American women’s most listened-to podcast is Call Her Daddy. It is hosted by the glamorous Alex Cooper, whose shtick is grilling female celebrities on their sex lives. For example, she made Gwyneth Paltrow rank all her boyfriends according to their sexual skills. I hope her husband and kids didn’t bother listening to that episode.
She recently hosted an actress named Sophia Bush. They discussed Sophia’s multiple divorces while Alex declared breathlessly that if a woman is questioning whether she can do better than her current husband, “the answer is always yes.” Sophia agreed. “The answer is always yes, and this idea that it’s too late or you’re too old, or who are you to want more – that’s patriarchy. That is crazy!” Something around here is crazy, yes, Ms. Bush.
Bush, in case you are not up-to-date on C-list television stars in their forties, is on her third marriage. It took place last year, and this time she wed a woman. She is now stepmother to her wife’s two adopted black children from the wife’s former marriage (to a different woman).
One wonders who Ms. Bush will be marrying next year – and which gender her wheel-of-fortune spin will land on. Hint: if you ask Bush to marry you, the answer will always be yes. (Spare a thought for her stepkids, who now have at least four mothers of various sorts and durations.)
Mama’s out there dabbling in polyamory, traveling to Third World countries, microdosing shrooms
A few days after the podcast came out, a Telegraph article appeared with this headline: “I thought motherhood had killed my sex drive, but I just needed a divorce.” The subheading went on: “Áine Rock spent years battling exhaustion, migraines and a lack of desire. Becoming single at 46 transformed her relationship with intimacy.”
The photograph of Ms. Rock depicts a mature, sultry blonde with, fluttering over her breastbone, a large butterfly tattoo that’s seen better days. (I wonder why no one told her that tramp stamps are supposed to go on the back of the body, right above the derriere.) I also recognized the look in her eyes – and so would you, if you’ve ever watched any of thoseNational Geographic documentaries that show female lions hunting prey on the savanna. I’m sure her children and grandchildren will be delighted to one day read all about their granny’s emergence as an aged, brittle butterfly escaping from the rigid, boring cocoon of her marriage, and how she spent her fifties doing unpaid sex work for strange men. Cozy!
Clearly, these women are making an end run around shame. If you celebrate ditching your marriage for a bloke (or lady) you think might be better in bed, there’s no need to feel any shame or guilt. It’s not betrayal, kids: it’s freedom! But I wonder what reaction these women would have if men started having press junkets every time they dumped their wives for their secretaries.
There’s no beating around this bush: Sophia Bush’s serial dumping of husbands before the wedding present thank-you notes have been sent is a thermonuclear red flag, not an achievement of female liberation.
Yes, marriage is a prison: didn’t you know? Your selfish husband is depriving you of your God-given right to live, laugh, and love (other people). Your selfish baby is depriving you of your right to travel in first class and have a glamorous career wearing cute outfits. Wake up and smell the female liberation, girlfriend. Haven’t you heard the good news about polyamory? Open relationships? Threesomes? Foursomes? Moresomes?
The divorce evangelists are here to rescue you. These women are living their best lives and are ready to teach you how to reject the patriarchy – and the nagging demands of spouses and small children. Living your best life will mean living alone – but your cats will keep you company. You’ll have your memories and a few STDs as souvenirs you picked up along the way.
There is a large class of women in America who, having found their own marriages and husbands lacking, spend the rest of their lives persuading other women to dump theirs. Book after book by delirious divorcées relishing their marriage-free lives has hit the bestseller list lately. Kids, schmids: Mama’s out there dabbling in polyamory, traveling to exotic Third World countries, microdosing shrooms, catching a little chlamydia – and committing every graphic detail to print.
This new class of divorce evangelists make Candace Bushnell, who chronicled chronically single women in Sex and the City, seem like a tradwife. At least Carrie and Charlotte wanted to find husbands. The divorce evangelist’s mantra can be summed up in this perfect quote from their leading guru: “Until I feel as ecstatic about having a baby as I felt about going to New Zealand to search for a giant squid, I cannot have a baby.” That quote is taken from Elizabeth Gilbert’s bestselling 2006 memoir, Eat, Pray, Love. Her book, a chronicle of her post-divorce year in Italy, India and Indonesia, was hailed as a beacon of female self-discovery, sold more than 30 million copies and inspired a movie starring Julia Roberts.
Gilbert’s story was one of an oppressed American woman exploring true liberation – in the form of high-end travel, incredible food and random sex with strangers. This was what the sexual revolution was really about: not empowerment, but enslavement to your own pleasure.
