essay on woman warrior

• The Woman Warrior

Maxine Hong Kingston

• Literature Notes
• The Woman Warrior in its Historical Context
• Book Summary
• About The Woman Warrior
• Character List
• Summary and Analysis
• No Name Woman
• White Tigers
• At the Western Palace
• A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe
• Maxine Hong Kingston Biography
• Critical Essays
• The Theme of the Voiceless Woman in The Woman Warrior
• The Woman Warrior in the Chinese Literary Context
• Full Glossary for The Woman Warrior
• Essay Questions
• Cite this Literature Note

Critical Essays The Woman Warrior in its Historical Context

In many ways, The Woman Warrior can best be understood in its historical context, particularly by three political incidents that occurred in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the Chinese May Fourth Movement of 1919, the 1949 Communist takeover of China, and the Chinese Exclusion Act passed by the United States Congress in 1882. Although Kingston never directly discusses the May Fourth Movement or the Chinese Exclusion Act, and only indirectly the fallout from the Communists' assuming power in China, to a large degree the events in The Woman Warrior are influenced by these three historical circumstances.

Historians often mark the beginning of modern China and its literature with the May Fourth Movement of 1919. Originally a demonstration against Japanese expansionism into China, the protest rapidly coalesced into a political, social, and cultural movement that gave birth to China's Communist Party. On May 4, 1919, several thousand Chinese students gathered in Beijing's Tiananmen Square — the same square made famous in the West for the Chinese government-sanctioned 1989 student massacre — to protest the decision by the victorious allies of World War I to cede Chinese territory to Japan. In the nineteenth century, Germany had won small territorial concessions from a weak China. Because Japan sided with the Western alliance against Germany in World War I, the Allies at the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference decided to give German-held territory in Shantung Province to Japan. When Chinese laborers, merchants, and others began supporting the student protest, the movement grew into a national crisis. The six-week standoff between the students and the Chinese government forced the Chinese delegation at the Versailles Peace Conference to reject the peace treaty.

The May Fourth Movement revolutionaries sought to replace China's heavy dependence on traditionalism with Western rationalism, democracy, and individualism. One of the cultural changes demanded by the activists, and one that has great consequences for modern Chinese literature, was the abandonment of classical Chinese, a language written but no longer spoken, in favor of a vernacular modern Chinese. The intellectuals wanted to adopt a written Chinese that was closer to colloquial Chinese, known as baihua . In support of this change, modern Chinese writers began adopting Western literary genres, including the novel, dramatic play, and short story. Writing for and about the general population, they created a new literary tradition using the spoken colloquial language, devoid of the sterile and overly stylized writing of ancient Chinese. Prominent in many of these new works are narratives using a first-person point of view, as well as themes of individualism and psychological self-examination.

This new literary and cultural movement influenced the attitudes of a new generation of Chinese. Because one of the cultural changes that the student demonstrators demanded was the education of women, in The Woman Warrior , Brave Orchid's decision to pursue a medical education must be understood in the context of the May Fourth Movement. Activists for educational change had been promoting universal education in China since the late-nineteenth century, but many women remained uneducated even after 1919. Brave Orchid, who in 1934 graduated from medical college at the age of thirty-seven, is thus somewhat of a late beneficiary of this progressive change. Kingston recognizes the sacrifices that Brave Orchid made in first obtaining a medical education and then abandoning her career to join her husband in America. Simultaneously, however, Kingston is pained and marginalized by the traditional upbringing she experienced. Despite Brave Orchid's progressive education, in many ways Kingston's mother still remained a traditionalist.

The May Fourth Movement of 1919 also gave birth to the Chinese Communist Party. The Communists, who formally took over China in 1949 after a long armed struggle, soon began a program of purging landowners, whom they disparagingly labeled as capitalists, as well as anyone associated with the previous nationalist regime. Under communism, farmland was seized and redistributed among peasants, who spoke out against their former landlords and thereby were responsible for the Communist government's massacring anywhere from fifty thousand to several million former landowners.

Although Kingston discusses only briefly how the 1949 Communist takeover affected her relatives still living in China, the political problems these Chinese family members experienced certainly occurred during the period immediately following the governmental change of power. For example, in "White Tigers," Kingston recounts how in 1949, when she was nine years old, her parents received letters mailed from China that reported that Kingston's uncles "were made to kneel on broken glass during their trials and had confessed to being landowners." As such, they were executed. More gruesome is Kingston's account of the aunt "whose thumbs were twisted off." And the senseless killings of Kingston's relatives during the Communists' purge of landlords is best seen in the story of the uncle who is inhumanely slaughtered for "selfishly" capturing two doves to feed his family. Without allowing the man to defend his actions, the Communists trap him in a tree and then shoot him to death, "leaving his body in the tree as an example" to others.

A third political event that shapes Kingston's The Woman Warrior is the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which was later followed by other anti-Chinese immigration laws in 1888, 1892, and 1924, all of which were passed into law by United States congresses intent on severely limiting the number of Chinese immigrants allowed into the country. In the nineteenth century, during the declining years of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912), China experienced great famines, internal uprisings, and wars against Western powers. During this tumultuous period, many Chinese came to America to find work; they participated in the California gold rush and worked on the transcontinental railroad. Like European immigrants, the Chinese considered America, which they colloquially termed "Gold Mountain," a land of opportunities.

In the 1870s and 1880s, however, many Americans resented the presence of these Chinese immigrants, whom they saw as cheap labor and, therefore, an economic threat. These protectionist Americans pressured Congress to pass the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which specifically restricted most Chinese from entering the United States and prevented those who were already in the country from gaining citizenship. To discourage the Chinese men who were already in the country from settling down and forming families, the act also barred Chinese women from entering the United States. In addition, anti-miscegenation laws prevented Chinese men from marrying non-Chinese women. As a result of these exclusionary laws, many Chinese who came to the United States in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries did so illegally. As illegal aliens, they lived underground lives, used fake identification papers, never mentioned their immigration status to non-Chinese people, and always avoided immigration authorities and the police. The Chinese Exclusion Act was not repealed until 1943.

In The Woman Warrior , although Kingston does not elaborate how her parents arrived in the United States, at least one of them must have arrived illegally. In China Men , the companion volume to The Woman Warrior , Kingston describes how her father used fake identification papers to gain entry into America and then, fifteen years later, sent for his wife from China. And in The Woman Warrior 's last chapter, "A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe," in which Kingston discusses her childhood memories of talking about illegal stowaways arriving in San Francisco's Chinatown, Brave Orchid warns her daughter never to mention her parents' immigration status to anyone, lest they be deported. Not surprising, such a life of existing outside of mainstream America deeply affected Kingston and many Chinese immigrant families, whose enforced silence protected parents from being deported but psychologically and emotionally confused the children trying to assimilate into a new, foreign culture.

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“The Woman Warrior” by Maxine Hong Kingston: Arguments About Prejudice, Gender, and Culture Essay

Introduction, brief description of chapters 1-3, comparison and contrast of the main theme.

