn and I doubt they live next to JFK.
3. Agree with Meghan that when literature tells the truth it’s not necessarily beautiful. Not all narrators or main characters are appealing. “Tropic of Cancer” and “Madame Bovary” come to mind.
For merch: Sarah? Hate her!
How about: “Sarah Haider - You Will Not Replace Us”
Not only is there a tradition of this kind of essay, it seems to be having another moment now. Leslie Jamison just published, "The birth of my daughter. The death of my marriage." I agree with Sarah. It starts to feel like kale chips. Am I wrong to wish for some acquired worldliness and wisdom after reading all this? So Emily doesn't blame the patriarchy. Nor should she. And yes, writers should not marry writers! Nora Ephron's book was much better because of the perspective she'd gained, (and her incredible sense of humor), as Meghan noted.
The comparison to Heartburn was a bit odd. Totally different dynamic.
On the other hand, if Bernstein had written a self-justifying essay right after cheating on a heavily pregnant Ephron, who he merely, and repetitively, described as just an object of his resentment ...