Doug Emhoff is a Good Husband memeThe potential first-ever first gentleman of the United States has become 'the internet’s boyfriend.'
I’ve been reading Sarah Manguso’s Liars, a brutal novel about a woman protagonist with an emotionally abusive husband. The husband is the worst. He lies and cheats. He negs and gaslights his wife. He undermines her writing career and fails to do his fair share of childcare and everything else. He doesn’t even try. All the while, the protagonist is trapped in the “drag show of nuclear family hood.” As she puts it, “I got enmeshed in a story that had already been told ten billion times.” At the same time that I was reading about this horrible fictional husband, another non-fictional husband started showing up in my feed: Doug Emhoff. In the wake of the announcement of Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential run, the potential first-ever first gentleman of the United States has inspired a slew of Good Husband memes. A post on X reads: “Find yourself a man that will look at you the way Doug looks at Kamala Harris.” The phrase “they actually like each other,” and variations thereof, has become a stock caption for Instagram photo carousels and TikTok edits of the couple looking happy and loving. It’s not just that they seem to actually like each other. It’s that he is doting and a bit moony toward his wife and seems to actually be OK with her being more famous and powerful than him (see: him telling Trump, "I know you have so much trouble pronouncing her name. After the election, you can just call her Madam President”). The caption in one fan edit reads, “We love a supportive spouse.” Emhoff has been doing the supportive spouse thing for a while. Earlier this year, Esquire called him “Washington’s no. 1 Wife Guy.” But it’s only now, with the announcement of Harris’s presidential run, that he’s become truly meme-able for it. It’s only now that people are unearthing decades-old hunky photos of him and declaring, “He’s about to be First Daddy, oh my god,” as one TikToker put it. It’s only now that Vanity Fair is calling him “the internet’s boyfriend.”
Taking a step back for context, I find the Good Husband memes to be totally fascinating. In the presidential race, Harris is facing off against a couple of men who, in addition to posing an existential threat to democracy, are representative of a racist right-wing pro-natalist effort to coerce women into traditional patriarchal marriage and motherhood, and trap them there by ending no-fault divorce. To say that they are walking Bad Husband memes would be a profound understatement, although, in so many ways it applies on the personal level. The Good Husband meme-ing of Emhoff feels like a hopeful and giddy rejoinder to the specter of a hypothetical Trump presidency. It also feels like a surge of optimism—a propping up of a shining example—in a cultural moment where heteronormative love and sex has been held up for enthusiastic and sustained critique in ways I’ve never seen before. I’m talking about everything from All Fours to the 4B movement to, yes, now Manguso’s novel. The fictional husband in Liars can’t stand his wife’s success. He can’t stand that she’s more talented and celebrated than he is. He engineers the demise of her career, in fact. In a recent interview with lyz, Manguso, who wrote the novel in the midst of her own divorce, memorably said that “plenty of men… like the challenge of reducing a strong woman to a bang maid.” That’s some Trump shit. The non-fictional Emhoff—now campaigning for Harris’s presidency, no less—appears to be the opposite. Of course, Good Husband Emhoff is a fiction in that the meme is a fan creation. It’s not a nuanced picture of a marriage so much as a desperate grasping for a bit of hetero-optimism in the midst of so much evidence-based heteropessimism. You’re currently a free subscriber. Would you upgrade to paid to support the work I do here?
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Doug Emhoff is a Good Husband meme
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