“The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts” is a creative non-fictional account of two worlds that begets different themes. This novel was penned down by Maxine Hong Kingston. The writer implicitly correlates several narratives with her own life. We find engulfing silence in the first chapters that later overtly show the triumph narration of the song. The clever diction in this novel inextricably exemplifies how the identity of the protagonist and other characters is obliterated. The first three chapters exemplify the search for identity and growth. However, the narrator’s use of silence not only makes the audience take notice of her memoir but to presents the selfless nature that engenders the true identity of the characters. Her use of narratives creates a collage of one’s life and struggle to integrate between different worlds. The symbolic articulation of silence fervently mutes the struggle of Maxine to integrate between American and Chinese cultures. Women in the novel are prejudiced and silenced from one epoch to another. Therefore, “The Woman Warrior” explicitly brings forth various arguments about prejudice, gender, and culture by thematically using the aspect of silence that fervently becomes louder to the audience.

The first chapter encapsulates the story of the No-Name Woman from a mother’s perspective. The words “You must not tell anyone” tell of the muting experience a woman is faced with while in China. The mother’s tonal voice explicitly tells the story of the woman who killed herself (Kingston, 1989). We find an adulterous account of the No-Name Woman who becomes pregnant. The husband to the woman had been absent from the country. The villagers become pissed about this act and opted to demolish her house. Sadly, she gives birth in a pigsty and later drowns herself together with the youngling in a well. In the second part, there are chances that the No-Name Woman might have been raped. This is elucidated in the essence that Chinese women had no autonomy of choice or preference either in their sexual or normal existence. The voluptuous nature of the No-Name Woman approves for her sexually liberated lifestyle that the narrator rarely acknowledges. The woman ostensibly brought disgrace to the family and thus she is forgotten by the family members and villagers. This is a cautionary story to Kingston who has mixed feelings about Chinese culture and the No-Name Woman (Kingston, 1989).

The second chapter is titled the White Tigers. The chapter gives an account of a fantasy life of a warrior woman called Fa Mu Lan. The story is derived from Brave Orchid’s talk stories and narrated in the first person. She finds her way to the house of an elderly couple as she stalks a bird (Kingston, 1989). The couple is bequeathed with clairvoyance ability that steams up her spirit to be a renowned powerful warrior. She is given an offer of being trained to be a great warrior. She goes to the White Tiger’s mountain and her diet toggles her to have hallucinations. As she attains the age of 14 she returns to her master. She is taught how to fight using a magical sky sword. In addition, Fa Mu Lan is magically shown her family’s image, her matrimonial arrangement, and her future companion. She is later shown how her conscripted husband is ambushed by the Chinese baron’s defense force. Her efforts to rescue the husband seem futile as she is told by her master that it was not at the right age to do so. Several arrangements ensue as she prepares to battle the Baron’s army. Riding on a white horse and disguised as a man she conquers many battles and becomes a heroine (Kingston, 1989). The story tells of her ability to be a diligent apprentice who accomplishes a male-dominated task. Kingston correlates such amazing ability of the warrior woman and her academic prowess but she meets the utter prejudice and opts to speak louder to her people to seek an audience (Kingston, 1989).

The third chapter is titled Shaman or a magician, which explicitly gives an account of the writer’s mother called Brave Orchid. Brave Orchid traces her life episodes from China to America. She manages to pursue education and attains a medical credential from Canton. We are introduced to malevolent ghosts that she manages to fight and trounce. She can heal the sick and jolt away malicious ghosts. A very frightening correlation between monster-eating humans and her mother is told to Kingston. The culture of the Chinese is evident here. Several talk stories like a child being born with a physique anomaly discontent Kingston. Brave Orchid imparts the knowledge to Kingston that white people in America resemble ghosts.

Well, Kingston employs cleverly the theme of silence in the above-discussed chapters to epitomize her own identity and voice as a Chinese American woman. The first chapter tells the story of her dead aunt who seemed unworthy mentioning. Her struggle with American life encases her search for identity and self-esteem. Here we see how the women have been deprived of their ability to speak and remain judged silently. This enforced silence makes Kingston correlate her life and find her inimitable self. She wonders at the ignorance of the villagers. The motif she uses enlaces her Chinese background from Brave Orchid narrative in the three chapters. The stories are Non-Name Woman, White Tigers, and Shaman. She correlates each story with her own life-giving forth the prejudices women encounter e.g., being murdered and scornful response from bosses who look down upon women no matter how elite they are. For example, the No-Name Woman makes a notable background to Kingston’s own life. Here she narrates her silenced life and later extrapolates to be a voiced Chinese American woman. Both chapters show how women are faced with prejudice and neglect as they try to seek identity. The paradox in these chapters revolves around the life experience of Brave Orchid and Kingston. However, the stories in the chapters differ in genres. That is, the first and last narratives are real and the second one is fantasy-oriented. In the first story, the No-Name Woman does not find freedom because she is purportedly called adulterous without verification. This neglects consent to her esteem which guides her and sadly she loses her life. In the second story, Fa Mu Lan the warrior woman gets basic skills to perform a man’s task. But she does not fully go to war as a woman; she disguises herself to resemble a man. Lastly, the Shaman story gives the inevitable power of Brave orchid who attains a high educational level of being a doctor. Both chapters are cleverly interrelated with fantasy and truth that show the American and Chinese cultures and their responses towards women.

The above discussions show how the different cultures oppress women through muting them. However, they are silenced in different ways but they finally find their freedom even if death seems the last remedy. Women’s bodies are objects used by men to fulfill their lust. Meaning they have no voice about their destiny. As we see Maxine and other characters struggling to find their identity. Therefore, “The Woman Warrior” explicitly brings forth various arguments about prejudice, gender, and culture by thematically using the aspect of silence that fervently becomes louder to the audience.

Kingston, H. M. (1989). The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts . New York, NY: Vintage.

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IvyPanda. (2022, January 3). “The Woman Warrior” by Maxine Hong Kingston: Arguments About Prejudice, Gender, and Culture. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-woman-warrior-by-maxine-hong-kingston-arguments-about-prejudice-gender-and-culture/

"“The Woman Warrior” by Maxine Hong Kingston: Arguments About Prejudice, Gender, and Culture." IvyPanda , 3 Jan. 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/the-woman-warrior-by-maxine-hong-kingston-arguments-about-prejudice-gender-and-culture/.

IvyPanda . (2022) '“The Woman Warrior” by Maxine Hong Kingston: Arguments About Prejudice, Gender, and Culture'. 3 January.

IvyPanda . 2022. "“The Woman Warrior” by Maxine Hong Kingston: Arguments About Prejudice, Gender, and Culture." January 3, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-woman-warrior-by-maxine-hong-kingston-arguments-about-prejudice-gender-and-culture/.

1. IvyPanda . "“The Woman Warrior” by Maxine Hong Kingston: Arguments About Prejudice, Gender, and Culture." January 3, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-woman-warrior-by-maxine-hong-kingston-arguments-about-prejudice-gender-and-culture/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "“The Woman Warrior” by Maxine Hong Kingston: Arguments About Prejudice, Gender, and Culture." January 3, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-woman-warrior-by-maxine-hong-kingston-arguments-about-prejudice-gender-and-culture/.

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The Mix of Fact and Fiction in "The Woman Warrior" and "Fun Home"

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Mother Figure in "In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens" and "The Woman Warrior"

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A Woman Warrior Born of a Cultural Crisis

Legacy drawbacks: female oppression in the warrior woman, harriet tubman – a warrior woman, the past and the present in kingston's and plath's works.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Memoir, autobiography, Chinese folk tale

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The Woman Warrior

by Maxine Kingston

The woman warrior essay questions.

What are the qualities that make someone a "woman warrior?"

