You Don't Want a Homestead, You Want The Sims

Major vibe shift happening on anti-feminist cottagecore fantasies

Normally Sunday is when I post my Many Such Takes free roundup of the wackiest Twitter drama of the week, but this week, there’s discourse that’s way too CHH-coded for me not to write about right away. I even had some readers ask me to write about it ASAP. But never fear- this week’s edition of Many Such Takes will go out on Tuesday of this week. There won’t be a Will There Be Free Food? chapter this week, but I will post one next week.

Btw, to celebrate quitting my day job and doing Substack full time, I’m offering a 20% off discount on all annual subscriptions!

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I’ve mentioned this a few times in the past, but I used to play a lot of Sims. I started playing when I was eleven (with the original Sims) and continued through Sims 2, 3 and 4. I haven’t played since my second child was born, but I was pretty hooked over the past several years—it was my go-to activity during my first child’s naps. And one thing that came up time and time again on Sims groups: we want farms.

First of all, this was a pretty normal thing for Simmers to request. Arguably the most normal thing. If you’re out of the loop, Simmers have requested so many bizarre features (mostly centered on wanting more realism) that at one point, the franchise actually listened and released an expansion pack about dust:

Now, unlike dust, farms could be approximated in earlier version of the Sims because we had the option to plant fruits, vegetables, flowers and herbs and loosely call it a farm. But Simmers wanted…more. We didn’t want to “pretend” to have farms. We wanted to actually have farms (really playing it fast and loose with the word “actually”) and the quaint architecture to go with them. We wanted to have farm animals, like lambs and chickens. And we wanted to sell our vegetables in a little twee village.

The farming hysteria really seemed to hit a fever pitch over 2020-2021 when we were all stuck inside because of covid. My husband, who was never into simulation games, suddenly got addicted to Animal Crossing because he could “pretend he was going outside.” The pandemic really made people wish they were outside, and not just outside on the sidewalk (it was never really forbidden to go outside) but really outside—far away from smog, people, and modernity. Anecdotally, I knew multiple people who left cities and fled to rural or semi-rural locations. None of them actually started farms, but the pandemic made a pastoral life seem appealing in a way that wasn’t as widespread in 2019.

Right on schedule, EA released The Sims Cottage Living in 2021. It was an instant hit with Simmers who saw everything they had been requesting (except for cars and horses—not going to get into that drama, but it’s a whole thing.)

Anyway, you might be wondering, why the hell are you talking about The Sims? What does this have to do with feminism? Well, give me a second!

This past week, conservative activist Jacky Eubanks went viral after being featured in a debate video about feminism. Her main argument was that women would be better off if we “returned” to the 1950s because being a working woman sucks. She also pointed out that people are getting married later, and most women don’t actually want to marry late and work. Women have been tricked into working for corporations who don’t care about us instead of being at home with our families who love us. She’d be happier, she insists, living on a homestead milking cows with a gaggle of babies.

While I strongly disagree with her on all things political (she wants to make birth control illegal, for a start), I’ve seen her substack article about this general topic of being “forced to work,” and we actually have some crossover. She and I agree that men are infantilized and needlessly discouraged from marrying on the younger side—I wrote an article about that recently. My most controversial article was probably the one about how men who delay proposing are equally, if not more, responsible for the birth rate decline as women who “delay marriage for their careers,” which she agrees with. She and I agree that women over 25 or 30 who are still single are unfairly maligned by the right as if their male counterparts had nothing to do with this. And it’s no surprise to anyone who follows this Substack that I’m not exactly gung-ho about the corporate life. I just left it (hopefully for good) a few days ago! I agree with Jacky that it sucks to work in an office, although I think it sucks for men too.

While Jacky might be serious about wanting a husband and children (perfectly reasonable, by the way!) it’s not her job or the economy preventing her from having those things. And I don’t believe she actually wants to live on a homestead. She wants to play The Sims.

Reminder, I’m offering a 20% off discount on all annual subscriptions!