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
Red Pill men:
“I live for the day when women will be replaced by robots.”
Red Pill women:
“I live for the day when I will be replaced by a robot.”
{shrugs}
Well, at least they’re consistent — at least they’re all on the same page. Far be it from me to manufacture a rift in the lute.
Yeah. My grandmother thought the same way as these “redpill” women, until she woke up one day in her 50s with no education, no job experience, and an empty house when my grandfather left her for one of a long line of mistresses. From that day on, she barely survived financially after decades of complying with the narrow gender roles of the day.
The fact is, no woman can count on some man being there to take care of things for her. Every generation of women finds that out eventually, and it’s a shame that some people can’t learn from other people’s mistakes instead of thinking that things will be different for them. Some get lucky, many don’t. If things were so great for the women in the past , most women would still be living that way. I can tell you that my grandmother spent the rest of her life preaching to the younger women and girls in the family about being able to support and take care of themselves.
RosaDeLava:
Even with your “there’s nothing wrong with,” this seemed to put down people who do decide to focus on their family. Focusing on the family (if able to) isn’t a lack of ambition. It’s ambition in a different direction. Different people have different priorities in life, that’s the point, that people can have their priorities and society won’t try to force them on particular groups. So calling it “not dreaming big” is belittling.
Anti socialite
Sorry about your grandma and disgust for your grandpa what an a-hole but I’m super glad she’s teaching women and girls to take care of themselves. That’s awesome.
I do have sympathy for red pill women (if some or most if not all are men) they have such low self esteem if only they meet other women who will be their friends and give them encouragement.
Whelp, let’s just toss The Stepford Wives on to the pile of things that Red Pillers don’t actually understand. Right on top of The Matrix.
If that works for the man and his (robot) companion, then that’s fine. However, not every family can do this, nor does every woman want to do this.
Or, maybe, your narrow-as-fuck idea of “complementarity, balance and teamwork” relies on really outdated gender roles that no one wants to fuck with anymore.
Back in the old days y’all Red Pillers have fauxstolgia for, it was looked down upon for women to do much of anything beyond the household, and if they had to get a job, they had to do “women’s work”, like being a secretary.
Now-a-days, women are given more freedom to explore what they’re good at, and can use their talents accordingly.
Household duties are chores. Are they not considered synonyms to you?
And yeah, they should be split between people who fucking live together.
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-BNzvkJMkUKc/VRxL-J0iqYI/AAAAAAAACwU/TA_4jvBnXQU/s1600/you-live-here.jpg
Shit, is it really that much trouble for people to expect their roommates/significant others to clean up after their fucking selves? Or is it too much trouble to ask people what they’re good at doing chore-wise and have them do that?
For instance, I love cooking, but I suck at cleaning, and one of my previous relationships was really good at cleaning and keeping to a schedule for it, but was really bad at cooking.
So, we agreed that I’d cook, and he could clean, and we’d also split other chores. I could vacuum and do laundry, and he’d sweep and mop and dust.
It wasn’t just me doing all the housework and him earning all the money, it was us doing what we were best at and could do with minimal effort.
I wouldn’t say “expected” so much for some families as “a goddamned necessity”. Some families, no matter their size, can’t afford to live with only one breadwinner.
That’s the fucking economy for you.
However, if both parties choose to focus on their careers, but don’t have to, then that’s their choice, and that’s great for them.
Only by people who are completely disregarding a woman’s right to choose what she wants to do with her life if it’s not the choice they want her to make.
I’m personally fine with women choosing to be a stay-at-home wife/mother/what-have-you, because choices are important. I’m also personally fine with men choosing to be a stay-at-home husband/father/what-have-you.
The problem with this is, you’re bringing it up in the context of where the wife was murdered for not being this perfect vision of wifeyness, and was replaced with a robot who has no autonomy.
That’s kind of the issue with the book, not the issue of “we don’t want women to be housewives”.
That’s good! If that’s what you want out of a relationship, then you go and do that, and I’ll support you 100%!
However, you’re attempting to shame other women for not doing the same because either they don’t want to, or they don’t have the option to, and that’s extremely shitty of you.
If I understood it correctly, the alternate interpretation is that the murder etc. is all a paranoid fantasy of the main character. While this is obviously not what was intended, headcanon is a thing that I don’t begrudge anyone.
Rejecting a plot based in the author’s worldview and replacing it with headcanon based in your own doesn’t mean you missed the point. It means you disagree with the point.
If some asshole wrote a book in which it was revealed that all feminists were secretly robots introduced by aliens to weaken the human race or some shit, we’d “miss the point” in a similar fashion. Assuming the author managed avoid horrible strawmanning, we’d approvingly quote lines said by the robots, and it wouldn’t mean that we missed the point of the story. It would mean that we fundamentally disagreed with the author about reality, not that we were unable to tell that the feminists were intended to be the villains.
