So one of the inhabitants of the Red Pill Women subreddit — devoted not to pickup artistry but to cultivating a regressive kind of femininity — has found an unusual source for inspiration. She’s been reading a novel from the early 1970s that contrasts a brash young woman influenced by the “women’s libbers” of the day with a group of more traditionally minded wives living in a certain (fictional) suburb.
At one point in the novel, the main character — the aforementioned brash young woman — asks one of the new traditionalists if she is happy, having given up her own feminist activism to become a stay-at-home wife whose life revolves entirely around her husband’s needs.
Kit looked at her, and nodded. “Yes, I’m happy,” she said. “I feel I’m living a very full life. Herb’s work is important, and he couldn’t do it nearly as well if not for me. We’re a unit, and between us we’re raising a family, and doing optical research, and running a clean comfortable household, and doing community work.”
Kit supports her husband by taking care of the house, and makes his life easier. Meanwhile, he works to provide for the family. This concept of complementarity, balance and teamwork seems completely lost in this day and age. Household duties are seen as being chores which must be split 50/50, and a more individualistic approach to fulfillment is considered the norm today. It is expected that both partners in a relationship have both their own career and must be career-driven, and “taking care of the household to make the husband’s life easier” is considered as a complete lack of ambition and a waste of talent/intelligence instead of being a way of fulfillment.
I agree with Kit’s vision (obviously), and even though it probably wasn’t the author’s goal at all, Kit’s response to Joanna helps me put words on how I feel about relationship dynamics.
There’s just one problem here. The novel jade_cat is reading, as you have surely realized, is The Stepford Wives, and Kit [SPOILER ALERT] is not a housewife at all, but a robot who has been designed to replace Kit, a flesh-and-blood woman murdered by a sinister cabal of Stepford husbands — with her husband’s cooperation.
Jade_cat is well aware of this; she just feels more sympathy for the murdering husbands than for the murdered wives. As she explains the plot of the 1972 novel (and the original 1975 movie version), Kit and the other Stepford wives
are in fact robots that have been created to replace the sloppy, nagging wives of the men of Stepford.
Because obviously, a pretty housewife who never complains and who isn’t a feminist is too good to be true, so she must be a robot ! 😉
Another Red Pill woman, SouthernPetite, weighs in with her thoughts on the main character of the film — that is, the flesh-and-blood woman who uncovers the secret wife-murdering, robot-making cabal.
The main character was a psycho. She not only did not work, but she also didn’t really take care of the house or kids, and pitched a fit when her H got angry when she would opt to hang out with her friend and get high.
As I recall the film, she was unhappy she’d been plopped down in Stepford amongst all these weird women. Her husband didn’t like her hanging out with her new friend Bobbie, because Bobbie, like her, was a newcomer to the town, a bit of a feminist herself, and, oh yeah, STILL A HUMAN BEING.
She also started freaking out, and eventually stabbed her friend, because some of the women started conforming more. While it was a bit odd, she had literally only been there…maybe a few weeks at most, so she didn’t really know those people, but apparently thought it was ok to become super paranoid, suspect a wild conspiracy right out the gate, and start stabbing people. While is turns out that she was correct, she was far from a rational person.
Uh, she stabbed her friend because by this point in the movie, her friend is not actually her friend any more but a robot made to replace her murdered friend.
Here’s the scene where it happens, by the way:
SouthernPetite continues:
Tbh, this portrayal is so bizarre, I would almost think it’s a critique on the paranoia and selfishness of feminists, but I don’t think that was the intent.
No, no it wasn’t.
Reading (or watching) The Stepford Wives and rooting for the husbands and their robot wives is a bit like reading 1984 and rooting for Big Brother.
H/T — r/TheBluePill
That’s the reason why we put fluoride in the drinking water in most parts of the US (and I hear that fluoride is added to table salt in Europe, like we add iodide to salt in the US for nutritional purposes).
Adding a trace amount of fluoride to the water supply isn’t a “mind control” conspiracy like in Dr. Strangelove, yet people still believe in the John Birch Society era canard, even in places people think are progressive, like Portland, which voted against adding fluoride to their water just a few years ago.
It’s funny that every time that issue comes up, people who live where the water isn’t fluoridated ask their dentists and then post to the Internet how their dentists invariably chuckle about how much more work they get than their colleagues who work one town over, where the water is fluoridated.
I don’t have a personal stake in “big fluoride” myself. It’s not something that really makes a big profit for anyone (just like vaccines aren’t all that profitable for the companies they make them). It’s a great example of how people can fervently believe ideas that lead them to vote against their own individual and collective interests (to live in a city where everyone has fewer or no cavities) out of “rugged individualist” and anti-progressive “progressivism” that’s just fear of technology (and fluoridated water is not that new).
Bringing things to Stepford Wives, I confess that I haven’t read the book or seen the movie, but even though the original plot involves killing the original women, I always thought it was also a metaphor for society’s concern about the new benzodiazepine drugs, namely Valium, that some people really were becoming addicted to and turning into the equivalent of robots (from both their own and others’ point of view) from the sedative hypnotic effects.
