Barefoot and pregnant
It’s been a while since I’ve written about a story on Jeff Wells’ blog, Hollywood Elsewhere, but this one just got me so riled I couldn’t let it pass by. Wells wrote a piece (relatively tame, for him) about how he doesn’t like the way Sasha Grey speaks in The Girlfriend Experience. There’s nothing wrong with the post itself — hell, we all get annoyed by the smallest things about particular films from time to time.
No, what got me irritated was the first comment on the post, in which the writer essentially blames the decline of “standards, manners and civility across the board” on the advent of the two-income family. Read: on women who choose to have careers rather than stay home barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, doing all those things that, you know, women are supposed to do. Because home is our place, right? What’s interesting is that the commenter very carefully avoids using the words “women” and “work” in the comment, but the intent underlying the comment is pretty clear.
Look, I don’t even have that much of an argument with a statement that it’s hard as hell to balance working and parenthood, or that the long hours we tend to work in this country (relative, at least, to many countries in Europe) have led to the neglect of kids who spend all day in school and often the hours before and after in daycare, only to come home and maybe see their parents for maybe an hour or two in between eating, doing a couple hours of homework, and collapsing in bed to start another day. Our kids are overscheduled and overstressed. I agree with that. It’s part of why I choose to have a job that allows me to work mostly from home, and why I choose to homeschool my kids and spend a lot of time with them. I get that part of the argument.
But to put the blame of the general decline of civilization as we know it on the backs of women who work is unfair. I can’t imagine any of my male colleagues being criticized by people they know for the travel their work requires of them, but I’ve sure taken more than my share of that judgment. In Nothing But the Truth, which I review below, Kate Beckinsale’s character faces criticism for her choice to go to jail rather than reveal her source, not because she’s wrong, but because she’s a mother who, it’s perceived, is making the choice to be apart from her son and ruin his young life for the sake of some lofty ideal. Women who work face these criticisms all the time, from their families and friends, their colleagues, from other moms who’ve chosen to leave their careers to be stay-at-home moms.
I did the stay-at-home gig for five years, which was about as long as I could take it. I appreciate women who choose to do that and find it completely fulfilling. I didn’t. And I believe women should be just as free to make the choice to work as men are. It’s not always just about wanting to have two incomes to buy more stuff. My family certainly doesn’t live a more spendy lifestyle because I work; I work for the same reason most of my male colleagues work — because I love what I do, I’m passionate about it, and it feeds my soul in a different way than the part of my life that involves me being a homeschooling mom to my kids does.
I work, also, because I want both my sons and my daughters to know that being a mother doesn’t mean that a woman has to give up everything else about herself. I want my girls to know they have that choice — the choice to stay home with their kids for a little or long while, and the choice to find a way to balance work and family. I want them to have the same choices and opportunities and dreams their brothers have, and I want my sons to grow up believing the women with whom they might someday partner and father children have that choice as well.
I won’t argue with the notion that we’ve gotten to a place, as a society, where we have some fucked-up, materialistic values that hurt both our kids and ourselves. But don’t put all the burden of that on women trying to carve their own place in the world as something more than just being defined as someone’s wife, as someone’s mother. The answer to those problems doesn’t lie in women going “back to their place” as barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen, or in women’s roles as nothing but supporting men and children.
Men and women have to work together to make changes in our overall value system that support both women and men in working and being productive, while still supporting the children we’re trying to raise — emotionally as well as financially. Men shouldn’t have to choose being having careers and having families, and neither should women. We all have to work together to find a greater balance that allows everyone to follow their potential and reach their dreams, and we’re not going to find those answers by blaming women for not being willing to play Father Knows Best anymore.
No one can argue with what you wrote, Kim, but I hope you’ll get into Sasha’s head and the flatness of her voice: The Sleeper Effect, The Girlfriend Experience, From E! to Married, How to Groom, Chew and Recognize Your Saints, Porn if You Say So Sacramento, Growing Up Grey.
That’s like blaming pigs for swine flu (I am not equating women with pigs!)
