Chelsea Fagan

At a certain point, we have to hold ourselves accountable as women and say, it's barely been 50 years that we can even have a credit card, that we can own property, that we can do things in our own name to...

be so eager to give up all of that and to go back into this place of voluntary helplessness and voluntary ignorance in service of a very specific kind of love to me is we just can't allow ourselves to do that.

Hi, thank you for having me.

This is so exciting.

Oh, well, I mean, for women, it's definitely the idea that being entirely reliant on a man is aspirational.

That's a big one.

Um,

And also, I think there's a real resurgence of this really delusional class fantasy for women that a wealthy man will kind of pluck you out of obscurity and give you this really, really fabulous life.

And what's ironic about that, to be clear, people have generally always married within their social class.

But what's even funnier about it now is that years ago, very rich men wanted a stay-at-home wife and mother.

Now, the very rich lawyer wants another lawyer.

The very rich doctor wants another doctor.

What's better than one income?

Exactly.

But it's a level of stratification of class that is on so many more along so many more axes than it ever was before.

It's like if you're a lower income woman, not only are you probably not going to marry a wealthy man because of the class difference, but also because he's likely looking for a woman who is extremely educated in similar circles, works a very similar job.

and essentially brings as much to the table as he does in terms of status, in terms of income, which, by the way, doesn't work out super well even for the women who are in these marriages.

There are tons of memoirs about that.

Yeah.

But I think it's a real fantasy that I see a lot more on social media now.