Answer: Examine the "woman warriors" in the book and explain how they are alike and different from one another. Direct evidence from the text can support the analysis of each quality.

Why does the narrator invoke Fa Mu Lan and Ts'ai Yen?

Answer: They are both legendary women. Events and themes from each legend apply to the novel as a whole. The characters in the novel also sometimes resemble one or both of these legendary women.

The Woman Warrior centers around the lives of women, but what about the men?

Answer: Consider the purpose each man serves. Why are their actions significant? What do they tell us about the novel's central characters?

Why does the author never give her name in the narrator’s tales?

Answer: The author is making a statement about the truth of her narrative by omitting her name—it is not quite a true story. Consider the title of Chapter 1, "No Name Woman," as well as the Chinese tradition of withholding one's true name from others.

What is a woman warrior?

Answer: According to the narrator, Chinese tradition states that women are deserters, slaves, and wastes of space. The narrator counters this derogatory view of women with the idea of the woman warrior, one who shatters those cultural traditions. Is there a possibility for a powerful woman in Chinese culture, or must the woman warrior act like a man to be counted a warrior? Consider the examples in the text and determine what the answer to this question suggests about female identity within Chinese culture.

Examine the theme of silence in the novel.

Answer: Is silence benevolent or malevolent? Does keeping an issue silent take away its power or give it more power? Specific examples can support various views about silence in the novel.

What is a "ghost"?

Answer: The term has different meanings in the narrative. It can refer to an individual who haunts others, living or dead, or a whole group of people who are mysterious. Consider how various types of ghosts affect the characters. When forming your argument, make sure to include an examination of the novel's subtitle, "Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts."

How is "At the Western Palace" distinct from the rest of the novel?

Answer: Think specifically about the contrast between Moon Orchid and Brave Orchid and what it represents. What major themes does the contrast help explain?

What role does food play in the novel?

Answer: Search the novel for references to food and eating. The way a person eats and what she eats says a great deal about her—personally, psychologically, culturally. Make sure to consider Brave Orchid, Fa Mu Lan, and the narrator.

What do you make of the opening story about the drowned aunt?

Answer: That story sets the tone and themes for the rest of the book. The story involves issues of culture, gender relations, family conflict, and generational reproduction. It may help to examine the chapter as though it is a thesis statement for the entire novel.

Why is the theme of birth so important in the novel?

Answer: There are many births described or mentioned in the narrative. It involves the relationship between mother and child and the relationship between generations, and it therefore implicates the reproduction of culture from one generation to the next. In your analysis, consider the births of the following people: "No-Name Woman" aunt's baby, Fa Mu Lan's son, the narrator's, and the babies Brave Orchid delivered. Also consider how traditions differ in assessing boys' and girls' births in China and in the United States.

Explore the issue of insanity in the novel.

Answer: Consider why the author includes so many mentally unstable characters. What do their stories tell us about the Chinese immigrant community? Do different people and different cultures have different standards of sanity and insanity? Make sure to consider: Moon Orchid, Crazy Mary, and the woman who was stoned to death in China.

The Woman Warrior Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for The Woman Warrior is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

The narrator constantly dearches for the sign of a bird.

What is the story of the crane boxer?

In the chapter, White Tigers, the narrator tells a story about the woman who invented white crane boxing. Legend says that the woman was a fighter, trained by “an order of fighting monks.” One morning, she tried to use her fighting pole to move a...

Describe a meal scene.

In the novel, Brave Orchid is determined to make her children brave eaters. In order to do this, she would keep serving them the same piece of food meal after meal until they ate it.

Study Guide for The Woman Warrior

The Woman Warrior study guide contains a biography of Maxine Kingston, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About The Woman Warrior
• The Woman Warrior Summary
• Character List

Essays for The Woman Warrior

The Woman Warrior essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Woman Warrior by Maxine Kingston.

• Becoming a Warrior Amidst Cultural Confusion
• The Past and the Present in Kingston's "Woman Warrior" and Sylvia Plath's Poetry
• Breaking the Silence
• The Woman Warrior in "Shaman" and "In Search of Our Mother's Gardens"
• The Problem With Legacies: Analysis of Chapter One, The Warrior Woman

Lesson Plan for The Woman Warrior

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to The Woman Warrior
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• The Woman Warrior Bibliography

Wikipedia Entries for The Woman Warrior

• Introduction
• Plot summary
• Language and narrative voice

The Woman Warrior

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Discussion Questions

Reality, in The Woman Warrior , is something richer and more complicated than plain fact. How do legend, folklore, magic, and history inflect Kingston’s telling of her own life story?

Kingston wrote The Woman Warrior in 1975 and studied at Berkeley during its 1960s political heyday. How might the historical and cultural context in which Kingston came of age have influenced her writing?

The Woman Warrior begins, “You must not tell anyone […] what I am about to tell you” (3). What role does the breaking of taboos—especially taboos around secrecy and femininity—play in this story?

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A Latina Harvard grad advised women to marry older men. The internet had thoughts.

When she was 20 years old and a junior at Harvard College, Grazie Sophia Christie had an epiphany. She could study hard and diligently pursue her “ideal existence” though years of work and effort.

Or she “could just marry it early.”

Christie chose the latter. 

In a column for New York magazine’s The Cut, the Cuban American editor and writer extolled the value of marrying an older, wealthier man as a shortcut to the life she desired. Christie’s March 27 story went viral, topping the magazine’s “most popular” list and inspiring hundreds of overwhelmingly negative comments online and on social media. As Miami New Times described it , “The essay hit the internet with a virtual thud heard round the world.”

Readers were taken aback by myriad aspects of Christie’s florid essay, which runs nearly 4,000 words. Though she was an undergraduate, Christie lugged “a heavy suitcase of books each Saturday to the Harvard Business School,” which she felt offered the best options for a suitable mate. “I had high breasts, most of my eggs, plausible deniability when it came to purity, a flush ponytail, a pep in my step that had yet to run out," she wrote. "Older men still desired those things.” 

She crashed an event at the Harvard Business School and met her future husband when she was 20, and they married four years later.

Many readers were struck by the fact that Christie had the benefit of an elite education — she also completed a fellowship at Oxford University — yet chose to enter into an unequal marriage. “My husband isn’t my partner. He’s my mentor, my lover, and, only in certain contexts, my friend,” she writes. “I’ll never forget it, how he showed me around our first place like he was introducing me to myself. This is the wine you’ll drink, where you’ll keep your clothes, we vacation here; this is the other language we’ll speak, you’ll learn it and I did.”

Christie, now 27, writes that she enjoys time “to read, to walk central London and Miami and think in delicious circles.”

There is, Christie writes, a downside to her monied existence: “I live in an apartment whose rent he pays and that shapes the freedom with which I can ever be angry with him. He doesn’t have to hold it over my head, it just floats there, complicating usual shorthands to explain dissatisfaction.”

By marrying so young — although as many social media users pointed out, her husband is only 10 years older — Christie was able to leave a “lucrative but deadening spreadsheet job to write full-time, without having to live like a writer.”

A recurring theme in the viral response to Christie’s article, ostensibly about age-gap relationships, is that it should have been titled “The Case for Marrying a Rich Man.”

Christie’s transactional approach to marriage and relationships resonated — negatively — with readers. An online parody of her original piece has already been posted by the literary magazine McSweeney’s. Her words have been dissected by a columnist at Slate, who called it “bad advice for most human beings, at least if what most human beings seek are meaningful and happy lives.”

