Thread by @distant_summer

Gonna make a short THREAD🧵on this article because it’s one of the most revealing pieces of media I’ve encountered in a while. Story is exactly as lurid as the headline makes it sound but most interesting part and bigger insight into American elite mindset is how it’s all framed

This is a story about an emotionally stunted autistic woman discovering love. But because she’s also a philosophy professor, she thinks she’s had a revelation about humanity that she needs to share. Expert-respecters at the New Yorker accept that narrative uncritically…

Premise is that she has some deep insight when in fact it’s totally pedestrian. Most people fall in love. "Philosophers often describe love from the outside, but she could provide an inside account." As if majority of high schoolers couldn't provide an inside account as well

What results is pure farce. Having experienced rare glimpse into ordinary human emotion, she writes philosophy papers about her personal divorce drama and gives academic lecture with tendentiously faux-profound title: “On the Kind of Love Into Which One Falls”

It amounts to a perfect synthesis of feminine sexual status signaling and autistic obliviousness to socially scripted modes of emotional expression. She reinterprets a Socrates speech from the Symposium to tell her class how she dumped her husband for a grad student after 6 weeks

Even better, because husband is also either himself autistic or fully committed to discursive reasoning as window into human behavior, he can’t take issue with her presentation and even promotes it. He gives feedback on her drafts and co-presents lecture on their divorce

These attempts to rationalize inevitably fall flat. Ex-husband can’t help but appear humiliated. Ex-wife’s belief that she has accessed a higher state of consciousness with her new man gives way to same stale familiarity that she felt before. But the article glosses over this…

The unremarkable phenomenon of a woman getting frustrated that a man isn’t giving her enough attention because he’s trying to do work is laden with grave philosophical implications. Her desire that he pursue a more successful career is recast as an erudite dispute over teleology

But the punchline never comes. The spiral into an open relationship with successively cuckolded husbands living as roommates while the wife makes a career recounting their humiliation first to her students and now a national audience is told with a straight face through the end

The real story is in the telling. It’s not “about” horny misadventures of overeducated mediocrities so much as the cargo cult bastardization of what's already extensively documented in any given pop song presented as aspirational wisdom of cognitive elite

The main character is, of course, the narrator. It’s all right there. Naivete about human experience. Ignorance of the means with which to apprehend it. The unsatisfying but “rationally” unobjectionable world that results. A lack of poetry.

“Apologize”