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
Can someone please provide a definition of what “choice feminism” actually is?
Choice feminism is yet another itterration of the pointless babbling of the post-sexualrevolution zeitgeist.
My colleagues around me all looked at me to see why I laughed.
Have you ever had one of those days when you feel that the pseudorandom text generator can actually understand you and is genuinely trying to take part in the conversation?
(That’s not intended as a joke against you, katz. I like and respect you. I just found Thomas Hobbes’s irrelevant random-text to be very amusing coming immediately after your question.)
@katz
“The term “choice feminism” is sometimes used as shorthand for the attitude that women should be able to make any choice they want, and that doing so is automatically feminist.
[…]
Choice feminism is sometimes criticised for failing to take into account the complex social pressures in place when people make choices. Choices are not made in a vacuum, and some choices women make are closely aligned with anti-feminist ideas in the larger world. Unfortunately, it can sometimes be hard to differentiate criticism of an individual woman’s choice from criticism of the wider social context of her choice.
[…]
Although it is wrong to say that any choice a woman makes is automatically feminist, it’s also wrong to say that women who choose the easy option in our kyriarchal society are necessarily anti-feminist. Women generally need to weigh the difficulty of the choices they make against other considerations like existing relationships, their ability to support themselves and/or their families, their mental health, etc. So it is perhaps better to say that feminists can and do make a wide range of choices, and can still be feminists despite that, than that all choices are equally feminist in and of themselves.”
-Geek Feminism Wiki
Or there’s this view which I’ve heard several times;
“The obvious threats to feminism today are the same as they have always been, the main ones being the existence of patriarchy and the backlash from that system when it hits out against any challenges to its continuation. However, there are more insidious and less obvious threats. Thesedangers hide in plain sight, and come partly in the form of a version of feminism known as “choice feminism”.
This term is used to refer to a common phenomenon, whereby the language of liberation, taken from feminist political theory, is turned on its head and used against women. Choice feminism can be found particularly in media representations of what feminism is and what women’s empowerment might look like. There is an attempt, unfortunately fairly successful, to reduce feminism to simply being the right for women to make choices. Not choices about whether to stand for parliament, or instigate pay transparency in the office or lead an unemployed worker’s union, or form a women-only consciousness-raising group in their town; far from it.
Instead, there are choices about what amount of makeup to wear, whether to go “natural” or try mascara that makes your eyelashes look like false eyelashes, or what diet drink to buy, or whether or not to make the first move with a man – or other such modern and edgy decisions of the sort which face the feisty, sassy, pull-no-punches liberated woman of today. Excuse me while I am sick”.
Unfortunately, I’m not so sure that “choice feminism” is super well defined, and I think that sometimes ends up being a “I know it when I see it” kind if thing. Usually, it refers to Libertarian Feminism, which is basically Libertarianism’s and Feminism’s love child. And like all Glibertarianism, it has it strong points, but those strong points often get drowned out by all the self-absorbed, privilege denying, shit.
” And I’ve known a lot of female friends who graduated from college and swore up and down they weren’t just going to quit their jobs and stay home when they had kids, but somehow fell into that role anyway.
No, they didn’t “somehow fall” into that role, they made the best decision they could make with what was available to them.
For all I know, your friends could be privileged enough to afford a good daycare, and have family help, and their kids could tolerate formula or they could pump at work, and etc. In that case, their choice to stay home was relatively free. Many people are not so lucky.
This is much of my problem with calling SAHM a “choice”. For example, in many parts of the US daycare costs MORE for 2 kids than many lower middle class women make, so the women doesn’t even break even. Who the hell can afford to pay over their pay check to work? Or even the majority their check? A catch-22 is not a choice, but calling it such gives us the opportunity to ignore the systematic problems behind it. It is faux-empowerment; an opportunity to hold victims of the system responsible for the fallout.
“No choice is a free choice, because every choice carries social baggage. So if you’re going to say you can’t use the word “choice” to describe being a SAHM, you shouldn’t use the word “choice” to describe almost anything”
Right, no choice is a free choice, which is why we should always critique the reasons behind our choices. I’m saying that SAHM isn’t a choice because it’s much more than social pressure driving the decision to stay at home or not.
