"Can women really have it all?" implies the existence of people who *do*

I wonder who those people might be (men) and why

Photography by Derek Henderson for Vogue, 2018

I’ve been out of the hot take business for, well, a hot minute but I wasn’t about to sit this one out given I Am the One Woman Who Has It All.

Yes this is about that BBC headline that, yes, did exist and then was updated once many, many women were like BRUH and someone over at the BBC hurriedly set down their fish and chips or beans and toast or whatever those gents like to eat over there and were like ladies, ladies (or maybe it was birds, birds?) there’s been a misunderstanding! (we 4-sure misunderstood how super pissed you’d get??)

Snopes confirmed!

First, CAN WOMEN REALLY HAVE IT ALL? is always the wrong question. It’s a question that serves as reprimand and joke, as if you were addressing a child who thought they could turn a cardboard box into a rocket ship and travel to the moon. There is always an undercurrent of how adorable whenever this question is posed.

But first, let’s back up to where the phrase “having it all” originated. In 2015 an essay by Jennifer Szalai — “The Complicated Origins of ‘Having It All’” [ed. note: this is a gifted link, yes I heard you on the paywalled links!] — ran in the The New York Times. It’s worth reading in its entirety, primarily for the history lesson.

The short version: In 1980 “having it all” was the title of a book by Joyce Gabriel and Bettye Baldwin, HAVING IT ALL: A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO MANAGING A HOME AND A CAREER. “…. true to its promise, Gabriel and Baldwin’s book offers straightforward tips on how a working mother might make the most of her scarce time. (‘Strive to do two things at once,’ the authors advise, like letting your nail polish set while you blow-dry your hair.)” But it was really only two years later when Helen Gurley Brown’s best-selling book, HAVING IT ALL: LOVE, SUCCESS, SEX, MONEY … EVEN IF YOU’RE STARTING WITH NOTHING, that the phrase exploded into popular culture, starting off as a feminist aspiration that would eventually come to feel more like a patronizing admonishment.

“Having it all” became a sort of shorthand for having both kids and a career. So it’s interesting to note that Helen Gurley Brown didn’t have children. From the same article:

“Only six of the 462 pages of ‘Having It All’ mention them, and Brown has a hard time disguising her suspicion that children aren’t so seamlessly integrated into her program. Admitting her own lack of firsthand knowledge on the subject, she quotes several of her time-starved mother-friends as authorities and sounds mildly flummoxed that anyone would willingly undertake such an endeavor: ‘Isn’t that a hard sell if you ever heard one?’”

And the kicker? She actually hated the title of the book:

“She conceded that she would accept her editors’ choice, but not before emphatically reiterating her objections: ‘ 'Having It All’ sounds so [expletive] cliché to me.’”

This all brings me to a neat little trick for you to try. Whenever you notice a take, an article, a statement that rubs you the wrong way and is also gender-based, try switching the genders and see if the premise holds up. Would it still make sense? Does it feel absurd? Insulting? (i.e. Does anyone ask if men can really have it all when they step down from a position of power?)

You can see this reframing in the popular (and funny and depressing) Twitter account @manwhohasitall. Let’s go back to the first HAVING IT ALL BOOK. Can you imagine writing tips for men like, “Strive to do two things at once! Try doing squats first thing in the morning while ironing your shirt for work.” This gender switch is also a reframing device that Dr. Jen Gunter uses to powerful effect in her book THE MENOPAUSE MANIFESTO where she writes in the section “Does the Word We Use Matter?”:

“… language isn’t a passive descriptor; rather, it’s an active participant. Words influence our thoughts …It’s misogynistic to tie a description of one-third or possibly even one-half of a woman’s life to to the function of her uterus and ovaries. We don’t define men [this way].”

and here, in her essay for the The New York Times:

“Menopause has long been treated as a pre-death, a metamorphosis from a woman to a crone with her exit ticket already punched. This is because a woman’s worth was measured by her reproductive ability and by extension her femininity, as defined by a narrow, misogynistic standard.

The medical language of menopause today reflects that trope. For example, it’s common to say that in menopause the ovarian supply of eggs has been ‘exhausted,’ but the concept of failure or fatigue is never applied to the penis — otherwise the term would be ‘penile failure’ or ‘penile exhaustion,’ rather than the more euphemistic ‘erectile dysfunction.’” [emphasis mine]

One more example: in Gabrielle Blair’s recent book EJACULATE RESPONSIBLY, the reframing of unwanted pregnancy as being fully the responsibility of men is the simple switch-up that made the original Twitter thread go viral. Woven throughout the book is assumption after assumption that we’ve so deeply internalized (why do sexually active women feel like they have to always have condoms on hand? Don’t condoms go on men? Do men not know how to buy condoms?) that it becomes mind-blowing that we haven’t questioned them more before.

Instead of asking if women can really have it all, it’d be more useful to examine why men seem to have it all.

