Multiple Truths: Cardi B, Offset, Stephon Diggs, and the Gendered Politics of Parenting

I would rather set this mess of a suitcase on fire, but let's unpack it anyway.

People have been speculating about (and Cardi B has been denying) Cardi B’s pregnancy for months, but she recently confirmed her fourth child is on the way and is fathered by her new boyfriend, Stephon Diggs.

That’s… a mess. Cardi B is still married to Offset, her youngest child is barely a year old, and most of the public discourse around her pregnancy has centered on ideas that I think are just outright weird and gross- but mostly in need of exploration.

The minute Cardi B’s pregnancy hit the timeline, the takes started flying. Most of them weren’t congratulatory. They were full of disdain, side-eyes, and warnings that she’s “ruining her life” by having another child. Folks turned her womb into a battleground for their personal moralizing, which, if nothing else, is an interesting choice in a Post Roe V Wade society.

What do I think? I think that this converstion isnt’t really about Cardi B, Offset, or Stephon Diggs, at all, it’s about how deeply our culture is invested in punishing women for the means by which they choose to become mothers if it doesn’t pass their arbitrary standards of respectability.

Let’s start with the obvious: Cardi is still married to Offset. Their relationship is messy, public, and often humiliating. It makes sense that people side-eye her choices through the lens of “Why would you tether yourself further to that man?” through her second and third pregnancy. That part is fair. Cardi is undeniably male-validated, male-identified, and deeply invested in performing for the male gaze. She has said and done plenty to signal that her power is still tied up in men’s approval. She has publicly and happily humiliated herself and attacked other women (including physically) behind a man she should have (and has all the necessary resources to) leave years ago.

But I also understand why she stayed. By all accounts, Cardi B is a great mother to her children, and she has a clear desire to have a big family. In the world we live in, the only “acceptable” way to do that is to get married first. Cardi did that. She got married and had her children with her husband. She fought to protect her family unit. I personally think that she should have cut her losses sooner from that philandering hot mess of a man, but the reality is, as a racialized woman from a lower-class background who is hyper sexualized, she has been unduly pressured into believing that the ring she got from him was a validator of her worth and worthiness and a level of permissiveness for her sexuality, and that’s a trap that many women fall into. “I don’t cook, I don’t clean, but let me tell you, I got this ring”.

However, multiple things can be true at once.

1. Cardi can be operating inside a patriarchal fantasy of love and family that centers men, the male gaze, and male validation.

2. Cardi can also be a grown woman who wants another child and has the resources to provide for them.

3. The critiques of her don’t happen in a vacuum… they sit inside a culture that relentlessly polices women’s reproductive choices. There is no “right” one.

All of these truths are concurrent.

We can’t talk about Cardi without naming the parenting double standard and gendered labor gap. The reality is, men are not doing an equal share of parenting, even when the children are conceived the “right way”.

There have been numerous studies that show that married women are still spending more time caring for their children and home and being the “default” parent than single women- even when they cohabitate with their husbands. Although everyone in this specific scenario is a celebrity, and that changes the dynamic a bit from an average family, for all intents and purposes, Cardi is the breadwinner of her family (which is why Offset is seeking spousal support) and yet- somehow- still the primary parent of all of the children she shares with her soon-to-be-ex-husband.

Clearly, that dynamic has not stopped Cardi from being the mother that she wants to be or showing up and providing for her children the way she pleases. Cardi is independently wealthy, but this same dynamic of being the forced default parent in addition to the labor commonly associated with being a “wife” cripples the life expectancy and lifelong happiness of married women compared to single women- even if those single women are ALSO MOTHERS.

In a patriarchy, we are made to believe that children need the provision and constant presence of their fathers as a nearly sole means of outcome prediction, but the reality is, many fathers are like Offset and Diggs. They have reduced themselves to what they can provide in occasional (if any) material support because they are not expected to be fathers the way that mothers are expected to mother ANYWAY, and that dynamic doesn’t actually change much with marriage and cohabitation. The work will, as a default, still fall on Cardi. Since she’s already ended up caring 100% for the three children she had “the right way”, why should she realistically balk at another?

The reality is Cardi has the means to support all of her children and does so consistently, with or without a man.

