Chronically Hetero-Fatigued
The Thing 1 and Thing 2 of newsletters has got opinions on Opinion, earworms about marriage, and major codependency envy
Welcome to Spreadlandia, where two veteran editors read it ALL to winnow out only the best: juicy yarns, big ideas, deeply personal essays, and hot goss—aka, the full Spread. Plus: original interviews, podcasts, and more. Come hungry!
Spreadpanions,
The New York Times Opinion section is stirring the pot again—not that they ever really took a breath—and this time it’s a spring fever kind of thing, with Magdalene J. Taylor, a senior editor at Playboy who has written about how people should be having more sex and about how dating apps were getting worse for the section in the past, summoning the ghost of Pamela Paul for the job. Her piece, which attempts to serve as a sort of rallying cry for “hetero-optimism” in the face of so much “heteropessimism,” initially ran with the headline “Being Straight Is Great, Actually.” Presumably that title was too over-the-top for even Opinion Editor Kathleen Kingsbury, and it quickly changed to the “There’s Nothing Wrong With Wanting Men.” (Was this better?) In addition to pouncing on the headline(s) and the timing—this little doozy landed right at the start of Pride Month—the internet fray has jumped all over Taylor’s text, which mixes together some “progressive” stats about how women now often earn as much as their husbands, dutifully checks boxes about the manosphere and the fall of Roe, and then takes a hard 180 in the fourth act, when the writer gives herself up. Turns out she is in love with “one such man.” Engaged, in fact, and everything is coming up roses. She would like everyone to experience such hombre y mujer bliss! Turns out it’s pretty sweet to be a straight gal in a straight world.
Much as we love a counterintuitive take, is this really the time to be reveling in the state of gender relations in America? Also, where even were we—had Modern Love taken a wrong turn? We’re still scratching our heads. Best thing we can come up with for now is a warning label: “The author is deliriously in love. It is not recommended by the medical establishment that she operate heavy machinery, including keyboards linked to millions of close-reading subscribers.”
Anyhoo, as women who are married to male men who we do like, and who shudder in this newsletter weekly about the misogyny seeping in through the doors and windows—citing the likes of Dame Helen Lewis’s current Atlantic cover story, for example—our wedding gift to Ms. Taylor is this: Twenty percent off a paid subscription to the Spread! In the name of lurve, we will of course extend it to those of you who have not yet ponied up as well. The code is SPREADOPINION. Congrats!
Rachel & Maggie
P.S. While we’re talkin’ choices made over at the Gray Lady: Did y’all read the sad-sack Styles story about Glamour magazine this week? Its raison d’être is, ostensibly, that the formerly robust and powerful brand has been reduced to an e-commerce operation. There’s very little industry context or even Condé Nast context—despite the fact that the company also just diminished and/or folded Teen Vogue, Allure, and Self. The result feels like they’re just kickin’ the ole Glamour girl while she’s down. Editors, if you’re hard up for assignments to keep that team of investigative media reporters busy, here’s what we’d like to know: Can a brand—not a Substacker but, like, a media company—actually survive on affiliate links? We need the facts!
P.P.S. We almost forgot (because we thought it was a bad dream) that in four weeks the Slate Culture Gabfest will end its 18-year run. As longterm fans, we hope someone is organizing them a Stephen Colbert-style send-off, and that our invites to said send-off are in the mail.
P.P.P.S. If you like the subject line on this newsletter, you’ll love this reel.
Mawwiage Problems
A new book by the marriage historian Stephanie Coontz is a Spready event indeed. Coontz came to the fore as a public intellectual during a different culture war—or maybe just an earlier battle of the same war we’re in now: During the ’90s push for “family values,” Coontz, a single mother herself, tried to cool the panic about divorce and single motherhood. Now, in For Better and Worse, she argues that we’re living in a new moment. Marriages are increasingly built around emotional fulfillment and personal choice, but they’re being dragged backward by “earworms”—internalized refrains, gender scripts from a previous era. In the Atlantic, Honor Jones (whose marital musings have been Spread Canon since this 2021 story1) processes the book through the lens of her own divorce, gently critiquing the oversimplification of Coontz’s argument (women “need to imagine better”" while men “need to rinse their cups”). In New York, Jessica Bennett delivers the full profile, traveling to Coontz’s home in Olympia, Washington, to bring the historian to life—from the antiwar stunts of her youth to her own reluctance to marry. In the end, we’re left with a deeper sense of how Coontz’s own marriage is genuinely hard-won, not just theoretically enlightened.
Read Jones’s “How to Save a Marriage” here.
Read Bennett’s “America’s Marriage Says We’re in a Tug-of-War With the Past” here.
The Parade of Bling-Emblazoned Panties that the Chic Bon Vivants Are Buzzing About at the Design-Forward Eatery
For those outside the biz: Per industry tradition, when an editor leaves a title after years of service, the staff makes them a personalized faux-cover or other magaziney artifact celebrating their work at the place. Lately, there have been several such artifacts popping up on Instagram. Our favorite is a full tribute issue to outgoing T editor Hanya Yanagihara, which features the A Little Life author’s banned words list2, and IOHO it bests even Graydon Carter’s much-discussed inventory of outlawed terms. Read to the bottom of this newsletter: In service to you, we squinted REALLY HARD at the Instagram post for a LONG TIME, to collect the full list of terms.
