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Another number-one New York Times best seller from this era, Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them, by the psychologist Susan Forward and published in 1986, took a different and more feminist approach by naming misogyny, rather than codependency or lack of self-love, as the main dysfunctio…

In sum, midcentury representations of marriage doubled down on earlier themes of opposite-sex disinterest and resentment by suggesting to women that not only their bodies but also their personalities needed to be carefully managed in order to produce happy heterosexuality. As experts elaborated the…

[...] In particular, the tension between the expectation of heterosexual love and men’s unapologetic disinterest in conversation with their wives produced a demand among women readers for advice on how to cultivate their husbands’ affection. For instance, Dr. Edward Podolsky’s 1947 book Sex Today i…

[...] The professional and university-educated young women whom Fincher interviewed described their boyfriends as selfish, jealous, insensitive, boring, arrogant, and generally unappealing, and yet they also described a high likelihood that they would marry these men because they did not believe be…

As for the normalized sexism inside straight culture, lesbian feminists wrote volumes. With righteous rage, they detailed the ways that straight men desired women’s services—emotional, sexual, reproductive, domestic—rather than actual women, and they exposed the toll this took on women’s mental hea…