Get Out of My Elite, Uncaring, Traditional Gender Roles
Jade's Definitive Guide to Living Life (3/n)
“Jade’s Definitive Guide to Living Life” is a new The Strawberry Gazette series where I explain my original, highly-specific theories about how best to live (not just survive, but thrive!)* in a niche facet of life. Today’s edition is on, well, feminism and choosing to be a stay-at-home-parent. Do me a favor: don't write this off as woke before you read it. As always, subscribe for more!
*no affiliation to any political parties whatsoever. this slogan was mine first.
Recently, I half-jokingly responded that my writing is “primarily influenced by the push factor of abject frustration in reaction to something”. It is a sign of the times that the push factor for me to finally write about feminism is a TikTok video.
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When I first watched this video, I was going to send it to a friend, but decided that I wasn't going to bother because it is dissertation season and my paper on Fascism awaits. So I just hit "Not Interested" and moved on. But 3 people (and counting) have sent it to me since, which means that this is gaining some traction, and the truth is I do have something valuable to contribute to the discourse (when do I not), and I’m procrastinating, so Mussolini has been put on pause. Without any further ado:
POFMA-ing Factual Inaccuracies
Firstly, it is completely factually wrong that RGS girls are trained to aspire towards becoming men. The popular girls being netballers or basketballers is not a function of an aspiration towards masculinity, but because of the burgeoning attraction to male-presenting people — ergo, the popularity is largely not emulatory in nature, but based in attraction. To add on to that, it was not remotely shameful to have breasts or present in any feminine way. Even if that was the case, it was at most petty pre-pubescent intragender jealousy (which is common amongst girls that age), and not shame or some radical RGS-specific rejection of femininity.
Which is, by the way, a misguided notion. RGS doesn't teach you to reject femininity, it just teaches you how to utilize it in a way that gets you a truckload of money (note: money, not political power, not feminist liberation). RGS teaches you to capitalize on femininity. RGS's school ethos is Leaning In, Sheryl-Sandberg-style. Therefore, it is actually completely indispensable to the cause that you are "feminine". RGS girls are trained to be pantsuit-wearing, glass-ceiling-breaking, high-heel-wearing girl-bosses. Note: you can’t just be a boss. You always have to be a girl-boss. And when you hit the right ripe age, you are also expected to handle being a girl-boss while also being a mother. Nothing is negotiable. You must have it all. But realistically, balancing both is not possible for most people having neurotic self-worth breakdowns all the time, so RGS girls tend to find more comfort and success in the path of least resistance (careers, because it’s familiar plus they're selection-biased to succeed), especially when it reaps them the aforementioned massive truckloads of money.
But even if they devote themselves to their careers, the expectation for them to be "feminine" is never something that they can escape, which contradicts the very premise of OP’s video. To prove that girl-boss-RGS-feminists cannot escape the expectations of femininity even in the workplace, let me just ask one single question. When was the last time you saw a female CEO with a bare face? Or a lawyer? Or a politician? Or any woman in any corporate position ever, even if it isn’t client-facing?
Of course there is no gun to her head to wear makeup. But she does, anyway. It’s the Goethe quote about how none are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. So, yes, girl-boss feminism is still about reinforcing gender norms and femininity, and RGS culture is not special or radical or even particularly liberatory in its practice of feminism. A fetishized, capitalist-friendly form of feminism (which still reinforces norms of femininity) is the backbone of the RGS curriculum. This is the type of feminism that OP and all her friends with the guilty consciences still subconsciously subscribe to. She’s not wrong. It is problematic. But that doesn’t mean that her solution is right.
Choice Feminism and its Discontents
I want to first set out that OP describes a phenomenon that very much exists. I’m not doubting the veracity of these symptoms that she describes, of the feelings of guilt and the shame of being a SAHM. But while these symptoms are valid, OP erroneously attributes the cause to what sounds like "feminism going too far" or "anti-woke" stuff. The truth? Feminism does not go far enough.
