In 1970, the intelligentsia loved Diary of a Mad Housewife. In the movie, a woman with an emotionally abusive husband starts an affair with an emotionally abusive man. The movie’s dénouement sees her telling her story to an emotionally abusive group therapy session. Now, that same movie would be about a bored, elitist housewife who has polyamorous relationships, writes books, gets celebrated in the New York Times—and still isn’t happy. I hate to say it, but if these women took motherhood and grandmotherhood more seriously, they’d be happier and less slutty.

Polyamory is suddenly a “thing” on the left. In a recent podcast, Matt Walsh noted, among other things, that the outcomes are not happy, no matter what the people involved claim, with everything from child abuse to non-stop therapy on the menu:

Ep 1296 - The Next Stage In The Slippery Slope Begins As The Media Pushes 'Polyamory'https://t.co/gXjG1wafT9

— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) January 18, 2024

At Front Page Magazine, Mark Tapson also wrote about the “Push For Polyamory.” He pointed out that practically every mainstream publication, from the New York Times to Time to The New Yorker to USA Today to The Wall Street Journal, is writing about it. Tapson properly excoriates the unbelievable selfishness of the movement when it comes to children, who are deeply disturbed to learn that their parents are voluntarily unfaithful to each other. “Good parents put their children’s welfare first; bad parents put their sexual peccadilloes first.”

Image (edited) by zinkevych.

Most recently, Peachy Keenan has written an essay focusing on a very specific group of women involved in polyamory. These are affluent, credentialed, white women, many of whom have children, who write much-heralded (and extremely graphic) books about their sexual adventurism.

Walsh, Tapson, and Keenan are all appropriately disgusted by these women’s escapades, as well as by the leftist culture that celebrates them. All understand that this celebration is yet another battle in the war to end Western culture, which revolves around the nuclear family, which is both the ultimate celebration of the individual and a bulwark against Big Government.

I asked myself a different question: Why do these women believe that exploiting their adulterous sex lives will make them happy? Here are some ideas:

One: Generations of women, especially the credentialed ones, have been taught to despise men. This is different from viewing them in a sexually hostile way (as in becoming lesbian). Instead, they’re told that men are bullying, selfish, patriarchal boors. If you go into a relationship believing that this is fundamentally true, that relationship cannot be fulfilling.

Two: Upper-middle-class, credentialed women still have lizard brains, and those lizard brains tell them that they need a man who is their “superior” in some way to support them when they are pregnant or have children. (This lizard-brain thinking applies even if the women have no intention of having children.) In today’s world, at the rarefied heights of corporate America, a lot of the most successful men are narcissistic. They scrabbled their way to their top through manipulative skills. They’re not nice husbands and, again, any relationship with them will be unfulfilling.

Three: The media—television, movies, podcasts, books (both fiction and non-fiction)—rather than focusing on the give and take of fulfilling relationships, focus on passion. While love, respect, and attraction last, passion is inherently time-limited. Women who dated a lot got addicted to the passion of new relationships. When their married relationship settles, it feels like a failure, so they return to their addiction.

Four: Our culture is completely obsessed with sex. That’s going to affect a certain percentage of people in any walk of life, including affluent mothers.

Five: Our culture lies to women and tells them that having children isn’t the be-it-and-end-all of their existence. I would certainly agree that it’s not the only thing about their existence and that a career that allows them to exercise their passions and skills is a wonderful thing. However, ultimately, women’s physical being is about children. That’s their biological destiny.

It's also the most empowering destiny of all, for it’s an act of creation that goes far beyond pregnancy. Any woman who raises a child, whether a biological or adopted child, is creating a person. She’s not creating a life because she’s not divine, but she is growing a person, and that’s both an extraordinary responsibility and, once that child has grown to adulthood, a tremendous source of pride and pleasure.

However, if you’ve been raised to believe that motherhood is inherently demeaning and unfulfilling, you’ll find that belief becomes predictively true, just as you’ll find your husband awful because (gasp!) he is, at bottom, a man.

This issue is made worse by the fact that women’s children delay their own childbearing years, while women no longer die at 50. That means that there’s a long, long phase of women’s lives when they have neither children nor grandchildren. (And did you know that, in premodern times, the surest trick to keep a child alive was to have a maternal grandmother helping out?) This creates a vacuum in the lives of women who resent their husbands, have nothing anymore to do for or with their children, and miss the passion of new relationships. What better thing to do, at that point, than have a steaming affair and write about it?