Men are able to have a family and a career because the cultural pressure is on women to create, maintain, and adjust their family care infrastructure, regardless of whether they stay at home, work part time, or even full-time. And it means being in charge of arranging all the childcare, vacation camps, and summer camps regardless of her employment status. In general, the infrastructure of a family is primarily seen as the responsibility or domain of women, regardless of how feminist both partners think they are. This is just what a good wife and a good mother does. Because you know who won’t be judged by how all of that goes? The husband. The father. What does he know? WoMeN ArE jUsT bEtTeR At iT.

Men are awarded and admired for having a family. It proves that they’re virile, caring, desirable (to one other person at least), “a catch”, a real team player. Women are punished for having families. They’re seen as worn out, stretched out, no longer fun, no longer sexual, dry as a bone, and unable to think about anything else other than their children, how on earth will these ditzy broads do their lady jobs?!

To take that a step further, single dads are fawned over, their self-sacrifice is seen as sexy. They’ve proven they’ve “gone against type” — their own self-interest — to prioritize the care of vulnerable creatures. Single moms? Wow, way to fuck up your kids. Nice going.

I could go on and on and on and on and on but better writers have dissected issues of emotional labor, invisible labor, patriarchy, work culture, the impact of the pandemic on women and especially mothers, and more.

The point of this newsletter is not to dump on men. I love men. Truly you cannot imagine how much I have loved men in the past year (lol). And men don’t have it all, not really. When they do have adequate paternity leave available, the internal, social, and professional pressures to not take it are still very much there. Workplaces still subtly (and not so subtly) pressure men to prove that their jobs (work! a thing most people hate!) is more important than family (people you theoretically love! small adorable stinky people you have made or adopted!) And men still feel the pressure to be emotional lockboxes, stoic experiencers of life, avoiders of therapy.

Truly you need look no further than the entirely predictable post-divorce pattern of many, many, oh so many men to see that, even if completely devastated, women will run screaming from marriage and men cannot stand to be alone for more than five minutes. They must rush out and plug the next woman into their lives, the next one who will get his personal infrastructure — social, sexual, emotional, a human calendar reminder, a birthday gift buyer, a life mediator you can also fuck — back up and running. And that’s because we don’t allow men the cultural, social, and emotional freedom to be fully realized, expressive, vulnerable humans all on their own. They need a woman for that. They need a woman to make all of that ok.

No one wins when we define anyone through the “having it all” lens, period. What I’m asking is that we stop taking the bait and learn to step back to closely examine the language being used. It reminds me of a line in The West Wing episode, “The Ticket”. Leo McGarry (played by the late great John Spencer) is running as a Vice Presidential candidate and is about to face a press Q&A. The White House press secretary, played by Kristin Chenoweth, reminds him, “If you don't like what they’re asking you, don't accept the premise of the question.”

This idea is nothing new in politics, of course, but in culture we tend to accept the premise of the question (or statement or headline) entirely too often. I’ll leave you with the perfect example of handling this at what can only be described as “assassin-level”, when Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin were asked the dumbest, goofiest question in the history of questions. I’m amazed this guy didn’t ask if they were going to have a pillow fight later.

Unfortunately, what was lost most of all in framing her resignation with “Can women really have it all?” is that Prime Minister Ardern accomplished what certainly no living American politician of any gender, family structure, nor level of responsibility or ambition has come even close to achieving. From “The many legacies of Jacinda Ardern” by Ishaan Tharoor in The Washington Post:

“She attracted worldwide attention as only the second modern world leader to give birth while in office in 2018; not long thereafter, she brought her infant to the floor of the U.N. General Assembly, a recognition of the demands placed on all working mothers. Her cabinet after winning reelection in 2020 was the most diverse in New Zealand’s history, comprising 40 percent women, 25 percent people of Maori background and 15 percent people from the country’s LGBTQ community.

In 2019, New Zealand was rocked by a far-right terrorist attack on two mosques in the city of Christchurch, which saw a white nationalist gunman kill 51 people. Her government pushed through significant gun control legislation, and Ardern herself led a global effort to counter against online extremism and hate.

When the pandemic hit the following year, Ardern made New Zealand into the world’s preeminent “zero covid” success story. Sure, the island nation was blessed by its geographic remoteness, but even later as border controls were relaxed and the virus spread, no country in the Western world had a lower covid death rate. That was in part because of a successful immunization drive carried out by Ardern’s government.”

Certainly sounds like she had a hell of a lot more than “all” to me. Care to guess how? Because her partner was a stay-at-home father. Because they kept putting off their wedding so she could run a country. Because she had staff. Because she had infrastructure galore, created and maintained by other people. Because she had power.

via Evening Standard

---

You can find my books here. You can find my writing here. You can find my copywriting and creative direction work here. You can find me on Instagram. Please do not find me in real life, I’m busy declaring my candidacy for Prime Minister of Yo Mama.