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[0:01] Tonya Pinkins: Good afternoon. This is Tonya Pinkins, and you are listening to You Can't SAY THAT on the Broadway Podcast Network.

[0:16] Tonya Pinkins: We gotta say we're new for you.

[0:32] Tonya Pinkins: I am so excited to talk to my guest today. I have this magnet on my refrigerator, and it says, if you go home with someone and they don't have any books, don't fuck them. Well, I found her in a book. I'm not certain how I came to own this book. I believe I was reading about a publishing house called Common Notions, and they described themselves as a press that wanted to publish voices that didn't often get heard, and they were looking for support. In exchange for the support that you provided for the year, you were gonna get a copy of everything they published. I thought, okay, that sounds exciting. And so I believe this book, STEPFORD DAUGHTERS, which is by Johanna Isaacson, Weapons for Feminists in Contemporary Horror, was on my shelf.

I got it in the mail, and I was getting ready to go traveling, and I was like, oh, what shall I read in the airport on the plane? And I took this along. The description in the front, you know, sort of Marxist feminist theory compared with horror films was like right up my alley, and I began to read it, and I was I don't even know what the word for it is. It was like all these things that I'd been feeling in my body and in my spirit, but I had no language for was there in this book. And some of it I can't even repeat because the language goes over my head, but it speaks to me in my bones. And so join me in welcoming Johanna Isaacson, the author of STEPFORD DAUGHTERS. Welcome.

[2:28] Johanna Isaacson: Hi. Thank you so much for having me on. This is really exciting for me.

[2:32] Tonya Pinkins: Oh, it's exciting for me. So why don't you tell us, um, the listeners, which is largely um a community of theater lovers and people who listen to Broadway, even though my specific podcast expands way beyond that, because I think as artists, um, there's nothing that we can't learn about that won't contribute to our work. Tell me, how did you get to write this book?

[2:57] Johanna Isaacson: Oh, good question. Well, um, my some of my friends and I started a journal, um, I think it's now eight years ago, and it's called Blind Field. It's an online, just all volunteer journal. And we were just all, you know, kind of lefty feminists who loved culture, and felt like, you know, we were in grad school together, but none of us went on to be really conventional academic people, but we just really felt like we wanted to write about culture in longer formats where you can really get deep into the political issues, where you can speak not just to other academics or to people who spent, you know, whatever seven years in grad school, but really talk to artists, to lovers of culture, to activists, to everyone about um, you know, the culture we love and and kind of you know work around some of the mainstream media biases and just thinking about it in maybe less political ways or in such short forms that you can't really get deep into the issues that evoke because um you as an artist, I'm sure like know that a lot of your work just gets reduced when it's written about to very simple um kind of points that are kind of you know like interest points and attention span, soundbites, right?

[4:29] Johanna Isaacson: Exactly. So that gave us a format to really uh write at length, and we've been doing that for years. Um and um this guy, Andy Battle, who I've become a huge fan of, who is an editor at Common Notions, wrote to me one day and asked me if because I mostly write about horror and feminism and and in sort of capitalism, um, if I would if I had a book in me, and I wasn't quite sure. But um that was so exciting for me because I don't think I could have, even though I kind of knew I did, I don't think I would have had the motivation to do a whole book without that encouragement and that um and and Andy reaching out and and just the beauty of that publisher, which puts out so many um amazing books that are like contribute so much to social justice and to um you know just an expansive way of thinking about the world.

So that really um became my pandemic project was to, you know, some of the some of the chapters have things that I had written for Blindfield in very transformed form, but most of it's new. And um and it's such an exciting time for horror right now. And I mean you've you're contributing to it. Thank you so much for telling me about Red Pill. That was so cool to get to see with more women, women of color directing and and putting and centering those stories. So it's just like a it's all the the book itself is about contemporary horror and and what it has to teach us um about politics, especially as feminists, but I can't really separate feminism from capitalism or from racism, so as you know, or from racial politics, so it's kind of all entwined in that book.

Um, and so yeah, so that was what it came to be. It excited me is because I love horror, and for me, horror is the um the space where you can talk about politics and people can just go, oh, that's so ridiculous. But you can really speak the truth that you can't speak in mainstream stories because it would be um transgressive.

