NY Times shocker: Lovelorn feminist in open marriage blames men



Jean Garnett’s recent New York Times screed, "The Trouble with Wanting Men," poses as cultural critique. It’s not.

It’s a bloated confession, narcissistic navel-gazing wrapped in feminist jargon.

If heterosexual relationships are fundamentally broken, what, one wonders, is the solution? Lesbianism by committee? Celibacy as political statement?

The article reads like a therapy session conducted in public. Unfiltered, sure — but more like a late-night voicemail from an unhinged ex. And painfully personal, without ever brushing up against anything profound. It’s Lena Dunham with a thesaurus, mistaking self-exposure for substance.

Fatal attraction

The premise is absurd. Women are "fed up" with the “mating behavior” of men. So fed up that they need a fancy name for it. Heterofatalism — the academy’s latest made-up spew. A term coined to canonize female disappointment and package failed flings as compelling commentary.

The term suggests fatal attraction to heterosexuality itself. As if being straight were a terminal diagnosis. As if desire for men were a character flaw requiring academic intervention.

Consider the writer's "case studies," if you can call them that. A man cancels a date because he’s anxious. This, we’re told, is proof of masculine failure.

A lawyer takes too long to text back. Suddenly it’s a crisis in male communication.

Then there’s the polyamorous sex enthusiast — honest, up front, emotionally literate. And yet even he disappoints. Too clear. Too composed. Too self-aware to project fantasy onto. His failure, it seems, is not failing enough. In Garnett’s world, men can’t win — not because they’re cruel, but because they’re human.

Tramp stamp

Garnett’s romantic history tells the real story, though she frames it as a feminist awakening. She and her husband enjoyed an open relationship, a setup that gave her license to chase new highs under the banner of sexual liberation.

What follows isn’t empowerment. It’s a slow-motion train wreck of bad choices, dressed up as theory. She blows up her marriage for a man defined by his “incapacity to commit” — J., the sad-eyed drifter who all but hands her a warning label. He’s detached, clear about his limits, uninterested in anything lasting. She pursues him anyway, certain she’s the exception.

When it all falls apart, as it inevitably does, she blames him for being exactly who he said he was. Garnett might be a capable writer, but she’s adrift — romantically, intellectually, and morally. Deluded, self-excusing, and painfully detached from reality, she isn’t just a product of modern feminism. She’s its poster child.

Soft boys

The "good guy" phenomenon reveals the deeper pathology. Men, having internalized decades of feminist scolding, now perform contrition. They soften their edges. They distance themselves from anything deemed traditionally masculine. They over-apologize, over-communicate, and tiptoe through relationships as if masculinity itself were a moral failing.

But this softness — the very quality they were told women wanted — has become the new target. Too hesitant. Too self-conscious. Too accommodating. In trying to be safe, they became invisible. The irony is brutal: Women spent years dismantling the masculine ideal, only to mourn its absence once it was gone.

Whine tasting

Garnett and her dinner companions ask, “Where are the men who can handle hard stuff?” They drove them out. They turned strength into suspicion, decisiveness into something diabolical. Now, faced with the results of their own demands, they sneer at the men left behind.

The restaurant scene is a window into this cultural mess. Four women, past their prime, wine in hand, mocking male inadequacy, giggling over penis jokes like it’s political commentary.

This woman's work

Then comes the grievance inflation monologue. Women, apparently, are now burdened with interpreting “mystifying male cues.” They call themselves “relationship-maintenance experts,” as if carrying the emotional weight of a partnership is a modern injustice. But relationships have always required attention and effort, from both sides. What was once called being an adult is now considered a form of oppression.

And then there’s the pièce de résistance: “hermeneutic labor.” A term so overstuffed that it buckles under its own pretension. It’s academic nonsense for what used to be called understanding your partner.

Women read signals. Men retreat. That’s the rhythm. One leans in, the other pulls back. Not because of patriarchy, but because intimacy is uneven, unpredictable, and often inconvenient. This dynamic didn’t arrive with gender studies. It’s been around since the first couple argued under a tree.

Rebel without a cause

Garnett's sexual encounters reveal the true dynamic. She wants dominance from men. The guitar player who makes her wait, who calls her a "bratty sub." This excites her. Clear masculine authority works.

