How To Force Women Back Into the Kitchen In 5 Obvious Steps
This is happening. Pay attention.
I once witnessed an intoxicated man stand next to the hot bar at a Gelson’s and lustily feed himself using his hands like they were ladles. The noises that he was making as he gulped down mittsful of cream of chicken were orgasm-adjacent and quite loud. He didn’t even try to be sneaky about it.
I didn’t intervene. Are you kidding? A guy crazy enough to eat soup from a hot bar with his hands was definitely crazy enough to stab me with a plastic knife. A small crowd gathered a cautious distance from him and watched. I think, in addition to the mental “hm, too dangerous” calculations I’d done, we also were all trying to process what we were witnessing. It was so blatantly strange, so obviously against the rules, and so confusing. How was he not burning his hands? Was the soup, like, not hot? Where are the store employees? What’s stopping any of us from practically cumming in our pants as we feast on the hot bar like we’re at a Medieval Times?
That’s what’s happening in America right now. You might think that Elon Musk is the crazy hand-soup man in this analogy; you’d be wrong. It’s all of them. They’re all fucking off their rockers. They’re all weird. I would wait for the next elevator if the doors opened and Russ Vought was standing there. I would not sit next to Donald Trump on an airplane. I would shield my three-year-old from the ghoulish plastic surgery playground that is Lara Trump’s face. I would cross the street to avoid Peter Thiel. They are all the soup-man.
There are rules. The president and his goons simply are not following them. And we’re all standing there looking at each other like “Uh, is anybody going to do something about this? Where are the employees?”
I’m so tired of politics. Everybody is so fucking tired of politics. The American right is hoping that enough people are tired of politics that they’ll be able to brute force though a bloodless coup. It will be the first revolution brought about entirely by one side being relentlessly annoying and the other side being like, ugh fine, have whatever you want, just shut the fuck up about it please, I have a migraine.
I’ve given up being angry at Trump voters; overall, they’re bitter losers, evil cultists, or terminally online ketamine-fueled tech dipshits and I’m not going to do the liberal media thing where I condescendingly pretend that they’re good people deep down inside. They’re not. They’re actually not. But since their only purpose for existing is getting off on triggering the libs, I try not to think about them much. I don’t care about them; they can spitefully pack their colons with red meat and poison their entire families with gas stoves and guzzle lead pipe water in defiance of Woke for all I care.
But I am angry at the people who, at this moment, are still pretending that there’s no guy standing there eating soup with his hands. That the soup will be fine. That we’ll all be able to get some soup after he’s done doing whatever it is he’s doing. I’m fucking pissed at the sleepwalkers.
The American right is trying to blatantly steal decades of social progress. This is happening right now. It is happening right in front of us.
If you are a woman or if you have daughters or you are one of those elusive straight white men who cares about the human rights of people who are not also straight white men, pay attention. They are trying to recreate a version of the 1950’s that only ever existed in ads for dream kitchens. (Actual 1950’s housewives, for the most part, were not having a good time.)
The ultimate goal of the American right is to make it so that the only way that women can fully participate in society is by linking herself to a man, and that, once linked to a man, she drowns in motherhood, disappears from her career and from existing in public apart from her husband and children. (Deleting the economic participation of women from the economy will, long-term, be pretty devastating, but I’m not sure that the American right, in its aim to turn America into a sort of Christofascist Disneyland minus the walkability, has played the tape that far forward.)
They are trying to shove us back into the kitchen and deadbolt the door behind us.
So, what stands in between the American right and their goals?
First, female education. Young women are out performing young men at nearly all levels of schooling in the US. In 2021, more than 3 million more women than men enrolled in college. According to Pew, in 2024, 47% of women between 25 and 34 have bachelors degrees, compared to 37% of men. This gap exists across all racial and ethnic groups. In some categories, young women earn more than their male counterparts.
If what you want is a Leave it to Beaver-ass society where everybody has loads of babies, this is a problem. It means that marriage, for young people, is increasingly and obviously an arrangement that benefits men at the expense of women. In a society where women are more educated and earn more than men, marriage gives men the benefit of having a partner who does the lion’s share of domestic labor and 100% of the biological labor of gestating and birthing children, while it gives women another person to do laundry for who can go halfsies on DoorDash from time to time. Plus, educated women the world over have fewer children. So even young American women who are able to find suitable partners are going to have fewer children and are economically empowered to leave their marriages if things don’t work out.