[6:46] Tonya Pinkins: And so there were so many movies um listed that you talked about in the book that I didn't know of. And uh, you know, I've just added them to my list and been little by little um marking them off. I also just find your analysis really deep. I almost some some of the time your analysis is better than the movie. I'm like, ooh, you saw some stuff in there that I was just like, okay, these people are getting on my nerves. So talk to me about this phrase. I don't know if it's yours because you are you're attributing people everywhere, every idea, and that's something I do in my essay. So I really appreciate that. So what is social reproduction?

[7:32] Johanna Isaacson: Well, it's basically work that um reproduces society, right? Everything from bearing children and raising children, cooking, cleaning, but also just emotional work, educational work. And um a lot of it what my argument is is this is work that's traditionally been seen as women's work and linked with that has been devalued, right? And it hasn't been seen as important work or worthy work of compensation as housewives, women have done it for free, as you know, domestic workers they've they've been forced to do it for very cheap and for and and be perhaps um mistreated. And a lot of the ways that that gets justified is it's seen as natural to women or done out of love. And so one of my arguments for sort of horror as the place where we can understand how important and how um undervalued that work has been and how connected that is with gender and race is because horror doesn't sugarcoat things, right?

It doesn't, it doesn't, you know, like in a lot of you know if you think of like the movie Roma, you know, there's good things about that movie, but it can't in that genre get around the idea that oh you know when a housekeeper is is with a family they just love them and that work comes naturally and that self-sacrifice comes natural and therefore there's just real love between a housekeeper and a family and I'm not saying that can never happen but horror is the place where you can kind of see the horror that is covered up by these mythologies and these ideologies of this work is just comes out of love right and like one of my you know moments where I thought that was sort of you know interesting is I'm really interested in this theorist her name Sylvia Federici on her whole um sort of one of her arguments when she talks about like witch trials is that the way that we moved from feudalism to capitalism and got men to go to this really unpleasant workplace and to do factory work was to make hierarchies between women and men and to reward men for going to the factories by saying oh look you'll have this servant wife who will you know clean your house raise your kids have sex with you all for free not question you let you rule the rule the roost and so it's a kind of divide and conquer method right where women were kind of bought off to do this work that actually really oppresses them too, and that there should be solidarity between women and men both fighting this transformation into capitalism, but instead the tactic was to divide them.

[10:45] Johanna Isaacson: And so you know, in in a movie like uh The Witch, um, you see uh this character who is uh I don't know if you've seen that it's a few years old, yeah.

[10:58] Tonya Pinkins: Yeah, I've seen it.

[10:59] Johanna Isaacson: Robert Egger's movie, and she goes, you know, the this young teenage girl is forced to do all that kind of labor for her family, and they're all really tyrannical to her, and it's joyless, and she goes out, and then you know, it kind of shows the flip side of that is that she when she becomes a witch, she's kind of free of all that. But Federici's theory is that women had to be called witches and burned at the stake to discipline them into taking on those roles. Like if they diverge from the role of the helpful wife and mother, somebody might accuse them of witchcraft and and and they could be actually burned at the streets. So the way this kind of horror monsters arise is out of this disciplinary logic where women are being like basically given the choice. Either you submit to the regime, you submit to the system that is oppressing everyone, but we are the shadow side.

[12:04] Johanna Isaacson: Um you you describe this division as um there's the the low-paid wage labor, and then there's the unpaid uh labor that has no wages without which the other could not exist. Um I think you said something like uh workers create the commodities that capitalism sells for profit, but they wouldn't do that if they didn't have someone at home who could cook and clean for them.

[12:38] Johanna Isaacson: And the people who are cooking and cleaning actually make the workers feed the workers, raise the workers, educate the workers, and do something you called effective labor. Tell us what that is.

[12:49] Johanna Isaacson: So effective labor um is you know, it's it's it's a tricky thing, but when you think about it, in some ways um love itself is a kind of labor when it's demanded, when it's not voluntary, when you can't choose, you know, to give it or or to not give it. So I one of my chapters I ask, you know, like what would happen if we went on a smile strike, right? What if what if women just stopped smiling, right? And and there's all of this stuff that you can encounter where like you walk down the street and men right and left will tell you smile, you know, it makes you look pretty or whatever, right? So it's a kind of work that women are are used to doing. And one of the kind of arguments I make is in the home, women were supposed to do this.

