In honor of Pride, some important news: Being Straight is Great, Actually! This public service announcement comes courtesy of the New York Times, which published an op-ed with that headline on the eve of Pride month, later retitled to There’s Nothing Wrong With Wanting Men. Author Magdalene J Taylor boldly declared, “There has still never been a better time in human history to happily and successfully pursue heterosexuality.”
While congratulations are in order for Taylor’s successful pursuit of heterosexuality, data contradicts the notion of a golden age for straight women. A 2023 Pew Research Center report found that in egalitarian marriages where spouses earn equal salaries, women still spend over double the time on housework and nearly two more hours per week on caregiving. Husbands, meanwhile, enjoy three-and-a-half more hours of leisure. Dads help more than before, but day-to-day drudgery remains women’s work.
Enter AI. According to a Wired feature, momfluencers are increasingly outsourcing household tasks to chatbots, pitching AI as a better co-parent than men. Lilian Schmidt, a Swiss mother of a three-year-old, went viral for outsourcing 97% of her mental load to ChatGPT and selling access to a custom GPT called Coparent. Schmidt, who says her partner “does his fair share,” notes that most planning still falls to her. “Our brains work differently. He’s a doer… I do the thinking. That mental load falls on me,” she said. “Unfortunately, mental load is still considered a female problem. A lot of men don’t even know what mental load is.”
The good news for straight women with partners too fragile for mental loads is that enterprising momfluencers now sell handbooks for co-parenting with AI. This growing genre includes YouTube videos and online courses. The Cut notes the “girlbossification of AI,” with figures like Reese Witherspoon and Sheryl Sandberg encouraging women to lean into chatbots for productivity. Truly, there has never been a better time for tech-enabled heterosexuality—just ask ChatGPT.
In other news: anti-vax dating apps are hosting in-person meetups, with an organizer telling WIRED that attendees are “still some of the most persecuted people.” Meanwhile, measles is making a comeback. Israel has detained members of Palestine’s women’s national football team, continuing what the Palestinian Football Association calls a pattern of targeting athletes. Niger’s military junta criminalized same-sex relations with up to 10 years in prison. Gwyneth Paltrow has been nicknamed “Gwynocide.” NASA faces backlash for an all-male Artemis III crew, despite 15 female astronauts. A shadowy group, CitizenGo, is influencing Australian abortion policy. And JD Vance installed a custom chicken coop at the vice-president’s residence, funded privately.
