Grazie Sophia Christie dropped a bombshell of an article in New York Magazine's The Cut titled "The Case for Marrying an Older Man: A woman's life is all work and little rest. An age gap relationship can help."
It's a long and winding walk through the writer's choice to marry a man ten years her senior because he had an established career and the money to support a family, and she did not.
There have certainly been a fair share of "gold digger" essays published over the years, but Christie's is making waves because it taps into the ire that many young people are feeling in the nation right now.
When I was 20 and a junior at Harvard College, a series of great ironies began to mock me. I could study all I wanted, prove myself as exceptional as I liked, and still my fiercest advantage remained so universal it deflated my other plans. My youth.
What young person hasn't felt the sting of lacking experience in the career hunt?
But youth isn't without its "superpowers." Christie decided she could use her youth to marry a man who was already established and work on her career in luxury rather than struggling.
So naturally I began to lug a heavy suitcase of books each Saturday to the Harvard Business School to work on my Nabokov paper. In one cavernous, well-appointed room sat approximately 50 of the planet's most suitable bachelors. I had high breasts, most of my eggs, plausible deniability when it came to purity, a flush ponytail, a pep in my step that had yet to run out. Apologies to Progress, but older men still desired those things.
One of those eligible bachelors took the bait.
After that, the article goes on and on about transactional love, power inequalities, and her luxurious vacations in the south of France, while looking down her nose at her friends and classmates juggling roadblocks in their career, while dating men their own age who were facing the same youth-based challenges.
Needless to say, the internet had thoughts:
There were the screaming feminists:
The red-pilled enthusiasts:
The grammar-nazis:
And of course my favorite, the humorists:
But my absolute favorite is this satirical piece from McSweeney's.
It's worth the click through to read in its entirety.
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