Crazy NYT Article Says THIS Is The Key To Marriage Equality?!

What this episode is about

The New York Times article by Nona Willis Aronowitz discusses the implications of feeding practices on parental equality, particularly highlighting how using baby formula can help create a more balanced parenting dynamic. By sharing her personal experiences, she emphasizes the importance of equal involvement between mothers and fathers in caring for their children to foster a healthier relationship and contribute to marriage equality.

Key takeaways

• In a baby's world, absence of mom is felt deeply; dads are still learning the ropes of parenting.
• Feeding may be fundamental, but equating baby formula with marital equality? That's a stretch even for The New York Times.
• Breastfeeding vs. formula: a hot debate; yet, the real challenge is achieving equal parenting amidst sleep deprivation.
• While societal pressure promotes breastfeeding, practical parenting wisdom leans heavily toward shared responsibilities.
• Consider 'equality' in marriage; it's a complex dance, not a simple arithmetic that ignores biological differences.

Who speaks in this episode?

• Matt Walsh (Host) · 18 min speaking
• Nona Willis Aronowitz (Guest) · 1 min speaking

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 3:00: Nona Willis Aronowitz, The New York Times Magazine
2. 15:00 – 18:00: ExpressVPN

Notable quotes from "Crazy NYT Article Says THIS Is The Key To Marriage Equality?!"

• Her mother to his mother than to the father. I wanted to mention this. The New York Times has an article this week giving us the formula for marriage equality. And the formula is they say formula. It's baby formula. So you can.

  about The New York Times Magazine · at 0:16

• The previous 3 months had been a crash course in parental equality, our conscious attempt to reverse the infuriatingly lopsided dynamic we had experienced with our first child. At the.

  about Nona Willis Aronowitz · at 1:07

• Devices simultaneously, and they even have servers in all 50 US states right now. Find out how you can get up to four extra months by scanning the QR code on screen. Click the…

  about ExpressVPN · at 17:21

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• Nona Willis Aronowitz — Person · Referenced journalist / op-ed writer · 3 mentions · first at 0:35
  She is cited as the author of a New York Times article arguing that using baby formula can support 'parental equality'; the host uses her piece as a foil for a broader critique of 'marriage equality' and equal parenting.

Companies & orgs

• The New York Times Magazine — Company · Referenced work · 2 mentions · first at 0:21
  Referenced in the discussion about an article on marriage equality and parenting

Sponsors

• ExpressVPN — Product · Sponsor · 3 mentions · first at 16:31
  Sponsor of the podcast, providing VPN services for internet privacy and security

Full transcript with timestamps

0:00 A young baby hardly even notices the dad. But if mom is gone, he notices. He feels it. If mom is gone for 10 minutes, much less 10 months, he feels it. He was physically inside her body for 9 months. Of course, he's going to be much more emotionally and physically attached to her mother uh to his mother than than than to the father. I wanted to mention this. The New York Times has an article this week uh giving us the formula for marriage equality. And the formula is they say formula. It's baby formula. So you can uh make your marriage equal with baby formula. This is the writer. The writer is a Nona Willis Aronowitz.

0:39 And here's what she says. In the middle of the night, a few days before Thanksgiving, I woke up with excruciating abdominal cramps. A CT scan revealed that my appendix had perforated and I needed emergency surgery. There were lots of things to stress about. I had a three-month-old, Pearl, whom I'd never been away from overnight. I had a three-year-old, Dory, who would once again uh worry about my sore tummy just as I'd finished my postpartum healing. But one thing I felt mercifully calm about was Dom, my husband, and his ability to care for Pearl on his own.

1:07 The previous 3 months had been a crash course in parental equality, our conscious attempt to reverse the infuriatingly lopsided dynamic we had experienced with our first child. At the heart of it was a simple strategy. Use baby formula early and often. Every parent instantly learns that feeding is paramount. Um, wait, let me just let me pause there for a second. How did this make it past an editor? Do they still have editors at the What is this? New York Times. Do they have editors there? Every new parent learns that feeding is paramount.

1:48 How did that uh Yeah, great insight, Nona. That's amazing. Yes, feeding is paramount. What? Nona, you should write a parenting book. I know you've only been parenting a few years, but you should write a book. 10 rules of raising children. Rule number one, feed them. Rule number one, you have to feed them. And all these people are going to read the book and go, "Oh, you're Oh, you're supposed to feed them. Is that what I've been doing wrong this whole time? Oh, you mean you have to feed the kids? Really? Actually, I I This is how advanced I am.