“(And if there is someone who says she decided to stay home with her kids and it was her own choice, saying it wasn’t a choice feels a tad gaslighty.)”
Asking women to examine the reasons behind their actions is neither manipulative nor telling them their feelings. I’m saying that the view of SAHM as being a “choice” by default is wrong. I’m not saying that it is literally impossible to make a free choice to be a SAHM.
‘b) At the end of the day, when women make choices, you can either support them in whatever choices they make, or you can try to control the choices they make by casting some of them as “better” or “worse.” ‘
A) Heh. Except you seem to imply in several posts that being non judgemental is “better”, and being judgemental is “worse”. And regardless whether you were, that’s OK, because now we’re having this discussion. We’re exchanging ideas, refining our opinions. Isn’t it a beautiful thing? 🙂
But you have a fair point. Ideas of the “better thing to do” can be used to control, but they can also be used to uplift and teach. It’s empowering to learn from other people’s mistakes. Who wants to constantly reinvent the wheel?
In the end of the day, opinions on the “better” thing to do are just words. They have no real power to force someone’s hand on their own. Unless someone backs them up with coercion or force, they will always be just words.
The following is seriously tl;dr, but I ended up writing more than I’d initially meant to.
—
re: SAHMs and choice-feminism:
I’m currently a stay-at-home-Mom by “choice”.
I’ve also been a soldier, a student of various stripes multiple times; a “military spouse” (during which time I was also a stay-at-home-parent, but it’s infinitely more difficult to work with children with the spouse in the US military given frequent moves to often otherwise economically depressed areas paired with erratic but nearly constant absence of the other parent for training and deployment – it’s more of a default in that particular population); a single Mom (with my ex multiple states away or out of country) working full-time while finishing a BA part-time who qualified for public assistance…and then very suddenly didn’t (and let me tell you – the abrupt cut off of benefits between being in dire poverty and just-out-of-dire-poverty can make your head spin); a newly-married Mom who, while working full-time and going to school part-time, was the sugar-Momma to her intensely supportive, feminist husband while he finished a Masters; and Mom scrambling with full-time work, a long commute, and the seeming-omnipotence schools seem to expect from parents while her husband had a travel-intensive job.
I “chose” – and those quotes are intentional – to be a stay-at-home-Mom again when we decided to have a third child. The cost of childcare with one infant and before/after care for two school-aged children would have eaten up most of my actually pretty decent salary (well above the median in the US – according to a quick Google search, it eclipsed the salaries of about 70% of the US). Professional costs (auto wear-and-tear, gas, nicer clothing, etc) would eat up a bit more. My job was also one that didn’t allow for much of a flex schedule or work-from-home opportunities (in part because of budgetary concerns on their end). And only six weeks with our new baby…putting her in childcare for long stretches (8.5 hours + about a 45 minute – an hour commute each way) when she was barely out of her “fourth trimester”…giving her just enough time to really learn to nurse, to sleep, to snuggle…
Then given that my husband traveled quite a bit (at the time) – which meant that our children’s days would begin by being dropped off 630 or 7am and end at between 530 and 600pm in daycare, when I could drop them off and pick them up – and that, even when in town, most US companies place draconian work-life balance expectations on men (fun fact: he got 2 days off after our daughter was born, 1 week of local work, and then had to catch a flight) – both logic and familial-self-interest would dictate that I, being the lower earner, be the one to take time off for a child’s illness or pressing appointment.
We weighed what was in front of us and made the “choice” for me to stay home.
If I had chosen to stay in the workforce but bear the brunt of childhood absences, I may have crippled my in-situ earning power, but my husband would have been able to conform to the expectations placed upon him by his employer and so would likely still have garnered the (demonstrated) dual-benefit of being seen as a family man and being a dedicated member of the team.
If I had chosen to stay in the work force but shared the balance of necessary days off with my husband, my reputation may have been spared a ding (or not – can you believe that ball-buster?), but my husband’s chances for advancement may have been seriously compromised.
