Chapter 17
Weeks to deadline: two. Progress: don’t ask.
Despite the high of inspiration—or, rather, because of it—Sloane had had a bad day.
The follow-up tests her pediatrician requested in re Isla’s low iron had gone about as poorly as expected.
Isla remained, how else to put this, sickeningly malnourished.
This was Sloane’s fault. Also, per the pediatrician’s disappointed scolding, Sloane was reminded that Isla had not yet gone for her first dental appointment.
This was also Sloane’s fault, because it was very obvious now to everyone involved that she simply didn’t care about her precious daughter’s teeth.
What exactly did she think motherhood was, just hugging your child when they were scared?
Just loving them so fiercely you had chronic chest pains and a perennial state of survivable dehydration?
“I’m glad she’s in daycare now,” the pediatrician said, implying heavily that any given stranger would be much better for Isla than Sloane, a decorated academic who nonetheless could not nurture her only child to save either of their lives.
“That’ll be good for her to get some real social stimulation,” the doctor added, which ostensibly meant that Sloane had done something wrong by virtue of …
being an adult? Unclear. The point was that Sloane was a bad mother, or at least an inadequate one.
Was she even reading to Isla? Had she considered simply being better at this, or flaying herself more deeply, beyond the subcutaneous level of skin and sweat and into the marrow of her sanity and time?
Then, after that month’s department meeting, Sloane’s subsequent chat with Dean Burns—for which she had been publicly asked to stay behind, like a child being sent to the principal’s office, despite her civilized request for a scheduled tête-á-tête—had also not gone well.
In fairness, he had heard the word VidStar and shut down immediately, so that was on Sloane for her ill-fated attempts to inject the situation with logic and facts.
“Dean Burns,” Sloane attempted, “with all due respect,” she had none, “this department has two thousand followers on Instagram,” pitiable.
“This Christian girl trad wife has over four million across multiple platforms. Are you really telling me your current faculty is having more of an impact on society than she is?” In retrospect, a bad move.
Burns flapped a hand, looking idly over Sloane’s shoulder for the proverbial gal with the great gams who could run off and fetch him a coffee. “She’s an ad, nothing more than the latest form of monetizing lifestyle publications. A glorified sales tactic.”
“But in this neocapitalist day and age,” Sloane had unwisely postured, “what is sociology if not an attempt to understand why something sells? The Country Wife has concrete, quantitative value whether or not you find her to be intellectually serious.”
To Sloane’s thinking, The Country Wife was objectively serious, not to mention academically so.
A tool of viral misinformation on one hand, given the quagmirical popularity of conservative feminine clout, and also a case study in feminized labor.
The Country Wife was proof of several things: one, that a Good Woman instinctively knew how to provide.
The Good Woman was an effortless cook; she could throw a meal together with nothing, because her talents were innate.
The Country Wife’s argument, which existed by virtue of not only her existence but her popularity, was that modern women (Sloane and her fellow whores) could no longer cultivate the divine feminine because they had been forced to seek some Western capitalist sense of meaning—to take demeaning jobs and suffer, only to prove they were worth a fraction of a man.
Meanwhile, men who performed women’s tasks were paid well for it—professional kitchens were run by men who primarily learned their craft from a woman.
When a woman knitted, she was a spinster; when a man did it, he was a designer.
When a woman made something, it was arts and crafts; when a man did it, it was engineering.
Anything innate was simultaneously valueless.
Burns’s response to the movement The Country Wife belonged to could be taken as proof that feminine labor was worth less, sociologically speaking, because it was the product of some mythologized instinct rather than a learned trade or a craft.
Sloane had heard, though, as soon as she said it aloud, that due to her flood of inspiration, she had begun to sound passionate, which meant that what Burns was hearing was a woman who had become emotional, which was obviously a sign that it was Sloane who was not being serious, which meant Burns had a fiduciary responsibility as the owner of a penis to condescend to her, so as to fulfill his masculine duty of securing the ongoing prestige of a lifeless dinosaur (i.e. , the University at large).
