I wasn’t going to watch the Republican response to President Biden’s State of the Union speech. But then social media posts started popping up: “What am I seeing?” “This porn sucks.” “Who is this?”
It was irresistable. I only caught the last half, but Oh My Goodness. I’ve watched the whole thing since then.
What we were seeing were worlds in collision. The folks I follow on social media were aware of a separate culture of evangelical Christians, Southerners, MAGAs. We had read articles about their culture from those who had ventured forth anthropologically or escaped. Hmm interesting, but reading about and actually seeing are two different things. We had been in a bubble.
Conversely, a United States Senator who presents herself with a dipping blouse neckline showing a gleaming stone-encrusted cross, speaking in a breathy childlike voice from a darkened and apparently unused kitchen was in a bubble of her own, along with a Republican Party that thought this would be appealing.
Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson could smirk and shake his head and refuse to applaud through the State of the Union because he lives in that bubble too. But let’s talk about Senator Katie Britt’s highly gendered performance.
For those who know (numbers now increasing), that bizarre voice is called “fundy baby voice.” It is cultivated by women in what let’s call the fundy bubble, which includes both more and less than MAGA or the Republican Party. It is explicitly taught to them, and they use it deliberately to signal that they belong to that bubble and all it implies about women – submissive to men, stays in the home, and certainly no attempt to control the relationship of sex to pregnancy. We want more children, Britt breathed as she endorsed IVF.
Her emotional presentation was also bizarre, with much too much smiling as she spoke about rape and household finances. But women are supposed to smile – men thought Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren should smile more. We’ve all been told more than once to smile more. Here was a woman who is willing to smile more, before our very eyes. And also to choke up her voice as if she was about to cry, to show us how very sensitive she is to others’ plights.
Tia Levings explains this. Yes, there are large numbers of people for whom this is expected and normal behavion, even as they know it is artificial. They even have a reference book to tell them how to do it: Fascinating Womanhood, by Helen Andelin, a contemporaneous reaction to second-wave feminism. It was first published in 1963, shortly after Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.
Fascinating Womanhood codified a set of behaviors that women had been exposed to as an expected norm. They were to be submissive to men and responsive to men’s desires. But they also were to understand that those behaviors could be used to mask their ambition, as long as that ambition was compatible with conning the men into compliance with it. There were limits to what was acceptable.
According to Levings, Fascinating Womanhood has never ceased to be popular within the fundy bubble. It is now in its sixth print run. I can’t recall if I bought it back in 1963. I do recall reading a bit of it, recognizing what it was, and not finishing it. Carly Simon recorded a song that referred to the ideas ironically in 1971 in “The Girl You Think You See.”
Simon’s emotional range, starting with that fundy breathiness, foreshadows Britt’s performance. And yes, it’s about sex, but I’ll leave that for another post.
I hadn’t thought about Fascinating Womanhood for a very long time. That’s my bubble. That was the shock of hearing that childish voice and histrionic delivery. Reading about the fundy bubble was different from seeing it in action. Reactions cited The Stepford Wives and The Handmaid’s Tale.