Emily Jashinsky (62:17)
Yes. It's like every girl in a Nashville puddle publishing Cillian Murphy Watch it like it's a tv utterly nonplussed that went viral. And if you pay close enough attention to his face, you just see him listen. This is my interpretation as many people on the Internet's interpretation, struggling to muster the smile, the talk show enthusiasm that one might need to muster in order to react appropriately to that thing on Taylor Swift's hand, which is truly massive. Some people, though, I think maybe it was swift, 50s on social media, we're looking at Killian Murphy and we're like, how sweet. He loves Taylor Swift. So it was a good sort of ink plot test of how enthusiastic you think Cillian Murphy is about Taylor Swift. But I wanted to react a little bit to the album because I was listening to it the day it came out. Obviously, I was traveling. But listen, I've written too much about Taylor Swift, like, simply too much about Taylor Swift over the years. And the reason is that I'm very squarely in Taylor Swift's demographic. You know, she's like, probably three or four years older than me. So when I was a teenager, Taylor Swift was really popular. And, you know, I love country music. It's one of my pet topics. As you can probably tell from the last segment we just did with Glenn, I could talk all day about country music. One of my ambitions before I realized it was dumb was to become a country music historian back in college. So here we are, I'm talking to you at 11pm on a Monday night about Taylor Swift, who needs a degree, am I right? But I do have a new piece coming out with the Institute for Family Studies in the next couple of days, looking at some of the lyrics, because, I mean, my jaw, to the extent that it could be, was like on the floor on an airplane as I was listening to a couple of these songs. So obviously the first one, eldest Daughter, I know this has caught a lot of people's attention. She says, quote, when I said I don't believe in marriage, that was a lie. Every eldest daughter was the first lamb to the slaughter. So we all dressed up as wolves. Just want to pause right there. People remember lavender haze from 2022. And the lyrics in Lavender Haze were like, no deal. The 1950s they want from me and all. They keep asking me if. If I'm going to be a bride. The only kind of girl they see is a one night or a wife. I went back and looked up how Reddit reacted at the time, like hardcore Swifties. And they were just trying to figure out what this meant about Taylor Swift and Merritt marriage. But Swift herself confirms that she was in those years rightfully being interpreted as somebody who was saying they don't believe in marriage. And now engaged to Travis Kelsey. This is what she's singing on eldest daughter, that they dress up as wolves, the eldest daughters. I mean, think of millennial women. This is going to get me started on Lena Dunham and Girls again. I have to resist myself a little bit here, but this is going to get me started on that for sure. Talking about dressing up as wolves in order to have this like hard exterior for just a. Just as a kind of COVID a shell for the truth, which is that these women often weren't in marriage relationships. They didn't. They hadn't found the right person. And so Taylor Swift in her Travis Kelce era feels completely differently. But what's important about that lyric in particular is the millennial woman woman elite millennial woman using feminism as a cover for something different. Openly lying in a political sense. She uses the word lie, of course, so openly sort of covering using feminism as a shield to mask pain and uncertainty and a yearning for something much more traditional. So Wish List then goes on and talks about. About all kinds of stuff. Basketball. The lyrics are, I just want you, hon, have a couple kids, got the whole block looking like you got me dreaming about a driveway with a basketball hoop. And then she mocks other people who quote those three dogs that they call their kids. So people who have quote those three dogs that they call their kids. Remember, this is the person who endorsed Kamala Harris with the picture of holding her cat, which everyone interpreted, interpreted appropriately as a response to J.D. vance's quote, Childless cat lady line. And so for Taylor Swift then also to be in the same song, mocking Hollywood decadence, people who put all of their stock in money and career success and have dogs instead of children. Her saying, no, I want lots of kids, I want my husband and I just want a basketball hoop in a driveway in a block. As opposed to, you know, at least she can never live a normal life like that. We all know it. But as opposed to right, being off in the hills in your massive mansion, she's alluding to something that is much more middle class American dream than anything else. And it's totally traditional. She talks about having used like this is her confirming that she was using feminism as a shield, political feminism as a shield to cover up what she really believed and what she really wanted. And that last part about what she really wanted is important because I think for a lot of millennial women, this is where I will return to the well of Lena Dunham and Girls, which