Follow Up: Responding to Rachel

As Rachel mentioned in her post, I too found Betty Friedan’s excerpt, The Feminine Mystique, extremely compelling and thought provoking. Her argument that “the core of the problem for women today is a problem of identity,” (Friedan, 48) was especially memorable to me. Friedan suggests that women struggled from feelings of lost purpose and meaning as their work at home became increasingly automatic and mindless.

This idea of women’s work as automatic, and therefore, of women as somewhat replaceable and inconsequential, is definitely a theme still common in movies, tv, and even some realities today. For example, the 2004 movie The Stepford Wives, depicts a seemingly problem free town with beautiful women enthusiastically focused on their jobs of pleasing their husbands. As the Stepford wife in the following photo shows, these women are passionate and excited to bake, cook, or do whatever it is that will satisfy their husbands. http://www.lebleb.com/images/star_galeri/Nicole%20Kidman/The%20Stepford%20Wives.2.

A new couple in town, however, is bewildered by these seemingly flawless couples with wives so willing, and even excited, to program and define their lives around the desires of their husbands. By the end of the movie, however, the newcomers to the town realize that the women of the town have been transformed in to robots and are therefore, machines rather than human beings.

As Friedan suggests in her essay, housewives are dehumanized as their jobs and livelihood become automatic and are sometimes reduced to the work of mechanical equipment. Understandably, many of these housewives feel unfulfilled and unhappy as they lose both purpose and meaning to themselves and their lives. If their work is uninspiring and mindless, these women sometimes do not receive the chance to challenge themselves. Instead, they become thoughtless objects used and defined purely based off of their male counterpart.

Do men enjoy women who are thoughtless and act much as decoration and tools towards their own furthered pleasure? Ariel Levy quotes Hugh Hefner as saying he likes “innocent, affectionate, faithful girls,” and that when he wants to think, he “stays with men,” (Levy, 59). In other words, Hefner suggests that he regards men as mentally exciting and stimulating while he views women as passive, loving, and loyal-similar characteristics used to describe a pet dog, or in Levy’s words, a “bunny.” Perspectives like Hefner’s propel me to wonder if all men enjoy women solely for the “pet” qualities they maintain? Further, how can women ensure that they maintain their identity and respect as human beings despite the demeaning opinions of people like Hugh Hefner?