Really stretching to find a way to bash feminism

Dahlia Lithwick really stretches hard to explain why the train wreck programs "Trading Spouses" and "Wife Swap" are popular--um, it has something to do with how women are relieved of their feminist responsibilities or something. Screw it, let's get to fisking.

If network television could invent the consummate porn for women, it would probably feature a gorgeous prince on a white horse with a bouquet of roses tucked under one arm, a fabulous Los Angeles hair-colorist tucked under the other, and whatever appliance it takes to fix the damn garbage disposal wedged into the back pocket of his Levi's.

Mine would still have sex in it, but then again, that's me.

Female fantasy, particularly in the post-feminist era, is a complicated blend of escapism and pragmatism. We're not so much interested in ditching our lives as we are committed to living them—but perfectly. There's a whole Real Simple Industrial Complex devoted to helping us achieve this goal, and most of us believe we may actually get there.

I was under the impression that stuff was mostly just guilt trips aimed at women who are pulled between cultural messages about how they need to be perfect wives and their own desires. But all this time, I secretly wanted to have the ideal, magazine-looking home that barely masks the seething resentments of the people inside it. Okay.

Having learned the hard way that women just can't have perfect homes, kids, and jobs, we're offered a chance to escape our own impossible choices, and an opportunity to completely remodel someone else's. None of us, it turns out, can decide if we want to be Laura Bush or Teresa Heinz Kerry, but Wife Swap lets us at least try out both. Happily, women utterly failing to "have it all" with their own families, then switching lives with other women who have failed as well, makes for fabulous theater.

Well, most us know that we damn well don't want to be killed and replaced with a robot, so I would say that Laura Bush isn't really the role model Lithwick thinks. But I'm still unsure why not "having it all", aka having the things that men expect in life, is so impossible for women. Could it be that they don't have wives to take care of their house and children for them?

The husbands in Wife Swap and Trading Spouses are almost universally caught sitting on couches, looking expectant. They rarely step up to show their new "wives" the ropes, or suggest any sort of household partnership. It's not because these men are lazy.

Wanna bet?

It's simply that how households run is still somehow primarily the province of women.

Which has nothing of course to do with power inequities that allow men to be lazy because women do all the household chores, I'm sure.

As a study released in September by the Bureau of Labor Statistics revealed, men are either congenitally unable to help out around the home, or women are congenitally unable to let them: Women still do an hour more housework a day than men do.

If you're gonna argue that it's congenital, admit that it's just congenital laziness. Of course it is. Both men and women are born lazy, but women just suffer more shame for it.

Whether we will be a "neat" family, a "rules" family, a "fun" family, or a "takeout food" family, still depends mainly on mom's choices. Because husbands and fathers just don't have six movies screening simultaneously in their heads telling them what they ought to be, as women do. (One can't quite shake the feeling that if this were Husband Swap the dramatic apogee might come at Day 5: In Which the Big Chair in Front of the TV Is Shifted Infinitesimally.)

Ah, it's just so cute the way men don't suffer under stifling social expectations to run a perfect home with a perfect family! Don't you just want to pinch their cheeks!

But since Wife Swap and Trading Spouses focus on how each mom performs on the cooking/cleaning/childcare front, it's no surprise the stay-at-home moms look like wizards, while the working (or shopping) moms bumble around like Abbott and Costello. This is, of course, hilarious, but it ignores the fact that most women work because they have to.

Of course, if women didn't have to work and therefore the only working women were selfish, then we could all laugh and laugh without worry.

Lithwick then winds the whole thing up with some sentimental blooey about how women can learn from each other, as if the problem is that women don't already know each other and how their lives are and not that women are living in a world where they are held up to be failures as women no matter what they do. Which, no matter how you slice it, it a cultural habit this show employs by facing "good" but boring moms against "bad" moms that make mockery of real women's desires to have their own lives even though they have children.

So why are these shows popular? For the same reason that any reality show is popular--it gives the audience a chance to feel superior for a half hour or so. You can say to yourself, well I may not be the best mom but at least I see my kids once in awhile. Or my husband may not pull his weight, but at least he does a chore or two, unlike this woman's husband. Women still want to have a better life, but in the meantime we're human and we're open to laughing and someone else more screwed up than we are.