Should we blame “Mad Men” for this?
This is annoying. An article on “Brokelyn” about “How to Survive as a SAHG (Stay-at-Home-Girlfriend.” The author lost her job shortly after moving in with her boyfriend, and her article — illustrated with a woman in a French maid outfit vacuuming while daydreaming about martinis — is a retro riff on the joys of staying home cleaning and cooking for one’s man.
The annoying bit is that the article is actually really good advice for a person who is in the difficult situation of being unemployed and living with someone who isn’t. It’s advice men and women, straights and gays, could use. Or, for that matter, people who have had to move back in with their parents. (Except for the part about having lots of sex with the person who’s putting a roof over your head.) The author suggests getting up when the employed person does, which keeps you on a regular schedule and reduces the other person’s resentment; take good care of yourself physically; get out of the house at least once a day; make a contribution such as cleaning the house or cooking; make physical pleasure a priority in your relationship.
This is great advice. It’s hard to be provided for. It’s hard to be the provider. Straight up, it’s hard for relationships between adults to be unequal.
So why couch this good advice in such “oooh I’m so daring by being a 50s housewife” language?
Is it because a straightforward article on how to cope with unemployment and the relationship strains it inevitably produces just isn’t sexy enough? Not edgy?
I mean, French maids’ outfits and martinis. Oooh la la.
I don’t even think it’s sexism that’s underlying this. Sure, sexism gives this article its shape. But I think, deep down, it’s pure economic terror. Unemployment is fun if you can say breezily, “The thing is, even though I?ve gotten the whole domestic thing down to a science, the idea of being an actual housewife is not at all appealing. I still fully intend to have a career of my own. Until I land that new job, I?m doing the best job I can as a stay-at-home girlfriend.”
But what if it’s not a fun, erotic power game any more?
What if you never find another job?
If we can pretend it’s all a game, it will go away. Playing house until the next $70K gig lands in our lap.
When it gets real — when your boyfriend wakes up in the night wondering if he still loves you, or merely feels obligated to support you until you get back on your feet; when your contribution isn’t fixing martinis and meals from the Whole Foods deli section for your hot boo, but cleaning out your mother’s sewing room; when the friends who used to so happily give you manicures start to smell that whiff of desperation that comes out of your pores — that’s not so very much fun.
The hell with the sexism. I started writing this post because that part made me angry. The more I think about it, the more I think the article’s worst sin is in the way it whistles past the cemetery.
For some people, unemployment means something other than a chance to engage in regressive fantasies.
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Brava. I’d also add (as someone said to me on Twitter) that if she does get another job, her boyfriend is still going to expect this kind of treatment. So, you know, good luck “having it all.”
Powerful and important post, Robin. I’ve been seeing and hearing of examples of people who thought they were unemployed for just a while. My current babysitter is my age and lost her job as a project manager a few years ago when people who thought they could have middle-management jobs starting losing theirs. She still thinks the job loss is temporary and leaves one day a week free for job hunting, but is also really pragmatic; enjoys kids and the schedule is convenient since she has teenagers at home. I pay her by writing checks to American Express or Card Services or whichever account of hers is coming due. A fellow professor mentioned that her husband is also a stay-at-home Dad (like mine). He became unemployed years ago and after fruitless job searching they pragmatically decided that he should take care of the kids, freeing up the wife so focus on her career. But how are these people feeling? In these cases its obviously not a french maid game.
My issue with the sexism is the same as the issue with her cluelessness about the economic reality (and I totally agree with you there): She can’t conceive of this as anything other than temporary. When I read about contemporary middle-class women’s Betty Draper fantasies, and see them pooh-poohing feminists as spoilsports who deprived a generation of the knowledge that cooking/cleaning/childrearing/sewing/whatevs can be FUN!!!, I just want to shake them. Like, you do get that women like you used to do this shit because they HAD TO, because they couldn’t get their own credit or own their own property, and in many cases the social pressure not to work was as fierce as the social pressure not to divorce even an abusive spouse, ET FUCKING CETERA, right? You do know they weren’t just playing house?
I can’t quite put my finger on what bugs me, beyond the implied sexism, but I think it has something to do with the whole thing being, apparently, in the SAHG’s mind.