They're supposed to be kind and nurturing all the time, never show their anger. And that's why films like Hereditary and the Babadook are sort of interesting because that's where women really rebel from that, those attitudes, right? Where they're they're mothers and their wives and they're not behaving lovingly, right? They're not doing that emotional labor and showing, you know, and and kind of um spreading that kind of sense of being nurturing all the time and that being natural, no matter how frustrated they are.

[14:21] Johanna Isaacson: But also those sort of emotional forms of labor that were developed by, you know, the domestic sphere, um, are now really a part of low-wage work itself, which, you know, um, one of the things I kind of why it's called STEPFORD DAUGHTERS, is that even though women aren't relegated to the home in the same way they were when the film STEPFORD DAUGHTERS came out, and it was a kind of horror film about the terror of becoming just a housewife and nothing else, a lot of the sort of behaviors that women learned in the domestic sphere are now in service work, which is the main sort of work that's out there.

[15:09] Johanna Isaacson: Yeah, I don't even say just service work. I think when women came into the work field, they were still expected to act like housewives as secretaries in the office, and even women who might have, um, risen to the executive suite talk about still being expected to go and get the coffee and the lunch orders. Now that makes me think about this concept you talked about, which was called the lean-in. Talk to explain some of that.

[15:37] Johanna Isaacson: Yeah, so one of the things that I'm making the case of is that a lot of people theorize that, oh, now we're in this post-feminist moment. Because look, there's, you know, the prime minister of Italy, there's Cheryl Sandberg, who's the COO of Facebook. There's lots of women in leadership positions. Um, and Sarah Cheryl Sandberg is the one who coined this term, lean in, that women, the way you achieve empowerment is through this kind of individual assertiveness in the workforce that will allow you to be that woman who rises above the glass ceiling and achieves that position. Um, but my argument is that that is in some ways a betrayal and a mask of what real feminism should look like and still that still needs to happen, in that even as these kind of token achievements have happened by some women, um, that kind of reproductive labor that is done mostly by women and is done by men is still really devalued.

[16:52] Johanna Isaacson: And we really saw this during the pandemic, what the people that were called essential laborers were all doing reproductive work, and they were getting paid badly for it, treated terribly for it, getting sick for it, right? Um, and so, um, there's a lot of work for feminism to be done, and it's good for men, it's good for women, because those jobs that do reproductive labor, they were shaped by devaluing the qualities associated with women, and that's why they've been able to be devalued. But now we're all doing those jobs, and they're all really devalued, right? And so those few women who have leaned in, if they call that the achievement of feminism, they're sort of betraying their sisters, right? They're betraying other people.

[17:46] Tonya Pinkins: Hey, this is Tonya Pinkins. We're back after about a three or four minute break where I just lost all connection to everything. And I sort of, I don't know, I said to Johanna that maybe capitalism was at work, that the algorithm might have been listening in and going, oh, this is a conversation we don't need to have. Uh, I guess I am a little bit of a conspiracy theorist when I think about, you know, the fact that I've worked most of my career in the theater, and that is a kind of devalued form of work as well. Whereas Hollywood, which is really the propaganda arm of the government, is the highly paid work, the highly celebrated work. But the work that actually, to me, is the soul of a society is often done in the theater, where people are actually challenging the way we live or holding a mirror up to the way we live.

[18:37] Tonya Pinkins: And one of the biggest roles I've ever had in my life was of a character named Caroline in a musical by Tony Kushner called Caroline or Change. And, um, one of the sort of behind the scenes things that happened is that Janine Tesori, the brilliant composer, she, um, talked about her maid and her nanny as her friend. When she was invited to her house, she was introduced as her boss. And it really stung her, uh, that she was thinking this was a friend, and that that wasn't the case. And one of the things that happened to me after the show was that many people would come up to me and talk about how I had shown something they had experienced in their nannies or housekeepers, and they didn't understand why she didn't love them the way they loved her.

Um, and yes, this was all effective labor, and the women who get to lean in have to replace themselves and all of that labor with someone else who is low-waged and devalued for what they do, and then their own children suffer for that.

[19:50] Tonya Pinkins: Um, when Caroline was first on Broadway, uh, the leading paper, the New York Times sort of dismissed it as, you know, who wants to see a show about nickels and dimes. And the fact is without all these housekeepers, there would not be a middle class. It's just a transformation of what serfdom to slavery to, you know, domestic workers becomes. And it was very transgressive that my Caroline was angry and bitter. And in this recent production, I remember reading things about it and even seeing the advertisement of it. She was smiling and she was the heavy black maid. And I was like, oh yes, of course that will be a hit because that's the way they like their workers smiling.

