Tom’s Big Picture

Since I’ve become a parent, one of my favorite stores to visit is Pottery Barn Kids.  While the merchandise is largely Chinese-made (but so is Ethan Allen these days!), the aesthetic of the children’s rooms, toys and furniture reminds me of a more innocent time for children, made all the more relevant when you consider the prevalence of slutty clothes for 3rd graders in every Wal-mart and JC Penney’s.

Now, PBK is NOT cheap, esp. when you consider you’re buying for kids.  When visiting their store in Houston, you can’t help but notice all of the pretty moms with pretty kids looking around the store.  What interests me the most are the toys they have for little girls: of course, the standard dollhouses and stuffed animals, but most interesting are the little pink ironing boards, pink play irons, pink dishwashers, pink kitchen appliances and pink refrigerators.  Not only are they pink, they are done in a 1950’s aesthetic, harkening back to the days before feminism:

These toys are pretty much exclusively on the “little girl” side of the fully sex-segregated store.  The “little boy” side has toys like airplanes, antique cars, fighting dinosaurs, and huge castles with working catapults. 

Think of how enraging this must be to the ardent feminist.  For fifty years, they have worked to deconstruct gender rules, to rebel against the order of nature, and convince women that their natural roles in the home are inherently oppressive and exploitive.

And now, in 2007, upper crust mommies are buying their little girls toys that demonstrate gender roles to them that are entirely inconsistent with the feminist worldview, in an aesthetic (retro 1950’s style) that is patently offensive to the feminist narrative. 

The feminists said that the 1950’s housewife, largely liberated from the labor of her mother by labor saving devices like the dishwasher, confident in her status as the heart of the home, was actually being exploited by her husband and society at large.  What the housewife really needed, according to the feminists, was to go to work in a cubicle somewhere in Corporate America, where she could find true fulfillment in a spreadsheet instead of in the lives of her children.

And this is why feminism is dead: it is a lie.  Most corporate jobs are not glamorous, they are tedious, boring, and dehumanizing; they cannot compare to motherhood.  It took women a generation to figure out the lie (I think they figured it out pretty quick myself, but were guilted into staying in the workforce longer by the relatively few hardcore feminist enforcers).

But now the damage has been done.  The increase in the labor pool lowered wages for male breadwinners, and globalism and outsourcing has further weakened the ability of most families to survive on one income.  Women were convinced by a lie to join the workforce, and now many, even if they realize the lie, cannot now escape, thus doubling the guilt of the feminists in their deception.  Having harmed women by convincing them of the non-existent “fulfillment” of a career, they closed the exits and women cannot go back.

Thus, in a roundabout twist, the “stay at home” mom is now a status symbol, an indication (except in cases of uncommon frugality) that the male breadwinner has sufficient income to provide a middle class lifestyle on one salary; this is especially true in cities where the cost of living is higher.  And the mommies are as uniformly pretty as their husbands are in earning power.

And why do these mommies buy their little girls gender-specific anti-feminist toys at Pottery Barn Kids?  Simple: they are training them for their future role as a middle class stay at home mommy, and inoculating them against the downward social mobility associated with the feminist outlook on life. 

Just another lesson in the undeniability of God and Nature in human affairs.  Everything will eventually seek its own level- and as a wise man once said, a woman’s primary role ever was and ever will be as mothers and “keepers of home”.