In 2011, after three Cornell alumni of Long Island privilege used said privilege to nurture the success of a website called Betches Love This, which then became more known for its Instagram account called simply Betches, a book release centered on “the brand” ensued. This was in 2013, and it was entitled Nice Is Just A Place in France: How to Win At Basically Everything. With such chapter titles as “Not Keeping Up With the News: How to Pretend to Know What’s Going On When You Have No Fucking Idea” and “How to Manipulate Your Parents Into Thinking They Raised a Normal Child,” it was only natural that “the Betches” should also cover the topic of how women spouting the rhetoric of feminism and equal rights ended up ruining it for every other woman by forcing them out of the “cush job” of being a housewife. Which, if Lucy Ricardo taught us anything, involved a lot of hat-buying, hair-dyeing and hijinks-creating to pass the time. Or, if Betty Draper taught us anything, a lot of “canoodling” with the washing machine during its spin cycle.
If anything, though, it’s Betty Friedan who enlightened us about the true hell behind the “effortlessness” of what it meant to be trapped in a “comfortable concentration camp.” We’ll get back to that in a minute. But first, the Betches’ take on the original housewives who destroyed the possibility of a permanent vacation for all the rest: “[Women] first got their taste of how much work sucks during the world wars, when all the bros went away and there was nothing to do. Fortunately, we went sake bombing with the Japanese, so betches got to take the 50s and 60s off from work, and they went back to chilling hard and hosting Tupperware parties. Some time after that, shit got really weird. Some angry women decided they weren’t happy wearing pearls and heels and went on a major power trip.”
Which brings us back to Betty Friedan and her opus, The Feminine Mystique. Released in 1963, Friedan addressed what she called “the problem that has no name.” Otherwise known as women being expected to willingly and happily self-quarantine into the role of hausfrau. Going about their limited world and restricted geography with the vacuum cleaner that would guide them through the confines of their post-war pod (yes, pod, not pad). Her sole joy being to gab and gossip on the telephone (“analog social distancing,” if you will) for a precious thirty minutes while dragging serenely on her cigarette before turning back to the mind-numbing tasks (none of which included the leisure of binge watching) of her quarantined existence. And yes, like those in the present, about her only “thrill” was going to the grocery store. A real event warranting putting on a “full face,” and the closest thing to social interaction apart from a bridge game here and there with the neighbors (which would, of course, in the current context, be forboden). And then men wondered what these “little women” were depressed about all the time. When they had it so easy. With their sole purpose in life being to “do nothing.” Just be pretty (which is something they definitely did with more skill than those staying at home now). Surely this sounds familiar to all of you being told to “hunker down” for the foreseeable future by the government.
These lonely, increasingly miserable housewives all acted in accordance with the unspoken mandates of their husbands and society at large to “stay home” as well. Much as the Americans in so-called “quarantine” (which will surely heighten to its real definition sooner or later) now, she would do her best to fill the hours alone without going insane. To never ask herself the question, as Friedan phrases it: “Is this all?” Because to ask that question would be to acknowledge that something was truly and horribly wrong, and to acknowledge that meant trying to find a solution to it when already knowing full well there was not one. And, at the moment, is not one. The only viable course of action being to bide one’s time while waiting in self-quarantine.
Alas, when one waits so long locked in a vacancy, they tend to get that warm, fuzzy feeling that comes just before being frozen to death. Frozen, indeed, in a state of complacency that can never again be shaken off. And, as Friedan posited, spread to the youth sprung from the housewife’s loins (at present, the very youth trapped at home with their parent[s] as schools remain shuttered). An aura of slack-jawed surrender posing as “dreaminess,” Friedan saw that “the feminine mystique” was not only spreading to a directionless next generation, but also to the “strong and powerful” men themselves, who were hanging up their monkey suits in favor of a beatnik aesthetic. Noting that “passivity; a weak ego or sense of self; renunciation of active aims, ambitions, interests of one’s own to live through others; retreat from activity directed outward to the world” were all the qualities attributed (primarily by Freud) to the truly feminine female. And now, to the similarly quarantined American of every gender. Friedan further questioned, “What does it mean, this emergence now in American boys as well as girls, of a personality arrested at the level of infantile fantasy and passivity?” Well, perhaps it meant “the man” should have listened to the collective housewife battle cry of suffering (culminating at times by sticking one’s head in the oven) before she spread her lack of purpose and identity to her progeny. Then again, maybe it would not have mattered, only for us all to be reduced to the comatose, numbed out state of the 50s housewife right here in the “future” called the twenty-first century. One might even say this is some sort of karmic retribution from all those since buried Mrs. So and Sos.
At the very least, housewives had two key sweet releases that those in self-quarantine now never will: Seconal and the blithe ability to smoke a real cigarette without the knowledge that they’re giving themselves an underlying condition. And those numbing agents were far more “soothing” than any Netflix series.
