Gisele Bundchen, Homewrecker

Feminist take great and serious umbrage if you should ever even hint that they are homewreckers. Or should we say that they are marriage wreckers? But still, ever since feminism entered the American cultural bloodstream, around five decades ago, they have broken a considerable number of marriages. 

Strong, empowered women, motivated by the absurdly unrealistic idea that men and women should have precisely the same division of tasks at home, have produced a raft of divorces. At of now, America leads the world in broken homes. America leads the world in fatherless homes. Don’t we all understand that this exertion of female power has damaged children?

So, now we have Gisele Bundchen the fashion model wife of football great Tom Brady taking her grievances public. She is “quiet quitting” her marriage. She has had enough of bringing up children and making a home. Now that her youngest child has reached the ripe age of 9, she has decided to abandon home and hearth, the better to go out and save the planet.

 You can’t make this stuff up.

As for the details, apparently Gisele had been pestering her husband for quite some time, trying to get him to retire from football. And she seems to have succeeded, when he announced his retirement in February. But then, he changed his mind, decided to play for just one more season. Gisele lost her mind over it.

 So, we can try to fill in some of the blanks here. Gisele, who is worth a fortune did not like being a housewife and mother. She wanted her husband to share chores, even though, we must mention, the Bradys could certainly have afforded to provide her with household help. So she browbeat her husband to quit, and he finally, perhaps in order to shut her up, did just that. 

But then he came to his senses and changed his mind. The notion that her husband could defy her will and not ply his talent to the feminist life plan was too much for Gisele. After all, the Amazon was calling and her environmental activism was more important than her family.

Is Gisele a feminist? We do not know. Is she involved in therapy, and has some feminist therapist fed her these lines? We suspect that she is, but we do not know for certain. But it would not surprise me if we discovered that Gisele’s mind had been taken over by a feminist therapist.

And, of course, Gisele is a role model for feminist scolds, women who show how strong and powerful they are by wrecking their marriages.

 So, we have yet another no-account dopey feminist, by name of Jacquelynn Powers Maurice writing in The New York Post that Gisele was right to quit her marriage. As for the issue of being a responsible and dutiful wife, the issue does not arise. As for what will happen to her abandoned and neglected children, JPM does not give the matter a thought.

So, feminists are homewreckers, openly and honestly and unabashedly. And it is men's fault-- being an ideologue means never being wrong.

Post reporter Maurice has oodles of empathy for poor, put-upon Gisele. It drips from her keyboard, or some such:

 In short, the Brazilian stunner has been “quiet quitting” her marriage — and many of us wives and mothers of a certain age can relate. At some point, the job of running a household, raising kids and supporting a husband’s career while keeping the romance alive can feel like a burden. Especially during the pandemic. Who among us can honestly say they haven’t fantasized about taking a break and finally putting ourselves first?

 “It’s noticing, planning and delegating. If you’re not the one that’s doing the work yourself, it’s overseeing it and making sure it gets done. Women see it as their responsibility, so even when we do delegate this work, it still seems to stay on our plates.”

 Supporting her superstar husband likely means that Gisele is parenting by herself for at least half the year, celebrating Christmas on her own, managing the household and staff, dealing with bruised body parts and egos and even relocating to Tampa. (Tampa!)

 “There’s an expectation that men can lean into their jobs more than women can, even when it’s not a celebrity couple,” Hartley continued. “[Men] do that by neglecting the invisible work that is needed to keep the relationship going, the life going and the family going.”

Now, don’t you feel sorry for Gisele? Don’t you feel her pain? Serious feminist thinkers feel great empathy for Gisele. After all, she only has some $400 million in the bank, and surely she must feel that her resources are dwindling.

The fault, as always in the feminist mindset, is men. The fault lies with husbands who do not do sufficient housework. Of course, as it happens, if husbands do more housework, their wives complain that they are not making enough money. And wives always complain that husbands make lousy housekeepers.

Many professional working mothers with husbands unwilling to take on the demands of the household “have a tough choice,” writes author Lara Bazelon in her book, “Ambitious Like a Mother.”

Tough choice, my @#$$#. The notion of having a duty to be a good wife never enters the feminist equation. The consequences of having mothers abandon home and hearth, all the while blaming it on their husbands, does not enter either.

So, Gisele decided to go public with her grievances. She went to Elle magazine to explain the pain and the torment of her life as a wife and mother:

For most of her kids’ lives, Bündchen has purposely downshifted her fashion career. She spent the 2010s living in Boston with her husband, the unstoppable quarterback Tom Brady (formerly of the New England Patriots), and limited herself to only a few advertising campaigns and magazine covers a year. She likens the shift from the full-throttle pace of her twenties to the quiet family routines of her thirties to summiting a mountaintop and then descending into a valley. Bündchen happily made the switch. “I’m so grateful to have been there in those moments that were really shaping who they are as people,” she says of her children’s early years.

Now that her kids are older, however, Bündchen is ready to start climbing mountains again. So what’s a supermodel to do after conquering the world and growing a family? Her peers typically turn their global names into product lines after their initial runway years, launching skin care brands or lingerie collections. Bündchen dabbled in that stuff years ago, and it doesn’t interest her right now.

As I noted, her youngest daughter is 9. Her boys are in their early teens. To think that they will do just fine as their mother tries to blame everything on their father is absurd. To think that they are going to take her side is even more absurd.

In any case, Gisele is going to abandon home and hearth in order to save the biome, whatever that is:

To mark her 42nd birthday in July, she launched a new initiative to fund seven organizations working to restore Brazil’s biomes. Next, she wants to bring attention to her country’s ecosystems by producing a travel series. As Bündchen starts to tell me more about how she envisions the series and its potential impact, and how she wants kids to understand what’s happening to their planet, she stops herself. “There are so many things I’m working on, I’ll be here the entire day talking about it,” she says.

Has Gisele been pestering her husband to quite football for yo these many years.

Although she and her husband have joked about his potential retirement for years, Bündchen is often depicted by the media as desperate for Brady to call it quits. I tell her the characterization seems sexist to me, and she agrees. “I think this is the system we’ve been living in. That’s what society has accepted and what society hasn’t accepted.” Ultimately, she wants him to be happy and she knows better than anyone how much he loves the sport. 

 “Obviously, I have my concerns—this is a very violent sport, and I have my children and I would like him to be more present,” she says. “I have definitely had those conversations with him over and over again. But ultimately, I feel that everybody has to make a decision that works for [them]. He needs to follow his joy, too.”

He needs to follow his joy. Unless he does something that I do not want him to do, in which case I will abandon my marriage and my children. That’s the message. Feminists are all for it. They do not care about broken homes and wrecked marriages. It makes them feel strong and empowered.