Is Your Wife Bonus Feminist? A Quiz

Dedicated readers of WEIRD SISTER know that you can be a feminist housewife. Morgan Parker wrote the manifesto; Becca Klaver and Lauren Besser provide case studies in their podcast, The Real Housewives of Bohemia; I’m kind of a part-time feminist housewife myself. Or a part-time feminist SAHM, which is a stay-at-home mom or a student-artist-home-working-mom.  So, like, don’t worry about whether women who don’t work outside the home or who do unpaid caretaking labor or who don’t directly contribute income to their families can be feminists. ISSUE RESOLVED.

But there’s been some debate lately about this kind of ridiculous book, Primates of Park Avenue, in which anthropologist-turned-Park-Avenue mom Wednesday Martin describes the bizarre culture of super-rich New York families. See Martin’s op-ed in the New York Times, or this hilarious contribution in the Post from a somewhat aspirational Wife Bonus-getter who wants us to “STFU,” or this interview on NPR, which I haven’t listened to, but in which I’m pretty sure Martin uses the phrase “going native,” which, uhh, nope. Also see various accounts of the inaccuracies in Martin’s book: her PhD is actually in comp lit (ooooh does this mean I get to write a book called Primates of Ditmas Park?), she misrepresents when she was pregnant and what fancy gym she went to, and she pretends you could get macarons on the UES during a time when you could CLEARLY ONLY GET THEM IN FRANCE. Hopeless lower-class poseur or not, Martin gives us a shocking glimpse of a forbidden world in which highly-educated skinny moms spend their days Mean-Girlsing each other, grooming their toddlers to be captains of industry, and having weird gender-segregated dinner parties and going on vacations where they all wear the same color (well, come on, that sounds pretty fun. It’s not like I’m not going on an all-you-can-drink-rosé booze cruise this month where we all have to wear something pink. No, I seriously am.) The big shocker, though, is that some of these rich moms, many of whom have MBAs and formerly held high-income, high-pressure jobs like Business Lady and Captainess of Industry and Executrix and Lawyeress and Bankerina and Stock Market Girl Wonder and Political Risks Insurance Brokeress and a bunch of jobs I don’t know about because I don’t understand and will never be allowed to understand the language of Wealth and Power, apparently get Wife Bonuses, probably so they can feel like they still have a high-stakes Rich Person job. The bonuses are distributed by their husbands, who are their bosses, and they’re often based on their Wife Performance that year, which usually involves getting the kids into a school that will help them become Captains of Industry or the wives of Captains of Industry or maybe Bankerinas. The Wife Performance may also involve blow jobs BUT that might just be Martin trying to titillate us, since we know the wives and husbands never see each other for the length of time that a really bonus-worthy blow job requires.

Anyway, the debate among the moms I know has really been about these Wife Bonuses and whether they could possibly be feminist. Even if Martin made up wife bonuses out of whole cloth, our reactions to the very idea of a Wife Bonus reveal a lot of our collective confusions and anxieties about work and parenting and relationships and gender and class. DON’T WORRY, MOMS. It’s my job to clear up feminist controversies, and I am going to clear up this one for you right now. But first I need you to take TWO QUIZZES IN ONE!

Sharpen your pencils, ladies! It’s time for

IS YOUR WIFE BONUS FEMINIST? A QUIZ

and

DOES YOUR PARTICULAR WIFE BONUS ALLOW YOU TO BE A FEMINIST? ANOTHER QUIZ

1) Do you get a wife bonus?

a) of course I do
b) I think so?
c) yes
d) uhhh
e) that sounds so subversive, let’s do it
f) no

2) Do you think you could get a wife bonus if you spent a longer time on blow jobs?

a) no, but I can legally make a living wage from giving blow jobs
b) how dare you
c) of course
d) uhhh
e) If by “blow jobs” you mean, like, a variety of nonreproductive and not-always-reciprocal sexual acts with which I delight my partner, like, probably not?
f) no

3) OK, so where does your wife bonus come from?

a) it comes from the government; I get a stipend to compensate me for the income I lost by leaving the workforce and for the labor I’m doing taking care of young members of our community.
b) it comes from my partner’s bonus
c) it comes from my husband’s prodigious wealth
d) like I mean we have a joint bank account
e) ha ha ha this is silly but I’m having fun taking this quiz
f) remember how I told you I don’t get a wife bonus?

