A Pox On both your Longhouse and your Princess Treatment

In Which I Furiously Rant About The New York Times

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Valentin_Serov_-_Portrait_of_Princess_Olga_Orlova_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg…Me Contemplating “The Princess Treatment”

If I’ve learned anything over the last week, it is that I own a sufficient number of books to crush me if they fall on my head, and, yet, I am not willing to relinquish a single one of them. Though, I would be happy to unload a small box of children’s chapter books that my kids never liked and I didn’t either. I guess you could DM me if you’re interested, but they’re not even worth the price of postage.

I have, heaven’s grace abounding, painted my new little office the usual deep purply blue and moved everything in except one large bookshelf. What that means is that I can’t even walk into the room, because of the piles and piles and piles of novels, bad theological takes, works of improving literature, papers, objet d’art, flotsam, jetsam, and detritus. If the age of the wallpaper seemed to go on for literally ever, now the era of moving books and clothes and shoes and trying to find my own toothbrush seems interminable. Every morning I try to tell myself that it’s going to be so amazing once we are “done,” and come 9 pm, I sadly admit to myself that there is no such thing as “done.” The only person who ever sufficiently accomplished a task with nary a trace of emotional, material, and psychological residue that still needed sorting out and putting away was Jesus, but the manner of his finished work was so extreme that I don’t really want to go there. I will settle for always having a pile of junk that needs taking to Salvation Army and yet never quite making it there.

Anyway, the jarring and discordant spiritual clutter of the internet and online world yesterday rather nicely reflects my inward state this morning. On the one hand, I listened to a lot of news about the devastating flooding in Texas—had to keep turning it off whenever anyone came in to ask a question, so disturbing was it to my four daughters who valiantly stove not to hear the testimonies and stories of survivors, as they would never sleep through the night again—and on the other hand, when I collapsed into my bed late at the late hour of 10, I found something completely ridiculous in the New York Times about a phenomenon called “The Princess Treatment.” Not missing this important cultural moment is why I pay however many dollars a month to read that enervating website.

According to the Times, the Princess Treatment is “loosely” about “how some women want to be treated in a relationship versus what is routinely expected.”

Last week, Courtney Palmer, 37, reignited that discussion with a video that has garnered more than three million views. In it, she describes how princess treatment informs her relationship, including how she will sometimes defer to her husband. “If I am at a restaurant with my husband, I do not talk to the hostess, I do not open any doors and I do not order my own food,” she says in the opening of the nearly six-minute video, which has prompted a wide-ranging discussion about gender roles, restaurant etiquette and relationship expectations.

I watched the video, which is embedded in the article, if you want to go over there and scroll a bit. A languid anorexic looking person explains how this goes—not ordering for herself, not making eye contact with the restaurant staff. It’s not that she is helpless, it’s just that she wants to be treated very specially.

In an interview, Ms. Palmer said that the response had been “blindsiding.” But she also feels that some of her beliefs have been misconstrued. Meredith Lynch, a content creator whose satirical recreation of Ms. Palmer’s video has racked up more views than the original, called the original video “regressive.” “The last thing that we need is somebody out there advocating for us to be quieter at a time when we are already being silenced,” Ms. Lynch said.

Ms. Lynch sure sounds like a peach. Isn’t the world we live in fun? For a tribe, you may choose between the people who are special enough never to have to order for themselves, or, if that’s not your cup of mushroom gut cleansing bilge, you may enjoin yourself to various online “spaces” where the envious and bitter complain about being silenced. In one capacious McMansion abide the live action role players, and over the way in a dismal, badly arranged longhouse huddle the scolds who must continually remind the American public that women, no matter how close they come to “equality,” if they aren’t careful, will unwittingly violate the progressive dogma of the day.

Echoing adherents of the trad wife culture and other conservative trends, Ms. Palmer, who has been a stay-at-home mother for nearly a year, said she had been cultivating a community of women on the internet who felt misunderstood for their desire to lean into “femininity.” “They felt so much pressure with the girlboss era to be a working mom or a working woman,” she said. “And they had to be so masculine to get through the world.”

