Kat Rosenfield

I've talked about this subject a lot, and I hadn't done a monologue in quite a while and wanted to talk about this again because I got a note in my email about this.

And also today, Kat Rosenfield on X posted, starting to think the plummeting birth rate might have something to do with millennial women being immersed in these motherhood as identity annihilation narratives for the entirety of their fertile years.

And I tweeted, I talk often to counter this persistent messaging that motherhood is the end of your life about the fact that my career took off only after having children and my identity and my purpose crystallized because of them.

Having kids was the beginning, not the end.

Hello, this is

Kat.

And this is Phoebe.

We are Feminine Chaos.

I mean, I think I agree with parts of it, not all of it, but I will try to unpack this a bit.

What I remember about Grace in the Aziz Ansari episode, which, by the way, Kat Rosenfield and I on our podcast Feminine Chaos discussed so much that now when Aziz Ansari comes up, we sort of like joke that you have to take the shot because it's just so frequent.

Yeah.

Although, of course, his acting career was maybe kind of destroyed by it.

But I guess I worry that

that's not realistic.

So returning to the hot agentic quadrant thing, I remember I had, as part of the never-ending Substack Gender Wars, which, as you say, 90% of the platform, I wrote an essay in response, I think, to Kat Rosenfield, your co-host on your podcast, about this question of agency.

And specifically, it was about a late Me Too case about a young woman I don't need to go into the details, but basically about a young woman who had done this thing of lusting after a famous man who treated her badly sexually, but she still lusted after him and still seemed to keep coming back for more and then subsequently said that he'd abused her in whatever bog standard.

I, I, I'm not buying it.

But it is-- Look, we, we do this all-- We, we-- The, the, the point that Kat Rosenfield makes is an important one.

We, we wanna disassociate.

We wanna stop at the diagnosis because we're so wired this way now.