We’ve all heard the tales of marital woe caused by a “third wheel.” An old flame. A nosy in-law. A so-called “work spouse.” God forbid, an affair with another person.
One anonymous writer for an Australian feminist outlet has declared that an unusual “third wheel” has entered her nuptials, however. He’s bald, entertaining, half a world away and beloved by millions. Yet, he’s “ruining my marriage,” the anonymous author said.
She speaks, of course, about Joe Rogan.
In a month that produced plenty of evidence that those on the left refuse to even tolerate those not on the same page as them, much less take their arguments seriously — a theme that was played out violently on campuses across America over the war in Israel, especially at Columbia University — one of the wackier manifestations of this phenomenon came from Down Under.
On April 8, an anonymous writer published a screed on MamaMia, an online feminist outlet that describes itself as a center of “independent women’s journalism.”
This includes hard-hitting articles like “Influencers are bringing back ‘Day on a Plate.’ And it’s more toxic than ever,” in which YouTubers and TikTokkers are slammed for sharing their healthy meal plans, with the author arguing they come in under the recommended calorie intake for a day.
Also, “Calling someone your ‘girlfriend’ is officially cancelled.” It’s a thinkpiece about how Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift, among other celebrities, refer to each other if they’re dating but not married. Spoiler alert: It’s “juvenile” to use those words, and “the structure of our relationships has changed significantly over time, but our vocabulary hasn’t sufficiently extended to be inclusive of these new unions.”
This is funny enough in its own peculiarly sad way, but the cake-taker is the anonymous spouse who declared, last month, “Joe Rogan is ruining my marriage.”
The scribe began with Princess Diana of Wales’ quote, during an interview, that, “There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.” She was referring, of course, to the then-title-free Camilla Parker-Bowles — now Queen Camilla — who then-Prince Charles was having an affair with.
Do you listen to Joe Rogan?
Our anonymous agonized spouse said she identifies with Princess Diana, “though the ‘third’ in my marriage is an annoying male American voice who has somehow managed to insert himself into my relationship.
“Joe Rogan, often touted as the world’s most popular podcast host, can be heard in our kitchen, bathroom, or backyard on loud speaker morning, noon and night,” she wrote. “And like the uninvited guest he is (by me anyway) he’s causing tension in my home.”
Yes, reality is now officially making satire obsolete. The Babylon Bee has nothing on this.
Now, the author admitted that both her husband and her differ politically, but had “settled into a companionable acceptance” of these differences.
“Very loosely I am more liberal and he is more conservative. There were arguments (usually around national elections) but it didn’t really interfere with our relationship,” she said.
“But since Rogan has appeared on the scene I feel like my husband’s taken a trip to right-wing-crazy-town. He’s developed a deep distrust of science and government. He stopped taking the COVID boosters early on and is skeptical about vaccinations generally. He once tried to explain to me why aliens probably built the pyramids,” she claimed in the article.
“And while I do believe in taking a critical approach to life, relentless conspiracy theories are exhausting and can leave you feeling like you’ve landed in la la land.”
The woman then brought up things she said Rogan has posited that are false, including furries demanding kitty litter in school bathrooms. However, how she would know this is beyond me, because this is what she admits in the very next paragraph:
“My husband will argue that I can’t criticize Rogan because I don’t listen to him, which is true. But what I can do is observe his influence on my husband, and this is what I see.” [Emphasis ours.]
Oh! Rogan is apparently on in her house day and night, so much so that his voice is inescapable … but she hasn’t listened to him? She just knows because now her husband is talking about things like wokeness gone amok, and we can’t have that.
According to her, the husband has gotten some wacky ideas via the “third wheel,” noting, “It appears that for Rogan and those who follow him, the political is personal. My husband will often get angry about what he calls ‘woke’ activists and how ‘they’ are going too far. When he says the word ‘feminist’ he reduces it to a dirty word.” [Emphasis again ours.]
In this paragraph, we can see exactly why Rogan irritates so many on the left, and it’s not because he gives marching orders to brainless, spineless men whose political views would otherwise be moldable by — thank ye heavens! — sensible women like our author, but who are now being warped by some podcaster.
Note the bolded phrase: “The personal is political.” It has a history, so much so that the Encyclopedia Britannica — among many other sources — has an entry on it. Spoiler alert: It didn’t originate with the right, but with radical feminists instead.
“The personal is political, political slogan expressing a common belief among feminists that the personal experiences of women are rooted in their political situation and gender inequality,” the Encyclopedia Britannica noted.
“Although the origin of the phrase ‘the personal is political’ is uncertain, it became popular following the publication in 1970 of an essay of the same name by American feminist Carol Hanisch, who argued that many personal experiences (particularly those of women) can be traced to one’s location within a system of power relationships.”
There’s no particular need for feminists to spout this phrase anymore, at least for themselves. In this arena of the culture war, they have assumed they’ve attained victory. “Toxic masculinity” and “gender roles” are phrases tossed around by liberals with the same contempt that this woman’s husband allegedly uses when he talks about “wokeness” and “feminism.” “Believe all women” isn’t just a phrase that sprouted from the #MeToo movement, it’s now become an inviolable cultural maxim in the West and similar cultures.
When men wake up and realize this is all rubbish forced upon them by a leftist monoculture, it’s blamed on that goshdarned “toxic masculinity” — in this case, embodied in the personage of Joe Rogan, a podcaster who is apparently ruining marriages.
“I know my husband is not a bigot. If a child asked him to use a certain pronoun, he absolutely would without a fuss. He has empathy. What has this harlot Rogan done to my kind, loving husband?” the writer asked.
It’s truly amazing that this woman — apparently more than willing to vocalize her opinions to her husband — is suddenly repulsed when he gets some of his own. But he couldn’t have come up with this himself, right? Blame the dude with the show on Spotify … which, admittedly, she’s never really listened to.
Before the author hit send on this, she surely must have read it again to see if she had cogently expressed her arguments. So lacking in self-awareness is this woman, apparently, that, at no point during this rereading, did it occur to her that she was telling one side of a problematic relationship, and a telling one at that.
To this writer’s husband, I imagine there’s a “third wheel,” too: the cudgel of political correctness she wields whenever he criticizes “wokeness.” Heaven forfend he ever doesn’t use the pronoun the hypothetical child asked him to, or then he’d really get a whack with it — probably in divorce court, from the sound of things.
Joe Rogan is not the one who made the political personal in this dysfunctional relationship. Instead, it’s the fact that this woman has apparently blindly swallowed whatever pap that was fed to her by progressive feminists who have succeeded in making their personal grievances political and react with unmerciful venom whenever their status quo is challenged.
This would all be quite silly — if there weren’t enough people who probably nodded along with this witless, self-deluded woman, and not given her condemnation of the “third wheel” in her marriage the mockery it so clearly deserved.