[20:33] Tonya Pinkins: So yeah, I've been really impressed with, um, the ways that a lot of contemporary horrors have been handling that, uh, horror films have been handling that topic. Um, and you know, there's this Singaporean film called The Maid that really, that has a kind of Filipina domestic worker in Singapore, and you know, there is where you hear the real horror stories of women being, you know, uh, domestic workers being thrown out windows, being treated just horribly, um, and you know, being really invisible. Um, and that film really kind of shows the ways that what I've noticed in a lot of these horror films that, um, do depict domestic work is they use the strategy of escalation and that's really horror's really good with, um, where at first it just doesn't seem like it's gonna be a big deal and then it just gradually ratchets up.

I noticed you did that really well with Red Pill too. But like, um, at first, oh yeah, of course doing domestic labor is hard, but then, you know, eventually, you know, she's being assaulted by ghosts as she's doing that domestic labor, and then her bosses are like locking her in the house and she can't get out and they won't send her mail.

[21:57] Johanna Isaacson: And by showing the kind of continuum in horror between just what we think of as everyday work and, you know, an effect of labor, and then that it kind of goes very extreme and over the top in a way that's not exactly realistic, but there's a deeper realism in it. Right, because you're trying to capture what someone feels and experiences, which no one can see. I made a very, uh, you know, a post today because a very famous person who I did not know or never experienced their work committed suicide, and so everybody's, uh, pages, you know, social media is about, oh, call a friend, you know, call a hotline, we love you, death is never the choice. And I'm like, uh, maybe sometimes death is the choice.

And how can any of us ever know what someone's pain is? Someone even posted, um, a picture of them like dancing for social media before they went and killed themselves in trigger warning, this person, uh, left their home in an Uber, went to a hotel, and, uh, ended their life, which to me was, uh, a very kind act because I think it is a very violent act to do that in a home and cause people in your home to have to find you. It's still violent to those poor low-wage domestic workers who have to come and find you as well. There's no, um, uh, uh, non-violent way to do that, but in a society that doesn't respect people's right to choose to live or die, then they don't create acceptable outlets for you to even make that choice because they need you to be the labor.

[23:38] Johanna Isaacson: And so if everybody decided they were gonna just check out, the whole system would fall apart. So there's an investment in making you think that that's a cowardly or sinful choice, because sometimes the conditions that people are forced to live in would drive anyone to that.

[23:56] Johanna Isaacson: Yeah, I mean, I think there needs to be more work done, not just to say, oh, suicide is bad, but to really, yeah, make people's lives livable, right? And care for people before it gets to that stage of crisis, right? And it does seem like, um, you know, that's another aspect of the lean-in logic is it's very competitive. It's very much this fantasy of meritocracy. Um, I talk about this in like a chapter where I talk about kind of coming of age stories where young people are just trained to think that, you know, if they don't make it to the top, it's their fault, right? And they did something wrong, they don't have the right grit, they don't have the right talent. Um, whereas, you know, this is a social problem, and we should be bringing each other up together, not climbing all over each other. And the logic of lean in is kind of that logic of doing it on the backs of other people, making other people invisible, right?

[24:59] Johanna Isaacson: You know, like, um, you know, Barbara Ehrenreich talks about how, you know, often one of the ways that domestic workers are like oppressed is that how is, you know, women that aren't trying to have it all, they're supposed to say, oh, I do this high-powered job and I keep my house clean and I do everything. So they're pressured to make their domestic workers invisible because they don't want to admit that they can't do it all, which no one can, right? No one can really, you know, bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan, right? Um, and so, you know, there is a way in which the relationship between women of different classes has to be understood as like, oh, we're not just all women and we all just the answer for us is the same.

There's these interlocking ways that oppression happens, and a lot of the films kind of, you know, horror films can really recognize this, where you see the kind of raw power relationships between people kind of exposed in these scenarios.

[25:58] Tonya Pinkins: Because narrative is my, you know, my world. The film that won Sundance, uh, 2022 was a film that was flirting with, um, flirting with horror elements, drama, um, beautifully done film. I'm always rooting for everybody black, but once again fell into this for me propagandist view of it. It is called The Nanny. I think it's, um, uh, going to be available widely there. Tomorrow I have it on my calendar. I'm so excited about it.