Alas, the liberation she preached was a hoax. An anthology called Eat, Pray, Love Made Me Do It is filled with stories of an army of lemmings inspired by Gilbert to abandon marriages and jobs – only to discover that the path to Gilbertian self-actualization led only to financial ruin and personal wreckage.
The false prophet behind the curtain was finally revealed in her 2025 memoir, All the Way to the River, in which she tells the sordid story of what happened after she left the man she’d found love with at the end of Eat, Pray, Love. She left him for her middle-aged, Syrian, lesbian hairdresser, who was an on-and-off heroin and cocaine addict. In one charming confession, Gilbert reveals that she was in so much emotional turmoil that she even thought about killing her girlfriend, who was dying of cancer, by poisoning her drug supply.
Surrendering to one’s whims is not noble or powerful: it’s weakness masquerading as freedom. It turns out Gilbert was not an eloquent spokeswoman for the female struggle. She was just a sex-addicted narcissist with a knack for Hallmark-card epigrams.
“Now 56, sober and celibate and committed to a 12-step program for sex and love addiction, Gilbert radiates calm and composure,” says a New York Times profile. She now lives alone, sports a gray buzz cut and eats her meals with her dog for company.
In 2024, eccentric Los Angeles cult actress Miranda July published a bestselling memoir-slash-novel called All Fours about (yet another) neurotic, self-obsessed narcissist who ditches her marriage for graphic sex (tampon foreplay, anyone?) with a man young enough to be her son, and some women for good measure.
July’s book, naturally, became a hit among other women who yearned to dump their homes and everyone in them. The New York Times (again) wrote a glowing profile about the women hoping to follow in her footsteps. “The novel… has spurred a whisper network of women fantasizing about desire and freedom.” She sings to the other perimenopausal neurotics like a siren, promising them that all their secret fantasies will come true.
Another high priestess of the movement is a freelance writer named Lyz Lenz. Lenz famously divorced her husband because he voted for Donald Trump in 2016. She wrote a book about the life-changing magic of dumping your husband called This American Ex-Wife.
No man is safe from his ex-wife’s future tell-all on his many failings and sexual inadequacies
She was married to a conservative Christian – a hard-working man who loved God, Star Trek and doing his own home renovations. The horror! Did I mention he was bad in bed? I didn’t have to: she did. Reverse chauvinism is part of the factory settings of the modern-day feminist; no man is safe from his ex-wife’s future tell-all on his many failings and sexual inadequacies.
Accusing your ex of being “bad in bed” in public as revenge for voting for Trump is the perfect terminus of liberal feminism. Imagine a man writing about how bad his ex-wife was in bed as revenge for forgetting to pick up his dry cleaning. Predictably, Lenz also declared that the only women for whom marriage works are white supremacists. “When an upper-middle-class white lady says marriage is working for her… like yeah that’s the point of white supremacy and patriarchy.”
These days, Lenz writes a blog called Men Yell at Me (shocker) and tours Midwestern college campuses, spreading the good news about divorce to young feminists. Her book is helpful to men in one regard, however. Young sailors, let Lenz be your lighthouse: if you see her book perched on the shelf or on the bedside table in a young lady’s apartment after a date, beware, and turn your ship around.
But it is Call Her Daddy’s Cooper who is the most influential divorce evangelist out there. She became an instant hit with her Howard Stern-tier discourses on technique. But the lifestyle she pimped to her legions of female fans was far from healthy – to them, it wasn’t just comedy. One former fan of the show wrote that “Cooper and her guests fully subscribed to the flavor of feminism declaring not merely that ‘men are pigs’ but, with a mobilizing spirit, that ‘men are pigs, so let’s be pigs, too.’”
Still, as a self-made multimillionaire, Cooper is impressive. She’s got it all – plus one thing many of her female listeners do not: a husband. She secretly married a successful Hollywood movie producer in 2024 after keeping their relationship hidden from her fans for years. Her husband should keep his head on a swivel – these ladies have their men sitting on ejector seats that they control, and they’ve got itchy trigger fingers.
After years spent encouraging young women to lean in hard to frictionless hookup culture with no shame, no consequences and no falling in love, she chose to rescue herself. Cooper, who is 32, has just had her first baby. Unfortunately, a lot of listeners who took her advice too literally will never get to hear anyone call them mommy.
A portion of this article was excerpted from Peachy Keenan’s Supervillains: Architects of America’s Decline, on sale now.
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