4) Who decides how big the bonus is?

a) It’s from the government so I think the legislature voted on it or something
b) Whenever we come into a big chunk of money, like when my partner gets a bonus at work, we each get to spend 20% of it on whatever we want and the rest of it goes in our savings account
c) My husband decides based on how much our kid has leveled up in Captain of Industry Academy
d) I guess if I wanted to buy something really expensive I would check with my partner first
e) I put on a frilly apron and my partner puts on a monocle and then affixes two pancakes over my eyes and spins me around until I’m dizzy and then I have to point at a chart we made on the wall in maple syrup and then we Instagram it and that’s the amount of my bonus
f) No, seriously, I don’t get a wife bonus

6) How would you describe your economic relationship with your partner?

a) Why are you assuming I have a partner? You don’t need a partner to get a wife bonus, by which I mean parental leave and a stipend.
b)  My partner understands that with my education and work experience, I’m sacrificing a lot of potential income and professional advancement to raise our family, so s/he does his/her best to make sure I know s/he appreciates the work I do and that s/he recognizes it as work.
c) My husband is my boss! I’m providing him with a whole suite of valuable services he can’t get elsewhere, and I deserve compensation for my work. But we don’t really socialize together. Just the occasional lightning-fast blow job when he strays into my wing of the house.
d) We do our best to make sure we have enough resources for our family’s needs, and we recognize that both our contributions have equal value, even if our monetary contributions are different.
e) We are having a great time taking this quiz together. I’m so glad we grew that acre of flax together so that we could barter it for our shared iPad.
f) Why are you assuming I have a partner?

7) How much money is your wife bonus?

a) For the first year or so after I became a parent it was equal to my salary at my old job, and then after that I got subsidized childcare and a stipend to defray extra parenting expenses.
b) It depends on how big a bonus my partner gets from work, but I can usually count on five figures. Enough to get as many pairs of Chanel navy ballet pumps as I want (did you know that there’s such a thing as ballet pumps? They’re what ballerinas wear when they want to murder each other—we’re on the board for a wonderful event where all the ballerinas put them on and the last one still standing gets to be a celebrity! and gets to live!), but not always enough for a starter Birkin.
c) It depends on my job performance, but it’s usually enough that I can buy at least a few couture pieces and sit on a couple of boards. Not, like, an important board. But maybe something outer-borough involving the arts, or, like, a children’s charity or something like that. Also, I usually get to redecorate my boudoir and coat all the entrances and exits with an advanced estrogen compound that burns men when they touch it.
d) One year we both got new phones, I guess? and, like, one time I bought a lipstick that cost like $20.
e) We built a compostable toilet with the proceeds from our last foraging trip!
f) STFU about this fucking wife bonus, seriously, I hate you.

RESULTS

Quiz #1:

If you answered

Mostly a’s: Soooo, you clearly live in Europe or somewhere where they have really progressive views about family leave and childcare and domestic labor. Get out of here. By which I mean, please marry us and take us with you to Europe where we can all laze around day-drinking while our children study media literacy and gender theory in state-subsidized daycare centers (credit for this vision of European parenthood goes to my friend Jonas Moody, who is married to an Icelandic gentleman, but for some reason they both have to live in Connecticut). Oh, sorry, I forgot to answer the question. Yes, obviously your wife bonus is extremely feminist. I mean, who knows, there are probably a bunch of weird gender dynamics in your country that I would find frustrating and annoying, but, like, this particular aspect of your culture is pretty good for women and families and people.

Mostly b’s: Your wife bonus is pretty feminist, but it might be that “plutocratic wave of feminism” that this guy wrote about in The Atlantic (think Sheryl Sandberg; also basically every rich or “well, I wouldn’t call us rich” mom you know). I think he’s wrong that gender inequality is only a problem among the richest captains and captainesses of industry, but I think he’s right that a feminism primarily focused on making sure that rich white women make the same amount of money as rich white men is (sorry, you might want to cover your ears) an impoverished form of feminism. But, like, Lean In feminism is a feminism, and you’re practicing a kind of great version of it where you’re demanding money and respect even though you’re not currently working as a Bankeress, but are instead doing labor that almost always goes uncompensated and unacknowledged in our culture as labor, and that’s cool, I guess. Keep workin’ for that Birkin, sister!