Online, people who commented on Christie’s essay called it “an insult to women of any age,” “a sad piece of writing,” and “pitiful in so many ways.”  Some readers wondered if the article was a satire or a joke. One of the kinder comments on New York magazine’s website said: “This is one of the most embarrassing things I have ever read. I am truly mortified for the writer.”

Christie has so far not responded to media requests for interviews, and several attempts by NBC News to contact her were unsuccessful. Her Instagram account was recently switched from public to private.

According to her personal website , Christie is editor-in-chief of a new publication, The Miami Native, “a serious magazine about an unserious city.” Her website’s bio page, which appears to have been disabled, previously stated that she was “writing a novel between Miami, London, sometimes France.”

Christie grew up in Miami. Her parents,  Miami New Times has reported , are prominent in Florida’s conservative Catholic community. Her mother was appointed to the state Board of Education in March 2022. A senior fellow for The Catholic Association, she hosts a radio show , “Conversations with Consequences,” on the Eternal Word Television Network. Her father is a physician and an anti-abortion activist who, according to his website , lectures regularly on Catholic social issues, particularly marriage, family, and the dignity of life.”

For more from NBC Latino,  sign up for our weekly newsletter .

Raul A. Reyes, a lawyer, is a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors. He has written for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Christian Science Monitor, Texas Monthly and the Huffington Post.

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That Viral Essay Wasn’t About Age Gaps. It Was About Marrying Rich.

But both tactics are flawed if you want to have any hope of becoming yourself..

Women are wisest, a viral essay in New York magazine’s the Cut argues , to maximize their most valuable cultural assets— youth and beauty—and marry older men when they’re still very young. Doing so, 27-year-old writer Grazie Sophia Christie writes, opens up a life of ease, and gets women off of a male-defined timeline that has our professional and reproductive lives crashing irreconcilably into each other. Sure, she says, there are concessions, like one’s freedom and entire independent identity. But those are small gives in comparison to a life in which a person has no adult responsibilities, including the responsibility to become oneself.

This is all framed as rational, perhaps even feminist advice, a way for women to quit playing by men’s rules and to reject exploitative capitalist demands—a choice the writer argues is the most obviously intelligent one. That other Harvard undergraduates did not busy themselves trying to attract wealthy or soon-to-be-wealthy men seems to flummox her (taking her “high breasts, most of my eggs, plausible deniability when it came to purity, a flush ponytail, a pep in my step that had yet to run out” to the Harvard Business School library, “I could not understand why my female classmates did not join me, given their intelligence”). But it’s nothing more than a recycling of some of the oldest advice around: For women to mold themselves around more-powerful men, to never grow into independent adults, and to find happiness in a state of perpetual pre-adolescence, submission, and dependence. These are odd choices for an aspiring writer (one wonders what, exactly, a girl who never wants to grow up and has no idea who she is beyond what a man has made her into could possibly have to write about). And it’s bad advice for most human beings, at least if what most human beings seek are meaningful and happy lives.

But this is not an essay about the benefits of younger women marrying older men. It is an essay about the benefits of younger women marrying rich men. Most of the purported upsides—a paid-for apartment, paid-for vacations, lives split between Miami and London—are less about her husband’s age than his wealth. Every 20-year-old in the country could decide to marry a thirtysomething and she wouldn’t suddenly be gifted an eternal vacation.

Which is part of what makes the framing of this as an age-gap essay both strange and revealing. The benefits the writer derives from her relationship come from her partner’s money. But the things she gives up are the result of both their profound financial inequality and her relative youth. Compared to her and her peers, she writes, her husband “struck me instead as so finished, formed.” By contrast, “At 20, I had felt daunted by the project of becoming my ideal self.” The idea of having to take responsibility for her own life was profoundly unappealing, as “adulthood seemed a series of exhausting obligations.” Tying herself to an older man gave her an out, a way to skip the work of becoming an adult by allowing a father-husband to mold her to his desires. “My husband isn’t my partner,” she writes. “He’s my mentor, my lover, and, only in certain contexts, my friend. I’ll never forget it, how he showed me around our first place like he was introducing me to myself: This is the wine you’ll drink, where you’ll keep your clothes, we vacation here, this is the other language we’ll speak, you’ll learn it, and I did.”

These, by the way, are the things she says are benefits of marrying older.

The downsides are many, including a basic inability to express a full range of human emotion (“I live in an apartment whose rent he pays and that constrains the freedom with which I can ever be angry with him”) and an understanding that she owes back, in some other form, what he materially provides (the most revealing line in the essay may be when she claims that “when someone says they feel unappreciated, what they really mean is you’re in debt to them”). It is clear that part of what she has paid in exchange for a paid-for life is a total lack of any sense of self, and a tacit agreement not to pursue one. “If he ever betrayed me and I had to move on, I would survive,” she writes, “but would find in my humor, preferences, the way I make coffee or the bed nothing that he did not teach, change, mold, recompose, stamp with his initials.”

Reading Christie’s essay, I thought of another one: Joan Didion’s on self-respect , in which Didion argues that “character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.” If we lack self-respect, “we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false notions of us.” Self-respect may not make life effortless and easy. But it means that whenever “we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously un- comfortable bed, the one we make ourselves,” at least we can fall asleep.

It can feel catty to publicly criticize another woman’s romantic choices, and doing so inevitably opens one up to accusations of jealousy or pettiness. But the stories we tell about marriage, love, partnership, and gender matter, especially when they’re told in major culture-shaping magazines. And it’s equally as condescending to say that women’s choices are off-limits for critique, especially when those choices are shared as universal advice, and especially when they neatly dovetail with resurgent conservative efforts to make women’s lives smaller and less independent. “Marry rich” is, as labor economist Kathryn Anne Edwards put it in Bloomberg, essentially the Republican plan for mothers. The model of marriage as a hierarchy with a breadwinning man on top and a younger, dependent, submissive woman meeting his needs and those of their children is not exactly a fresh or groundbreaking ideal. It’s a model that kept women trapped and miserable for centuries.

It’s also one that profoundly stunted women’s intellectual and personal growth. In her essay for the Cut, Christie seems to believe that a life of ease will abet a life freed up for creative endeavors, and happiness. But there’s little evidence that having material abundance and little adversity actually makes people happy, let alone more creatively generativ e . Having one’s basic material needs met does seem to be a prerequisite for happiness. But a meaningful life requires some sense of self, an ability to look outward rather than inward, and the intellectual and experiential layers that come with facing hardship and surmounting it.

A good and happy life is not a life in which all is easy. A good and happy life (and here I am borrowing from centuries of philosophers and scholars) is one characterized by the pursuit of meaning and knowledge, by deep connections with and service to other people (and not just to your husband and children), and by the kind of rich self-knowledge and satisfaction that comes from owning one’s choices, taking responsibility for one’s life, and doing the difficult and endless work of growing into a fully-formed person—and then evolving again. Handing everything about one’s life over to an authority figure, from the big decisions to the minute details, may seem like a path to ease for those who cannot stomach the obligations and opportunities of their own freedom. It’s really an intellectual and emotional dead end.