The solution: make it more difficult for young women to obtain an education. Pay attention to what they’re doing to the Department of Education. Pay attention to the way that they’re trying to devalue college degrees, and digging in their heels when it comes to student loan forgiveness. Pay attention to their targeting of “DEI.” Women from all ethnic groups benefit from pushes for diversity in public institutions; nobody has benefitted from these programs more than white women. All of their efforts around making college less valuable and less affordable are attempts to make it more difficult for young women to choose to survive on their own. Yes, even white women. Perhaps, given the demonstrated racial preference of an American society through MAGA colored glasses, especially white women.
Another issue standing between the American right and its goal of getting women back home: the fact that a lot of women have pesky jobs! And that if they do have children, they have a federally protected right, in some cases, to take unpaid leave from work to care for their baby. (Our federal parental leave program is pathetic, but it’s not absolutely nothing.) The EEOC also protects mothers’ right to have time and space to pump breastmilk after returning to work. And, if a woman believes she was fired or mistreated because of her status, she can bring her employer to court. Or, rather, she could.
Solution number one: make it harder for women to have jobs. Pay attention to what they’re doing to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. This is the entity that would pursue employers caught discriminating against people in protected classes– like sex, race, gender identity, etc. This should set off alarm bells for anybody in any of those classes, or related to somebody in those classes, or who cares about nondiscrimination in the workforce. People are sleepwalking through their lives as though everything is just as it was two months ago. The other week, I saw somebody on Reddit mulling suing their employer for pregnancy discrimination. As though none of this was happening.
Solution number two: Make it so difficult and punishing to have children that women are forced to choose one or the other. And tell women that not choosing to have children will lead them to a life of sadness and regret.
Pay attention to how Republicans have had the opportunity to extend the child tax credit, but declined to do so.
Pay attention to how they have been slowly choking the public school system, making schooling outside of the home so dangerous and subpar that homeschooling is now an option that more women are considering. Pay attention to how crunchy MAHA voices are scaring mothers into believing that school vaccine mandates are worth quitting your job to avoid. (Guess who is the teacher at a homeschool? Probably not a woman with a job!)
Pay attention to how low on the priority list affordable child care is for GOP lawmakers. A few years back, lawmakers in deep-red Utah refused to address the state’s childcare shortage because they could not get the support of the most conservative lawmakers, who think that day care shouldn’t exist because mothers should be the ones staying home with their children.
Pay attention to how they’re going after remote work. Remote or flexible work is a godsend for parents. Especially primary parents– which usually means mothers. Having flexible work gives parents the chance to do things like drop off and pick up from school or day care. It allows them to spend a little bit of time with their kids in the mornings or evenings– time they’d normally be wasting on a commute. Return-to-office mandates means that parents who had figured out a way to patchwork together a system that works will need to figure out a solution– longer hours at day care, with a nanny, or home alone for a few hours. More cost, less quality time. Right wingers are pushing for return-to-office mandates for federal employees with a cruel enthusiasm normally reserved for calling AOC a stupid bitch.
Third issue: some women, given all this, may choose to have fewer, if any children.
The solution: Make it a lot more difficult to not be pregnant. They’ve been trying this one for the last 50 years, and it’s really ramped up since 2022, when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and red states got to maiming pregnant women just as quickly as they could. Pay attention to how they’re trying to re-characterize many forms of birth control as abortifacients so that they’re easier to regulate. Pay attention how some states have already declared that abortion drugs– which are also used for other purposes like stopping post-birth hemorrhaging– are being declared “controlled substances.” Pay attention to how the Comstock Act, a formerly obscure law from the 1800’s made by a certified dork who was terrified of sex, is being used to restrict access to hormonal birth control. Pay attention to how suddenly there seems to be a lot of discussion out there about how birth control is Bad for Women, actually. Pay attention to how, even when faced with evidence that there is, medically, no difference between an elective abortion and an abortion to save the life of a mother, the right wing will insist that actually they’re totally different. Pay attention to the female anatomy fanfiction that the right is attempting to use to overwrite the medical reality of our bodies.
