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Do you have Bruenig Derangement Syndrome?
NYT opinion writer sets off the Mother of All Twitterstorms

May 11, 2021 | 10:34 am


What’s the most subversive argument a woman can make in the topsy-turvy la-la land that is America in 2021? It is of course a point that would have been regarded as utterly normal and sane just a few years ago — i.e., that women shouldn’t necessarily be afraid to have children.

Elizabeth Bruenig, an opinion writer at the New York Times, this week made the shockingly transgressive point that ‘there are good reasons to wait to have children and good reasons not to’. She mildly suggested that the nation’s declining birthrates was a cause for concern, that the Biden administration was right to want to do more to support parents in need of financial help. She admitted that she found becoming a mother at 25 daunting but also a ‘relief…for this member of a generation famously beset by anxiety, it was a welcome liberation.’

Heresy! Feminist Twitter duly vented spleen...

It’s no wonder so many of these women can’t find time to have a child, given the hours they dedicate to being angry on Twitter. A few members of the perpetually offended hivemind were clearly unable to spare the five minutes needed to read Bruenig’s article.

What we are seeing here is the most powerful case yet of what others have dubbed ‘Bruenig Derangement Syndrome’. For Bruenig, a Christian, seems to trigger the most insane outrage on social media...

Or perhaps it’s just veiled female misogyny: after all Bruenig is physically attractive and, er, fecund. Women can be rather resentful towards more handsome members of their sex...

‘People feel personally accused by her, since she’s apparently happy and they are not.’

That gets to the heart of it: in her latest piece, Bruenig dared to suggest that her child had made her content. For many, that is unforgivable.