Let us lean into SAHM stigma, acknowledge it, and start critically thinking — why do women feel like they’re wasting their potential by becoming a SAHM? The reason is not RGS/feminist propaganda or brainwashing or whatever. It is because domestic labor and motherhood are valued much less than it should be within our society, as a result of patriarchal pressures. What OP is advocating for is “choice feminism”: the idea that feminism means women having "the freedom to make your own choices in life". Sounds lovely, but true, real, liberatory feminism is much more nuanced than that.
True feminism is about resistance against the patriarchy, and then making your informed choices after gaining consciousness. This is the only way you will be able to make truly free choices. This sounds abstract, so I will illustrate what it means with concrete examples. When your personal choice architecture is tainted by patriarchal pressures, but you’re either not willing or able to recognize it, you're not making a fully free choice. When you, as a woman, put on your MAC lipstick to go to work, or when you shave your pits for a talking stage, or when you tolerate the leering gazes of hamsuplo on the bus, you're not making fully free choices. You’re making choices borne out of a calculation of cost, costs that are disproportionately high due to your identity as a woman. If I show up without makeup to work, they're going to think I don't care enough about my appearance and the job. If I don't shave my pits, Brad is gonna think I'm dirty and he won’t want me, carnally-speaking. If I tell the uncle to stop, he’s going to shout at me. The everyday choice architecture of women is affected by these invisible costs that manifest solely on the basis of their identity as women. You can make smart choices, yes, choices that will may get you want you want in the end - the delicious promotion, the love of the 187-cm ACSI rugby player, a safe bus ride. But your choice architecture is still fundamentally distorted, and ignoring that fact does not make it disappear.
Similarly, the only reason why being a SAHM gives you this feeling of guilt or like you're wasting your potential is because the patriarchal pressures have made it so that it feels like this kind of work below your paygrade. If the occupation of parenthood was valued proportionately within society (thus, higher), then you would never feel like you’re "wasting your potential". For instance, if you valued being a SAHM as much as a job as an investment banker, you would hardly feel like your MIT-trained skills are being put to waste by a job change. To reiterate, the shame around a SAHM is less of a flaw of “over-feminism”, but the fact that our current mainstream paradigm of feminism does not go far enough to acknowledge and eradicate the fact that the labor of domestic work and parenthood is inherently devalued.
The reason for this devaluation is actually pretty simple. It’s because domestic labor and child-rearing is the kind of work done by women that has gone unpaid, uncompensated, and unacknowledged for thousands of years. At that point, the labor doesn’t look like work, it looks like duty. And it looks like the duty of women. What’s that Marriage Story quote again?
“Don’t ever say that. People don’t accept a mother who drinks too much wine and yells at her child and calls him an asshole. I get it. I do it too. We can accept an imperfect Dad. Let’s face it, the idea of a good father was only invented like 30 years ago. Before that fathers were expected to be silent and absent and unreliable and selfish and we can all say that we want them to be different but on some basic level we accept them, we love them for their fallibilities. But people absolutely don’t accept those same failings in mothers.
“We don’t accept it structurally and we don’t accept it spiritually because the basis of our Judeo-Christian Whatever is Mary Mother of Jesus and she’s perfect. She’s a virgin who gives birth, unwaveringly supports her child, and holds his dead body when he’s gone. But the Dad isn’t there. He didn’t even do the fucking because God’s in heaven. God is the father and God didn’t show up so you have to be perfect and Charlie can be a fuck up and it doesn’t matter. You’ll always be held to a different, higher standard and it’s fucked up, but that’s the way it is.”
