Feminism Demolishes a Family

We might admire Honor Jones for her raw honesty. Our admiration, however, will be short lived. In what must count as one of the most horrifying examples of moral dereliction Jones writes coldly and dispassionately about how she “demolished” her marriage. For no discernible reason.

She did it for no reason that we can ascertain from reading her Atlantic article. She undoubtedly damaged her three children. She probably damaged her husband. And she certainly hurt herself.

And yet, she offers no reason beyond the standard feminist reason that she did not want to make a home any more and did not want to have a man define her.

She is not some semi-literate rube from the back country. She is or has been an editor at the New York Times and the Atlantic.

One would have understood if she had been fed a line by a caring empathetic therapist, but, no, there seems to be no therapist in the picture.

So, we are left with a feminist awakening, one that is characterized, if we read it closely, by the simple fact that she only cares about what she wants. With one exceptional scene she has no sense of responsibility, to her children, to her husband, or even herself. 

One does not like to accuse people of being moral eunuchs, but if we did Honor Jones certainly qualifies. Besides, irony of irony, she takes actions that clearly violate her sense of honor. She does not ask about the honorable thing to do. She does not act to defend her honor. She ignores her honor or better, drowns it in her endless drooling about her wants.

Take her opening paragraph, regarding homemaking. We all know that in the feminist lexicon, from the time of Betty Friedan, homemaking was akin to enslavement. Jones tells us that she had thought she had wanted to be a homemaker, but when it came time to renovate her house, she balked. She sensed that it was not what she really, really wanted:

I had wanted, I thought, soapstone counters and a farmhouse sink. I had wanted an island and a breakfast nook and two narrow, vertical cabinets on either side of the stove; one could be for cutting boards and one could be for baking sheets. 

Note well, it’s all about her wants. She repeats the word, over and over again. Not a word about her responsibilities as an honorable and responsible human being, wife and mother of three. Next to her wants, the rest becomes irrelevant:

I started fantasizing about replacing the counters with two-by-fours on sawhorses and hanging the pots from nails on the wall. Slowly, I realized, I didn’t want this kitchen. Slowly, I realized, I didn’t want this life.

I didn’t want to renovate. I wanted to get divorced.

Apparently, she was not very good at homemaking. Perhaps this is one reason why she chose to walk away from the responsibilities that belonged to the status of wife and mother. She had a housekeeper, named Luba, but that did not suffice:

Even with Luba’s help, the house was chaos. I could never keep the children and their mess corralled. Toys and books were always underfoot. The crumbs—they were everywhere. I knew I was lucky to have all these crumbs and the house to keep them in. 

By her account, she was not cheating on her husband. She did not have a fancy man hidden in the attic. She did not have career aspirations that were being thwarted by marriage-- though perhaps she did. 

She wants above all to live the feminist dream, and that entails demolishing the lives of five people. About that she has no moral sense whatever. She is looking for total individual self-actualization, the kind that Betty Friedan promised to women who freed themselves of the shackles of domesticity:

I didn’t have a secret life. But I had a secret dream life—which might have been worse. I loved my husband; it’s not that I didn’t. But I felt that he was standing between me and the world, between me and myself. Everything I experienced—relationships, reality, my understanding of my own identity and desires—were filtered through him before I could access them. The worst part was that it wasn’t remotely his fault; this is probably exactly what I asked him to do when we were 21 and first in love, even if I never said it out loud. To shelter me from the elements; to be caring and broad-shouldered. But now it was like I was always on my tiptoes, trying to see around him. I couldn’t see, but I could imagine. I started imagining other lives. Other homes.

So, she tells her husband how she feels. In fact, she is so completely self-absorbed that her husband, the father of her three children, seems to be a mere afterthought. The same pertains to the children-- all of them fade into insignificance when placed next to the questions of countertops and backsplashes.

And she explains that she, like a moral eunuch, must leave her marriage, because her desire lies elsewhere:

What is it with divorced women and real estate? After the terrible conversation when I told my husband how I felt, and that I didn’t think I could change how I felt, I read Dana Spiotta’s new book, Wayward, about a woman who realizes she wants to leave her marriage only after she impulsively buys a fixer-upper.

