It was The Cut story heard round the world. Last week, a 27-year-old writer’s article called ‘The Case for Marrying an Older Man’ caused a social media frenzy, when it really should have been called ‘The Case for Marrying a Rich Man’. What do her notions about men and women, and age gaps and money, say about society and internalised misogyny? Sarah Lang has thoughts.
Ever gone to great lengths to meet a man? Grazie Sophia Christie sure has. In a story for thecut.com called ‘The Case For Marrying An Older Man’, Christie describes how, when she was a college student studying English literature, she essentially decided (and this is my paraphrasing) that she should nab a rich man while she could.
“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.”
OMG, WTF, FFS, any other applicable acronyms, and a RAGE EMOJI. We need “plausible deniability when it came to purity”? Screw that. Also how about we applaud progress, not ‘apologise’ to it?
Of these sojourns to the business school, Christie says that “I could not understand why my female classmates did not join me, given their intelligence”. Say what? Maybe they were intelligently, well, studying? As someone with a degree in English literature, I find the idea of trying to attract the attention of wealthy men under the guise of studying Nabokov to be deeply inauthentic and wildly embarrassing.
‘In the 21st century, women shouldn’t need to circle men like rings around a planet.’
At age 20, Christie met her Harvard boyfriend – nope, not in the supposed library, but while crashing a graduate-school party. At age 23, she married him so… well done? He’s 10 years older, and wealthy. That enables Christie to split her time between Miami, London, and France, and “write full-time, without having to live like a writer”.
She’s currently writing a novel, plus articles like the one we’re discussing. Published last week, it’s gone viral on Twitter (now known as X), and it’s not hard to see why. As one person tweeted, the article gives Tradwife meets AI-chatbot vibes. It feels like a step backwards.
The ‘Window Of Time’ Of Womanhood
Pre-emptive sigh: Christie writes about the ‘fleeting’ power of women. She writes that “women really do have a tragically short window of power, and reason enough to take advantage of that fact while they can”. Which she did. “My fiercest advantage remained so universal it deflated my other plans. My youth. The newness of my face and body.”
She’s talking about youth and also beauty. To which I say that women can be beautiful at any age, and also that we shouldn’t be judged on our looks. What about the other things we bring to the table: wisdom, experience and knowledge, for starters? When we glimpse grey hairs, we shouldn’t need to panic about the closing of a ‘tragically short window’. Christie also mentions facing “a decline in status as we [women] age, like a looming eclipse”.
Newsflash: women can be powerful at any age. This metaphor of a fleeting window is lazy and damaging. But if that’s your approach, be sure to have a back-up plan, because someone who chooses you primarily for your youth and beauty may not stick around (and we’re not just talking about Leonardo DiCaprio).
The Age Gap = Marrying Rich
The subtitle of Christie’s article is: ‘A woman’s life is all work and little rest. An age gap relationship can help’. Really? Shouldn’t we focus less on the age gap, and more about how men of all ages should be ‘helping out’ so more women can get more rest?
Christie writes that she sought an older man “on purpose, not by chance”. Why? “I could diligently craft an ideal existence, over years and years of sleepless nights and industry. Or I could just marry it early.” Marry ‘it’? Marry an ideal existence? What about, say, being in a marriage or long-term de-facto relationship with someone who is your equal? It didn’t appeal. “I had grown bored of discussions of fair and unfair, equal or unequal, and preferred instead to consider a thing called ease.”
When she says “ease,” she’s really talking about money. She describes marrying her husband as winning “something like the lotto”. In summer, in France, she buys lottery tickets for fun but doesn’t bother checking to see if she’s won. Girl, your extreme privilege is on display here. I hope you at least gave those tickets to someone less fortunate.
However, she feels an imbalance in her marriage. “I live in an apartment whose rent he pays and that shapes the freedom with which I can ever be angry with him,” she writes. “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’.” Yikes. I’d be interested to know what her husband thinks about this article.
Revolving Your Life Around Men
Christie writes that her husband left his job, jaded, at age 30. “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.” Geez; it sounds like exhausting performance art. “I was flexible enough in my habits to build them around his hours,” she writes. And she could “make myself free, materialize beside him when he calls for me”.
This statement reminds me of the majestic novel Middlemarch, in which a young woman sacrifices herself to her much-older scholar of a husband, who proves a patronising fool. That was published in 1871. In the 21st century, women shouldn’t need to circle men like rings around a planet.
You might argue that feminism is about choice and that Christie is making her own choices. But you could also argue that feminism is about equality, and that this article feels like a step backwards for feminism. Words have weight and we have to think about how they might affect others
Yet how much can we really hold against Christie, who after all is still in her 20s? As the late French feminist Simone de Beauvoir said in her book The Second Sex, “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”. Christie didn’t emerge like Aphrodite, fully formed from the foam of the sea. Christie’s notions spring from patriarchal pillars in a society where the male gaze is insidious. So I think her article is maybe more like an example of internalised misogyny than it is a feminist betrayal. But I don’t want to hear anything else about women’s “tragically short window of power”. Our windows are damn well staying open, thanks very much.
