Based on the last sentence, it’ll get better. Just don’t beat yourself up if you’re not who you were before. A decade is a long time.

You’ll be hard pressed to find causation unless you find a gaggle of grandmas confessing.

There’s a lot of herbology lore and stories. Maybe it’s all made up. But even today we find people poisoning their spouses and everyone’s reaction is always “why not just leave?”. So extrapolate that out and it seems reasonable.

Yes exactly. Force someone to stay and they’ll find a way out.

It was also tied up in modernist space-age utopian ideals about freeing housewives from drudgery and whatnot, and from that perspective, it wasn’t a bad thing.

But in retrospect (especially 2020s retrospect, seeing how corporations coopt and enshittify everything), the extent to which it was driven by cynical, gimmicky marketing is pretty darn repulsive. Think about how we have an entire generational set of “traditions” that are basically fake, invented by marketers:

• green bean casserole became a thing to sell Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup and French’s Crispy Fried Onions.
• Betty Crocker was never a real person, but rather the persona of General Mills’ marketing department.
• Fuckin’ Santa Claus as we picture him in the US is basically a genericized Coca-Cola trademark.

Basically, every recipe from the '50s, if it says “one can of X” or “one box of Y” instead of having proper quantity measurements, was created as a ploy to sell those convenience foods and there’s something deeply cynical about that.

I dunno, maybe I just find it extra eerie because I understand it as the harbinger of the new gilded-age cyberpunk dystopia that we’ve created since then.

I’d like to tell you about a wonderful new invention, they call it “divorce.”

Yes exactly. No fault divorce is the simple and obvious answer.

That wasn’t an option for my mother or my grandmother. There was no way for a woman to initiate a divorce.

My mother couldn’t open a bank account in her name, she needed a man (her father, brother, or husband) to co-sign.

So “going out for cigarettes” also wasn’t easy, she could leave, sure, but once the cash she had in hand ran out, then what? Her income would still be going into her husbands bank account, she can’t change where the money goes because she doesn’t have any other bank account for her employer to pay into.

The Second wave feminist movement is what pushed to provide women the right to manage their own finances and affairs, and also gave us no-fault divorce laws.

So yes, “Quit blaming everyone else for all your problems and leave” is good advice for women who have the legal freedom to move about their country and be independent members of society. That hasn’t historically been the case, and it’s currently not the case for many women in many countries with different laws. Those women have fewer options, and rat poison is cheap.

Even with no fault divorce and the ability for women to own property, have a bank account, and work for an income paid directly to them, There will always be individually nuanced situations that are more complex and don’t allow for an easy exit, especially when domestic violence or financial abuse is involved. (eg: I’m working disabled, my boyfriend holds my medical guardianship, hypothetically, if we mutually broke up, I couldn’t make a “clean break” until I got that legal loose end tied up, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to book a doctor’s appointment or get a flu shot without my ex-boyfriend’s signature, and transferring guardianship takes months, and money. During a mutual break up that’s okay, but if I needed to “leave him” and he didn’t want his affordable maid and nanny to go, I’d have an incredibly difficult time getting my life back to myself… But fortunately it’s 2024 so there is a process I can follow, not every woman has had those same rights to leave like I have.

Oh I must’ve been mistaken, I was under the impression that several states have banned abortion

I would say women are revengeful.

Vindictive is an “unreasonable” desire for revenge, and what makes the desire “unreasonable” is going to depend on every individual situation, so I don’t think you can generalise that women are vindictive.

I would also hesitate to use the term “vengeful” too, due the nuance of vengeful being a perceived injustice over revengeful being for a known injustice. Again that’s always going to depend on the specific situation and context of what has happened.

When you look at being revengeful through a broader lens, I disagree that women are more prone to revengefulness or vindictiveness than men, I think the ways women express their revenge is gender-specific and can draw more attention to itself than masculine approaches to revenge.

So I think it’s fair to generalise that people in general have the capacity to feel revengeful, and as a marginalised class women are often revengeful, and as additional minor injustices are compounded on systemic injustice, the revenge of women is perceived as vindictiveness.

But that doesn’t mean women are vindictive.