And what kind of man seeks out a marriage like this, in which his only job is to provide, but very much is owed? What kind of man desires, as the writer cast herself, a raw lump of clay to be molded to simply fill in whatever cracks in his life needed filling? And if the transaction is money and guidance in exchange for youth, beauty, and pliability, what happens when the young, beautiful, and pliable party inevitably ages and perhaps feels her backbone begin to harden? What happens if she has children?

The thing about using youth and beauty as a currency is that those assets depreciate pretty rapidly. There is a nearly endless supply of young and beautiful women, with more added each year. There are smaller numbers of wealthy older men, and the pool winnows down even further if one presumes, as Christie does, that many of these men want to date and marry compliant twentysomethings. If youth and beauty are what you’re exchanging for a man’s resources, you’d better make sure there’s something else there—like the basic ability to provide for yourself, or at the very least a sense of self—to back that exchange up.

It is hard to be an adult woman; it’s hard to be an adult, period. And many women in our era of unfinished feminism no doubt find plenty to envy about a life in which they don’t have to work tirelessly to barely make ends meet, don’t have to manage the needs of both children and man-children, could simply be taken care of for once. This may also explain some of the social media fascination with Trad Wives and stay-at-home girlfriends (some of that fascination is also, I suspect, simply a sexual submission fetish , but that’s another column). Fantasies of leisure reflect a real need for it, and American women would be far better off—happier, freer—if time and resources were not so often so constrained, and doled out so inequitably.

But the way out is not actually found in submission, and certainly not in electing to be carried by a man who could choose to drop you at any time. That’s not a life of ease. It’s a life of perpetual insecurity, knowing your spouse believes your value is decreasing by the day while his—an actual dollar figure—rises. A life in which one simply allows another adult to do all the deciding for them is a stunted life, one of profound smallness—even if the vacations are nice.

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Maga darling or woke warrior? Kim Mulkey probably doesn’t care

The LSU coach is one of the most polarizing figures in sports. But her true focus, and first love, has always been basketball

E verything about Kim Mulkey screams LOOK AT ME – from her garish sideline fashion to her in-your-face coaching style to her combative media posture . But perceptions of Mulkey have never shifted as wildly as during this year’s NCAA women’s basketball tournament, where the LSU coach has been under a level of scrutiny unlike any she has endured over her long hoops career.

The rollercoaster ride started late last month, with the 61-year-old dedicating the first of two postgame news conferences to lambasting an imminent Washington Post “hit piece” on her. This, despite the paper spending two years courting her cooperation and giving her two more days to respond to a final list of questions. Mulkey threatened legal action and tarred Kent Babb, the respected Post writer in question, as a two-bit muckraker. (“Not many people are in a position to hold these kinds of journalists accountable, but I am, and I’ll do it,” Mulkey said.) While the aggressive PR defense endeared Mulkey to swathes of conservative-leaning hoops agnostics who are plenty leery of the press already, it had the backfiring effect of providing free advertising for what proved to be a fairly benign profile – a major letdown for readers who were half expecting the Post to report that she had been at the Capitol on January 6, based on the coach’s outburst.

Just when Mulkey appeared beyond redemption, the Los Angeles Times ran an op-ed before LSU’s Sweet Sixteen matchup with UCLA, touting it as a reckoning between good and evil. Writer Ben Bolch described UCLA as “milk and cookies” and “America’s sweethearts,” while depicting LSU’s predominantly Black women’s team as “Louisiana hot sauce,” and “dirty debutantes”. Bolch and the Times scrambled to save face , albeit without mentioning the role massive layoffs at the paper played in helping the column sneak through. Even as Mulkey beat the press again, she was nonetheless careful to frame Bolch’s broadside as a sexist attack while ignoring the obvious racial components. “How dare people attack kids like that,” she fumed. “You don’t have to like the way we play. You don’t have to like the way we trash-talk … But I can’t sit up here as a mother and a grandmother and a leader of young people and allow somebody to say that. Because guys, that’s wrong. I know sexism when I see it and I read it.”

When LSU were beaten by a Caitlin Clark-inspired Iowa on Monday night, ending their title defense, it seemed Mulkey’s arc would end with opposing fans getting the last laugh by sharing pictures of her with an image from the Capitol riot superimposed on to her green screen pantsuit . But a reporter had noticed that LSU hadn’t been on the court for the national anthem and asked Mulkey about it after the game – the most-watched women’s college game in history. “I don’t know,” said Mulkey, insisting the move wasn’t politically motivated. “We come in and we do our pregame stuff. I’m sorry, listen, that’s nothing intentionally done.”

Whether she was playing coy or not, that didn’t stop Louisiana governor Jeff Landry, a noted Trump ally , from calling for student-athletes who don’t stand for the anthem to lose their scholarships . “My mother coached women’s high school basketball during the height of desegregation,” Landry wrote on X, “no one has a greater respect for the sport and for Coach Mulkey. However, above respect for that game is a deeper respect for those that serve to protect and unite us under one flag!”

All of it only further clouds the picture of a coach who couldn’t seem more misunderstood. Where UConn’s Geno Auriemma and South Carolina’s Dawn Staley are well-known quantities in women’s basketball, Mulkey remains an enigma despite a career that started nearly 50 years ago. As a 5ft 4in point guard in the 1980s, she led Louisiana Tech to two national championships and won an Olympic gold medal with the 1984 US national team. She would spend the next 15 years on the Lady Techsters’ bench as a coaching apprentice, styling herself in the mold of her idol and mentor Pat Summitt – perhaps the best to ever do it.

By the time Mulkey was settling into her first head coaching job at Baylor, back when she shopped off the rack and hyphenated her ex-husband’s last name , I was a student reporter on the Missouri women’s basketball beat. And even then, Mulkey stood out in a coaching cohort that included Texas’ Jody Conradt, Texas Tech’s Marsha Sharp and other living legends. You knew it was a matter of time before Mulkey turned Waco into a title town, starting by signing a spectacular Vincentian-American big named Sophia Young. Within three years, Mulkey led Baylor to the 2005 national championship and Young was named the tournament’s most outstanding player.

Weeks after the confetti fell in 2005, I caught up with Mulkey in New York as she was leaving a dinner honoring the winning men’s and women’s college hoops coaches. She couldn’t have been nicer, more patient or gracious – perhaps because she was still the new kid on the block and Summitt, her idol, was the dominant woman on the sideline. And while the success that has come with three more national titles has stretched Mulkey’s ego, some part of me wonders if she became a lightning rod in part to fill some of the void Summitt left after her death in 2016.

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That’s not to forgive Mulkey’s transgressions. She could have vouched for Brittney Griner (still the best player she has ever coached) when the Baylor great was stuck in a Russian prison . She could have thought twice before defending the sexual assault and Title IX scandal that shook Baylor and took down the once untouchable football coach Art Briles. (“If somebody’s around you, and they ever say, ‘I will never send my daughter to Baylor,’” she said on court after earning her 500th victory, “you knock them right in the face.”) She could have been far less dismissive of gay players. She could have done more to stop Clark from going off on Monday than just defending her straight up with Hailey Van Lith, the undersized LSU guard doomed to everlasting meme-hood despite giving her best possible effort. If anyone on LSU was going to cover Clark one-on-one, you’d expect it would be the standout Flau’jae Johnson – who’s not only taller and more dynamic but also came into Monday’s game expecting Clark to be her assignment . “There’s not a lot of strategy,” Mulkey said of her defense after Monday’s game. “You’ve got to guard her. Nobody else seems to be able to guard her. We didn’t even guard her last year when we beat them.”

