In 2010, the US was emerging from the Great Recession. Unemployment for women was high, and the "opt-out revolution" (women leaving the workforce to be homemakers) was a hot topic in The Atlantic . The video tapped into a genuine fear: that economic independence was a lie, and that traditional gender roles were a safer bet.
The social media discussion about the video has been archived by digital historians as a warning. It proves that the internet is long, long memory. It proves that satire without a wink is indistinguishable from dogma. And most painfully, it proves that we are often angrier at the women who perform patriarchy than at the system that rewards them for the performance.
If you were actively scrolling through Facebook, Tumblr, or early YouTube in the summer of 2010, there is a high probability you encountered a grainy, sepia-toned video clip that seemed to break the internet before "breaking the internet" was a cliché. The video, known colloquially as the "Housewives Girls" video, did not feature cooking tips or parenting hacks. Instead, it featured a group of young women—barely out of high school—dressed in silk robes and pearls, lip-syncing to a misogynistic rant about the "lazy" generation of women who wanted careers instead of husbands.
