Thread by @sourhoestarter

ok im gonna live tweet my read of the age gap cut article...

"when i was 20 and a junior at Harvard College, a series of great ironies began to mock me"....passive voice rly does not lend itself to likeability here lol

this initially reads as....early 2000s studious brat vibes like an elle woods meets paris geller where you wish it was ironic but it's not

as a previous red scare crony...whoever tweeted that the high breasts, plausible deniability line is ripped from the pod was right

"Apologies to Progress" me calling myself a trad wife when i was unemployed last winter

"As for me, I liked history, Victorian novels, and knew of imminent female pitfalls from all the books I’d read" who among us has not read jane eyre and wuthering heights? ..."a little Bovarist" right...u are just like madame bovary fr

i feel like sm of this is her selling herself as this special kind of woman "as for me" ...couldn't understand why her female classmates etc...but then sm of "i, like all women" like ok i know women are multifaceted but are u a pick me or a girl's girl

"an English-literature student with all the corresponding major ambitions and minor prospects" this is exactly how u have to talk ab ur major when you take up the least lucrative one lmao

"I used to love men like men love women — that is, not very well, and with a hunger driven only by my own inadequacies." kind of love her for this. i too have felt like i love like a man sometimes. this is almost making me soften toward her

the short staccato-like sentences are really overdone in this...the whole thing. Reads like this. I mean it.

"They paraphrased without meaning to my favorite line from Nabokov’s Lolita" omg hang it up suki waterhouse

her idea that women in same-age relationships only have partners as equals is cope... u don't have to date a man twice ur age to be treated like a princess. perhaps it's also just nice to be well-adjusted but i digress...anyways

"I wonder what these women are getting back. I imagine them like Cinderella’s mice, scurrying around..." is quite the claim considering this is how i look at, and feel sorry for, women like the author

the way she talks ab her younger brother reads as cruel but it's also just so perfect that she openly looks down on her friends and family this much like omg i cant look away

ofc her husband would be jaded, uninspired and burnt out by 30. tbh he sounds spiritually female

"He bore the traces of other women who’d improved him, small but crucial basics like use a coaster; listen, don’t give advice. Young egos mellow into patience and generosity" this line's striking. makes me think ab the manchildren i've dated whom i made better for the next woman

i understand her rejection of the word partner but i also think that discourse is played out. i recall tweeting ab rejecting the term in the peak of my own pickmeism...that partner was aromantic/reserved for lgbtq+. now, i see it as professional/clinical but also who tf cares

"But his logistics ran so smoothly that he simply tacked mine on." honestly i don't think this is every woman's dream but this is kind of my dream. softening for her again lol

"I am the work in progress, the party we worry about, a surprising dominance." hm.. she never speaks of rly knowing him and it doesn't seem she cares to know him bc she's put him on such a pedestal as this whole and complete person when he's clearly fucked up. i want to hear...

more about him but im afraid hes just not that interesting and likely sad, has everything he needs, is bored, etc. to make a passion project out of a relationship

"He doesn’t have to hold it over my head. It just floats there, complicating usual shorthands to explain dissatisfaction" horrible sinking feeling she describes when being indebted to a man. can be applied to sm other things that pervade a relationship. i want more of this voice

the ten-year age gap only bred this level of analysis/churned enough content to even generate an essay bc of the age she was at when it began. i'd much rather read an essay of a woman at 40, dating a 50-year-old or 70 and dating 80 and he's dying or something...anything else

expressing that shes worried ab the possibility of not being able to do anything without him after she criticized all of her friends and family who are in same-age relationships for not knowing how to do anything is.........so rich

the random but cheap references to the victorian era or renaissance paintings bore me, mostly bc it feels like shes trying so hard to be this dark academia ivy league archetype who fucks older men. i guess i just want her to find herself. this is so sad womanhood is so Hard

now shes doing the women hit the wall, beautiful and damned thing...women are and men become. i feel this sometimes and it pains me too. infantilizing yourself wont fix this tho. i don't know. this is rly a case for jemima kirk's "i think you're thinking about yourself too much."

i wish she hadn't waited until the last two paragraphs to examine why women seek these kinds of relationships in the first place. "So when is her time, exactly? For leisure, ease, liberty? There is no brand of feminism which achieved female rest" bingo...yikes. i kinda fw her

she's acting as if same-age marriages strain maternal capabilities more than they do. to a degree, being maternal comes from within and is an independent act. you're carrying the child, you're breastfeeding. it's not all socialization + support of a husband.

plus, does she rly believe this older guy, who sees her as his little puppet, is going to be father of the year? this is starting to become scary naive to me. "he will aid me as he always has." i hope so. i don't think so though. no man fully will.

"A chance at a destiny that doesn’t adhere rigidly to the routines and timelines of men" oh girl... the entire essay is just riddled w points that could so easily be flipped on their heads. i suppose this is all narrative work to a degree but this feels esp hypocritical and Dumb

ok wait tbh i would love to stand still, have a smoke, take a break, make a baby and enjoy myself <3

when she acknowledged that men could also possibly long for this instead of being forced to climb the corporate ladder, etc. it would've been nice if she tied that back to her husband. i still don't think she sees him as anything else but a provider/wallet. im too earnest wtf...

"Sometimes real equality is not so obvious, sometimes it takes turns, sometimes it takes almost a decade to reveal itself." this is like watching a bad movie that has a semi-decent ending that fools u into giving it a higher rating on letterboxd bc your judgement's clouded

but im not convinced. yes...they've both made sacrifices and will continue to but she's indebted to him. and thats ok. i dont even take issue w a lot of her points, so much as the delivery. a narrator doesn't have to be likeable, but this read like a parody of itself 70% of time

ofc it's hard to separate my own personal opinions on this. im not a fan of age-gap relationships. i've never found it flattering when older men have hit on me. i reject the lana fantasies....i find it all p silly, cringe etc. and the essay reinforced that but !

no doubt she made some points. modern feminism has, and continues to fail us, in sm ways, i just don't think the solution to that, personally for me, is in the arms of a man ten, twenty, thirty years my senior. this is getting muddled now. great for clicks. bravo to the cut. fin.