Everything About This Article Is Perfect

[Content Note: Misogyny.]

And by "perfect," obviously I mean terrible. Even by the Daily Fail's rock-bottom garbage standards.

Single women should ditch Facebook because the 'perfect lives' of their friends are bad for their health, a relationship expert has warned.

Author Zoe Strimpel [who wrote "Man Diet: One Woman's Quest to End Bad Romance"] says the social media site bombards singletons with pictures of 'perfect' weddings and babies which causes envy and voyeurism.

She said: "What [Facebook] does is it enhances the sense that your life is lacking and specifically, when you are single, you focus in on all those pictures of perfect weddings, perfect babies, perfect couples."

A few thoughts, from the cluttered pathways of my feminist brain:

1. There exist single women who want to be single. Like, forever.

2. There exist single women who don't want to be single forever, but in the meantime don't feel that their lives are "lacking."

3. There exist women, single and partnered, who don't ever want to be married.

4. There exist women, single and partnered, who don't ever want to have babies.

5. There exist women whose visceral reaction to images of their friends' happiness is joy, who have no instinct toward a self-destructive jealousy, because they don't measure their own worth in increments born of competition with other women.

6. There exist women who recognize that many people either consciously use social media to cultivate the illusion of a perfect life via carefully curated imagery in service to a specific narrative, as well as many people who simply censor anything that isn't happy, celebratory, upbeat news because publicly sharing bad or sad news makes them feel uncomfortably vulnerable, or because they are obliged to maintain family connections with people who exploit any cracks in their emotional edifice, or because they were entrained by family dysfunction to conceal negative emotions, or any one of a million other reasons that just makes it easier to not broadcast the hard stuff—and the women who recognize these realities aren't likely to then interpret the Appearance of a Perfect Life as evidence of an actual perfect life against which they measure their own lives and always come up wanting.

7. There exist women who recognize some people do have pretty awesome lives, any number of which might be better in some ways than one's own, which doesn't inherently demean one's own life—and might be a source of inspiration rather than cause for envy.

8. There exist women who have found that not judging the women in their lives, not auditing their choices and not valuing them based on their won achievements according to some arbitrary cultural standard of Things Women Should Do and Have, creates a safe space in which other women can share the good, the bad, and the ugly, because they don't feel obliged to maintain a pretense of perfection in order to be cared for and about. And so those women don't even have the problem of the Perfect Parade in the first place.

But I'm no relationship expert with a published book called Man Diet, so, hey, sure—ditch Facebook. That's terrific advice, I'm sure.