Yet she simultaneously resents male confidence as problematic. It never occurs to her that the contradiction isn’t societal. It’s entirely personal. She’s not uncovering a grand cultural flaw. She is the flaw.

The contradiction is stark. Feminist theory demands male sensitivity. Female biology craves male strength. Women caught between ideology and instinct blame men for the confusion. "Heterofatalism" becomes the convenient scapegoat.

Consider the broader implications. If heterosexual relationships are fundamentally broken, what, one wonders, is the solution? Lesbianism by committee? Celibacy as political statement? The heterofatalists offer no answers, only complaints. So many complaints.

The real tragedy is simpler. Modern dating culture has poisoned romantic relationships for everyone. Apps reduce people to profiles. Hookup culture eliminates courtship. Endless options prevent commitment. Both sexes suffer equally.

But women have weaponized their suffering into theoretical frameworks. Men's pain remains invisible, their struggles dismissed as weakness, their anxiety mocked as inadequacy.

Intellectualizing idiocy

The solution is not new terminology. It's old wisdom. Lower expectations. Accept imperfection. Stop treating romantic disappointment as social pathology. Recognize that good relationships require compromise from both parties.

"Heterofatalism" is not a real phenomenon, of course. It's a fancy name for ordinary human disappointment, a way to intellectualize personal failures, to repackage private mistakes as cultural critique. To turn individual shortcomings into a shared burden everyone else is expected to answer for.

Academia enables the absurdity. Professors build careers on cataloging female dissatisfaction. Students earn degrees studying their own disastrous dating decisions. The circular logic is perfect. Every bad date becomes data. Every ghosting proves the theory.

Meanwhile, actual problems go unsolved. Birth rates collapse. Marriage rates plummet. Loneliness epidemics spread. But sure, let's focus on heterofatalism. Let's give hyper-liberal women another reason to avoid commitment. Another excuse to blame men for everything.

The real fatalism is accepting this story of victimhood, thinking half the population are powerless against their own desires. Women deserve better than this pseudo-intellectual mush. Men deserve better than being cast as villains in every failed relationship. And society deserves more than recycled heartbreak dressed up in academic drag.

We need honesty about modern romance. Not another made-up term for problems as old as desire itself.

Yes, Ken Burns, the Founding Fathers believed in God — and His 'divine Providence'



Ken Burns has built his career as America's memory keeper. For decades, he's positioned himself as the guardian against historical revisionism, the man who rescues truth from the dustbin of academic fashion. His camera doesn't just record past events — it sanctifies them.

For nearly five decades, Burns has reminded Americans that memory matters and that history shapes how a nation sees itself.

Jefferson's 'Nature’s God' wasn’t a placeholder. It was a real presence. He sliced up the Gospels but still bowed to the idea of eternal moral law.

Which makes his recent performance on Joe Rogan's podcast all the more stunning in its brazen historical malpractice.

At the 1-hour, 17-minute mark, Burns delivered his verdict on the Founding Fathers with the confidence of a man who's never been wrong about anything.

They were deists, he declared. Believers in a distant, disinterested God, a cosmic clockmaker who wound up the universe and wandered off to tend other galaxies. Cold, clinical, and entirely absent from human affairs.

It's a tidy narrative. One small problem: It's so very wrong.

The irony cuts so deep it draws blood. The man who made his reputation fighting historical revisionism has become its most prominent practitioner. Burns, the supposed guardian of American memory, has developed a curious case of selective amnesia, and Americans are supposed to pretend not to notice.

The deist delusion

Now, some might ask: Who cares? What difference does it make whether Washington believed in an active God or a divine absentee landlord? The answer is everything, and the fact that it's Burns making this claim makes it infinitely worse.

This isn't some graduate student getting his dissertation wrong. This is America's most trusted historical documentarian, the man whose work shapes how millions understand their past. When Burns speaks, the nation listens.

When he gets it wrong, the mistake seeps like an oil spill across the national story, quietly coating textbooks, classrooms, and documentaries for decades.

