Chapter 15 #2
“What’s up?” replied Arya, turning away from the grades he was inputting on his laptop.
(Also pulled up on his laptop screen was a playlist called Grading Vibes, which had previously made Sloane wonder aloud how many different vibes he had.
He’d given her a sly look that sent her attention briefly to his mouth.
He was, he informed her, a man of many vibes.)
“What do you think about mommy bloggers?” asked Sloane.
“Love ’em,” said Arya instantly. “Why, thinking of starting one?”
“No, I—” Sloane stared hard into the distance, trying to accommodate a sudden onslaught of unarticulated thought.
“I feel like there’s … something to it.” She was mentally arranging the many, many accounts she’d scrolled on VidStar as she breastfed Isla in the early days, fighting to stay awake at 3 A.M. “Have you heard of crunchy moms?”
“Crunchy? Like they’re edible?”
Sloane flapped a hand, swiping left on his knowingly dumb joke.
“There’s crunchy, or maybe I’m thinking of scrunchy.
” She couldn’t remember which—it had never mattered to her before.
“Whichever one means, like, not a total hippie but not totally anal. Someone who uses gentle parenting techniques but also, I don’t know, fosters independence—”
“I know gentle parenting was kind of a hot social movement a few years ago.” Right, Sloane recalled—Arya’s dissertation on post-9/11 cultural responses to patriotism relied on observing generational trends.
Arya twisted around in his seat to look at her then, a thoughtful expression crossing his face.
“My mom thinks it’s stupid and making us all soft.
And I mean, it’s definitely problematic, though not for the reasons my mom thinks, but still.
Not surprising that gentle parenting coincides with trad wife stuff, considering that it basically requires the mother to stay home with the children. ”
“Trad wife.” Sloane could practically hear herself delivering it in a presentation: Women who believe in, and practice—as in religion—traditional sex roles.
“Like this one?” On Sloane’s screen, as if she’d been summoned by magic, a young woman no older than twenty-five was once again baking a loaf of bread to pair with her home-cured prosciutto, beside which sat a bloodred apothecary jar of freshly decanted wine.
It was, of course, The Country Wife.
Caroline Collins plaited her long hair, dressed in a linen shift that made her waist unavoidably envious, referred to her husband as Dear Husband, and—now that Sloane knew that her maiden name was Pang and that she’d graduated from this University rather than, say, growing up in a fairy commune—seemed, in context, an entirely different person from the one Sloane had watched so many times before.
“Yeah,” said Arya, who’d come around his desk to look at Sloane’s screen.
“I wish I knew less about this, truthfully,” he said with a grimace, “but my cousin Jas talks nonstop about this shit. She thinks it’s setting feminism back at least a century and that homeschooling is—” He paused to get the wording right.
“Something about ‘unsubscribing from community’ and also, inevitably, fascism.”
Sloane looked up to regard his expression of resigned ambivalence. “What?” said Arya, meeting Sloane’s glance with a candor that made her cheeks heat. “She’s not wrong. She just also doesn’t have an off switch.”
“Does your family sit down regularly for these kinds of sociological accords?”
Arya shrugged. “She and my mom rile each other up. It’s a love language.”
“I bet.” Having looked away from him by then, for survival reasons, Sloane’s mind was back on its track to something she still hadn’t named.
“So is it inherently problematic, do you think?” she asked, scrolling through The Country Wife’s recent content as if she hadn’t already seen it all.
Sloane wondered, for the first time, not how long it took to collect vampiric apothecary jars, but to gain the editing skills to create this sort of viral content—to make a living full-time on something you had to pretend wasn’t a job.
Money, definitely, lots of it, and there was no way this girl had children, but how much longer could she hypothetically Madonna without them before she became a Whore?
“I mean, it’s a pendulum swing,” Arya pointed out. “Ten years ago, everything was you go, girlboss. Then the wellness bubble faltered. Maybe the girlbosses got tired of having to have it all, you know? Maybe they decided to have one thing with the volume turned all the way up.”
Sloane thought back to what Alex said about ambition. About hunger. About the loss of aspiration, the desire for tradition that was quietly synonymous with oppression.
Just how dangerous was it to drool over the aesthetic of a wife?
Because it was true, even Sloane couldn’t honestly resist it. Whether she consumed this content ironically or with intent to hate-watch, she was still a view. She contributed to the virality, and therefore who was she to say it wasn’t valid?
Sloane tried to imagine her daughter growing up with social media, wearing these linen Handmaid’s Tale dresses and buying into this shit, whatever it was.
If Sloane explained to Isla that this shit was stupid but then she still engaged with it herself, what would Isla believe?
And what was the line between the cult of The Women and, per Arya’s inevitability, fascism?
Did moderation exist, or did the pendulum always swing, like Arya had said?
Something in Sloane’s brain was speed running, drawing up disparate considerations—trad wife?
Good WomanTM? Madonna and Whore?—and determining a thread, one she couldn’t see yet but that she trusted did exist. She thought of beautiful Dalil Serrano in her lecture hall with her precious Greek letters, the brand of The House emblazoned across her perfect tits.
Was progress the freedom to have babies, to embrace domesticity, to abscond sexily to the woods?
Was it resources; was it capital? Was progress necessarily presidential office?
Was Sloane an accomplished woman who might achieve tenure (pending the next four weeks) or was she just a woman who half-heartedly shaved her eyebrows and worried about sun exposure?
And if she was both, who was the model for her womanhood?
In what ways was Sloane merely a woman and not A Woman, and how hard would it be to become, like Alex Carlisle, some tangible epitome of womanhood itself?
What was the difference between Alex Carlisle and The Country Wife? Was it, as visuals suggested, a throwaway matter of a handful of years? Was it sociopolitical assignations? Was it how they had each been raised? Was it nature? Was it nurture? Was it society?
Was it The House?
Was The House some kind of laboratory for high-achieving womanhood, and if so, was Caroline Collins a failure or a success?
“I’ve got something,” Sloane said aloud to Arya, who gave her a cheeky, knowing grin.
“Is it good?” he asked, scouring her face. “It looks good.”
“I don’t know what it is yet. Maybe.” Sloane’s fingers drummed of their own accord, agitation via inspiration. “Maybe it’s something.”
From a long-dormant tomb, the vestiges of Sloane’s passion were suddenly thunderstruck. Whatever this was, it felt undeniably important. It felt interesting. And honestly, it felt—
Fuck, it felt possible! Achievable by semester’s end, even, because it wouldn’t divide her resources any more than she’d already spliced them up. And that alone was good enough to feel miraculous. Like water to wine, a future from nothing. Sanctified and glorious. #Blessed.