Consider for example Satan in Paradise Lost. Milton intended him to be the villain, but centuries later, from a completely different perspective, he’s a badass rebelling against a tyrannical regime of Heaven. The most well-known line of the story, “better to reign in hell than serve in heaven,” is more likely to be quoted approvingly than not, even though Milton put it in the mouth of the cosmological epitome of evil.
Agreeing with the villain of a story doesn’t make you unable to see that they’re the villain of the story. It just means you disagree with the author on something fundamental.
There’s another book she should read…it’s called ‘The Feminine Mystique’ by Betty Friedan.
It gives an interesting take on this woman’s idea of the perfect partnership between a man and a woman.
Cerberus
I like your comment and I agree wholeheartedly. It’s easier to rebel against the women who have chosen a different path…or a better kind of relationship than to admit they have made a mistake and are miserable in their’s.
It’s always easier to criticize people who are active in this world, rather than passive.
So, from what I gather, redpillers see feminism as a fascist system and want to replace it with another fascist system. Oops.
David Futrelle,
I take it these ladies somehow didn’t realize the point of the story. Also, did they somehow miss the fact that in the story, the newly subservient women weren’t the original ones at all, but robots? You would think that even the most backwards, conservative, submissive women of the 18th and 19th centuries wouldn’t feel comfortable with husbands replacing their wives with machines.
“headcanon?” yikes. That isn’t how literary interpretation works. Disagreeing with an explicit or implicit thesis in a novel is not the same as rewriting it in one’s own mind. Nor is it the same as missing the point.
It is perfectly acceptable to disagree with prevailing interpretations of a novel and it is also acceptable to disagree with a novel’s main point. However, support from the novel itself must be provided to back up the point. In this case, the poster wants to offer an interpretation of the novel that is not supported by the novel, but by her own external ideology. The character is not “paranoid” because she notices odd things happening and people acting funny. When she investigate further, she finds that there are, indeed, odd doings transpiring.
Interpreting the main character as paranoid would be similar to asserting Sam Spade is paranoid because he investigates a number of crimes. In both cases, good reason and motivation are established for their inquiry.
@Tessa
I don’t think wanting to be a housewife isn’t dreaming big based on priorities, but on scope. You can’t usually reach a lot of people (at least I don’t think you can?) by taking care of a household.
Taking care of your family can be rewarding and even be, to the person doing it, the biggest, most important thing in the world, but I cannot regard it as such if I am not emotionally invested in it.
Though, technically, wanting something does mean you have ambition.
I wonder if some or most if not all red pill women are actually male red pillers.
Normally I assume everyone I meet on the Internet is who they claim to be, because I meet a lot of super-swole millionaire lawyer scientists that way, but a large number of Red Pill Women do sound suspiciously like Red Pill Men roleplaying their fantasy wives.
The original book and 1970s movie are both pretty great. Ira Levin, who wrote the book, also wrote Rosemary’s Baby, another classic horror novel with strong feminist themes.
She’s like those libertarians who watch It’s a Wonderful Life and think Mr. Potter is the good guy.
I’d almost suspect the original poster is trolling RedPillWomen to see how many of them agree that it would be awesome to be murdered and replaced with a robot (as long as it was a sufficiently alpha man doing the murdering), but she seems to be a regular poster and totally sincere. The Red Pill forums are so supremely goofy it can be hard to tell.
@ Tessa,
I suppose it shouldn’t necessarily be a part of the meaning of the word “ambition”, but I think the way the word is used does imply that you strive for power, status, money and/or respect, and aim for results that out of the ordinary. The word entails certain assumptions about what your goals are and what success is. In a world where a proper emphasis was placed on everyone defining their own values and what success means to them, ambition probably wouldn’t have these meanings. But we don’t live in that world. We live in a kyriarchy, and I don’t think we can afford to forget that.
It’s also redpill levels of fucked up to apply ambition, where it means a desire to outdo others, to one’s family life and particularly the raising of children. That’s just not right, morally or pragmatically.
I don’t buy the bullshit about “empowered” women making “choices” in a suddenly existing non-patriarchal vacuum. Especially not if those choices curiously look like appeasement, capitulation and collaboration. People should make what private choices work for them, for whatever reasons they want. But feminist women should also be aware of the wider context of patriarchy and what their choices mean against that. Women who choose to be traditional women should be aware that it means to be less than, which really isn’t compatible with ambition. We don’t have a world where that is not true yet.
“There’s nothing wrong with not dreaming big…”
Oh please, working a 9 to 5 is not “dreaming big”.
Also what’s with this idea that the one who stays home has to do all the chores and cooking?! My partner lived alone before he lived with me and he worked full time and did all his own cleaning and cooking then so why should that change now just because we currently live together? I should start doing his personal laundry and clean his toilet after he takes a dump now… because why exactly?
