Kulturkampf

[HaughtyFrank]

Not sure if we talked about this before.

Lindy West, a super feminist and writer who basically shaped the Jezebel website revealed in her memoir that she's in a polyamory relationship. Thing is, reading the memoir everyon concludes that she was absolutely pressured into it and that her husband was initially secretly cheating on her with multiple women. Since the husband is a POC he played the uno reverse card and made some progressive arguments about how monogamy is white supremacy or whatever and that it's patriarchal ownership.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/03/lindy-west-millennial-feminism/686488/?gift=SKtFP-7gCBnFn1bNJdqPMg92hUfwcKE5vnQbelq5DQA&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

At the same time as it offers a revisionist history of West’s 2010s, Adult Braces makes another grand claim: that West is now polyamorous and lovin’ it. Yes, she might have been upset when a fan texted her with the news that Oluo was out in public kissing another woman. (Even then, she admits halfway through the book, that wasn’t the whole truth: “I told you Aham was secretly seeing one woman in 2019. He was actually seeing two.”) But really, she absolutely adores her and Oluo’s now-mutual girlfriend, Roya, to the extent that through sheer force of will, she has become bisexual. It only took driving a van from Seattle to the Florida Keys and back, while also undergoing cosmetic dentistry, to realize this.

When I read Adult Braces, my instinctive reaction was: I don’t believe you.

To me, it seemed obvious that Oluo, who is mixed race, had successfully used West’s desire to be progressive against her: “He believed that monogamy was, at its root, a system of ownership. I had to admit that perhaps I didn’t feel it as keenly, as a white person.” Oluo had also rebranded himself as a “non-binary he/they,” perhaps to shrug off any suggestion that he was acting like every harem-patrolling patriarch in history.

Now, I know plenty of people who have come to a different understanding of their sexuality as adults—mostly Later-Life Lesbians, or LLLs—but it seems an unlikely coincidence that the first woman West has ever been attracted to was already her husband’s girlfriend. Not least when the book includes this line: “Being cool about polyamory felt like a growing imperative in progressive circles.”

Lindy West and her husband have not taken the backlash well and started attacking journalists. The husband wrote an email to a slate journalist calling her names, when later asked if he wants to comment on that email he responded with "Free Palestine"

Just all around and amazing example of someone trying to excuse his personal shittiness with "progressivism" to the point he screams "Free Palestine" when it has absolutely nothing to do with the topic.