What Year Is It?

With all the irritating shit I read about every day, perhaps this ought to be low on the list, but it’s really pissing me off. In the span of a month, Jennifer Aniston was named “Man of the Year” for her grace in splitting up with Brad, and now Angelina Jolie is being reduced to a consternating enigma for not immediately becoming his wife. Yeesh.


Angelina’s taking prenatal vitamins—so why is she waiting to marry Brad? Are you fucking kidding me? Assuming for a moment that Angelina Jolie really is trying to get pregnant, and that getting hitched has even been discussed between the two of them, I truly cannot believe that a magazine had the audacity to suggest on its cover that a woman who is a successful, intelligent, self-sufficient single mother to two children (pictured, by the way, taking her son to a museum), not to mention one of the most highly paid people in her field and a UN good will ambassador, who can fly an airplane, has multiple citizenships, and has won top awards in her profession, ought to get married for any reason.

A marriage certificate is no guarantee that people will stay together forever, anyway, nor that married parents automatically make better parents—two points to which anyone with two brain cells knocking together can surely acquiesce. So what bloody reason is there to imply Angelina should get married, aside from the lingering puritanism that likes to pretend only healthy children are raised in “traditional families” and the indelible sexism that still regards an unmarried woman as incomplete, no matter how successful and fulfilled she is?

Perhaps the only thing at which Angelina hasn’t been successful is marriage. So maybe she’s gun-shy; maybe she’s decided marriage isn’t for her; maybe she just doesn’t give a rat’s ass about convention, considering she will likely never have to be concerned with the financial protections marriage provides to most mothers and children; maybe they’re already secretly married. Whatever her reason, it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference, because none of it has any bearing on her ability to be a good mother, which, by all accounts, she is.

This shit is so tiring. Move on.