Liberating Motherhood

This is an updated version of an older article. I hope you enjoy it! “I’ve changed. Please take me back.” It’s the plea of the abuser returning for another round of abuse. And often, that plea comes interspersed with a ton of emotional violence: “Take me back or else I’ll take the kids.” “Take me back, you fucking bitch.” “I can’t believe you slept with someone else. I’ll destroy you if you don’t take me back.” “How dare you leave me?

Welcome to the fifth installment in my February limited series, Deconstructing Masculinity. If you’re new to this series, you can read more about it here. Find all the pieces in these series here. As a reminder, this series is for paid subscribers only, as I work to offer more value to those who pay to support my work. I’m continuing with my usual extensive editorial calendar. Free subscribers still get a minimum of two posts a week, plus one podcast per week.

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Current time: 0:00 / Total time: -30:35 Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. This is the first podcast episode I’ve done by myself, because I wanted to speak directly to all of you. If you like it, I may do more. On a recent AMA, someone asked me how I sustain hope when I’m surrounded by horror and despair. Here’s what I told her: I know that the only thing that makes things actually hopeless is giving up hope.

A quick editorial note: Household labor inequity can occur in many relationship structures, but the data consistently show that it is overwhelmingly, disproportionately, massively men exploiting women’s labor. The degree and prevalence of the inequality falls hardest on heterosexual couples. While there can be inequality in other relationship structures, the thing that makes inequality palatable is the notion that the work is the woman’s job, and that her time, sleep, dreams, health, etc.

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Hi Zawn, I have been in a long distance relationship for a few years now with a man who has been very cruel and abusive to me and I've been advised to just "stop talking to him". I never knew what narcissistic abuse even was until I started reading about it recently and I see the cycle of love bomb, devalue, discard, hoover etc. has happened to me hundreds of times over this relationship.

Anyone can smile and behave respectfully for a few moments in public. This tells you precisely nothing about their private behavior—and less still about their behavior with women. Today we’re going to talk about one of the most pervasive and harmful patriarchal behaviors: reflexively giving men the benefit of the doubt, and slotting them into the role of nice guy. To treat men as “nice” by default is to ignore the widespread reality of male violence. This post is for paid subscribers

Welcome to the first installment of Deconstructing Masculinity! I got the idea for this series while writing January’s Deconstructing Patriarchal Thinking, which was a limited run designed to help women root out patriarchal biases in their own thoughts and lives. This series targets men who want to do better. It’s not for those who want credit without work, or who want to absolve themselves of sexism.

Today is the final day of Deconstructing Patriarchy. I feel genuinely sad to be winding it down. It’s helped me think a lot more deeply, and I’ve gotten so much great feedback from readers. I’m going to think on ways I can incorporate this approach into my regular editorial calendar, and am open to your suggestions. I can assure you that this series will continue in some way, though not daily (at least not for now). In the meantime, I am going to be running another limited-run series in February.