The Problem We Ignore Because It Freaks Us Out

With the “AI Mystique” about endless work, women get the short end — again

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Let’s start with a quick quiz. What era is the author below writing about?

“They learned that truly feminine women do not want careers, higher education, political rights — the independence and the opportunities that the old-fashioned feminists fought for. Some women, in their forties and fifties, still remembered painfully giving up those dreams, but most of the younger women no longer even thought about them. A thousand expert voices applauded their femininity, their adjustment, their new maturity. All they had to do was devote their lives from earliest girlhood to finding a husband and bearing children.”

If you guessed this was a commentary about trad wives or the blatherings of JD Vance, you wouldn’t be wrong about the substance. But given the hints I’ve dropped, most of you over thirty (forty?) have likely figured out it’s from Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. She described “the problem that has no name” for a generation of women in the 1950s. Friedan focused on middle-class white women like herself, well educated at Smith and other colleges who were then expected after graduation to put on aprons as “happy housewives” with multiple babies and toddlers underfoot.

By 1960, news outlets began reporting that these housewives — real women, not the fantasy blondes raving about washing machines in ads worthy of Mad Men — weren’t happy at all. Male commentators, Friedan noted with her gimlet gaze, rushed in to explain what was wrong with women who had everything (over-educated, not good in bed, no faith, Freud’s “anatomy is destiny”); there were TV news specials about “The Trapped Housewife” (CBS). Betty Friedan herself was raising kids in the suburbs, but she’d worked as a journalist and was still writing for magazines. When she interviewed women about “the problem,” young wives and mothers said they felt “empty” or “incomplete.” One told Friedan, “I just don’t feel alive.” Another said:

“I’m desperate. I begin to feel I have no personality. I’m a server of food and a putter-on of pants and a bedmaker, somebody who can be called on when you want something. But who am I?”

By any definition, this was an existential crisis. Yet what was so secretively whispered about decades ago now bears a spooky resemblance to the current crisis for people of all genders: the impact of AI on work and family life.

Call it the AI Mystique, a problem shoved at us 24/7 and far from secret. Even tech-friendly outlets are tolling existential notes of doom. The print cover of the July/August 2026 issue of Wired, for instance, shows a tombstone in an office chair with the title “AI or Die Trying.” Many of the stories in the print edition have already appeared online, but I only found them this week after returning from a trip to Europe and going through my mail. (Yes, a print subscription to Wired is anachronistic.)

Even in my jetlagged state, one of those stories catapulted me all the way back to Betty Friedan: “The Sad Wives of AI” by Alessandra Ram. Are you married to a man who’s obsessed with AI? I’m so, so sorry. That tagline made me laugh out loud. I’m sure others have written about Ram’s report of wretched marriages from the Bay Area’s trenches; I doubt the feminist connections I’m drawing are more than obvious. Then again, we just might need to keep stating the obvious. Here’s how she opens:

“If I had to listen to another minute of my husband talking about Claude Code, I might have actually died. It was 11 pm in Berkeley, California, where I was home alone with our 10-month-old daughter, and 2 am in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was visiting for his newish job in AI. ‘JUST LOOK AT THIS!’ he shouted. The FaceTime camera zoomed toward a laptop sitting on a hotel bed. ‘SEE?!’

See what, I thought. I wanted to shower. I still had to take the dog out.

‘ARE YOU LOOKING?’ he shouted again. I wasn’t. I was looking at our real baby. But that’s the thing. There are two babies in this household now: the small human one and the large language model. Both demand constant attention. Both keep us up at 2 am.

Is this a Sophie’s choice kind of situation? Please. I’d kill the AI baby in an instant.”

Ram wastes no time pretending to be a happy housewife. She’s a snappy writer, an award-winning journalist, and a co-host of the podcast Sabotage. She pinpoints the growing gender divide in terms Friedan would have recognized, although Ram doesn’t cite her or second-wave feminism explicitly (not to mention the first wave Friedan referred to above). Instead, Ram makes clear from the get-go that she belongs to the “ranks” of sad wives: women in other professions married to men who work on artificial intelligence. Or, she writes, “it’s bleaker: He desperately wants to work in AI — or feels he must work in AI — and she wants him to do literally anything else.”

