Comment by huhkerrf
2 days ago
It's easier to swallow when you can blame a group of people for things that are bad. You can other them and not sit with the possibility that people who look like you (maybe even are you) can also do things that harm others. I couldn't do something bad, I'm not one of _them_.
You see this later as well when she slyly glides over women who do what her husband did. When her husband decided to end their marriage, it was representative of men. When women do it, it's their choice to make.
That’s an understandable misreading of what she said. I appreciate that the rhetorical effect could feel like a sly way to slip in asymmetric gender standards about how to interpret divorce.
But I am a pedantic person who prefers to focus on the literal statements in text rather than the perceived underlying emotional current. So I’ll pedantically plod through what she actually said.
She’s dealing with two dimensions of divorce: who initiated it (husband, wife, or collaborative), and whether it was surprising or unsurprising.
That gives several possibilities, but she lists three. What unifies them is that they are all written from the perspective of the abstract woman undergoing the experience.
1. Woman initiated, surprise unspecified.
2. Collaborative, so assume unsurprising.
3. Man initiated, surprising (her situation).
She doesn’t claim this covers all possibilities. The point of that bit is just to emphasize that divorces are different, and to object to treating them as a genre for wellness AI slop.
Here is the original text containing that part so others can easily form their own opinion.
“I also object to the flattening of the contours of my particular divorce. There are really important distinctions between the experiences of women who initiate their own divorces versus women who come to a mutual agreement with their spouses to end the marriage versus women, like me, who are completely blindsided by their husbands’ decisions to suddenly end the marriage. All divorces do involve self-discovery and rebuilding your life, but the ways in which you begin down that path often involve dramatically different circumstances.”