To show how this is a problem with a societal devaluation of domestic labor rather than blue-hair-feminism-gone-haywire, I’ll give you guys a thought experiment. Picture a high-flying man who realizes that he really wants to raise his kids and see them through their first years of life. I don't think it would be a surprise to himself or the people around him if he was extremely reluctant to quit his job because of the opportunity cost. But we are much more forgiving of a man who hesitates, because we all implicitly devalue domestic labor and the work of parenthood, and also assign it to women. There’s almost a “it’s not his duty to make this sacrifice” vibe. But, to be honest, if we truly believed in equality, that’s not a woman’s duty either. Besides, why is child-rearing even that big of a “sacrifice”? Why does it seem like the opportunity cost is so high for such a specialized, meaningful and precious job — raising your children?
OP’s proposed remedy sweeps the real problems under the rug. Our response cannot be, "Oh yeah let's not shame women for their choices, just let them take the copium and do this work they think is beneath them but repress it cause they have a duty to be a good mom." Real solutions have to get to the root of the issue. We have to actually re-evaluate and re-value domestic labor and parenthood as a society, and treat it as a job that is proportionate to what it is worth (hint: a lot).
To be clear: I'm not saying that women shouldn't be SAHMs. I'm just saying that there is absolutely nothing radical or political or feminist about making the choice to stick to the status quo in society. On the other hand, there is also nothing radical or political or feminist at all about NOT being a SAHM, because then you're just a girl-boss feminist cog in the machine, except the good part is that you have some sort of independent income in case your marriage goes south.
What is radical, political, feminist, and most importantly INTELLIGENT is that when you're making these long-term life choices as a woman, you must must must be cognizant of the fact that there does exist a status quo state of affairs, and your life choices do not exist in a vacuum. Assess: are you becoming a SAHM because you feel the pressure to conform to the norms, or because you genuinely value the occupation of full-time parenthood and find it at least equally rewarding to being whatever your current job is? If you actually believe the latter, then you won't feel the shame or trade-off or guilt, because it is simply a lateral job transition. It's only if you have internalized the patriarchal norm of devaluing the labor of parenthood / if you actually aren't really that willing to be a SAHM, that you begin to see it as some sort of waste of your education or career or potential.
But!!!!!! This is where freedom of choice comes in. You cannot be truly free unless you are fully informed and aware of the pressures involved in your choice architecture. It's like when you write a social science paper and have to announce the biases that may be involved. It is good practice to have the same due diligence of the possible externalities in making your your major life decisions. Basically: choose whatever you want, just do it informed, aware and conscious of your desires.
Of course, the onus of re-valuing domestic work is not just on individual women, but us as a society. To even begin to work towards a truly gender-equal society, we must all start proportionately valuing domestic labor and the work of child-rearing (which is incidentally probably the key to solving the population crisis).
Why, Why, Why, is RGS Relevant?
But the funny thing about OP’s "normalize being a SAHM!!" rhetoric is that being a SAHM is actually…completely normal? For most of history and in fact globally today, being a SAHM is/was the default/only job for women. The subtext of the TikTok, which is the part that irked me, is that OP and all the RGS girls she mentions (though, to be fair to her, inter alia) just don’t think being a SAHM is a normalised occupation for women like them. Domestic labour for thee but not for me.
To spot this, note how in the video, OP drops brand names like RGS and MIT and all sorts of high-powered prestigious careers. Why on earth is this relevant? It's because Singapore values achievement (and very particular kinds of achievement) above everything, which gives those who are able to “win” the system a sense of entitlement and superiority. This issue is no longer about feminism, it's about elitism, which is distinctly genderless (also informs the aforementioned aspiring househusband’s hesitation).
Elitism makes you buy into this strange idea that your labor (which translates into your time, and subsequently your value as a human being) is worth much more than not just that of a standard issue SAHP, but that of the bulk of the people around you. I can sort of see why elitist people may feel this way — if you're a lawyer with thousand-dollar billable hours and you end up changing diapers for a baby, it is much more jarring and resentment-building compared to if you were in some dead-end job that valued you at $10/h. There is a real, numerical, opportunity cost to your hours, and this is a BIG difference.
