In honour of Pride I’d like to share some important news: Being Straight is Great, Actually! This public service announcement is brought to you by the New York Times which, in an offering to the Ragebait Gods, published an op-ed with that headline on the eve of Pride month. It then changed the headline of the piece, which was written by a Playboy editor, to There’s Nothing Wrong With Wanting Men. “I’m going to go out on a limb and say it,” author Magdalene J Taylor bravely wrote. “There has still never been a better time in human history to happily and successfully pursue heterosexuality.”
A sincere congratulations to Ms Taylor for her successful pursuit of heterosexuality, and her brave dismantling of straw men. But, look, while I don’t like to rain on anyone’s (straight) parade, I do have a few little quibbles with her argument. Namely, I keep seeing data which somewhat contradicts the idea that we live in a golden age for straight women.
Take, for example, the fact that women in opposite-sex marriages continue to do the bulk of the housework and caregiving. A 2023 report from the Pew Research Center found that in so-called egalitarian marriages where husbands and wives earn about the same salaries, women are stilling spending more than double the amount of time their partners do on housework. They’re also spending almost two hours more a week on caregiving. Husbands, meanwhile, spent three-and-a-half hours more on leisure activities. Dads are certainly helping out more than they used to, but much of the day-to-day domestic drudgery is still considered women’s work.
But perhaps AI is poised to solve that problem and usher in Taylor’s golden age of heterosexuality. According to a new feature in Wired, momfluencers are increasingly outsourcing their household tasks to chatbots and “pitching AI as a better coparent than men”. One of the leaders of this momfluencer movement is Swiss woman called Lilian Schmidt, who has a three-year-old daughter. Schmidt recently went viral for saying she’d outsourced 97% of her mental load to ChatGPT and has capitalized on her newfound fame by selling access to a custom GPT called Coparent.
Schmidt, by the way, has a partner who she says “does his fair share”. Still, she’s said that most of the household planning still falls to her. “Our brains work differently. He’s a doer and takes on the planning,” Schmidt said in interview. “I do the thinking. That mental load falls on me.” She expanded on that in her conversation with Wired. “Unfortunately, mental load is still considered a female problem,” Scmidt said. “A lot of men don’t even know what mental load even is.”
The good news for straight women with partners whose brains are too fragile to carry a mental load is that a whole host of enterprising momfluencers are now selling handbooks to help you co-parent with AI. It’s not just Schmidt; there’s a growing genre of YouTube videos and online courses…
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