“My job was 9 to 5 and left me anything but fulfilled. Being home with my kid, keeping my family fed, with the leisure of extended breastfeeding and being able to help him nurture and grow one-on-one, isn’t “lesser”. It has more of a positive impact on the world than the office grind ever did. My life is full of joy, learning, creativity and purpose.
Looking down on traditionally “feminine” roles makes the status of women worse. Valuing them more highly is a feminist mission that also helps to de-gender them, because if caring is higher status, it’s also more attractive as a role to men.
As for the implication that I’m letting the side down as a feminist by being some sort of selfish, individualist “choice feminist” who should be taking one for the team and making the choice that’sg less optimal for me, well… I’m a lesbian. I’m by definition not doing this for any man.
Please don’t buy into misogynist assumptions that roles assigned “feminine” are limited in scope and lesser. I think everyone needs to find the role that best fits them as a human being. My wife would be bored and restless doing what I do… Just as I was in every single job I ever had, once the novelty and excitement wore off.
The Stepford Wives novel terrified me as a kid, incidentally, but I love the clothes in the first movie.”
Lily Louise, I co-sign, co-sign, co-sign.
I never understood the cries for more female CEO’s. More CEO’s? Having been raised by a bunch of die-hard hippies and having to just happen to agree with a lot of their values , my view is we need LESS CEO’s, not more.
Y’all actually stopped to consider why stay-at-home parenting and all this stuff you say is ‘traditionally coded as feminine’ is traditionally coded as feminine and why you call certain values ‘male-coded’?
Because of misogyny. This is the case for almost EVERYTHING traditionally coded as feminine.
Also, let me offer an opinion from my mother, who was a SAHM for the first eight years of my life, then went back to work: she regretted every moment of it, wishes she worked, and thinks SAHMs are lazy (fwiw she and I have a pretty healthy relationship, and I was a planned baby, if you are left wondering)
Almost anybody can pop out sprog and raise a family provided their reproductive system is in working order. It’s not some great big achievement. It’s hard work and achievement just like daily menial drudgery is. You want real achievement, go do something that few people can actually do.
There’s nothing ambitious about getting pregnant or getting someone pregnant.
Hmm. Well, my SAHM doesn’t regret one bit of her choice to be a SAHM. We were poor, so she worked her ass off. She went back to school once the last of us was in high school and the other two were in college.
Maybe she could have become a leading researcher in autism if she had started in special education when she was young — but then again, her interest in the subject came in large part from her children being more or less on the spectrum.
You can fuck right off with “there’s nothing ambitious about getting pregnant or getting someone pregnant”, and “almost anybody can pop out sprog” — so sad for you that you think that the responsibilities of being a stay-at-home parent end with pregnancy and/or birth.
You’re right that getting pregnant is not much of an achievement for most people. You’re wrong that actually being a good parent isn’t. If there’s anything I’ve learned in my years on this earth, it’s that people who have the skills and dedication to actually do the job well, who really get things, and who succeed in raising kind, compassionate, and thoughtful children, are extraordinarily rare.
My mom was anything but lazy. And, even better, she wasn’t a judgmental asshole.
Oh God, not this piece of shit failthread again.
And working parents are better parents for kids:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/emmajohnson/2015/04/20/study-proves-moms-spend-too-much-time-with-their-kids-liberates-working-moms-everywhere/#1e48759939f5
http://www.refinery29.com/2015/06/87544/working-mothers-sons-help-with-housework
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/17/upshot/mounting-evidence-of-some-advantages-for-children-of-working-mothers.html?_r=1
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2014/06/23/3451313/working-mothers-children/
Stay-at-home mothers and fathers are also a net drain on the economy, creating children who need money poured into them.
They work as unpaid interns for their spouses instead of independently having economic power, except for the fact that unpaid interns actually create more for the economy than they’re paid whereas when you create a human being it’s a net drain. Why do you think misogynist men are so ardent on keeping women locked into the role of housewife and stay-at-home mother? Because they value the unpaid labor of women they’ve forced into the role?
And the economy is better off without stay-at-home parents: http://www.unwomen.org/en/what-we-do/economic-empowerment/facts-and-figures
https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/women-at-pwc/assets/pwc_genesis_park_report.pdf
http://www.state.gov/s/gwi/econ/
What are you, a fucking Objectivist?
Since when do we police the choices parents make about how much time they want to spend with their growing children based on how much they contribute to the fucking economy?
I didn’t say anything to suggest that not being a stay at home parent was bad for children. I never said what worked for our family must go for everyone’s. And I agree that overall, mothers working is better for society and for women. I just objected to your bullshit opinion of stay-at-home mothers as lazy.
My mom was most definitely not an “unpaid intern” for my dad. They split the fucking housework. She wasn’t a maid, she sure as fuck wasn’t forced into the “role”, and my dad is the exact opposite of a misogynist. My dad worked from home, and my mom stayed at home. My two brothers and I greatly benefited from the amount of reading help and attention we got. We needed it more than most. We also grew up very poor, and there were times my parents struggled to buy shoes for us.
Every family’s different. But my mother has nothing to apologize for.
Sorry to contribute to the necro, SFHC. I’ll let K have the last word, if you’d like.
Are we all trapped living in the year 1022?