T. Holly: I give you a now-traditional ‘huh?’
Considering how the way Sasha Grey speaks has JACK BLOODY NOTHING to do with how many parents were either in the home or working during her upbringing, I don’t even see the connection.
And what the hell can you do with the name “Wells” that screws it up in the first place? Do you rhyme it with “else” instead of “tells”? Is he seriously becrying the difficulty of pronouncing a bone-simple name like “Wells”? If you can’t get it right and it’s YOUR OWN NAME, you need to see a speech therapist tomorrow. I’m not kidding.
The woman is a Porn Star and the problem he has with her upbringing is that it led to her speaking style? Now that is a father who only had sons.
I love Soderberg but I don’t like the way that giving Grey an actual acting job legitimizes the porn industry as a route to Hollywood.
True hcat, I kinda think I coulda tolerated being one back when I had the chance, when all ya really needed was a drug habit to get through it. Now ya need enimas, a taste for violence, an eager willingness to be gang banged and a drug-free clear headedness to prove it’s all good and a helluva way to pull down low six figures every year. Soderbergh is three projects ahead, so don’t be bothering him, ok? He’s not even interested in reading the reviews.
I’m sorry, I don’t see it. Oh, I’m sure you do, but I think you want to.
raygo’s (and not Wells, for those who missed the part that this was a COMMENT, not the post itself) point is with no direct, family supervision (hence “parents” which can also include grandparents if you are lucky enough to have them available), then the corrections that help refine children with the thousand such every year go wanting.
But despite his avoidance of which parent should stay home, Voynar magically reads his mind over the ‘net and says he secretly meant women. It’s always nice when sexism cuts both ways.
However, raygo’s contributing factors are crap. The two income household I grew up in in the 70’s & 80’s (his supposed “first wave” of such) was not about “nicer things” but about necessity. A friend just this week was astounded to learn I didn’t see color TV until ’76.
Yet, I somehow managed to grow up knowing how to speak more or less clearly, not carelessly throw film spoilers out there and allow folks to merge in front of me.
Now, if you want something to stew about, I could throw out the fact that the Feminist movement directly led to a skyrocketing divorce rate because it freed MEN to leave by removing the social stigma of leaving your family. Aren’t ironic unintended consequences fun…?
Deathtongue,
You’re being deliberately obtuse here. Here’s what the comment I referred to said:
“There is a general decline in standards, manners, and civility across the board that started when the 2-income household became the norm. Children learn these lessons from “parents” at a very young age. No parents around? You can’t expect minimum wage daycare to give a damn about refining a child’s sensibilities.
How many generations are we into this phenom? Two maybe? It’s discouraging. When both parents decided to work so people could have “nicer” things and not necessities, that was the beginning of the end. The current Wall Street collapse the culmination.”
I don’t have to magically read anyone’s mind to understand exactly what this comment implies, Deathtongue. The phrase “started when the 2-income household became the norm” could hardly mean the advent of MEN going out of the house to work, could it? Because that’s what men have always done, save during WW2 when women had to go into the factories to keep things running while the men were off at war, only to get promptly booted back out, whether they also had families to support or not, as soon as the war was over and the men came home. The “two-income family,” for the most part, means women leaving the home to go to work, thus adding their paycheck to the bacon traditionally brought home by the man. And I think you know this, and are deliberately trying to be contrarian, but whatever.
Then again, you also try to twist the feminist movement around so as to also blame feminist women for men feeling free to leave their families and upping the divorce rate. Personally, I prefer to look at the rise in divorce rate post-feminism as a positive indicator. Post-feminism, more women had the financial means to (more or less) support themselves and their children (even in the absence of tough child support enforcement, which is a relatively new thing) and were (again, more or less) freed from the stigma of being a “divorcee,” and were therefore more willing and able to walk away from the kind of shitty, loveless marriages they would have stayed in three decades earlier no matter how bad it got.
And the kind of man who would leave his family simply because the perceived stigma of leaving was reduced, frankly, probably wouldn’t have been much of a partner and father to begin with.