In honour of Pride I’d like to share some important news: Being Straight is Great, Actually! This public service announcement is brought to you by the New York Times which, in an offering to the Ragebait Gods, published an op-ed with that headline on the eve of Pride month. It then changed the headline of the piece, which was written by a Playboy editor, to There’s Nothing Wrong With Wanting Men. “I’m going to go out on a limb and say it,” author Magdalene J Taylor bravely wrote. “There has still never been a better time in human history to happily and successfully pursue heterosexuality.”

A sincere congratulations to Ms Taylor for her successful pursuit of heterosexuality, and her brave dismantling of straw men. But, look, while I don’t like to rain on anyone’s (straight) parade, I do have a few little quibbles with her argument. Namely, I keep seeing data which somewhat contradicts the idea that we live in a golden age for straight women.

Take, for example, the fact that women in opposite-sex marriages continue to do the bulk of the housework and caregiving. A 2023 report from the Pew Research Center found that in so-called egalitarian marriages where husbands and wives earn about the same salaries, women are stilling spending more than double the amount of time their partners do on housework. They’re also spending almost two hours more a week on caregiving. Husbands, meanwhile, spent three-and-a-half hours more on leisure activities. Dads are certainly helping out more than they used to, but much of the day-to-day domestic drudgery is........

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