is just an endless supply for me. But if you, without spoiling the last episode, the last season of Girls, if you watch that show's arc, what you realize is you see Lena Dunham, I think the brilliant writer, creator of Girls, grappling with the reality of what she really wants and what her character Hannah really wants. And I'm not gonna the series because I still really believe people need to watch it. But it ends in a symbolic and literal triumph for traditionalism, dare I say small C conservatism. And you just. We're seeing as we go through millennial women's 30s into their 40s, that that is what so many people want. And Lyman Stone at the Institute for Family Studies has looked at American women, has looked at the data and found American women do end up having fewer children than they say they wanted or. Well, what's possible behind that? I think there are absolutely economic reasons behind that. I think there are many, many factors that go into it. But clearly some of it comes from this idea that there's a period of self exploration in your 20s and career prioritization in your 20s. I mean, I've talked on the show before about the difference that a lot of people, especially in Christian circles, talk about between a startup marriage and a merger marriage. Right. Like the millennials were the merger marriage generation. That was the right way to, you know, start that chapter in your life after establishing your yourself and your success, traveling, accomplishing great strides at work. Then you merge as opposed to growing sort of together in a relationship. And, you know, I just think there are going to be more and more examples of this. It's, it's, it's f. It's fascinating to me to see Taylor Swift do it so flamboyantly and brazenly and shame on this new record, which people are absolutely right to mock the lyrics. People will be absolutely right to be mocking the lyrics and just the sort of clumsiness of them probably until Taylor Swift writes her last song. But I promise, numbers and numbers you shall have. Let's take a look. This is actually a Gen Z divorce article from the Times that I promised to talk about. But before we get to it, I'll put this beautiful New York Times are up. Well, I read from Brad Wilcox in he's of the Institute for Family Studies in the Atlantic back in July, he noted that since the early 1980s, the divorce rate has now fallen by almost 40%. And about half of that decline has happened in just the past 15 years. The idea that marriage will end in failure half the time or more well entrenched in many American minds, is out of date. 8 the proportion of first marriages expected to end in divorce has fallen to about 40% in recent years. He goes on to say in 2023, the most recent year available, it was higher. This is the rate of new marriages among prime age adults was higher in the it was higher than in any year since 2008 in 2023, at least some of this increase, he says, Brad says is a post pandemic bounce. But the share of all prime age adults who are married has also leveled off in the past few years, which suggests that the decades long dec the proportion of Americans who are married may have reached its low point. Now the feminist writer you may be familiar with, Joe Flipovich, wrote about what Brad wrote in the Atlantic. She reacted to it by saying, actually, maybe it was millennial feminism that saved marriage because millennial women entered marriage and found it to be very healthy. And that pattern just sort of continued. At one point, Filipovich wrote, she had such an interesting line. She said, one of the less predictable turns of my life and my politics have taken is that I, a long term time marriage skeptical feminist, wound up a woman in my 40s who is not only happily married, but increasingly convinced that marriage is a broad social good worth promoting and investing in marriage and the success, success, success, success maybe that too sequence is actually as the Institute for Family Studies and others have a lot of data on, also great for people on a class basis. So you end up earning more and being more financially stable if you follow the success path which the success sequence, which is hard to say because of the alliterative properties that make it so sticky, but at the same time generally is a great ticket to upward mobility or financial stability just in general. So so let us return to this divorce article from Gen Z to test the Joe full up point about feminism. Here's the lead that was going viral in this New York Times piece. Quote In 2021, Kara Benson, a violinist living in Seattle, knew it was time to get a divorce ending their 2 year QUOTE lavender marriage wasn't an easy decision, but the musician had a supportive ally. If you have to dump your ex Hydra husband, Mix Benson said co dump him with his mistress before the breakup. Mix Benson, 27, who uses the pronoun they checked in with their therapist who said a divorce would be a good choice. Out of queer solidarity, they informed their husband's mistress. This was kosher. In Mix Benson's arrangement, when I say mix. By the way, it's MX Benson's arrangement, which was not a legal marriage, but a domestic partnership, about their shared partner's troubling behavior. Their shared