Grudge of the Week—The Male Genius™, Part I
Gender dynamics have plagued me with the strength of daycare viruses in the nearly four years since I became a parent—specifically, a mother, a word loaded with societal expectations. I struggled to write after G. was born. I followed the conventional wisdom to nap while the baby napped, even if that meant producing little more than breastmilk, the “liquid gold” that can’t land a pitch or win a Pulitzer.
I began to think about what it’d be like to be a famous man, a man known for his work, whether in his slice of industry or in the broader culture. His beautiful brain must be protected at all costs. He doesn’t read women. But he depends on them to type, as Véra did for Nabokov. His desires swallow the whole of a cisheterosexual couple like a snake preying on an egg for the spectacle of it all. Does he really need the nourishment?
I developed a name for my imaginary nemesis: The Male Genius™.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that society values the desires of a famous man in a cishet couple at the expense of his partner’s or wife’s. My spouse is not a famous man, but while I fed the baby from my body, an act that costs families as much as $11,000 per year, according to a Yale University estimate, he starred in Zoom productions where he was paid for his time and expertise. I wanted to be paid for my time and expertise—in this instance, the three to four feedings a day and the latch I perfected. I didn’t blame my spouse, but I did complain to him, often, about whose work received societal recognition and compensation. Even the anti-abortion activists I covered as a reproductive rights journalist would not have cared, since the baby was no longer a fetus over which to stake a claim in a pregnant person’s—often, a woman’s—body.
I hated how my resentment reflected and reinforced the myth of a gender binary upon which capitalism feeds. Picture a famous man. What do you know about his partner or wife?
Recorded history values the Male Genius, from Jesus Christ onward. Who would Jesus be without Mary Magdalene to wash his feet? The early Catholic Church turned her from an apostle into a whore and in a one-two punch, castigated sex work as a sin instead of honest-to-God work. Sex workers present a danger to capitalism because they are at the forefront of organizing (in the form of solidarity) and caregiving (in the form of mutual aid).
Billy Joel didn’t start the fire. Yet women tend it.
The Piano Man is a trinitarian god. His prolific rule over the Kingdom of Long Island exists as a holy trinity of ex-wives: Elizabeth to manage his career, Christie to raise his child, and Katie to drag his ass to rehab. He could not create or play without their dedication to his comfort. With his fourth wife, he gets to raise the family that his genius crowded out when he was younger.
Eleanor Coppola wanted to be the family filmmaker but became her husband’s documentarian. Pregnant with the beloved son she’d lose to his drunken friend’s negligence 22 years later, Eleanor considered her options in 1963. Abortion, adoption, and marriage were her three choices, and she leaned toward the first two. The Vegas shotgun wedding was her husband’s preferred course of action. The Male Genius won the marriage and later, the awards.
“Most of my life my creative self has been pushed to last place on my to-do list,” Eleanor wrote in her posthumous memoir, Two of Me: Notes on Living and Leaving. “Family and friends always came first. Is it cultural guilt that made women of my generation prioritize given roles above who we really are and what we want to do?”
Francis Ford Coppola won’t go to the grave with regrets. “There’s so many people when they die they say, ‘Oh I wish I had done this, I wish I had done that.’ But when I die, I’m going to say, ‘I got to do this and I got to see my daughter win an Oscar and I got to make wine and I got every movie that I wanted to make,’” he declared at a Cannes 2024 press conference for his $120 million flop of a passion (or vanity) project, “Megalopolis.”
Tell me more about how good that feels, Francis. I feel like I’ve been in conversation with that particular Male Genius since I first watched “The Godfather” in my early 20s. He could be one of my uncles. “How’s Washington?” they’d ask me on Christmas Eve, at our family’s Feast of the Seven Fishes. The answer became too honest for them once Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election and I wanted to burn down the holiday. Italian American patriarchs, like Male Geniuses, do not appreciate challenges to their authority.
Mythology is essential to the construction of the Male Genius. It’s not that he’s selfish, or that his selfishness isn’t part of the story. It’s that women don’t get to be the story.
The Male Genius is the subject of documentaries and feature films. Bruce Springsteen. Bob Dylan. The categories don’t spotlight the supporting characters in their lives. Patti Scialfa. Joan Baez. They’re both artists. But the Male Genius is the artiste. He’s always center stage.
At least Joan Baez is renowned in her own right, Dylan be damned. Beyoncé must be the brightest star to exist outside the eclipsing binary of a marriage. Even then, “and Jay-Z” often gets added to the end of her name. At least she made “Lemonade” out of it.