Apparently, being married was inhibiting her ability to reflect philosophically. It was inhibiting her ability to think about patriarchy. This would be pathetic if it were not real. Or perhaps the fact that it’s real makes it more pathetic. 

She believes that marriage is constraining her. It makes it more difficult to think about art, to microdose or to have sex with women. Precisely why, she does not explain:

I wanted to be thinking about art and sex and politics and the patriarchy. How much of my life—I mean the architecture of my life, but also its essence, my soul, my mind—had I built around my husband? Who could I be if I wasn’t his wife? Maybe I would microdose. Maybe I would have sex with women. Maybe I would write a book. Not a book about real estate!

Her sense of motherhood, of her responsibility to her small children seems to reduce to the effects pregnancy has on the female body. Gross anatomy, don’t you think:

My children, the three pregnancies—a literal gut renovation. A major addition, and then a subtraction, and then the strange misshapen aftermath. The giant boobs of breastfeeding that seemed borrowed from another woman’s body entirely and were eventually returned to the mothers of the universe. And then the whole thing again, and again. And now finally my own winnowed, older body, which still feels foreign to me. I had been a house for my family, and now I was empty.

Not surprisingly, Jones has numbed her moral sense, to the point where a rush of cold air, like a breath of freedom, seemed to make it all worthwhile. Otherwise, she has only a minimal, undefined sense of the magnitude of the damage she had done:

There were days when the magnitude of what I’d done bore down on me. I kept wondering if I’d feel regret, or remorse. It is hard to admit this—it makes me cold, as cold a woman as my ex-husband sometimes suspects I am—but I didn’t. I felt raw, and I liked it. There was nothing between me and the world. It was as if I’d been wearing sunglasses and then taken them off, and suddenly everything looked different. Not better or worse, just clearer, harsher. Cold wind on my face.

I had caused so much upheaval, so much suffering, and for what? He asked me that, at first, again and again: For what? So I could put my face in the wind. So I could see the sun’s glare. I didn’t say that out loud.

Again, hers seems to be a feminist rebellion against the notion of homemaker-- even though, one hastens to add, she had been working full time as an editor and writer:

Besides, I wanted to let go of the idea that the home I made defined me, that I was made more real by homemaking. And yet there was truth to it. So much of homemaking is plainly material: dishwasher pods and blackout curtains and crumb control. But so much is storytelling. Maybe what I really wanted was new things—things only I had chosen, things that would make my hidden self come into view.

She adds that she was somewhat aware of the damage she had done to her children. And yet, she speaks through a veil of utter moral numbness, simply saying that she thought about it a lot. Don’t her children deserve more from their mother?

By breaking up our family, I’d taken something from my kids that they were never going to get back. Naturally, I thought about this a lot. There was nothing I could give them to make up for it, except, maybe, a way of being in the world: of being open to it, and open in it.

So, she moved to Brooklyn and told us all that she had gained for having caused so much pain:

On my nights alone, I caught up with old friends, frantically made new friends, said way too much about my personal life over drinks with colleagues. Out in the city, I felt solid: a capable woman taking care of her family.

A glimmer of understanding occasionally passes through her mind. Though it ends up with the notion that she had no real reason, no reason that she could admit to herself, for her effort to live the feminist dream:

Maybe I’m deluding myself. Maybe I’m not free of anything and I just want different objects, a different home, maybe someday—admit it—a different man. Maybe I’m starting the same story all over again. “For what?” you’d ask me, and you’d be right.

But I don’t think so. I think I’m making something new.

This feels like a breakdown in a case of clinical depression. Since I am not a psychiatrist I will not offer more in the way of a diagnosis. If she has had a breakdown, her divorce was presumably the right kind of feminist therapy.

Were this a single story, it would not be so bad. But, it is certainly not unique. Feminism has demolished the lives of five people, and it has done by turning one robotized woman into an agent of destruction. She does not know what she has done. She has simply been manipulated by an ideology, and by the sense that destroying her family, her home, her husband and her children spells liberation.