Burns is often treated as an apolitical narrator of history, but there’s a soft ideological current running through much of his work: reverence for progressive causes, selective moral framing, and a tendency to recast American complexity through a modern liberal lens.

Burns isn't stupid. One assumes he knows exactly what he's saying. If he doesn't — if his remarks on Rogan's podcast represent genuine ignorance rather than deliberate distortion — then we have serious questions about the depth of his actual knowledge. How does someone spend decades documenting American history while missing something this fundamental?

The truth is that Americans have been lied to about the Founders' faith for so long that Burns' deist mythology sounds plausible. The secular academy has been rewriting these men for decades, stripping away their religious convictions, sanding down their theological edges, making them safe for modern consumption. Burns isn't breaking new ground. He's perpetuating a familiar falsehood.

Taking a knee

Let's start with George Washington, the supposed deist in chief. Burns would have us believe the general bowed not to God, but to a kind of cosmic CEO who delegated all earthly duties to middle management. But at least one contemporary account attests that Washington knelt in the snow at Valley Forge — not once, but repeatedly.

He called for the national day of "prayer and thanksgiving" that eventually became the November federal holiday we know today. He invoked divine Providence so frequently you’d think he was writing sermons, not military orders.

His Farewell Address reads more like a theological tract than a retirement speech, warning that “religion and morality are indispensable supports” of political prosperity. Does that sound like a man who thought God had checked out?

John Adams, another Founder often branded a deist, wrote bluntly that “our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.”

Adams saw the American Revolution as the outgrowth of divine intervention. As he wrote to Thomas Jefferson in 1813, “The general principles on which the fathers achieved independence were ... the general principles of Christianity.”

And what of Jefferson? By far the most heterodox, even he never denied divine order. His “Nature’s God” wasn’t a placeholder. It was a real presence. He sliced up the Gospels but still bowed to the idea of eternal moral law. Whatever his quarrels with organized religion, he did not believe in a silent universe.

Some of these men were, philosophically at least, frustrated Catholics. They couldn’t fully accept Protestantism, but they had no access to the Church’s intellectual infrastructure. The natural law reasoning that permeates their political thought — Jefferson’s “self-evident truths,” Madison’s checks and balances born of man’s fallen nature — comes straight from Aquinas, filtered through Locke, Montesquieu, and centuries of Christian jurisprudence.

The Founders weren’t Enlightenment nihilists. They weren’t secular technocrats. And they certainly weren’t deists. They were men steeped in a moral framework older than the American experiment itself.

Burns, for all his sepia-toned genius, has a blind spot you could drive a colonial wagon through. His documentaries glow with progressive reverence — plenty of civil rights and moral reckoning, but the Almighty gets the silent treatment. God may have guided the Founders, but in Ken’s cut, he barely makes the final edit.

The sacred and the sanitized

I mentioned irony at the start, but it deserves more than a passing nod. That's because the septuagenarian's own cinematic legacy contradicts the very theology he now peddles on podcasts.

His brilliant nine-part series "The Civil War" captured the moral agony of a nation tearing itself apart, and it did so in unmistakably religious terms. Here Burns treats Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address — haunted, prophetic, bathed in biblical cadence — with reverence, not revisionism.

The series understood something essential: Americans have always been a biblical people. They see their history not just in terms of dates and treaties, but in terms of sin, sacrifice, and redemption. Sacred story, divine purpose — this was the language of American reckoning.

The Founders weren’t saints, and they weren’t simple. They read Greek, spoke Latin, studied Scripture, and debated philosophy with a seriousness that puts modern politicians to shame. But they weren’t spiritual agnostics, either.

They were men of imperfect but active faith, shaped by the Bible, steeped in Christian moral tradition, and convinced that human rights came not from government but from God.

They didn’t build a republic of personal preference. They built one grounded in enduring truths that predated the Constitution, anchored to the idea that law and liberty meant nothing without a higher law above them.

Burns may deal in memory, but his treatment of religion reveals something else entirely. He doesn’t misremember. He reorders. He filters faith through a modern lens until it becomes unrecognizable.

Memory isn’t just about what’s preserved — it’s about what’s permitted. And when the sacred gets cast aside, what’s left isn’t history. It’s propaganda with better lighting.