He works outside the home, I don’t. He does his laundry, I do mine. He cleans his bathroom, I clean mine. If I’m home at lunch time I make enough for him and save it so he can have it for dinner when he gets back. If I’m not at home then he makes dinner and makes enough for me and saves my portion . Please don’t tell me there’s someone out there who thinks I should wake up at 6 am to make him breakfast before he leaves, that’s just crazy. Especially considering that he goes to bed at 9 and I’m usually up til midnight or beyond.
“taking care of the household to make the husband’s life easier” is a gross goal because it’s still focused entirely on the husband, not on the family as a unit (including the wife), not on the kids, not on having a good life and not on making a place in the community, or improving one’s skills at taking care of the household or enhancing the home life.
There are lots of ways to be a homemaker of any gender in a positive way; focusing entirely on one person instead of the multiple people in any family unit (two, plus optional kidlets) is gross. And I would argue ineffective; person A will be affected if spouse B is radiating misery even while focusing every drop of B’s energy on person A.
“taking care of the household to make the husband’s life easier” is a gross goal because it’s still focused entirely on the husband, not on the family as a unit (including the wife), not on the kids, not on having a good life and not on making a place in the community, or improving one’s skills at taking care of the household or enhancing the home life.
There are lots of ways to be a homemaker of any gender in a positive way; focusing entirely on one person instead of the multiple people in any family unit (two, plus optional kidlets) is gross. And I would argue ineffective; person A will be affected if spouse B is radiating misery even while focusing every drop of B’s energy on person A.”
Agreed. I notice these Christian “red pillers” are all about divorce if the wife commits adultery, even once, for any reason, even if they have kids, instead of trying to work things out for the greater good of the family as a whole. Marriage in their mind is all about them. Family in their mind is all about them and not at all about the kids.
Bullshit as it is, ambition is a male-coded word, which explains both why wanting to climb the corporate ladder might be seen as ambitious but wanting to raise kids isn’t, and why lack of ambition is used so often to dismiss women.
“I don’t think wanting to be a housewife isn’t dreaming big based on priorities, but on scope. You can’t usually reach a lot of people (at least I don’t think you can?) by taking care of a household.”
How do people who are not housewives “reach a lot of people”? You seem to be arguing that working a job outside of one’s home is “reaching a lot of people” somehow. And reaching them in a positive way even.
Oh bollocks.
1. Feminism is about choice – about not forcing women into roles, regardless of that role. Forcing women into the role opposite of the traditional patriarchal one is still forcing women into a role.
2. So, even though it fell through due to reasons beyond my control, since my original goal in life was to raise a family, I’m not a real feminist? I’m secretly working for the patriarchy because I love and wish I could have children? Because that’s what it sounds like you’re saying.
@ VOoT
I don’t think RosaDeLava is arguing that all jobs outside of the house reach people in a positive way. But unless you’re a blogger superstar or an author, reaching a lot of people does require leaving the house.
Ehhh… While it’s true that statements can have positive or negative connotation depending on one’s worldview, and that one can disagree with the author in regards to which characters are sympathetic/correct, context does matter. Picking your talking points out of a work where the people saying those points are clearly intended to be wrong kind of weakens one’s position, especially if there are alternative sources of the same sentiments which do not depict the speakers as villains.
Or not even if they’re depicted as the villain, but have other non-desirable traits. Deciding to quote a puppy-eating character saying that “Brownies are delicious”, instead of a vegetarian college kid from a different work saying the exact same thing, gives the words different connotations- did the puppy-eater include puppy bits in his brownies? The college kid might be talking about vegan brownies, or maybe hash brownies, or both. Not only that, but it makes the viewers of your quote wonder if you don’t agree with some of the other opinions of the speakers as well, as you chose one source over the other.
To illustrate my point more succinctly:
http://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/20131006.png
@mola the ocean sunfish
This is BS, and kind of misses the whole point of feminism and what we’re countering. You are falling into the trap of buying that something that’s traditionally coded “woman” is “bad.” I was specifically speaking in non-gendered terms before for this reason. This coding as “bad” is part of the reason for sexism in the workplace. Men are traditionally getting the better paid jobs partially because even when both parents work, it’s still more often the woman who is expected to be the one to put more into the kids and housework. This is where the “men do more overtime” idea comes from and why it’s seen as a negative for women to have kids while in the workforce and a positive for men to have kids. Women are still expected to “take care” of the family even while working, while the man is supposed to “support” the family. Assigning the “taking care” aspect the label of “less than” as you have done, will do nothing to change the stigma. Just make it worse.
Given two parents, the whole thing is kinda a sliding scale from one parent doing allmost of the housechildren stuff while the other focuses on work all the way to both parents equally split work and family and house stuff. This can be for any number of reasons, one has a very good job, or the other’s job barely cover’s day care, so it’d be cheaper otherise. Whatever the reasons, shitting on them and calling them “lesser than” for it isn’t helpful. What we should be striving for is that no gender is socially coded for any aspect of the scale.