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The next thing you know, you're strung out on bedspreads.

One of the rare childhood films that the Guy Girls remember watching with both their mom and their dad, the 1983 John Hughes film Mr. Mom was in some ways an incredible progressive look at gendered work. There were only 6 (as in, one less than seven) self-reported stay-at-home dads in the U.S. in 1983, so Michael Keaton’s Jack Butler journey from incompetent, unemployed, and resentful primary parent to master homemaker and better dad truly was revolutionary. But as Tracie points out this week, the movie still carries outdated assumptions about the cost of being a woman in public (sexual harassment that is never punished), the inherent rivalries between women (because they always be fighting over a man), and the invisibility of women’s labor (unless and until a man has to do it).

Curl up with your woobie and take a listen!

Mentioned in this episode:
The Politics of Housework by Pat Mainardi

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus episodes, video versions, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our family as the Guy Girls.

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, and analyzing pop culture for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, and whatever else we find.