I don’t need to belabor this point. I’ve basically been spending my entire writing career warning people that this would happen, and it’s happening, and if people are still too dense to listen, well, then I guess there’s no getting through to them. (For more coverage of Republican attacks on reproductive health care, please do follow Jessica Valenti’s Substack “Abortion, Every Day.”)
Fourth issue: women are choosing not to get married at all, or to get divorce. Due to the large number of aforementioned suboptimal partners and guys who cosplay as decent people before turning awful in the context of marriage, something around 3/4 of divorces in the US are filed by women. (I suspect that this also has to do with the fact that women in marriages where they do the larger share of domestic labor are often the ones who handle a lot of the secretarial and paperwork-related tasks, and so the duty falls to them just like signing a field trip permission slip or helping out with a book report.)
This one’s easy. The solution is obviously to make divorce more difficult to obtain, and punish women who are able to get divorces granted by limiting or eliminating spousal support.
Several states have introduced bills that would eliminate no-fault divorce. If no-fault divorce were to be eliminated, it would mean that couples looking to legally break up would need to prove misconduct by one party. One fun fact about no-fault divorce is that states that legalized it saw about a 20% drop in female suicide rates in the immediate aftermath.
In 2023, wee little Florida governor Ron De Santis eliminated permanent alimony, upsetting a lot of divorced Republican women who had their income stream cut off as a result of the measure. If something like this were to be enacted nationally, it would, again, punish women most likely to vote Republican the most— traditional women who stayed home to raise their kids in lieu of building a career outside of the home.
Clearly, the solution to women choosing to have children outside of marriage is to punish those women. Make it almost impossible, both financially and socially.
Pay attention to what they’re doing to programs that disproportionately benefit unmarried mothers. WIC. Food stamps. Medicaid. More than 40% of births in the US are paid for by Medicaid. Gutting it means that motherhood would be impossible without either the support of a second income (a man) or ditching the kid. And on that note– an unmarried pregnant woman can always just give the baby up for adoption.
[That word “just” is tossed around by the pro-life set like a fistful of pennies found in between the couch cushions. Just give the child up for adoption. Just go through an entire pregnancy, suffer the pain and injury of childbirth, and then… just. Surrendering a child for adoption is, by many accounts, traumatic for both the birth mother and the baby. But luckily, many weird American churches, including the one that Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett belongs to, emphasize adoption. So the kid its mother couldn’t afford will probably end up in a megachurch where it belongs.]
Pay attention to what Trump isn’t doing for IVF, despite the fact that in a desperate moment during the 2024 campaign, he declared himself the “father of IVF” and promised that the federal government would pay for it if he was elected. There’s been no executive order. No bill introduced in Congress. IVF has made it possible for women to choose to become mothers without a man in the picture, it’s helped same-sex couples and women who put off childbearing until later in their reproductive years— all groups that the American Christofascist right would like to see punished. But it also benefits infertile couples of all political ideologies. Then again, the MAGA set has never been opposed to cutting off its own head to spite its face.
It’s not just AI-aided executive orders and DOGE-helmed ketamine fueled declarations that should be setting off all the alarm bells. Beware the choreographed cultural shift. For the next several years, we are going to see the fruition of plans that a lot of people have spent a lot of time planning.
Pay attention to the way that far right figures try to flex soft power. Pay attention to the rebrand of the housewife from the disheveled, harried wine mom to the smizing soft-focus long-necked influencer who has time to braid her children’s hair and do a whole skin care routine every night. The high-earning single woman without children who lives on her own and fills her days with whatever she wants is no longer aspirational; she’s a sad “childless cat lady.” The woman with a career that excites her is not a role model, she’s now a pathetic cautionary tale about the folly of neglecting your precious babies during the most important time in their lives.
We cannot let them get away with this. We cannot let them bamboozle us into believing that the thing they’re stealing from us, right in front of us, shouldn’t have been something we even wanted in the first place.
You’re not crazy. I’m not crazy. We are, in fact, seeing what we’re seeing. A guy is using his hands like ladles to eat hot soup.
YESSSSSSSSS