The moms hang with the moms

And the dads hang with the dads. Also: 'social monogamy,' masculine mores, carpet grinding, and more in the weekend roundup.

Photo: Nathan Wright

I’ve had this draft in Substack tentatively titled, “The gender-sorting of heteronormative parental life.” I wanted to write about being fascinated and maddened by hetero social norms that seem to dictate that “the moms hang with the moms and the dads hang with the dads,” as I’ve tried to explain it to single friends without kids. A necessary followup: “Sometimes the moms arrange couple-on-couple hangs.”

I find it very… illuminating… to try to explain these dynamics anthropologically to people who are not living them, because they are objectively fucking weird when you say it out loud. Including to many of us who are living it! Just last weekend, the topic came up with some straight women friends and we all felt personally fine with each other hanging out with each other’s husbands, and yet we all agreed that it would be considered “weird,” socially.

Of course, this normative script is directed toward protecting the married, monogamous, and heterosexual nuclear family. It also seems to assume that men and women don’t really have anything in common or enjoy each other all that much (see: The Tragedy of Heterosexuality).

Can I even say that I miss having men in my life, that I mourn the post-marriage-and-kid loss of “guy friends” from my twenties, without sounding like a “pick me,” and without taking away from the total life-changing revelation that has been quote-unquote mom friends? Anyway, all of this is just a messy prelude to saying:

Sarah Wheeler

just wrote an article about this, so now I don’t have to finish that draft (maybe one day). A choice excerpt: “Sexual monogamy is apparently not enough to protect couples—social monogamy is also demanded.” Go read it.

To the other links…

I’m currently noodling on this piece on Ryan Gosling’s “ability to simultaneously affirm and question masculine mores.”

Angela Garbes on reading Miranda July’s All Fours:

I found myself involuntarily grinding my pelvis against the carpet I was lying on. A sign of life! July’s narrator, an unnamed 45-year-old artist on a journey of cracking open her life and body, describes an urge that ‘lit up new neural pathways, as if sex, the whole concept of it, was being freshly mapped’. Yes, I thought. I want that.

The Rock in a Benny Safdie film? I’m pumped. Don’t know how to feel about the hair!

“Why can’t a love song be gentle and aggressive, grounded and spectral? Isn’t love?”

Josh Gondelman says: “We are like two days from finding out that Justice Alito has a lower back tattoo that says: ‘My other erection is an insurrection.’” (Re: this.)

A fascinating look at the history of no-fault divorce.

Everyone is talking about Hit Man. I’m afraid I’ll have to drag myself to the theater to see it.

Ruth Whippman

writes: “That could be the tagline for the entirety of boy socialization. Boyhood. The shark experience.”