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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 AI-ifying parenting. As the Cut recently noted, we’re also seeing “the girlbossification of AI”, as high-profile women such as Reese Witherspoon and Sheryl Sandberg encourage women to lean in to chatbots to make themselves more productive parents and workers. Truly, there has never been a better time in human history to happily and successfully pursue tech-enabled heterosexuality. Just ask ChatGPT.
Anti-vax dating apps are hosting in-person meetups
“We’re still some of the most persecuted people in society right now,” an event organizer for a “Summer of Love” mixer hosted by Unjected, an anti-vax dating app, told WIRED. “It just continues to encourage us to host these meetups.” In other news, measles has been making a huge comeback. Nothing says “romance” like unnecessarily succumbing to a once eliminated disease.
As the World Cup kicks off, Israel has continued what the Palestinian Football Association described as “a well-documented pattern of systematic targeting of Palestinian athletes, which continues without accountability”.
Niger military junta criminalizes same-sex relations
According to the Washington Post, the new penal code punishes anyone who “commits or attempts to commit an immodest or unnatural act or practices lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans-gender, Queer, intersex, Asexual (LGBTQIA+) acts” with between five and 10 years in prison and a fine. (Fascinated to know how they are going to identify asexuals!) Laws criminalizing same-sex activity are common across Africa and can even carry the death penalty in places like Uganda.
Why has Gwyneth Paltrow been nicknamed ‘Gwynocide’?
I explain here.
Nasa faces backlash for all-male Artemis III crew
Out of Nasas 37 active astronauts eligible for flight assignments, 15 are women, NBC reports. Alas, none of these women made the cut for the four-person Artemis III crew which will head to lower Earth orbit next year as part of a project (named for a Greek goddess) to return humans to the moon and prepare for crewed missions to Mars. “I don’t think anyone should be reading into this,” the Nasa administrator, Jared Isaacman, said after backlash to the crew announcement. Next time, just call Katy Perry, OK?
A shadowy overseas group is trying to influence Australian abortion policy
An anti-choice group called CitizenGo, founded in Spain and described by a UN research institute as a global leader of anti-gender ideology, has been trying to make inroads in Australia.
What the heck is a fraysexual?
The Guardian gallantly tries to explain.
The week in pawtriarchy
JD Vance has installed a custom-built chicken coop on the grounds of the vice-president’s residence. Those lucky hens are getting better living conditions than some Americans are: the luxury coop is designed to look like the VP’s own home and features a faux slate roof. An anonymous source told the Associated Press that taxpayer money was not used to build the chicken hut, which is eggcellent news. Anyway, I hope Vance enjoys his omelets. And, rather more importantly, I hope that one day his chickens come home to roost.
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Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
