We Need to Talk About the Pink-Pill Pipeline
You can't slap a tiara on a human rights crisis and call it the 'princess treatment'
There are very specific rules to getting the ‘princess treatment’. When you’re out at a restaurant, you never speak to the hostess or the waiter. In fact, you don’t even meet their gaze. You let your husband order food for you, and when you do talk, it’s only quietly—and only when spoken to.
“The most elegant women are often soft-spoken and don’t over-speak,” Courtney Palmer says.
The Utah mother went mega-viral last month after telling women that if they want the ‘princess treatment’ from their husbands, they need to stay “feminine” and “let him have control.”
And she wasn’t just talking about date night. “I don’t really tie my shoes,” Palmer cooed. “He does that for me.”
I’ve thought of Palmer often these last few weeks. I pictured her husband kneeling to lace up her shoes as I wrote about the Trump administration’s plan to fund “infertility centers” instead of birth control. I imagined her gaze fixed on the restaurant floor—her husband speaking for her—while reading about the nearly $10 million in contraception the government plans to burn rather than distribute to women overseas.
There’s no Disney movie about a Tennessee woman denied prenatal care for being unmarried, no glass slipper for the South Carolina woman arrested for her miscarriage. Yet that’s the lie conservatives are selling women: That the rapid erosion of our rights isn’t a political and moral crisis, but a fairytale. That secretly, feminism makes women unhappy, and what we really want is some big strong man—or the state—to come along and make all the decisions for us.
That this fantasy has to be forced on women with rules, laws, and public punishments, of course, goes unmentioned in tradwife videos and Republican talking points. As does the fact that American women have been there, done that: we saw what their ‘fairytale’ looked like years ago, and chose freedom instead.
We made sure women couldn’t be trapped in unhappy or abusive marriages by legalizing no-fault divorce—which led to a 20% drop in the female suicide rate. We stopped banks from denying women credit cards and loans; repealed bans on birth control; and made it illegal to rape your wife, harass your secretary, or refuse to hire a pregnant woman. And yes, we legalized abortion—codifying our humanity, and ensuring that women could determine our own fates and futures.
This nostalgia that conservatives are trying to sell us? Generations fought like hell to escape it.
But for younger women—those who can’t imagine a world where they can’t get a credit card or a divorce—conservatives are offering up something seductive, even if false. After all, who isn’t disheartened by the state of the world right now? Who doesn’t feel despairing or exhausted? Who among us wouldn’t rather check the fuck out and bake some cookies?
Republicans may be pitching a lie, but it’s still an alternative—and for some, that’s all it takes. And after all, it’s not as if conservatives are admitting they want to roll back hard-won rights. Instead, incredibly, they’re pitching their vision for women as ‘empowerment’.
Under conservatives’ slick and well-funded spin, quitting the workforce isn’t regressive, but a rejection of capitalism and toxic work culture. (The latest tradwife mantra: “Less burnout, more babies.”) Forgoing birth control? That’s just women reclaiming their bodies’ natural rhythms, or turning away from a sexist medical establishment that doesn’t listen to them.
I warned this was coming years ago, in a column about the suspiciously well-timed rise of tradwives and romanticized housewife imagery:
“It’s not a coincidence that this resurgence of housewife iconography comes at the same time abortion rights have been stripped from American women. What better way to quiet the next generation of girls, growing up in a country without reproductive rights, than to tell them it’s actually progress? They’re making sexism aspirational.”
That’s what worries me most: that this insidious campaign targeting young women isn’t broadly seen as an extremist pipeline. Instead, it’s a lifestyle, an aesthetic, and—most dangerously—a perfectly good and feminist choice.
Indeed, much of what we’re witnessing is the predictable outcome of ‘choice feminism’: if anything a woman does is inherently feminist, it’s that much easier for conservatives to convince young women that surrendering their personal and political power is just as ‘empowering’ as fighting for it.
They’re depoliticizing women’s subjugation. Every “day in the life” video of a 20-year-old laying out her husband’s socks, and every magazine spread of a stay-at-home mom with five kids in matching beige outfits, take the nightmare of women’s subservience and make it…cutesy.
There’s a reason that unlike the radicalization of young men—called the ‘alt-right pipeline’ or ‘red-pilling’—there’s no catchy label for what’s happening to young women. The closest we’ve gotten is what UK writer Lois Shearing calls ‘pink pilling’—a brilliant book title, but not a term that’s taken off here in the US quite yet.
That’s because at some level, America still believes that women’s subservience is natural, and that campaigns pushing us to co-sign our own oppression aren’t indoctrination as much as they are gentle reminders of women’s proper place.
Even ‘tradwife’ gets at that: it’s traditional, a return to women’s default settings, the way things are meant to be.
None of this is to say that young women are broadly falling for it. (Not yet, at least.) Palmer’s ‘princess treatment’ videos, for example, sparked a huge backlash. They struck a nerve, I think, because women immediately recognized her message as part of this broader conservative lie that oppression is great, actually. It’s been flooding their algorithms.
You can’t slap a tiara on a human rights crisis and call it the ‘princess treatment’. It will take a lot more than that to convince American women to give up decades of rights without a fight.
The problem? Conservatives are doing a lot more. They’re pairing online lies with classroom laws, forcing anti-abortion propaganda videos into public schools. They’re dismantling sex education to prevent young people from understanding their bodies and the policies legislating them. And they’re funding a massive spread of crisis pregnancy centers that target girls young enough for middle school with misinformation about birth control and abortion.
The nation’s most powerful right-wing organizations are invading culture, politics, homes, and schools—backed by billionaires willing to spend untold dollars to win over young women. Sure, it may take them a while—decades, even—but they’ve waited for big wins before.
That’s why we need to take on ‘pink pilling’ now. We can start by calling it what it is: radicalization. And Democrats, who’ve shifted their focus to young male voters, need to start thinking years ahead like Republicans do—and stop assuming young women’s votes will always be there.
Most of all, we can remind Americans why conservatives need soft-lit videos of gorgeous young moms baking bread from scratch—it’s to counter the ugly reality of what their laws really look like:
A woman, turned away from the hospital, bleeding so badly she has to sit in the bathtub. A man carrying his wife’s limp body, hoping their third trip to the hospital will be the one where they finally help her. The navel-to-pubis hysterectomy scar of a woman forced to lose her uterus rather than get a life-saving abortion. The 10 year-old girl who breaks her pelvis after being forced to give birth.
Somehow, I don’t think we’ll see any of those on a Pinterest board anytime soon.
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Another comment: I am old enough to remember when Roe was decided, and when the fair credit act was passed(thank you, Lindy Boggs).
I remember hearing my mother once say how generous our dad was with her allowance. That stuck in my mind. I NEVER wanted to rely on any man to ve generous. I wanted my own job, my own money.
If Courtney Palmer is happy, fine. She has ZERO business encouraging women to shut up and smile for Prince Charming.
Okay. I will go there. I want EVERY.SINGLE.woman pitching this tradwife/princess shite to experience a life-threatening pregnancy and then be denied medical care.