[26:29] Tonya Pinkins: Well, I'm about to spoiler alert it. I'm about to spoiler alert it. It's, um, it's kind of a riff on Usman Simbani's, uh, very, very important film, Black Girl, uh, from the 1960s about a black servant who's enticed to go to the French Riviera with a white family, and she's enticed with beautiful outfits and shoes and jewelry, and so she's imagining herself escaping from her not bad life in her village, but once she gets to the Riviera, she's like locked in the house, and they don't want her wearing the nice clothes, and they're not paying her, and it becomes a nightmare. And what was so seminal about the film was the film was told from her point of view, from the misery that she was going through, and she, uh, ultimately commits suicide.

[27:18] Tonya Pinkins: In this new, uh, contemporary riff on it, um, there are elements in it that for me as a, uh, a black woman felt, um, that they were feeding into this, uh, capitalist idea of having people having to be happy with their situation. Yes, they weren't paying her on time. Um, yes, they were a bit abusive with her, but there was a plot line in there where she was doing this work to bring her son home. And, um, at a certain point, the people she works for keep her so busy that she misses several calls with her son. And then, um, the day her son is supposed to arrive, she goes to the airport and he's not there. So, you know, right there, the first moment I'm like, who leaves the airport and your child was supposed to be on the plane?

So I'm like, we've already turned her into something that's not human. Uh, any mother I know that's expecting her child is on the phone, um, throwing a fit at the airport. Uh, they're doing something and they're not leaving to go home and see what happened. Why isn't my kid on the plane?

[28:39] Johanna Isaacson: And when she walks out, there is the friend who was supposed to be taking care of her, who has used the money to fly herself to America and casually says, "Oh, your son died, and I don't know how to tell you that." And I'm like, as if this woman had no other friends, no other family, there was no one in her life who was going to tell her that her child died and that they would turn her black caretaker friend into someone who just doesn't bother to tell her and takes the money. For me, that is more poverty-borne. You know, this way of framing black people in this way that we're so callous about children, about our relationships, our friendships, and then the happy ending is, oh, she's pregnant, as if having another baby can replace the child that she's lost.

So for me, that was the horror of the film. These choices that were made that were unrealistic, but they try to add the elements of the mama wathy and these spiders and different things to take it into horror. But for me, the horror was of trying to make this character less of a human being that she would be in this situation.

[29:52] Johanna Isaacson: Yeah, I mean, that's why I really love approaches that are really unapologetic. I mean, I think, you know, even like "Get Out," people don't usually read it this way, but I love thinking about these domestic workers in "Get Out" who are actually possessed by the family from the inside, can't even—they're literally in the sunken place. They can't speak or act, they're just, I mean, it's a kind of a classic way of doing gothic where they're like almost turned into some kind of undead, right? Or in some liminal place and taken over by these white family members. Those kinds of extreme metaphorical kind of horror then kind of really move us away from that sort of what's considered emotional realism, but is actually, like you're saying, kind of ends up being propaganda for, oh, it is so natural to love and to forgive and to do all these other things that we can't really dig into the horrors.

And even though that might seem like, oh, it's so negative to want to see things that are that dark, for me it's like, well, it's this one space where we can speak the truth about those kinds of oppressions and anger that we are kind of forced to keep repressed in other contexts, right? So it's a way to have it out and to admit that some of those kind of ways that we compensate and just deal with the world as it is and reconcile ourselves to it.

[31:34] Johanna Isaacson: We don't have to, we can have some kind of cultural representation that allows an outside to those forms of reconciliation and obedience really to the rules of emotional labor, right? And so like horror things like possession, where you're actually taken over by this demon, right? Like in "The Babadook," where she is like actually says, you know, mean things to her child, and not because she hates the child, actually, that you know, in the whole movie that allows her to love her child more when she can go through this period of possession where she expresses her resentments and her feelings of entrapment and this kind of thing. So to me, it's a really fertile genre to kind of think about these taboo topics.