The problem, though what do I know, is that Ms. Palmer is betraying her sex. She is supposed to want to be a girlboss, for that is the highest and best calling a woman can achieve. To tell a man what to do and yet be a victim while doing it, what more is there in life?

Also, what does it even mean to “lean into femininity?” Why can’t an adult human female just be a woman without having to curate the experience? For, you can fuss around with hair and makeup and rules about who will order or not order, but at the end of the day, the only way to be happy is, without thinking about it every single tiny second, to give yourself, body and soul, to the person you’re married to. You have to do it when you’re feeling cute and feminine, and you have to do it when you’re covered in a thick layer of dust and are limping around with some strange sore on the bottom of your foot.

Crafting an “online community” centered around your exciting new revelations about how to be a person is so, what’s the word, 2025. Is it possible to be against everything? Ms. Palmer, the New York Times, the “licensed therapist who specializes in working with women,” the girlboss, and even the so called Princess Treatment? When is Jesus going to come back? It has to be soon.

Others said princess treatment, in general, was just the sign of a healthy relationship. “There’s certain times somebody is going to need to pick up the slack for the other person,” Mr. Raynor said, later adding, “But I would hope that a lot of the guys would want to treat their girl like a princess.”

I don’t want to be “treated” any particular way. I want the person to whom I’m married to just be a man who has the capacity to be both selfless and self-forgetful. I want him to do nice things for me—slightly more nice things than I do for him, if I’m going to be perfectly honest, which, of course I always am—and also not have to live in terror of the water hose that, to communicate the substance of what the princess treatment is, one sprays in his face when he gets it wrong (seriously, the TikToks are embedded in the “article.”)

What’s so funny—or rather, not funny, but disappointing—is that women worked so hard to grasp equality with men and probably God also, but once they got it, they discovered it was not at all what they preferred, and so began to clamber back down the ladder to feminism to find men who can be coaxed to sacrifice themselves in the usual way, to care enough to “pick up the slack,” to open doors and earn the money and be gentlemanly and competent. And this is supposed to be some awesome discovery the NYTimes the world has never heard of before.

Amanda White, a licensed therapist who specializes in working with women, said if princess treatment became about suppressing your own needs or making yourself “as small as possible,” it might create unhealthy relationship dynamics. “If you are inhabiting this role of a princess, that person isn’t going to fully know you and it isn’t going to cause you to feel as deeply loved and connected,” she said. Ms. White said women had spent the past decade discussing how to address conflict in relationships and be their own advocate, “and I think it’s definitely concerning to me that there is kind of this shift back.” However, Ms. White said, the discussion may also help partners to provide recognition for the “invisible mental load” women often carry.

I am weary to death of the “invisible mental load” bit. Sure, I hold a lot of information in my head that Matt doesn’t know anything about. I carry the competing schedules and needs of all seven people who live here in my very flesh. I am the functioning logistics guru. And on top of that I do a lot of paid work unrelated to the household. I am always toiling away to achieve a work/life balance which does not actually exist on this side of the grave. But guess what, Matt has a huge number of anxieties that he carries around as well, that I have nothing to do with. He is trying to make it so we can retire. He is trying to figure out how to put a door on our main bathroom. He laboriously picks Japanese beetles off my roses morning and evening—the ones that escape the traps he has strategically placed all over the garden he dug and planted and continually tends for me. He cooks the meals and runs errands and carries the church day by day in his mind and heart, bringing the needs of his congregation before the Lord in prayer before I flutter my eyes to wakefulness in the early dawn.

Ms. White should reconsider the use of that stupid stupid phrase, “make yourself small as possible.” If you want nice things, you have to let go of your own way. You must decrease so that other people can increase. There need be neither a princess, nor a girlboss. Instead, just got on with the day and let God arrange the world.

And now, if you will excuse me, I must go arrange books into some kind of order.