Op-Ed: Writer's Dive Into Polyamory Is a 'Cautionary Tale'

Millennial feminism's glossy success story looks very different up close in Michelle Goldberg's latest New York Times opinion column. She zeroes in on writer Lindy West—once a loud, funny standard-bearer for online feminism and fat positivity—whose new memoir, Adult Braces, recounts a marriage shaped by her husband's insistence on nonmonogamy and her own profound insecurites around it. West frames her eventual embrace of their polyamorous triad as liberation, but Goldberg finds the narrative more unsettling than empowering, noting that West "can't see through [her husband's] apparent manipulation." He "took advantage of West's devastating lack of entitlement" and "used her politics against her," Goldberg writes.

She contrasts the book's progressive trappings with an old pattern: a woman steadily sanding down her own needs to keep a man, then retrofitting the compromise with political language. In West's account, her husband invokes anti-ownership arguments against monogamy, while West, wracked with self-doubt and a childlike dependence, learns to see herself as the problem. Critics on the right have seized on the memoir as proof that left-wing ideas are corrosive. "But I interpreted West's book as a cautionary tale about female self-abnegation," writes Goldberg, who reads it as a broader warning about how any ideology—left or right—can be used to make women feel they're failing. For a fuller, more nuanced take, Goldberg's full column here.