[32:25] Johanna Isaacson: You talk a lot about the futureless future, and right before I came on with you, I was reading an article in "The Economist" about just the loss of the future. And I must admit that when I started this podcast, I guess it was in the middle of the pandemic or just before it, November 2019 was the first recording. I don't think anything ever aired until January of 2020. But I was a little unsympathetic towards this young generation of people who are so traumatized and so fragile and I don't know what, but I am very aware of the anxieties now that they are facing that they now are going to be looking at going into this sort of low wage, demeaned, devalued workplace, and not even be able to afford to have that housewife or those children. And it is actually a future that who would want to do that? What life, what is there to look forward to in that life?

[33:32] Johanna Isaacson: Yeah, and so I think that a lot also horror films are really helping us think about that and it's, you know, and think about ways that we need to start caring for young people and making a future for them because if you see something like, you know, "It Follows," where, you know, the coming of age means you're being followed by these monsters that, you know, are possessed by this creature. But all when you look at who those monsters are, they do symbolize how young people fear the future, right? Like, so the main character Jay in "It Follows" is followed by women who look like they've just been sexually assaulted or look like they are so impoverished that they don't have shoes or are like, you know, old women who don't are totally seen as disgusting or are in hospital gowns, right?

So all the kinds of terror of the future and of growing up that people feel in, you know, are with when social reproduction is neglected, when we don't have free education, when we don't have good jobs, when we don't have sort of hope, right? That is that through support, right?

[34:46] Johanna Isaacson: And but the flip side of that I think is, you know, that's interesting in these kind of what I call coming of rage horror movies of young people is that when these young girls that you see in some of these movies divest from that myth and no longer hate themselves because they're not rising to the top because they can't make it in the meritocracy, a lot of times those films will show that that is a kind of empowerment too to fight, right? And you'll see them going from like, I write about this film "Assassination Nation" where there's these four girlfriends who are faced with this similar kind of futureless future and at a certain point they're like, they know they're not gonna win until they've just really fight back and they get on their war gear and they go out there and they become like kind of female avengers.

[35:47] Johanna Isaacson: So there's, you know, and you can see that I think that young people are really active in the hopeful movements that we see like Black Lives Matter, like, you know, Occupy, things like that, that there is a lot of awareness. I get very excited when I talk to young people about their sort of, you know, I don't see it as a drag awokeness, right? Their ability to like hope for a future that's, you know, equal and expressive of all kinds of gender expressions and things like that. So I'm excited about the gender expressions. I think I read that in the indigenous peoples of America some of them had twenty-seven gender expressions and there's something very exciting about that to me.

[36:40] Johanna Isaacson: But, you know, once again this article in "The Economist" was talking about how when everything looks really, really bleak, then you have to feel empowered by the fact that you know how to have nothing and that you're stoic. And I guess I think about like what is it inside of us as human beings that makes us feel like we have to make the way we live noble? And I certainly have it inside of myself, but could we look at our lives and feel like the little specks of nothing that we are in the universe and from that place maybe build something that works for everyone because we're all the same little speck of nothing in the blink of eternity.

[37:30] Johanna Isaacson: I love that, that's really beautiful. Yeah, and I just, you know, I was thinking about a while back this term negative solidarity that you see happening in the face of, you know, austerity and this feeling of futurelessness where, you know, like that you showed me this article that I thought was pretty interesting too where instead of realizing that we're all in one boat and that we need to build a more sustainable future that's more solidaristic and communal, people displace blame onto, you know, people who seem like the other, whether that's immigrants or women or trans people or, you know, various forms of, you know, seeming outsiders or people who seem to enjoy pleasure or who are considered, you know, for some reason or another not embracing like just total stoicness like you say, enough.

And that's been, you know, possibly the basis of, you know, this kind of rise of the far right is this kind of idea that we are the ones that work hard and have this kind of, you know, discipline versus these others. So it's sad to see that and I think this movie "Assassination Nation" does that really well too of kind of showing the rise of the far right as this kind of, there's all these things that everybody's suffering but there's this desire to exteriorize it instead of like embrace each other and face it together and it's kind of the modern version of what we were talking about earlier with Sylvia Federici of dividing and conquering and kind of offering men this like incentive to feel superior in the face of worsening conditions, right? So they at least have that compensation for their sufferings and stuff like that.