2:28 She said that parents learn that you have that feeding is paramount. I actually I'm so ahead of the game that I knew that before I had kids. I don't mean to be I don't I don't mean to be arrogant. I don't mean to brag at all, okay? I'm not saying I I don't I didn't have every everything figured out, but I had that figured out going in. I I learned that feeding is paramount actually when I was a baby. That's how long I've known it. So incredible wisdom. Anyway, um let's see. So in an age when the vast majority of parents support the concept of equal parenting, why don't we openly discuss one of the most one of the best ways to avoid that imbalance? There are plenty of good reasons to breastfeed.

3:11 from passing on protective antibodies to your baby in the first few months of life to bonding in a lovely way. Uh women will not be surprised to hear this. Our society bombards us with the benefits of breastfeeding, many of which, like the claim that increases a baby's IQ, are tenuous at best. By contrast, finding guidance on how to fairly distribute the mind-boggling amount of care required for a newborn, feels like going on a treasure hunt through Reddit threads and mom group chats. Um, it's not a mind-boggling a lot of amount of care, by the way, to feed to take care of a newborn is not mind-boggling.

3:43 It's really not. It It just isn't. You know, night times are can be stressful because they don't sleep a lot, but other than that, it's like there's actually not much like they don't need I mean, you do have to feed them. So, feeding is paramount. Feed them, change them. It's like real basic stuff. It's not mind-boggling. It really, trust me, it's not. Uh, formula has been hotly debated ever since its invention as a commercial product in the mid-9th century. Oh, who cares? All right, so it goes on and on. Uh, you get the idea.

4:11 Lots of parenting decisions involve trade-offs. It's time to explicitly tell parents to be before they're in the trenches that the two worthwhile enterprises of exclusive breastfeeding and equal parenting are a zero sum game and that it can be utterly life-changing to choose the latter. Okay. Um, I want to say a couple things about this. I'm not going to weigh in on the formula versus breastfeeding debate. I don't really care that much. Obviously, breastfeeding is preferable. Obviously, it's healthier for the baby, clearly.

4:41 Um, I'm not one of these people who will judge you if you feel that you have to use formula. Um, but I will certainly judge you if you go around talking about equal parenting and marriage equality, equality in a marriage. I'll judge you for that. Whether you're using formula or not, the idea of marriage equality, the idea of equality in a marriage, uh an equal marriage, equal parenting, that's all total nonsense. There's no such thing as marriage equality because equality means sameness. And men and women are not the same. Husbands and wives are not the same, which means they are not equal.

5:24 Okay? Now men and women are are equal in the sense of possessing uh human dignity as as children of God. We we all possess human dignity. And so in that kind of spiritual sense there is equality. And also you could say that we're equal allegedly under the law. You know laws apply to both men and women equally in theory. Now in practice that's not the case because women have all kinds of legal advantages over men. They have they have advantages. They're favored in in family courts. They're favored in criminal courts. They get lighter sentences for the same crimes.

5:58 But in theory, they're equal under the law. And they're also equal in their human dignity. Outside of that, especially in the context of a marriage, there is no equality. The concept of equality, it ends there as this kind of spiritual concept, as a as a theoretical legal concept. Outside of that, it it has no meaning in your everyday life and it doesn't exist outside of those contexts. It's a myth. Men and women in particular are not equal in in any way. Which means in in any other way, which means a marriage cannot be equal. And if equality, this is what you have to understand. Okay? If equality, if making everything equal, everything even, everything the same, if that is the motivating principle in your marriage, you will get divorced. Not will, not might, not maybe.

6:50 I'm saying it will happen. I if you're I mean they don't tell you this. When you look at the the divorce statistics, they'll tell you that oh x amount of marriages end because of money or they end because of this or that adultery. All that stuff factors in. But the the real thing that kills most marriages or most of the marriages that that that end up breaking up, the thing that killed most of them is this idea that everything has to be equal. And so you've got both spouses in the marriage who are keeping score and they feel like it's uneven, it's unfair, I do more than they do and they don't appreciate me. That's the thing that destroys most of the marriages that are going to be destroyed.