By and large, Mulkey comes off less like a cartoon baddie than the blinkered mama bear whose only concern is for the cubs under her charge. That much came through in her non-answer to the anthem question (Who’d want to further fan the flames after the tournament she just had?), and in her justified reaction to the UCLA column. When a tearful LSU star Angel Reese revealed some of the horrors she’s endured since the team won last year’s title in bold fashion, I couldn’t help but recall the lengths Mulkey went to shield Reese from the press after holding out her best player for the first few games of the season. “Those kids are like my children,” she said at the time , “and I’m not going to tell you what you don’t need to know. That’s just the way I address things.” It goes a long way to explaining why a parent might still send their daughter to play for her.

No doubt the scrutiny of Mulkey will only become more intense as interest around women’s basketball grows . And that scrutiny will most likely reveal a coach in a strange position: a polarizing figure who doesn’t quite settle on either pole. One minute, she’s being touted as a Maga darling; the next, she’s being bashed as a woke warrior. On one hand, she has been less than progressive on matters such as sexuality and gender-based violence and grumbled about the media and journalists in a similar manner to many on the right. On the other, she has led an LSU team of mostly Black women to a national title, has defended her players against sexism and now finds herself a target of the same people who attacked Colin Kaepernick around the national anthem. And maybe that ambiguity is down to the fact that all Mulkey really cares about – all she has ever really known – is the ruthless pursuit of winning basketball games. In Mulkey’s world, anything else, for better or worse, is superfluous.

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The Case for Marrying an Older Man

A woman’s life is all work and little rest. an age gap relationship can help..

In the summer, in the south of France, my husband and I like to play, rather badly, the lottery. We take long, scorching walks to the village — gratuitous beauty, gratuitous heat — kicking up dust and languid debates over how we’d spend such an influx. I purchase scratch-offs, jackpot tickets, scraping the former with euro coins in restaurants too fine for that. I never cash them in, nor do I check the winning numbers. For I already won something like the lotto, with its gifts and its curses, when he married me.

He is ten years older than I am. I chose him on purpose, not by chance. As far as life decisions go, on balance, I recommend it.

When I was 20 and a junior at Harvard College, a series of great ironies began to mock me. I could study all I wanted, prove myself as exceptional as I liked, and still my fiercest advantage remained so universal it deflated my other plans. My youth. The newness of my face and body. Compellingly effortless; cruelly fleeting. I shared it with the average, idle young woman shrugging down the street. The thought, when it descended on me, jolted my perspective, the way a falling leaf can make you look up: I could diligently craft an ideal existence, over years and years of sleepless nights and industry. Or I could just marry it early.

So naturally I began to lug a heavy suitcase of books each Saturday to the Harvard Business School to work on my Nabokov paper. In one cavernous, well-appointed room sat approximately 50 of the planet’s most suitable bachelors. I had high breasts, most of my eggs, plausible deniability when it came to purity, a flush ponytail, a pep in my step that had yet to run out. Apologies to Progress, but older men still desired those things.

I could not understand why my female classmates did not join me, given their intelligence. Each time I reconsidered the project, it struck me as more reasonable. Why ignore our youth when it amounted to a superpower? Why assume the burdens of womanhood, its too-quick-to-vanish upper hand, but not its brief benefits at least? Perhaps it came easier to avoid the topic wholesale than to accept that women really do have a tragically short window of power, and reason enough to take advantage of that fact while they can. As for me, I liked history, Victorian novels, knew of imminent female pitfalls from all the books I’d read: vampiric boyfriends; labor, at the office and in the hospital, expected simultaneously; a decline in status as we aged, like a looming eclipse. I’d have disliked being called calculating, but I had, like all women, a calculator in my head. I thought it silly to ignore its answers when they pointed to an unfairness for which we really ought to have been preparing.

I was competitive by nature, an English-literature student with all the corresponding major ambitions and minor prospects (Great American novel; email job). A little Bovarist , frantic for new places and ideas; to travel here, to travel there, to be in the room where things happened. I resented the callow boys in my class, who lusted after a particular, socially sanctioned type on campus: thin and sexless, emotionally detached and socially connected, the opposite of me. Restless one Saturday night, I slipped on a red dress and snuck into a graduate-school event, coiling an HDMI cord around my wrist as proof of some technical duty. I danced. I drank for free, until one of the organizers asked me to leave. I called and climbed into an Uber. Then I promptly climbed out of it. For there he was, emerging from the revolving doors. Brown eyes, curved lips, immaculate jacket. I went to him, asked him for a cigarette. A date, days later. A second one, where I discovered he was a person, potentially my favorite kind: funny, clear-eyed, brilliant, on intimate terms with the universe.

I used to love men like men love women — that is, not very well, and with a hunger driven only by my own inadequacies. Not him. In those early days, I spoke fondly of my family, stocked the fridge with his favorite pasta, folded his clothes more neatly than I ever have since. I wrote his mother a thank-you note for hosting me in his native France, something befitting a daughter-in-law. It worked; I meant it. After graduation and my fellowship at Oxford, I stayed in Europe for his career and married him at 23.

Of course I just fell in love. Romances have a setting; I had only intervened to place myself well. Mainly, I spotted the precise trouble of being a woman ahead of time, tried to surf it instead of letting it drown me on principle. I had grown bored of discussions of fair and unfair, equal or unequal , and preferred instead to consider a thing called ease.

The reception of a particular age-gap relationship depends on its obviousness. The greater and more visible the difference in years and status between a man and a woman, the more it strikes others as transactional. Transactional thinking in relationships is both as American as it gets and the least kosher subject in the American romantic lexicon. When a 50-year-old man and a 25-year-old woman walk down the street, the questions form themselves inside of you; they make you feel cynical and obscene: How good of a deal is that? Which party is getting the better one? Would I take it? He is older. Income rises with age, so we assume he has money, at least relative to her; at minimum, more connections and experience. She has supple skin. Energy. Sex. Maybe she gets a Birkin. Maybe he gets a baby long after his prime. The sight of their entwined hands throws a lucid light on the calculations each of us makes, in love, to varying degrees of denial. You could get married in the most romantic place in the world, like I did, and you would still have to sign a contract.

Twenty and 30 is not like 30 and 40; some freshness to my features back then, some clumsiness in my bearing, warped our decade, in the eyes of others, to an uncrossable gulf. Perhaps this explains the anger we felt directed at us at the start of our relationship. People seemed to take us very, very personally. I recall a hellish car ride with a friend of his who began to castigate me in the backseat, in tones so low that only I could hear him. He told me, You wanted a rich boyfriend. You chased and snuck into parties . He spared me the insult of gold digger, but he drew, with other words, the outline for it. Most offended were the single older women, my husband’s classmates. They discussed me in the bathroom at parties when I was in the stall. What does he see in her? What do they talk about? They were concerned about me. They wielded their concern like a bludgeon. They paraphrased without meaning to my favorite line from Nabokov’s Lolita : “You took advantage of my disadvantage,” suspecting me of some weakness he in turn mined. It did not disturb them, so much, to consider that all relationships were trades. The trouble was the trade I’d made struck them as a bad one.