But while this cost calculation has been hammered into you from birth, you HAVE to unlearn it, and this applies to everyone under a meritocratic system, but particularly parents. Because this very personal practice of calculating how much your time and effort and personhood is worth in dollar amounts, taking into account your elite education and your elite job, gives you an illusion. It creates this mirage that actual meaningful work like parenthood (arguably much more than data analysis or something), is completely beneath you, and you're getting shorted somehow. Elitism, entitlement, discontent, inescapable cycle of samsara etc. But come on, that is obviously a Level-One fallacy and so far from the truth of how you should actually value yourself, the people around you, and the job of parenthood. Entitlement is a slow poison that will sink into you, especially if you make the leap to be a SAHP without thinking it through. The worst part? If you don’t unlearn it, this elitist entitlement will poison your children too, because this “dollar-bill” mindset will damage them beyond repair. These are the personal and societal repercussions of devaluing domestic work and parenthood. These are the true social costs of the patriarchy. Also, beyond personal happiness, elitism bad. Obvi.
Closing Remarks
The biggest cognitive dissonance I want to highlight here is that, contrary to what OP argues, no one thinks femininity is shameful. Not men, not other women, not freaking RGS girls. Femininity is the status quo. While the pressures of femininity may manifest in different forms, whether it is the red-lip-girl-boss or the 50s-Housewife-Küche-Kirche-Kinder situation, at the crux of it there is a clear vision of femininity that women are expected to conform to (which RGS does subscribe to wholeheartedly, for better or for worse).
Because the secret truth is: conforming to femininity feels nice and comforting. On the conservative trad-wife side, you get to stay at home with your kid and revel in your “feminine energy”, whatever that means. You get to “switch off your brain” and “act like a baby” in front of your boyfriend as he navigates Google Maps. You get to do fun things like “bimbo economics” and pretend like you can’t understand simple DD-SS without a Sephora metaphor. On the girl-boss side, it’s all pretty cute too. You get to run the world in shoes you cannot walk in. You get a “Woman in Business Award” and pretend like it is some revolutionary prize that has levelled the playing field when all it does is trap you within your identity as a woman, rather than a person. Of course, the 5-figure monthly salary doesn’t hurt, and who cares if everyone in the office conjectures that you’re either a lonely single woman consumed by work who goes home to your cats or in a marriage where you fight with your husband and never feel satisfied? Why would you choose to victimise yourself? Why face up to the real costs of your choices? Why recognise structural injustices that you can’t change when you can just be blissfully unaware or wilfully in denial?
And because conforming feels so nice and warm and lovely, the pernicious danger here is that both types play a role in proliferating false beliefs that there is some sort of ridiculous widespread "feminist rejection of femininity". Rhetoric like OP’s describes a set of real symptoms (stigma of SAHMs in this case), making it extremely easy to misdiagnose the root issue (as she did with RGS culture). Supporting girl-boss culture (as RGS actually does) is also a similar kind of misdiagnosis, because norms of femininity continue to be reproduced, just dulled by financial compensation and superficial power gains.
But like, genuinely, can we please do better? All these misdiagnoses obfuscate the real problem: the inherent distortions in the everyday choice architectures of women on the basis of their identities. This is Alexis Dang having to decide whether or not to respond to catcallers screaming chiobu at her, putting her womanhood (and the associated standards of beauty) before her personhood. This distortion is clearly a product of the patriarchy, not girl-boss-feminists. To be honest, the latter is a bit of a relic of a bygone-era. Just saying that Obama is certainly not at the helm of global cultural hegemony right now.
As we backslide back into divine-femininity-woo-woo fascist mythos, it is more important than ever to keep a clear head when assessing what the root issues of The Symptoms are. You can’t fix a gaping wound with painkillers and a plaster. You have to dig in deep, disinfect with antibiotics, wrap it with bandages, and wait for it to heal. Sure, it’ll hurt like hell in the moment. Much worse than if you anaesthetize yourself with platitudes. But if you don’t do it, it’ll fester, then pus comes out, and you’ve got a terrible infection, and the only thing that will fix you is getting hit by a bus.