7:40 So if you organize your marriage around this idea of equality, either your marriage will fail or um you'll have to give up on the fiction of equality. That's what happens when you organize your marriage around something artificial and impossible. Either you give up on the fiction or you give up on your marriage. Men and women are different. They are different people. They bring different traits. They have different strengths, different weaknesses, uh different innate abilities, different a different essence, you know, that they bring to the marriage. Either you embrace that and you harness it. You say to each other, "Okay, you go over there and do that because that's what you're most suited for. I'll do this because this is what I'm most suited for." And either you do that, which is another way of saying gender roles, god forbid, or you insist that everything h everyone has to do all the same things.

8:34 I'll do 50% of this. You do 50% of it. We'll do everything will be split right down the middle. Everything's equal. And if you do that, you're approaching marriage in the way that children approach chore time, right? It's like when you tell your kids to do chores. Everything has to be equal. Everyone has to do the same things for an equal amount of time. That's not fair. He did less than me. I'm telling mom, you know, you're like a child. If you bring kids to a an ice cream, you get ice cream and and one kid gets like two toppings and the other kid gets only one. That's not fair. He got two. That's not fair.

9:19 And you have grown adults who approach their marriage like this and then they're shocked. They're shocked when it doesn't work and they go looking for other explanations. Why? Why didn't it work? And then they'll pin it on the they'll pin it on the the so-called inequality itself. They'll say, "Oh, because he got more toppings than I got." No, it's not the inequality that killed your marriage. It's your attitude about the inequality. It is your it is your unwillingness to embrace and accept the inevitability of inequality in a marriage. That is what killed it.

9:56 Now, the beauty of God's design is that is that you are thrown into this right away. That's one thing the article gets right. Like when you have a child, there's no there's no warm-up really. It's like you're thrown into this right away and you got to make a decision. Are you going to embrace the inequality, the differences, the unsaness, which is not a word, but let's go with it, uh, in your marriage, or or are you or are you going to jam the square peg into the round hole and force yourselves to live by the fiction of equality?

10:30 And right there with with a newborn baby in particular, that's a time for choosing, you know, because if you're if you're going to force equality, we're all doing the same things. Everything's 50%. Like, it's so unnatural with a newborn that you have to go out of your way, right? Right? And that's when you end up with things like the mom is getting up to feed and she wakes up the husband too. Just because well I'm not sleeping, you can't sleep. That kind of thing. That is how unnatural and sort of out of your way you have to go with a newborn to make everything equal.

11:10 Or you could be an adult and say, "Okay, this is going to be unequal because we're different people." Because here's what you discover right away. Women were made to care for newborns. Literally made for it. Men were not. That doesn't mean men can't help. Right? A man can help. He can help. He can he can do. But he is merely helping. If you are following the natural course of events, if you are if you are doing what comes most naturally, then the man will merely play a supporting role in the care of the newborn while he plays a starring role in the overall care of the family unit by going out and working and earning a living for mom and baby.

11:56 That's the most natural way of doing it, which is why it was the way that every society, every culture has functioned forever. And even these progressive liberal types, even they will admit, as this woman does in the article, that when they first have kids, they usually end up falling into that sort of naturally, but they talk about it later like it's a horror. They say, "Oh, when I first had kids, I believed in equality, but we we we we fell out of it when we had they have to force themselves. They have to they have to force themselves." So, this is what comes naturally is to embrace the inequality of the roles. uh the inequality of of of you know man and woman and they have to force themselves out of this sort of natural arrangement and wedge they have to wedge themselves out of their natural roles because the reality is a woman is physically built to care for a newborn. She carries the

12:50 child in her body for 9 months. Her body is made to provide nourishment to the child in the womb and out of it. Even if you use formula that remains the case. The woman was made to provide nourishment to the child. The baby baby wants his mother, right? The baby only has eyes for his mother for the first several months of his life. Baby doesn't really care about dad that much in in in the early months of life. And that's fine. Like as a dad, that's the kind of Okay, that's that's just the way this goes right now. Like dad, he can take or leave. He wants his mother.

13:29 And that is natural. This is the way we're made. As a dad, you could disappear for the first 10 months of your child's life and he would barely notice that you're not there. I mean, you shouldn't you should not disappear. You should be there. Uh it would cause a lot of other major problems for you not to be there. But what my point is that the that a young baby hardly even notices the dad. But if mom is gone, he notices. He feels it. If mom is gone for 10 minutes, much less 10 months, he feels it. Of course he does.