[39:36] Johanna Isaacson: I wrote an essay recently that was really trying to get to what you described so beautifully and you have the ability to use words that I don't have in my vocabulary but that, you know, this cracking down on women's bodies like we ex chromosomes control the means of production, all of the power rests with ex chromosome people and the denial, the extent of energy in law, in violence that is to deny a factual reality. Like we are not gonna give that power to those people, but we are going to put them under our thumb and reduce them to nothingness. Reduce them to slaves. Reduce them to baby warmers or carriers on our behalf, on behalf of the system that we are going to make. They are just going to become a function, a verb rather than a noun. That is so much a part of this system.

[40:49] Johanna Isaacson: And I don't know what's better. It's not like there was anything in the past that was better. But who's visioning better? Do you think that the horror filmmakers are visioning better or are they just holding up a mirror?

[41:02] Johanna Isaacson: Well, I do think that again like the sort of ways that the people who are like for instance anti-choice right now and who are, you know, would force everyone into that position of reproduction, they justify that is that there's nothing more beautiful, it's not really work, it's just love. There's no, you know, that this is just like, or you know, the woman who just sits home all day and eats bonbons because she's a housewife, not that it's not work raising children, right? All this is, you know, such BS. And again horror films have this ability to show, I mean there's this film I love called "Anti-Birth" where it just kind of has Natasha Lyonne being kind of forcibly impregnated by this scientific experiment or who to kind of create new workers and she's somebody who's, you know, kind of impoverished and not like the ideal citizen.

So she's considered expendable and she can just carry this baby whether she wants to or not. But you know, so there's this place where it acknowledges that not everybody wants to be pregnant, that that being pregnant creates workers that capitalism needs and, you know, there's, and you know, films like again "The Babadook" where you see how much work and struggle it is to raise a child especially alone when now there's so many, you know, single mothers trying to do everything by themselves and, you know, ever since the, you know, 80s there's been this stigma on those, you know, single mothers who are blamed for like the downfall of society. So longer go than that the Moynihan report in the 50s blaming everything wrong with the Negro problem on black mothers.

[42:11] Johanna Isaacson: Exactly, yeah, so it's been going on for forever and this is just, you know, like all of that experience especially, yeah, being a single mother. Another film I love is called "Dark Water," which is a kind of the Japanese version of that of just showing how much struggle it is and despite all that you can't keep the monsters out, you can't keep your children safe, right? Everything, all these forces are coming down on you.

[43:34] Johanna Isaacson: At one point in the book I kind of describe what it would be like if there were male workers without women to take care of them and their children, and that in itself would be a horror movie, right? Like where if you went to the factory, you worked all day and you didn't have a home to come home to, you didn't have a cooked meal, you didn't have sex, you didn't have children, right? This would be untenable. You wouldn't be able to do those jobs, right? So, but I think that we already have that. I think that we have that. We have that in the incel community. And they turn to extreme violence. Yeah. Because they feel they have somehow believed that they were owed that woman. Um, and if they aren't going to be able to get her, then they should die.

Yeah, it's terrifying. It's terrifying. And this is, you know, we live in a horror show that way. I mean, there's shootings every time you hear of one of these mass shootings, you realize that there's an impulse is often behind it, right? It's an incel or it's somebody who's already done domestic abuse, um, or and or these people. Or someone's world should, right? The world should be different for me. I should have better. Um, rather than, uh, all of us realizing that, you know, the sun shines and the rain falls on everyone equally. There's nothing personal about it. Uh, uh, what is that culture from this idea of it should be good? I know Aaron Reich, I actually knew Barbara. Um, right sided was, uh, you know, the positivity movement and the positivity religions and, uh, capitalism is really good at selling us things that go against our interests.

[45:26] Johanna Isaacson: Yeah, I mean, I think that, um, one of the films I try to talk about is it's not, it's kind of obscure, so I don't know how many people have seen it, but it's called Maps to the Stars. It's kind of a late Cronenberg movie. Um, he's pretty well known as a director, but, um, it's people who listen here are theater people really. Yeah, so they might not know, but it's, um, it has a kind of plot where you see this new age guru and he's constantly telling people to, you know, feel better and do all these kind of woo-woo things to feel better, but he's extremely like mean to his family, and I noticed that came up right during the pandemic when there was an article in the New York Times where this woman said, you know, this is a good time to kind of cull your social world and, you know, you should keep your friends who are positive, but you know, maybe the ones that are depressed or overweight, you might want to just get rid of that.