This might sound like a First World problem among techies jacking up real-estate prices in San Francisco. Ram offers the usual caveats: AI is wreaking havoc with “all kinds of families, gay or straight, rich or poor, with any AI-pilled members.” But she acknowledges her focus on “white-collar heteros” — like Friedan, who came in for plenty of criticism back in the day for mostly reporting on her fellow white Smithies.

Still, The Feminist Mystique and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex aren’t simply classics read in gender studies courses: they helped spark a major social movement. For the same reason, Ram is calling out a problem we might want to ignore but really shouldn’t, especially given how male-dominated AI work is.

As she paraphrases one expert, “What’s happening in Bay Area households isn’t just a lifestyle story. It’s a labor market story.” To feed the AI beast, one partner works endless, obsessive hours; the other takes care of the family, propping up the AI toiler if they don’t succeed or lose their job or just fall apart because of the stress. Not surprisingly, the support work tends to fall on women. Cue Kate Bush warbling along with Peter Gabriel in 1986: “Don’t give up, you still have us / Don’t give up, we don’t need much of anything / Don’t give up ’cause somewhere there’s a place where we belong…”

Ram points out, after chatting with a couple of other sad wives in a wine bar, that “neither of my friends’ husbands actually makes money from AI. Not yet.” She admits that more than half of her own family’s income depends on her husband’s AI work. Most people who are employed by AI companies feel as if “this is their last chance” to make it big. Work-life balance? Ha! The AI Mystique is driving a crisis for hollow-eyed AI workers, too, regardless of gender. But it’s the partners, she writes, often taking care of their kids, who “have quietly taken on a second job: emotional support. Chief Existential Officer, uncompensated. No one asked us if we wanted the gig.”

“The Sad Wives of AI” does an amusingly tart job of evoking the freaked-out women of Ram’s generation and class, even noting a robust TikTok meme: “Working so hard so my man can work on his AI startup that loses $30K a month.” As far as I can see, however, Ram doesn’t breathe the word feminism aloud or promote collective action. I doubt it’s intentional (she digs into climate-change activism in her podcast), but a depressing aftertaste lingers, as if little can be done beyond sad wives accepting their fate and/or talking to therapists (some consult chatbots for dubious help).

I know, changing the world doesn’t happen in a short personal article. Except the blatant sexism in alt-right media demands more than a shrug of oh, well. In The Feminine Mystique, Friedan cited commentators of the time joking that the Nineteenth Amendment should be repealed so women don’t have to worry their pretty little heads about voting. Douglas Wilson, Pete Hegseth’s pastor, recently called for the same thing. Other wags in 1960 thought women should stop going to college. Now we have bros “just asking questions” and the UFC wrestler shouting, after his White House match at Trump’s birthday travesty, “Michelle Obama is a man! Am I right, America?”

As Betty Friedan noted wryly in her 1963 preface, more than sixty years ago:

“At the present time, many experts, finally forced to recognize this problem, are redoubling their efforts to adjust women to it in terms of the feminine mystique. My answers may disturb the experts and women alike, for they imply social change. But there would be no sense in writing this book at all if I did not believe that women can affect society, as well as be affected by it; that, in the end, a woman, as a man, has the power to choose, and to make her own heaven or hell.”

I’m too young to have swallowed the happy-housewife pill, although the 1970s had its share of playing “old lady” to stoned guys. I’ve never been a sad tech wife, even if my engineer husband is our main breadwinner. A longtime robotics professor, he’s not taken in by the hype. When startups claim they can make AI robots to handle domestic work within a few years — one “uninspiring” fix mentioned in Ram’s article — he snorts. No way. Just as TV commercials once showed housewives who “beamed over their foaming dishpans,” in Friedan’s terms, current robot demos are fantasies. Take Melania Trump’s faltering, strained smile this past spring as Figure 03 the robot treads past her, “welcoming” a table of uncomfortable women professionals.

Human discomfort doesn’t stop tech honchos like Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen from bloviating about “suicidal empathy” or introspection as a waste of time. I’m pretty sure these guys assume they’ll lick the bad social consequences of AI by creating robot women. Just automate anything that involves caring for a human. (These are the same men who want to live forever by transferring themselves to silicon.) If that’s not a collective existential crisis worth opposing, I’m not sure what is.

Why? Because Patriarchy. It’s a many-headed beast that keeps roaring back to life. I’m showing my age as a feminist, of course, but the current AI Mystique hawked by business tycoons jibes too well with the same old biases. I am freaked out. I’m also not ignoring the men in power and how much the rest of us need to fight back.

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