14:04 Of course he does. He was just inside his mom's body for nine months. He was physically inside her body for 9 months. Of course, he's going to be much more emotionally and physically attached to her mother uh to his mother than than than to the father. That's totally normal. And of course, if you go from the baby being physically attached to the mother inside her body to now within a few weeks or months being in a daycare under fluorescent lights cared for by strangers so the mom could go back to her office job, that is going to harm the child. It is. That is bad for the child. Obviously, that is a traumatizing level of separation. Of course, it is.

14:45 A baby will not be traumatized by being separated from his father for hours every day. That's not traumatizing. Like that's fine. But he will be traumatized by separation from his mother. And that that's not a problem unless you insist on making it a problem. And that's the thing with marriage equality. It takes a bunch of things that don't have to be problems and it chooses to make them into problems rather than following the natural path. rather than sort of going with the grooves, the tracks that are already there in the snow for you to follow. Um the natural path, you know, is a uh you know, where you say, "Okay, well, obviously the baby needs mom more.

15:27 So, I as the man will go out and I'll leave the house and provide for the family, and you as the mom will stay here and care for the baby, and when I get home at night, we'll be together as a family." That's the natural path. That's the way it's always been done. There's no nature-based reason to reject that. There is no reason grounded in concern for the child to reject that. It is simply if the woman says, "No, that's not fair. That's not equal. That's not fair." Then the whole natural setup of the family has to be reorganized and the child has to suffer just so the woman can feel like things are equal.

16:03 It is selfish. It just is. I don't care whether you want to hear it or not. It is selfish. And and you know it like every we all know it. It's childish and selfish and ridiculous. We have reorganized and reoriented our whole society. We have divorced ourselves from the natural way that things have always been done from the way that is best for families and best for children. And we have done it for one reason only. It is simply so that women can feel like things are equal. This video is sponsored by ExpressVPN. Your internet provider can see and log everything you do online. And in the US, they can even sell that data to advertisers. Kind of creepy, right?

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17:26 now. Find out how you can get up to four extra months by scanning the QR code on screen. Click the link in the description box below or go to expressvpn.com/mattwalsh show. It is simply for the sake of a fiction that all of this has been done. And that sets you off on a course for the rest of your marriage where everything is measured. Everything has to be equal all the time. If you do something, then you know if the wife does something, the husband has to do 50% of it. If the husband does something, the wife has to do 50% of it, right?

18:04 I I'll I'll uh I'll unload the dishwasher. You do the you you rinse off the dishes, right? I'll load, you rinse, which is like on its own, okay, fine if that's how you want to tackle it. But also like you could just do the the dishes yourself. And now we got these people, both spouses say, "I I can't. This is outrageous. I I can't do the whole thing. This is unfair. It is unfair." And you're going to kill your marriage. It's that simple. Embrace the inequality or your marriage dies. Those are your two choices. You You don't have any other choices. I'm afraid to tell you.

18:45 That's all there is to it. The good news is you can forget about equality. You just totally forget about it because it's a fiction. It's made up. It's not real. Well, you might as well organize your marriage around Bigfoot. You might as well organize your marriage around, you know, magical unicorns. You could forget about that and instead you could have a marriage that's organized around love, devotion, service. These are what a healthy marriage is grounded in. Um, and there's no scorecard for those. So, that's your other option.

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "Crazy NYT Article Says THIS Is The Key To Marriage Equality?!"?

Matt Walsh (Host), Nona Willis Aronowitz (Guest).

What is "Crazy NYT Article Says THIS Is The Key To Marriage Equality?!" about?

The New York Times article by Nona Willis Aronowitz discusses the implications of feeding practices on parental equality, particularly highlighting how using baby formula can help create a more balanced parenting dynamic. By sharing her personal experiences, she emphasizes the importance of equal involvement between mothers and fathers in caring for their children to foster a healthier…

What is mentioned in this Matt Walsh episode?

3 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Nona Willis Aronowitz, The New York Times Magazine. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "Crazy NYT Article Says THIS Is The Key To Marriage Equality?!"?

The episode runs 19 min; the transcript is about 3,406 words in 29 timestamped sections.

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