Leave it to the relentlessly didactic feminists at Slate to turn a goofy New York Post feature about parents who take a walk on the wild side while their kids are away at summer camp into…yet another Slate tirade against stay-at-home moms.
Here’s what the Post’s Doree Lewak wrote:
When Elle, 39, and her husband dropped off their 9-year-old son and 8-year-old daughter at camp three weeks ago, the Long Island parents were only too happy to wave goodbye to their kids for several weeks. Later that day they boarded a party bus with 30 friends and plenty of booze to go see Dead & Company at Citi Field.
“As soon as [our children] left, we’ve been in nonstop [party] mode — it’s seven weeks of freedom,” says Elle, a fitness instructor whose two kids are away for the first summer ever, leaving her to enjoy parties with pot, magic mushrooms, ecstasy and group sex.
“This is the first time in nine years I’m not having to be a mom — I want no responsibility,” says Elle, who, like many in this story, declined to give her last name for privacy reasons. “Some friends have swingers parties — I’ve seen group sex . . . It’s no pressure, go with the flow. It’s summer.”
Traditionally, it’s the kids who run amok when Mom and Dad are out of town. But these days, it’s the parents who are home alone and going skinny-dipping while their youngsters are away at camp.
Well, maybe in New York.
But here’s the take of Slate’s Elissa Strauss:
Less obvious, but more insidious, is the way this trend piece peddles retrograde ideas about family life. In Elle, Tara and Melanie’s lives, the transition to motherhood has a sharp before and after. As mothers, they act different, dress different, and subsume their needs and desires in order to adequately attend to others. Reach an extreme enough level of sexual repression, and you too might find yourself letting off steam at an epic bash populated with nude women and midgets.
Motherhood as an all-encompassing identity is an idea most often promoted by those yearning for what they’d call a “traditional” lifestyle, but it also has currency among more progressive circles. Take, for example, our insistence on asking working mothers how they manage, or the fact that women’s magazines are largely divided between titles for fabulous singles and titles for breeders, or how women with children are less likely to be hired or promoted than women without children. Women hear the message that motherhood can and should dramatically change them on surround sound.
And then comes the cure: Yes, once again, it's Make Your Husband Fold the Laundry:
The irony is that married people have more sex than singles, and the less tethered to an all-consuming, self-abnegating narrative motherhood a woman is, the more likely she is to be sexually satisfied. According to the latest research, which comes from Sharon Sassler at Cornell University, “contemporary couples who adhere to this more egalitarian division of labor are the only couples who have experienced an increase in sexual frequency compared to their counterparts of the past, whereas other groups—including those where the woman does the bulk of the housework—have experienced declines in sexual frequency.”
Now, a positive correlation between shared housework and sexual frequency has been disputed in recent years, as has the Sheryl Sandberg-endorsed notion that a man doing laundry is a turn-on. Personally speaking, I know few women who are put in the mood by the sight of their husband folding onesies. However, I know many who have enough energy for sex at the end of the day because their husbands folded the onesies.
I don’t understand the feminist obsession with the appalling burden of hauling clothes out of the drier and arranging them in neat piles. Why doesn’t the “egalitarian division of labor” around the house ever include you, the wife, shoveling the snow and cleaning the leaves out of the drainpipe?
But it’s the “all-consuming, self-negating” lifestyle of the full-time mother that ultimately grates on Strauss. The message at Slate is: We hate stay-at-home moms.