Imagine this: you’re given the opportunity to spend a thousand dollars on anything you want. The options are completely open. Do you pack your house with necessary and unnecessary objects, knowing the money will go to things like washing machines and dinette sets, or do you blow the money on a once-in-a-lifetime experience? A trip abroad, meals at fine restaurants, a weekend away at a really nice hotel?
If you pick the latter, at least according to one author at Slate, you’re a raging sexist.
That’s right, choosing experiences over stuff is just yet another way the wider world exhibits the latent, oppressive trappings of patriarchy. The trend of choosing to spend disposable income (or really any money) on meals, trips, hotels and special events is the newest way that male privilege rears its ugly head in society.
Now, obviously, the concepts of “taking to the woods” or “surfing the open road” aren’t new—they’ve driven humans in almost every era—but apparently, when modern men and women decide to set out to pepper a road trip with Guy Fieri-approved diners, drive-ins and dives, they are deliberately quashing that work of female genius known as “home decorating.”
The author, who is riffing on several other works from places like New Republic, accuses those who would live with less of denying the fact that women have always made a habit of creating good homes, picking out nice furniture, and embracing domestic bliss as the high sacrament of femininity. To encourage anyone to scale back on their belongings and pursue experiences instead, she says, is to encourage them to be masculine; women like stuff, so if you tell them to have less of it, you’re sexist.
She almost sounds like a sitcom housewife penned by Donna Reed.
But do women really prefer ‘”stuff”? Studies have shown that women do perform most of the household spending, but also because society—perhaps in a truly sexist way—expects them to be responsible for domestic chores. In fact, a great number of feminists would probably take issue with the idea that women should be directly associated with domesticity. Certainly, they’ve been doing the lion’s share of the cooking and cleaning, but according to feminism (and probably most women), not willingly.
It also seems inordinately sexist to say that women wouldn’t want to trade clutter for a nice vacation or dinner prepared by a great chef. Is eating, relaxing or driving really an activity associated with a single gender? What if the experience was wine-tasting or shoe shopping? Would it still be a masculine event—or does the stereotypical association to the feminine make it less sexist of an experience?
The only evidence the author has that experiences are masculine is that “some men who are famous have them.” She points to Henry David Thoreau as an example of experiential living, and Jack Kerouac and Anthony Bourdain. She seems to forget Julia Child, who traveled the world before experiencing the joys of French cooking, and Ann Bancroft and Amelia Earhart. For every Walden Pond, there’s a Wild. Sure, frat boys might take more road trips, but if Britney Spears has truly taught us anything, young women at a Crossroads can benefit from open highways and roadside attractions.
There is, of course, something to be said for prioritizing a mortgage, a working microwave and a couple of pets over an expensive vacation. Millennials are increasingly hesitant to pursue quiet life, and they’re less likely to think that marriage, home and family can lead to self-fulfillment. But typically, those arguments—that the nuclear family, a house in the suburbs and a white picket fence might bring happiness and peace—are seen as sexist, backwards visions of a life before birth control and the vacuum cleaner.
The good news, though, is that feminists will probably make you feel bad whichever choice you make—so at least you can choose for yourself.