As it is, most of my professional contacts have withered – my fault, really, but I also didn’t particularly like them – and getting back to work will likely be a pretty big push. Meanwhile, my husband’s income has about doubled in three years, in no small part because his high-travel job was also a relatively high-prestige job, and the reputation that he build there as “tireless” and “focused” helped him a foot in the door for something else.
And I’m incredibly proud of him.
I love him and he’s worked both intelligently and diligently.
And he says that he’s incredibly proud of and thankful for me, that I’ve enabled for our children’s young lives to have a bit more constancy and that I’ve borne the brunt of the often thankless, un-directly-compensated work that goes into ensuring a busy household doesn’t spin apart.
The choices that made sense for our family, including the ones that I didn’t make but considered, made sense given our milieu. Acting outside of the dictates of society, for anyone, is tiring. It begins to feel, at best, like banging your head into a wall. At worst, it feels like tilting at windmills.
Would we have made different choices given a different culture?
Most likely.
But we all operate from within the matrices around us.
Feminism and feminists should recognize this even while seeking to critique and build anew.
The good fight should be fought, but it’s not for everyone at all times.
The problem isn’t that the choices are wrong, it’s that so few choices exist, and that women’s choices are always seen as making a political/sexual statement. Whichever way you choose, you’ll get branded a prude/whore/traitor/unambitious/unfeminine/etc. by the other side. It’s a tightrope that few women can navigate successfully.
Agreed. Robots are a form of dread game. They send the message to women “you are interchangeable and replaceable, and you will never be as perfect as this robot.” It’s unfortunate that Red Pill Women have swallowed the bait and are trying to live up to that impossible standard.
Oddly enough, Red Pill Women don’t seem to think very highly of Red Pill Men. Maybe it’s because Red Pill Men want all the benefits of a traditional marriage without having to hold up their end of the bargain. The whole idea of marriage and providing for a family is anathema to them. They spend their days devising ways to weasel out of having to support a family and rationalizing why they should never lift a finger to help out with raising of said children beyond emotionally abusing them to gratify their egos (while whining about how unfair it is not to get custody). In return they expect total, slavish obedience and dependence. Then they wonder why women aren’t throwing themselves at them to start a family.
… He takes requests!
Ooh, ooh, ooh!! *raises and waves hand excitedly* Do “Free Bird!” “Smoke on the Water!” Alien! The Shining!
I dunno, that Bobbie robot doesn’t look very durable. All it took was a stab in the hip and its cybernetics were on the fritz? That looks like poor design, to me.
Have a look at the FAQ – the Poe indicator is down at the bottom 🙂
http://www.wearysloth.com/Gallery/ActorsD/83120-29725.jpg
BTW, I found Jade_cat´s facebook photo.
@Buttercup Q. Skullpants:
Who does, though? Even Red Pill men don’t seem to think very highly of Red Pill men.
Or a person posting late at night, jeez.
I didn’t mean to suggest that the robots in Stepford were the actual villains – rather that they’re pawns of the true villains, and thus part of the villain “faction,” espousing the villains’ views. I shortened this to “villain” because, as previously mentioned, posting late at night.
And yet, rewriting the novel in your own mind is pretty great, and a fun way to help yourself get through a work that is ideologically anathema to you. It’s also a fairly common way (on the internet) of talking about books that are irredeemably stupid or irreconcilable with your own worldview. cf Slacktivist, Heathen Critique, Das Mervin.
That’s just not true. In formal literary criticism, sure, but this is hosted on reddit ferchrissakes. This kind of disagreement with the author about what happened or should have happened in their books is very common in fan communities, of which Reddit hosts several.
Canon is invented by the author and carries the author’s worldview. Sure, if you want to talk about what is actually present in the novel, you need to support your interpretation. But if you want to talk about what should have been present in the novel, what would have been a better or more realistic (in your own worldview) way for the novel to have progressed, you need no such support. You can just fork it off and enjoy your fan interpretation.