Truthfully, Sloane did love social media.
She thought, academically, that one could view it as something that was rewiring our collective brain, actively rewriting society.
Or one could think of it as exceptionally powerful hypnosis.
Either way, it was proof that everyone was inherently interested in sociology, even if sociology as an institution was not interested in them.
Case in point.
“The question we must ask ourselves, Sloane, is will this be a question of relevance in five years? Ten?” pondered Burns in a tone of utter superiority. “Will it even be relevant beyond the end of the week?”
Sloane wanted to ask just how long Burns and his cohort planned to remain relevant themselves, but on second thought reconsidered that it might be a touchy subject.
She began instead to say, “This is a very charged time, politically speaking, with regard to the rights of marginalized groups, which do”—per silly matters of demographics and facts—“include women. Reproductive rights, for example”—a hot-button issue presently driving all levels of politics—“are a question of agency. But whether or not the state can meddle with a person’s uterus is only a symptom of a larger problem—of the basic fact that agency is conditional if the person in question identifies as or is visibly a woman.
” Oh no. She’d gotten worked up again. Scale it back.
Retreat! “The point is,” Sloane attempted again, “even if something is merely a trend, does that make it less significant? We’re in a critical time of radically right-leaning politics, which is of interest to at least half of this population.
” Whereas most of the work this department does is aimed at twelve or so people who do your same job, Sloane didn’t add.
Burns gave her a kindly smile. Poor thing. Poor Sloane. She tried so hard to matter and yet here she was, someone’s mother, and barely even a good one at that. Where, after all, was her child? Did she even know?
“I’m sure there’s something there,” Burns said, as if, if Sloane merely thought a bit harder, she could find a man at the center of this thought experiment, and that man could speak to Burns, and together they could find a way. “By the way, how is Max?”
“Max has downloaded a Scrabble app,” Sloane didn’t say, because Burns wouldn’t understand the point, because Burns couldn’t understand a point if it walked up and flicked his balls.
Alex, meanwhile, had not required explanation.
“Oh, no,” Alex had said with a shake of her head.
She’d called Sloane and invited her and Isla over, something Alex occasionally did now that they’d become friends.
Alex’s house was clean (a weekly housekeeper) and Montessori-ed (it was important to her to have everything be a “yes” space for Theo) and she always had a beautifully stocked kitchen (Theo actually loved grocery shopping—it was a way they bonded, both sharing a love of fine yogurts and fresh berries and other such treats).
Theo was a remarkably social child who seemed to enjoy Isla’s primordial efforts at play, which Alex attributed to him having been in daycare since he was four months old.
Not a situation Alex delighted in, she confessed—oh, the nightmare that was pumping in the bathroom at work for almost two years until she’d riled up enough support for a proper nursing facility!
—but Alex was a single mother, by design.
Theo was the result of a sperm donor and Alex’s desire to focus on her child without simultaneously addressing a husband’s dirty socks or his disinterest in family time.
“So, wait,” Alex said upon learning of The Scrabble Betrayal, “does that mean he’s on his phone even more now?”
Let us be clear: Sloane did not want to complain about Max.
She wanted (needed) (desperately needed) Alex to believe that Sloane was an intelligent woman who, in a time of profound feminine progress, had chosen a radical feminist for a partner from a place of deep love and sexual attraction, not economic necessity or any pressing sociological need to marry like she was some kind of basic pumpkin spice bitch.
That being said, Alex had immediately spotted the issue—the further erosion of Sloane’s husband’s time and mental acuity was weighing heavily on her, such that she didn’t think she could prevent herself from bringing it up, which she most certainly did not want to accidentally do in public or worse, in front of Britt, whose husband openly delighted in the routine tasks of domesticity that Max seemed to intellectually discard.
But Sloane also didn’t particularly want to go into detail about the research Burns had dismissed, because it did feel a bit invasive, or perhaps judgmental—Sloane didn’t want Alex to think she saw her as an experiment, a subject to write about like Jane Goodall’s apes.
So, of the available discussion topics, it would obviously have to be Max.