Here’s the part nobody wants to say out loud: the only legitimate reason for a woman to have a child is that SHE wants one and knows SHE can take care of it. Everything else- marriage status, men’s behavior, public opinion- is background noise. If all of the labor will fall on the mother and the mother is able and willing to do it, really, that is all that matters.

I know that the concept of a woman desiring parenthood, regardless of the role a man may or may not play in that parenthood, is foreign in patriarchal minds, however. I am willing to bet that most women reading this would never have children unless they felt they found “the right man” and are willing to hold off on their dream of being a mother (if they have one) because that dream is about having a FAMILY that centers on a man… not actually much about a child at all. Many women have structured their lives and reproductive decisions around a man in all directions, having or not having.

The only ones happy with their choice at the end of the day are the ones who had (or didnt have) children because of what THEY wanted or THEIR limitations.

This doesn’t mean a partner’s and coparent’s behavior doesn’t matter at all, and I will concede that the idea of having a baby to “get back” at your ex is bird-brained, but people are only speculating about that being Cardi’s motive. It DOES mean that our critiques are often misplaced and misframed. Cardi is not ruining her life by having another baby. If she wants another child and has the resources, then she’s doing what women should do: choosing for themselves. And if she’s having a baby as a “gotcha” I can only hope that that truth coincides with her wanting a baby as a concurrent truth.

The danger of constantly filtering women’s choices through the lens of men is that it re-centers men even in conversations that are supposedly about women’s autonomy.

To understand why the Cardi conversation looks the way it does, you have to pull back and see the bigger picture: society expects men to be active parents, but even in the “right” circumstances, they rarely are; otherwise, the term “married single mother” wouldn’t exist.

Historically, men’s fatherhood has been defined through provision, not caretaking. If a man pays child support, or simply doesn’t abandon the household altogether, he’s already seen as “doing his part.”

Women, on the other hand, are defined by their parenting. Every choice they make is filtered through “what does this mean for the kids?” A woman can be a CEO, a millionaire, or a celeb like Cardi, and she’ll still be judged by whether people think she’s “ruining her life” through her family decisions.

So what does all this mean for conversations about Cardi and similar discussions of reproductive autonomy specifically? It means we don’t have to flatten the choices into either celebration or condemnation. Multiple truths can sit side by side:

• Cardi is a male-identified woman who often moves in ways that reinforce patriarchy.

• Cardi also has every right to have another baby because she wants one and can provide for them.

• Men often escape real accountability because we still don’t expect men to actually parent, anyway.

Nuance doesn’t mean protecting Cardi from critique. It means critiquing within proper context.

In short: yes, Cardi’s situation is messy, and it’s not what I would choose for myself, but I am not a multi millionaire who can have all of the children I want without having to factor in paternal involvement at all. Yes, it’s frustrating to watch women tie themselves to men like Offset and Diggs. But also, yes, she still has a right to make choices about her body without the internet turning her pregnancy into a moral panic.

So when people ask, “Why would Cardi have another baby?” the answer is simple: because she wants to, and because she can. Every other layer of judgment, the marriage certificate, the messiness of Offset, the speculation about Diggs, is noise meant to disguise an uncomfortable truth.

Women will always be expected to mother, whether the man is in the picture or not, and Cardi has already proven she will show up for her children. The question isn’t whether she’s “ruining her life,” it’s why we still cling to the fantasy that men are central to parenting when, in reality, most of the labor was never theirs to begin with and a lot of you will feel deeply uncomfortable pondering the truth of that matter if you’ve bought into the lies that patriarchy tells us about parenting.

In a world where women can make their own money, provide their own resources and support, and build their own communities, men have effectively made themselves less needed in the one way they’re expected to show up (financially)… I feel like we don’t talk about THAT enough.

I would also rather talk about how Cardi has zero Black parents but y’all let her say “nigga” but that’s a conversation for another day.

Anyway, if you like this article and it gave you some things to think about, you should check out my Decentering Men, Reclaiming Self Reflection Journal. I think you’ll like it. If you didn’t like this article, I hope that relying on men to father like you mother works out for you and you win the lottery, truly… but I also hope that you thoroughly prepare yourself for the likelihood that they don’t. Your babies will need it.