When I have lived in financially or temporally unbalanced situations, we’ve always sat down and talked about what each of are responsibilities, duties, privileges and rights would be. Just stepping into a bunch of behaviors based on assumptions about what the other person wants is never a good way to meet his or her needs. And just assuming s/he’ll give you what you want in exchange is just stupid (at least if you want your needs met); someone has to pay for those afternoons of boozing she so blithely appears to be taking and that’s the kind of thing that can really build resentment if it’s not an agreed upon part of the package. The general advice is good, but if may or may not supply what the boyfriend (or parents, or best friend who lets you live in her spare room, or whatever) wants out of the exchange.
Also, I have to wonder how serious she is about job hunting; last time I did it it was close to a full-time job. Maybe this is less a “how to cope with a bad situation” and more “actually, I want to be a stay at home wife and I’ve tricked him into it”.
Historical costumer’s note: not a French maid outfit (which would also have a cute little cap and ruffles, at the very least)! What the illo shows is an updated version of June Cleaver’s polyester housework dress and pearls. I find this even more depressing: not even the frisson of roleplaying Victorian pornography.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Lesley Kinzel, drst, Awl, Miss Boyechko, KofC and others. KofC said: follow-up to my prior tweet RT @52stations A spot-on response to that stay-at-home weirdness, from @robinabrahams: http://bit.ly/gw75if [...]
“For some people, unemployment means something other than a chance to engage in regressive fantasies.”
This.
(Also,that SAHG article made me go immediately to http://www.theboxcarkids.net/wordpress/ for the anti-venom. Quite a different take on being an unemployed woman in these times!)
Shulamuth, welcome back! It’s been a while.
As lots of people have said, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with playing housewife while doing a full time job search, or actually being one if that’s what you want to do. The part that got to me that she implies that she’s selling herself in a way – she says a couple of times that she _has_ to keep him happy for financial reasons. You should want to keep your partner happy because it makes them happy. You should want to avoid making them feel taken advantage of because you don’t want them to feel that way. You shouldn’t be desperately aping an old stereotype (and making yourself have sex with them every night, interested or not!), to keep their financial support.
What Risha said.
AND–except for the boozy lunches, the writer doesn’t really talk about doing anything to keep _herself_ happy. She cleans for him; she’s up for sex whenever he is (and wears cut-offs and tank tops so he’ll continue to be up for it); she mixes his cocktail every night. She says she enjoys cooking, but frames it in terms of how much her boyfriend likes coming home to the meal. Even the boozy lunches keep her from driving her boyfriend crazy by needing too much conversation from him when he gets home.
I see a different fear behind this article: not fear of never getting another job and being stuck in this role forever, but of losing the boyfriend and her material support, and having her period of unemployment get _really_ hard. It’s as though, without the job she used to have, she has no faith in herself as a person her boyfriend would want to stay with.
The part that got to me that she implies that she’s selling herself in a way – she says a couple of times that she _has_ to keep him happy for financial reasons. You should want to keep your partner happy because it makes them happy. You should want to avoid making them feel taken advantage of because you don’t want them to feel that way. You shouldn’t be desperately aping an old stereotype (and making yourself have sex with them every night, interested or not!), to keep their financial support.
That bothered me too–the bit about there being no reason for her to not have sex, especially. Um, you’re allowed to just not want to, for any reason or no reason.
I see a different fear behind this article: not fear of never getting another job and being stuck in this role forever, but of losing the boyfriend and her material support, and having her period of unemployment get _really_ hard. It’s as though, without the job she used to have, she has no faith in herself as a person her boyfriend would want to stay with.
I got that impression too, since so much of her focus is on her role as “his girlfriend” rather than her as her own person and what she’s doing to keep herself sane.
“Whistling past the cemetery” is right. The economy isn’t a “woman’s issue,” it’s a slow-motion human tragedy. I found Ms. Stokes article regressive and depressing. It had a “Latin American” feel to it. The fact is, she’s trapped. She’s a bright young woman who ought to be able to find employment in a good job at a wage sufficient to support herself. But she can’t. And so she writes an article rationalizing her situation, illustrated with pictures of her vacuuming and dreaming of martinis.
Grim.