The poster isn’t saying “This is what’s in the book.” The poster says “I think this would have been a better way to go.” Maybe I just spent too much time in fan fiction communities as a teen, but I don’t see that as a problem.
It would be similar to asserting that Sam Spade is paranoid because he investigates a number of crimes that don’t make sense to the person doing the asserting. And that happens all the time. Have some “Fox Mulder is paranoid and delusional” fan theory (CN: ablism): http://www.cracked.com/video_19524_why-fox-mulder-might-actually-be-crazy-person.html
@EJ – No, no, all the Red Pill men are super-swole multimillionaire STEM geniuses who radiate MALE HONOR. If you read their field reports, they win at every single thing they do, from ordering coffee to cheating on their wives. It’s the rest of us that are total losers, with our “feelings” and our “relationships”.
@Rosa, re:ambition
Where did you pull this definition of ambition? I know no one likes quoting dictionaries, but I think it’s warranted here.
https://www.google.ca/search?q=ambition+definition&oq=ambi&aqs=chrome.0.0j69i57j0l4.1672j0j4&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8#q=unambitious
You don’t think raising a family is an achievement? Or running a household? You don’t think it requires hard work or determination? You wouldn’t consider doing your best as a parent to be a success? How about you stop shitting all over other people’s hard work? When you say that someone’s goal is unambitious you are implying that their dream isn’t “big” enough and is unworthy of recognition that it doesn’t count as an achievement like it’s “no big deal”.
@Button:
Jackie and I had the same discussion a few weeks ago, with her representing the views of fan communities and the belief in canon, and me representing the formal literary theory position and the belief in death of the author. The conclusion I drew from that discussion was that her position (that is, that authorial authority is paramount) is useful for ongoing works; but once a work has been concluded then nobody, especially not the author, has any particular authority over it.
Jackie may have drawn a different view from it. I’m fine with this. I’m a literary postmodernist, after all.
@Buttercup Q. Skullpants:
I believe it was Shaenon on this blog who said that she believes everything people tell her about themselves on the internet, because you meet more millionaire lawyer philanthropists that way.
In my opinion? I have met STEM geniuses. I have also met Dunning-Kruger-effect poster boys. I’m not saying most red pill people are closer to the second than the first, but it’s a working hypothesis.
To add on, I think it’s hilarious your definition of “ambition” (i.e. needs to have a “big scope”) you would say that by and large men are more ambitious, white people are more ambitious, rich people are more ambitious etc. Those are the people who can afford to dream big and aim for positions with “big scope”. Maybe some people dream smaller because they know what is realistic for them the achieve. Unlike you I won’t insult people by saying that they are unambitious because they goal doesn’t necessarily meet my standards.
mockingbird
Certainly Australia and many parts of Britain.
http://www.jeron.je/anglia/learn/sec/history/welfare/page02.htm
http://bizarrevictoria.livejournal.com/95923.html
I remember it being pointed out as a reason why women seemed to age much faster among my grandmother’s friends and some of mum’s friends as well. Having all your teeth out so early in life meant that the musculature of the lower half of the face began to collapse around the shrinking bone mass of the jaw into “old lady” shape much sooner than it should have. (My husband’s gone to bed, so I can’t ask. I have a vague suspicion his mother had all her teeth out before she married, but I’m not sure. Maybe it was her mother.)
@mockingbird
Thank you for sharing your story to help add context to the ongoing discussion about choices.
@mrex
Thank you for taking the time and patience to go into details to explain the definition of ‘choice feminism’ and the criticism against it
I personally still find the entire definition of ‘choice feminism’ to still be a little vague, but mrex covers the obvious flawed ‘choices’ with her quoted examples.
It is no coincidence that a lot of modern advertising has co-opted the word ’empowerment’ for their adverts – pretending to ’empower’ women today while actually pushing them along lines endorsed by the patriarchal society. One thing to worth noting is that even if women are encouraged along by the system, they typically also have their own personal reasons for it that we should not ignore – that may have almost nothing to do with the pressures of society. I think that is one of the reasons why when some feminists question the choices of women as being largely driven by society, they may ignore the personal context these decisions are being made in.