partner's troubling behavior. Behavior. Let's just admit that all of them are engaged in troubling behavior at that point. There is no one person engaged in troubling behavior when there is a shared partner of three. The night of the breakup mix Benson and the and the mistress spent a cozy evening together. Quote, we were eating a lot of comfort food, playing a lot of Animal Crossing. Good Lord, I don't even know what to say about that. A cozy evening together. You would think maybe they were at a ski lodge having some some red wine and relaxing after a long day on the slopes. No, they were eating Cheetos and playing Animal Crossing and then talked to the New York Times about it. The senior Most members of Gen Z, the Times says, are in their late 20s, old enough to have gotten married, but also old enough to regret it. As this generation enters divorcing age, it's finding little shame in the act. Especially when a split like Mick Benson's is motivated by prioritizing one's mental health and rather than quietly moving on younger divorce are often highlighting this facet of their story even after they're in new relationships. I just want to say that is in all likelihood not true. Like, it's probably true of a really small slice of Gen Z that people are are getting divorced without shame and quietly moving on. They talk about Emily Ratajkowski creating divorce rings out of her wedding rings and others. And again, like, I don't. Who am I to say that some members of Gen Z aren't experiencing this and I'm sure going full throttle into it. But one of the things we've obviously seen with polling is that young men and young women, Gen Z in particular, are starting to come apart at the seams on basic foundational values like culture, questions about marriage and kids and all of that. So I don't know. You know, I think what the best guess is here is there's going to be a fringe that the New York Times happens to be much more attuned to because they tend to be more elite, more affluent people who have, you know, who are in their circles that really are like, quote, shameless about it, pursuing divorces in Gen Z. The New York Times is going to be more attuned to them because they're going to flaunt it as some type of cultural signifier and cultural good. But you know, often what that coverage ends up doing is diminishing the value of things like marriage for people on a class basis or people who don't have the privileges of paying for fancy therapy and having close social ties, civic ties, in a sort of Robert Putnam Bowling alone sense that members of the elite class do. And it's extremely messed up. Elites, you know, will trash these institutions that they enjoy at higher rates, like marriage, for example, by finding like nut picking members of Gen Z and saying, saying hey, this is. There's a bunch of like shameless divorces happening in Gen Z when the numbers actually as, as Brad wrote suggest otherwise. So all that is to say this like vibe shift that's happening, you know, there's a lot of people on the right that are probably going to want to claim Taylor Swift even after all of Trump's back and forth with her as a trad wife or something. I don't know. Taylor Swift is, I'm quite certain, not like a MAGA supporter, although of course Brittany Mahomes is. But I'm sure she's not going to come out. Maybe I'll, maybe I'll be proven wrong as like a political conservative or a MAGA person. But I think that's the point is that like this shouldn't be this, this game of like claiming celebrities gets so silly and this doesn't have to be politicized. We can just at a certain point acknowledge this is Gen Z falling back to the western norm after this period of post sexual revolution adjusting investment for the children of baby boomers in the millennial generation. And that is just fine. It doesn't even need to be over complicated. We can just enjoy what appears to be happening and not panic over New York Times stories about cozy nights of, I don't know, Animal crossing and I was gonna say Cheetos, but I already used Cheetos. What's another funny, disgusting food that one eats while playing Animal Crossing? I'd rather not speculate. I'll probably just leave it at that at this point. But it is what happens over and over again in the press is the nut picking and amplifying these fringe people as representative. I think in the context of Brad's research, it doesn't look like thankfully this is what's happening, that polycules are proudly embracing their divorce forces. Not the average experience. Probably won't be the average experience. And in fact the data looks at is forcing us to look at something that's actually pretty good. So wow, are we ending this on a happy note? I think we're ending this on a happy note. What a rare occasion that we should be grateful for. Thank you so much for tuning into today's edition of After Party. As a reminder, you can contact me at emily@devilmaker media. And if you want to ask a question for Happy Hour, that's what comes out every Friday, you can put happy hour in the subject line. You don't have to, but that definitely helps me sort through them as I answer live unscripted when we do those Friday shows. So thanks for tuning in. We'll be back on Wednesday with more After Party.
