It’s felt like an awfully retro week in American politics. In Texas, gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis hashed out 20-year-old details of her former marriage in a lengthy New York Times Magazine profile, while in Washington, wannabe presidential candidate Rand Paul diligently stirred a pot of about the same vintage, with comments about the 1990s marital troubles of his imagined future rival, Hillary Clinton.

Though it’s tempting to crack jokes about grunge and .com bubbles, the grim truth is that neither of these silly mini-stories is actually that dated. Their resurgence speaks not to some weird nostalgia for the '90s, but rather to a story without beginning or end: the way that women’s lives are always—have always been—measured, weighed and judged via metrics of personal-public trade-off.

Yet somehow, the male politicians in these conversations seem sure that America is going to be shocked by the notion that women make complicated choices in their pursuit of both professional and personal goals.

In Davis’s case, the issue is the fact-checking of her slickly reductive campaign bio: the one that depicted her as a struggling but devoted single mother who gutted her way through Harvard Law School. It has since been revealed that the real-life version of events included a second husband who helped out with school loans and primary childcare.

Clinton’s story, the details of which are known to everyone on the planet, involves her choice to stay with her husband through his affair with Monica Lewinsky and all the other rumored cases of infidelity. In her case, it’s not just men who’ve leapt to judge: Rand Paul’s wife served as a stalking horse for his case against the Clinton marriage, telling Vogue that Bill’s relationship with Lewinsky was “predatory.” Paul himself has taken it a step closer to Hillary, calling Bill an “unsavory character” and wondering, "What if that unsavory character is your husband?" But when GOP chief Reince Priebus defended Paul’s line of attack this week by explaining that for Republicans, “everything is on the table,” all I could do was shrug.