There in also lies the catch. It is true that our society is pressuring the genders to act in specific ways – but how do you work out if certain people are being largely driven by their environment or more through personal agency? Is it possible that their personal agency has already been heavily influenced by society (and therefore not as autonomous as they may think)? How aware are they of such influences, and do the choices still remain the same given such knowledge? If they remain the same, are they the correct ones?
There is good reason to be critical of ‘choice feminism’ as it has been used as a defense for the status quo (now and historically) – it is used to justify the wage gap, it has been used to argue that women want to be domesticated, used to reinforce gender sterotyping, etc.
However, there is also the inherent problem that criticism against ‘choice feminism’ sometimes sounds like an attack on a woman’s personal liberty in her choices. And to be honest, sometimes the criticism does go too far and does blame the woman for her choices (such instance are super rare). This is a line that still has not been marked clearly in the sand and easily leads to disagreements among feminists (as shown by the ongoing discussion).
To be clear, I don’t believe that feminists that criticize ‘choice feminism’ are wanting to police the choices of women in general at all, but sometimes the way they state the criticism can sound like it (read the comment section of this post to see what I am getting at). They instead want to highlight the disparity of the social influences that push people’s choices down certain paths (mockingbird brought up the example of the woman sacrificing her career as it is not expected of men) that is not fair and should be equalized.
This issue of dealing with ‘choices’ is something I believe have to be dealt with over generations as it is not as simple as educating the public and then large sweeping changes happening with minimal impact. This will be a significant switch in perceptions, in social structures, and in many governmental policies that will take a long time. I do think we should remain aware of it as this is one of the ways the patriarchy has maintained its dominance all the way till now, by saying that ‘women want it this way too’.
Thank you for reading this long post 8p. Just my two cents.
I do think that the quote Mrex posted sums it up well. I’ve seen people try to dismiss criticisms of problematic industries like porn or cosmetic surgery, or problematic beauty standards as shaming. It’s annoying. Stating that for example, cosmetic surgery can be harmful because it can maim and kill, the industry feeds off insecurities of women, and there’s a reason women are the majority of the customers is not the same as saying you’re a traitor to all women if you get a nose job.
That said, discussion of these issues should be limited mostly to the industries and norms. It would be nice to be able to buck patriarchal norms, but not everyone is in a position to do so all the time.
That’s exactly what it’s like. Maybe these Red Pill women are already robots.
In Brazil ripping off your teeth at young age was somewhat common in the 50s. Both my grandmother and her sister did it when in their 20s,and they had perfectly healthy teeth. It was a sign of hygiene.
@EJ
It is quite remarkable how so many STEM geniuses, business tycoons, and med school students have all managed to congregate together on the redpill sub. It’s like a mini Bohemian Grove.
It’s also amazing how they manage to find hours of free time to spend posting 4,000 word manifestos on lifting and how terrible women are. I was always under the impression that becoming a doctor/job creator/inventor/John Galt clone was rather time-consuming.
You’d think, too, that medical school would entail at least a passing familiarity with biology, empathy, and women’s anatomy, and entrepeneurship would require a nodding acquaintance with basic economic concepts and business practices (not to mention basic people skills).
And you might think that, within a
culthate groupphilosophy where bragging, competition, and alphaness are lavishly rewarded, there might be just the tiniest incentive tolieexaggeratecover the lily with liquid gold. But maybe that’s just the blue pill talking.“Free Bird” is an Augustinian paradox which bespeaks the soul liberation undergurding one’s reception into the Catholic Church after baptism. It also represents the glorious feeling of power that red pill women have when they reject feminism and go alpha, pledging to criticize feminism at ever turn.
@ RosaDeLava
In the Stepford Wives movie they do address the issue of children subtly,
******Spoilers**************
When Joanna is in the HQ of the men’s club at the end, we see that the men have been making voice tapes of the children as well. All the wives had voice tapes made before they were murdered, so the implication is the men are preparing to murder and replace all their children as well.