Mostly c’s: Whoa. Whoa. YOU DO EXIST! I can’t believe an actual Primate of Park Avenue took this quiz. Whooooa. Like, I pretend to be, like, unimpressed by wealth and power and class. Like, I pretend to be beyond class. And, like, I went to school with people like you and I was underwhelmed. But here I am, feeling so honored that you took my quiz! Is that real diamond powder on your skin? No, I know, you’re so classy that if you did use diamond powder, I wouldn’t even be able to tell. Anyway. Wife bonus. Feminist. Is the True Wife Bonus, which you, milady, actually get, feminist? Let’s break it down.

OK, so, like Foucault says that power is complicated, and it’s never unidirectional, so you certainly have power and agency. Like Ms. Mostly B’s above, you’re being compensated for labor that often goes unacknowledged and uncompensated; you get to wear gorgeous clothes and go to beautiful places; you have the resources to employ and boss around and exploit a small army of other women and probably even some men! So inasmuch as your wife bonus allows you, a woman, 1) to negotiate some agency within a very sexist system; 2) to do work that you find fulfilling, and to receive compensation and acknowledgement for that work; 3) to experience pleasure; 4) to get $$$ and power, it’s kinda feminist. Also, as I said above, I love all-girl trips and dinner parties and wearing the same color tracksuit as all my girlfriends! I mean, you might be living in my feminist-separatist fantasy of what it would be like to lounge around all day drinking sparkling rosé in the Disney Vault, talking about how I got an amazing pearl-and-diamond tailpiece even though I gave Prince Eric literally zero blow jobs this year. But a system where husbands are (almost) always bosses and wives are (almost) always employees, where men hold the lion’s share (rawr!) of economic power, and where women’s concerns/interests/charity events are secondary is a profoundly sexist system. We already live in a profoundly sexist system, and you’re living in what sounds like a hilarious parody of that system. Also, even if you don’t personally exploit your enormous staff, all that $$$ and power you and The Captain and Captain, Jr., managed to get your hands on probably comes from exploiting and oppressing a lot of other people, including other women. I mean, that’s where my $$$ and power comes from, too, because we both live in white-supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy and that’s where the $$$ and power tend to come from, but you have a ton more of it.

Summary of how feminists should feel about you: respect you for getting some agency within a Profoundly Sexist System; sympathize with you for having to live in a Profoundly Sexist System; don’t let our sympathy get in the way of our work to dismantle the systems that give you those bonuses.

Mostly d’s: You’re me, so we don’t need to talk about this. Of course your wife bonus is feminist. Everything you do is so feminist just by virtue of how feminist you naturally and artificially are. (OK, I guess you could also be kind of a normal person who doesn’t think too hard about the politics of your household finances and the divisions of labor in your home, and I encourage you to start thinking about them! But, like, rest assured that your wife bonus is perfectly consistent with a feminist approach to divisions of family labor.)

Mostly e’s: You don’t have to worry about this creepy heteronormative wife bonus weirdness. You seem oddly, miraculously removed from the oppressive, exploitative global economy that haunts everybody else’s wife bonuses (except for your iPad, I guess, but I don’t get to point fingers); you have a delightful sense of humor regarding gender and sexuality, without being a jerk about it; and you’re great at sharing resources with your partner(s) and at valuing each other’s work. Please invite us to your eco-pod for some dandelion wine or whatever you made together yesterday.

Mostly f’s: You don’t get a wife bonus, which makes you a pretty normal person. Thanks for taking the quiz, normal! Aren’t you glad you don’t have to deal with all this nonsense? If you have children, though, or if you do any kind of caretaking work for which you aren’t financially compensated, or if you do caretaking work and you’re not making, like, as much as those Captains of Industry who are giving out the wife bonuses, you really deserve a fucking wife bonus. Your lack of a wife bonus is so feminist. If you got a wife bonus it would be so feminist. Let me tell you right now, the work you’re doing is important and I’m here to honor it and praise it, and I hope more and more people will be here to honor and praise it, and give you the attention and resources you deserve, but that you clearly don’t need, because you are doing it.

What about Quiz #2?

If you answered

Mostly a’s: Yes, you can still be a feminist.

Mostly b’s: Yes, you can still be a feminist.

Mostly c’s: Yes, you can still be a feminist.

Mostly d’s: Yes, you can still be a feminist.

Mostly e’s: Yes, you can still be a feminist.

Mostly f’s: Yes, you can still be a feminist.