The truth is you can fall in love with someone for all sorts of reasons, tiny transactions, pluses and minuses, whose sum is your affection for each other, your loyalty, your commitment. The way someone picks up your favorite croissant. Their habit of listening hard. What they do for you on your anniversary and your reciprocal gesture, wrapped thoughtfully. The serenity they inspire; your happiness, enlivening it. When someone says they feel unappreciated, what they really mean is you’re in debt to them.

When I think of same-age, same-stage relationships, what I tend to picture is a woman who is doing too much for too little.

I’m 27 now, and most women my age have “partners.” These days, girls become partners quite young. A partner is supposed to be a modern answer to the oppression of marriage, the terrible feeling of someone looming over you, head of a household to which you can only ever be the neck. Necks are vulnerable. The problem with a partner, however, is if you’re equal in all things, you compromise in all things. And men are too skilled at taking .

There is a boy out there who knows how to floss because my friend taught him. Now he kisses college girls with fresh breath. A boy married to my friend who doesn’t know how to pack his own suitcase. She “likes to do it for him.” A million boys who know how to touch a woman, who go to therapy because they were pushed, who learned fidelity, boundaries, decency, manners, to use a top sheet and act humanely beneath it, to call their mothers, match colors, bring flowers to a funeral and inhale, exhale in the face of rage, because some girl, some girl we know, some girl they probably don’t speak to and will never, ever credit, took the time to teach him. All while she was working, raising herself, clawing up the cliff-face of adulthood. Hauling him at her own expense.

I find a post on Reddit where five thousand men try to define “ a woman’s touch .” They describe raised flower beds, blankets, photographs of their loved ones, not hers, sprouting on the mantel overnight. Candles, coasters, side tables. Someone remembering to take lint out of the dryer. To give compliments. I wonder what these women are getting back. I imagine them like Cinderella’s mice, scurrying around, their sole proof of life their contributions to a more central character. On occasion I meet a nice couple, who grew up together. They know each other with a fraternalism tender and alien to me.  But I think of all my friends who failed at this, were failed at this, and I think, No, absolutely not, too risky . Riskier, sometimes, than an age gap.

My younger brother is in his early 20s, handsome, successful, but in many ways: an endearing disaster. By his age, I had long since wisened up. He leaves his clothes in the dryer, takes out a single shirt, steams it for three minutes. His towel on the floor, for someone else to retrieve. His lovely, same-age girlfriend is aching to fix these tendencies, among others. She is capable beyond words. Statistically, they will not end up together. He moved into his first place recently, and she, the girlfriend, supplied him with a long, detailed list of things he needed for his apartment: sheets, towels, hangers, a colander, which made me laugh. She picked out his couch. I will bet you anything she will fix his laundry habits, and if so, they will impress the next girl. If they break up, she will never see that couch again, and he will forget its story. I tell her when I visit because I like her, though I get in trouble for it: You shouldn’t do so much for him, not for someone who is not stuck with you, not for any boy, not even for my wonderful brother.

Too much work had left my husband, by 30, jaded and uninspired. He’d burned out — but I could reenchant things. I danced at restaurants when they played a song I liked. I turned grocery shopping into an adventure, pleased by what I provided. Ambitious, hungry, he needed someone smart enough to sustain his interest, but flexible enough in her habits to build them around his hours. I could. I do: read myself occupied, make myself free, materialize beside him when he calls for me. In exchange, I left a lucrative but deadening spreadsheet job to write full-time, without having to live like a writer. I learned to cook, a little, and decorate, somewhat poorly. Mostly I get to read, to walk central London and Miami and think in delicious circles, to work hard, when necessary, for free, and write stories for far less than minimum wage when I tally all the hours I take to write them.

At 20, I had felt daunted by the project of becoming my ideal self, couldn’t imagine doing it in tandem with someone, two raw lumps of clay trying to mold one another and only sullying things worse. I’d go on dates with boys my age and leave with the impression they were telling me not about themselves but some person who didn’t exist yet and on whom I was meant to bet regardless. My husband struck me instead as so finished, formed. Analyzable for compatibility. He bore the traces of other women who’d improved him, small but crucial basics like use a coaster ; listen, don’t give advice. Young egos mellow into patience and generosity.

My husband isn’t my partner. He’s my mentor, my lover, and, only in certain contexts, my friend. I’ll never forget it, how he showed me around our first place like he was introducing me to myself: This is the wine you’ll drink, where you’ll keep your clothes, we vacation here, this is the other language we’ll speak, you’ll learn it, and I did. Adulthood seemed a series of exhausting obligations. But his logistics ran so smoothly that he simply tacked mine on. I moved into his flat, onto his level, drag and drop, cleaner thrice a week, bills automatic. By opting out of partnership in my 20s, I granted myself a kind of compartmentalized, liberating selfishness none of my friends have managed. I am the work in progress, the party we worry about, a surprising dominance. When I searched for my first job, at 21, we combined our efforts, for my sake. He had wisdom to impart, contacts with whom he arranged coffees; we spent an afternoon, laughing, drawing up earnest lists of my pros and cons (highly sociable; sloppy math). Meanwhile, I took calls from a dear friend who had a boyfriend her age. Both savagely ambitious, hyperclose and entwined in each other’s projects. If each was a start-up , the other was the first hire, an intense dedication I found riveting. Yet every time she called me, I hung up with the distinct feeling that too much was happening at the same time: both learning to please a boss; to forge more adult relationships with their families; to pay bills and taxes and hang prints on the wall. Neither had any advice to give and certainly no stability. I pictured a three-legged race, two people tied together and hobbling toward every milestone.

I don’t fool myself. My marriage has its cons. There are only so many times one can say “thank you” — for splendid scenes, fine dinners — before the phrase starts to grate. I live in an apartment whose rent he pays and that shapes the freedom with which I can ever be angry with him. He doesn’t have to hold it over my head. It just floats there, complicating usual shorthands to explain dissatisfaction like, You aren’t being supportive lately . It’s a Frenchism to say, “Take a decision,” and from time to time I joke: from whom? Occasionally I find myself in some fabulous country at some fabulous party and I think what a long way I have traveled, like a lucky cloud, and it is frightening to think of oneself as vapor.

Mostly I worry that if he ever betrayed me and I had to move on, I would survive, but would find in my humor, preferences, the way I make coffee or the bed nothing that he did not teach, change, mold, recompose, stamp with his initials, the way Renaissance painters hid in their paintings their faces among a crowd. I wonder if when they looked at their paintings, they saw their own faces first. But this is the wrong question, if our aim is happiness. Like the other question on which I’m expected to dwell: Who is in charge, the man who drives or the woman who put him there so she could enjoy herself? I sit in the car, in the painting it would have taken me a corporate job and 20 years to paint alone, and my concern over who has the upper hand becomes as distant as the horizon, the one he and I made so wide for me.

To be a woman is to race against the clock, in several ways, until there is nothing left to be but run ragged.

We try to put it off, but it will hit us at some point: that we live in a world in which our power has a different shape from that of men, a different distribution of advantage, ours a funnel and theirs an expanding cone. A woman at 20 rarely has to earn her welcome; a boy at 20 will be turned away at the door. A woman at 30 may find a younger woman has taken her seat; a man at 30 will have invited her. I think back to the women in the bathroom, my husband’s classmates. What was my relationship if not an inconvertible sign of this unfairness? What was I doing, in marrying older, if not endorsing it? I had taken advantage of their disadvantage. I had preempted my own. After all, principled women are meant to defy unfairness, to show some integrity or denial, not plan around it, like I had. These were driven women, successful, beautiful, capable. I merely possessed the one thing they had already lost. In getting ahead of the problem, had I pushed them down? If I hadn’t, would it really have made any difference?

When we decided we wanted to be equal to men, we got on men’s time. We worked when they worked, retired when they retired, had to squeeze pregnancy, children, menopause somewhere impossibly in the margins. I have a friend, in her late 20s, who wears a mood ring; these days it is often red, flickering in the air like a siren when she explains her predicament to me. She has raised her fair share of same-age boyfriends. She has put her head down, worked laboriously alongside them, too. At last she is beginning to reap the dividends, earning the income to finally enjoy herself. But it is now, exactly at this precipice of freedom and pleasure, that a time problem comes closing in. If she would like to have children before 35, she must begin her next profession, motherhood, rather soon, compromising inevitably her original one. The same-age partner, equally unsettled in his career, will take only the minimum time off, she guesses, or else pay some cost which will come back to bite her. Everything unfailingly does. If she freezes her eggs to buy time, the decision and its logistics will burden her singly — and perhaps it will not work. Overlay the years a woman is supposed to establish herself in her career and her fertility window and it’s a perfect, miserable circle. By midlife women report feeling invisible, undervalued; it is a telling cliché, that after all this, some husbands leave for a younger girl. So when is her time, exactly? For leisure, ease, liberty? There is no brand of feminism which achieved female rest. If women’s problem in the ’50s was a paralyzing malaise, now it is that they are too active, too capable, never permitted a vacation they didn’t plan. It’s not that our efforts to have it all were fated for failure. They simply weren’t imaginative enough.

For me, my relationship, with its age gap, has alleviated this rush , permitted me to massage the clock, shift its hands to my benefit. Very soon, we will decide to have children, and I don’t panic over last gasps of fun, because I took so many big breaths of it early: on the holidays of someone who had worked a decade longer than I had, in beautiful places when I was young and beautiful, a symmetry I recommend. If such a thing as maternal energy exists, mine was never depleted. I spent the last nearly seven years supported more than I support and I am still not as old as my husband was when he met me. When I have a child, I will expect more help from him than I would if he were younger, for what does professional tenure earn you if not the right to set more limits on work demands — or, if not, to secure some child care, at the very least? When I return to work after maternal upheaval, he will aid me, as he’s always had, with his ability to put himself aside, as younger men are rarely able.

Above all, the great gift of my marriage is flexibility. A chance to live my life before I become responsible for someone else’s — a lover’s, or a child’s. A chance to write. A chance at a destiny that doesn’t adhere rigidly to the routines and timelines of men, but lends itself instead to roomy accommodation, to the very fluidity Betty Friedan dreamed of in 1963 in The Feminine Mystique , but we’ve largely forgotten: some career or style of life that “permits year-to-year variation — a full-time paid job in one community, part-time in another, exercise of the professional skill in serious volunteer work or a period of study during pregnancy or early motherhood when a full-time job is not feasible.” Some things are just not feasible in our current structures. Somewhere along the way we stopped admitting that, and all we did was make women feel like personal failures. I dream of new structures, a world in which women have entry-level jobs in their 30s; alternate avenues for promotion; corporate ladders with balconies on which they can stand still, have a smoke, take a break, make a baby, enjoy themselves, before they keep climbing. Perhaps men long for this in their own way. Actually I am sure of that.

Once, when we first fell in love, I put my head in his lap on a long car ride; I remember his hands on my face, the sun, the twisting turns of a mountain road, surprising and not surprising us like our romance, and his voice, telling me that it was his biggest regret that I was so young, he feared he would lose me. Last week, we looked back at old photos and agreed we’d given each other our respective best years. Sometimes real equality is not so obvious, sometimes it takes turns, sometimes it takes almost a decade to reveal itself.

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Sammo Hung, Kung Fu Superstar, Sets Masterclass, Screenings in Singapore – Global Bulletin

By Naman Ramachandran

Naman Ramachandran

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KUNG FU HUSTLE

Kung Fu superstar Sammo Hung will deliver a masterclass on May 4 as part of the 12th Singapore Chinese Film Festival . He will also attend a mini-retrospective of his films. Hung studied under Peking Opera master Yu Jim Yuen at a young age and was the “big brother”’ to the China Drama Academy’s performance troupe known as the Seven Little Fortunes, whose members included Jackie Chan, Yuen Biao, Yuen Wah, Yuen Qiu and Corey Yuen. He starred in “Painted Faces” (1988), which was based on his time in the Seven Little Fortunes.

In 2023, Hung was presented with a lifetime achievement honor at the  Asian Film Awards . The Singapore event is organized by the Asian Film Awards Academy, co-organized by the Singapore Film Society, financially supported by Create Hong Kong and the Film Development Fund, and supported by the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office in Singapore. Hung titles screening at the festival include “Warriors Two” (1978), “Encounters of the Spooky Kind” (1980), “Winners and Sinners” (1983) and “The Bodyguard” (2016), with “Painted Faces” as the closing film.

FAST AND FURIOUS

Live motorsport event tour Monster Jam is driving into the FAST (free ad-supported streaming television) track via a partnership with Spacemob. The first Monster Jam FAST channel is now live on free streaming television service Pluto TV across the U.S., Canada, the U.K., France, Spain, Italy and the Nordics with planned launches in Latin America and Brazil later this year.

CLIMATE WARRIOR

Climate warrior and Bollywood star Bhumi Pednekar is being recognized as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and will be inducted into its class of 2024 at Geneva later this year. Pednekar is known for her efforts towards raising awareness on sustainability and climate change along with her work to save lives during the COVID-19 pandemic.

STREAMING ADD-ON

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Indian singer-songwriter Armaan Malik is debuting radio show “Only Just Begun” exclusively on Apple Music worldwide. Debuting on April 5, the show will feature well-known Indian and international music industry guests.

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Angel Reese Bids Farewell to LSU, College Basketball With Heartfelt Video Essay

• Author: Karl Rasmussen

In this story:

Angel Reese announced Wednesday morning that she intends to enter the 2024 WNBA draft following LSU's season-ending defeat against Caitlin Clark and Iowa in Monday's Elite Eight .

Shortly after her announcement, Reese bid farewell to the Tigers and all of her fans across the country on a more personal level, sharing a heartfelt video essay to her social media accounts. In the video, Reese thanked her supporters and expressed her gratitude to those who helped her along her journey.

"I'm leaving college with everything I've ever wanted," Reese said. "A degree. A national championship. And this platform I could have never imagined. This is for the girls that look like me, that's going to speak up on what they believe in, it's unapologetically you. To grow up in sports and have an impact on what's coming next.

"This was a difficult decision, but I trust the next chapter because I know the author. Bayou Barbie, out."

Grateful for these last four years and excited for this next chapter. #BAYOUBARBIEOUT pic.twitter.com/EvkzUW08JV — Angel Reese (@Reese10Angel) April 3, 2024

Reese played two seasons at LSU after transferring from the University of Maryland. With the Tigers, she racked up a multitude of accolades and won a national championship last season, vaulting herself into the national spotlight in the process. Across 69 games for LSU, Reese averaged 20.9 points and 14.4 rebounds.

After wrapping up a legendary college career and bidding an emotional farewell to her fans, Reese has officially declared her intention to enter the WNBA draft, where she projects as a first-round pick in what figures to be a loaded draft class.

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