And it's like it just shows you how this like positivity is actually this way of victim blaming people who it and and being cruel in a way, right? If you're telling everybody that you should be positive or else, or you're not worthy of friendship or you're not worthy of support, um, then what kind of positivity really is that, right? And this movie Maps to the Stars really captures that of way like kind of the veneer of kind of positive, you know, and new age culture can serve to mask this really ruthless culling out of people who don't obey the rules of emotional labor or something.

[47:13] Tonya Pinkins: Now you're an educator, right? You're an educator, right?

[47:16] Johanna Isaacson: Yeah.

[47:16] Tonya Pinkins: Have you ever heard of Charlotte Isserby?

[47:19] Johanna Isaacson: No, I haven't. Um, tell me.

[47:21] Tonya Pinkins: So Charlotte Iserby was a high-level person in the department of education under Ronald Reagan. And Reagan was thinking of getting rid of the DOE at that time. And so she was a daughter of someone who was skull and bones, and she was appointed there because DOE is a presidential appointee, so she was appointed there, and there was nothing for her to do. And she spent her time figuring out what was the purpose of the DOE, and the purpose of the DOE, she discovered in all the documents that they wrote was to create compliant citizens, and each decade they had a new method of how they were going to create compliant citizens. So if I look to today, one of the final things before she was fired because she released all these documents publicly, was that they were moving towards bookless education because they realized that all the other methods were tracking out people who were never going to be compliant citizens into prison or death or whatever, um, defreezing values, breaking the parent-child authority bond, that the best way to create a compliant citizen was neurologically, and when you're dealing with a screen, you're just looking at the surface and you have no idea what is behind that screen and what is being subliminally programmed to you.

[48:49] Johanna Isaacson: So there's a part of me that feels like this, um, thing that I see a lot of people saying, Oh, if someone's ever been mean to somebody, I'm never gonna talk to them. And I'm thinking, well, gosh, you're not gonna be able to talk to anybody because all of us have been mean to somebody in their point of view, but when you get all these isolated people in the world because we are a community kind of animal, then they are right to be turned into anything you want to turn them into, because we need a community. That is the kind of species that we are.

[49:21] Tonya Pinkins: Yeah, exactly. And you know, one of the films I talk about again, I mentioned before it's called Assassination Nation, and the horror kind of impetus happens when some hacker gets into social media and spreads everybody's like personal messages, right? So and and pictures and everything. So everybody in the small town now knows what everybody else is saying about them, what everybody else is like, what kind of sex pictures they're, you know, or sex they're um sending to each other, and because there is no other sociality in that town other than the internet, they have no public sphere, they have no way of connecting other than that screen. Once that happens, they immediately devolve into absolute chaos, right?

And violence and terror, because that's the only connection that we have is through these, you know, networks of the internet, and then that becomes, um, you know, is clearly, you know, able to be manipulated and controlled in this way that real face-to-face bonds are allow for more complexity and forgiveness, and I mean, even as a teacher, you know, talking to my students about texts, right? You can't send a text that evokes complexity. There's so many ways that somebody can misunderstand you, so you have to like find a rhetoric that is very positive and encouraging, but also kind of dumbed down. You can't really like communicate subtle thoughts and this kind of thing, so, um, you know, and on top of that, the that, you know, that's another form of emotional labor.

Every time you spend an hour on Facebook, which I'm completely guilty of, or Twitter, there is money to be made from your attention, right? That actually is a form of labor that you're doing for that company that can sell advertisements, that can kind of gather information and data about you.

[51:23] Johanna Isaacson: So there is this one woman that did this manifesto called wages for Facebook, and it's like demanding that we all get paid for our use of social media. Um, but she's riffing on this 70s manifesto called Wages for Housework, where a bunch of housewives of fem international feminists got together, and it's almost somewhat performance art that they're demanding to get paid to do housework, um, partially because they want the money, but partially because they want it to be recognized as work, right? And how do you get people to recognize anything as work while you ask for it to be waged, and then people will take it a little bit more seriously. So there's a way in which there is like this continuum between the kind of emotional labor that people have done in the household and the emotional labor we do on social media.

Um, and a lot of it is, you know, women having to display themselves in a certain way as pretty or as, you know, kind of um desirable and that kind of thing as well. So that's part of that, that this, you know, that that work that we do.

[52:36] Tonya Pinkins: You just made me think of something that would be really, uh, you know, if we could get our heads out of, you know, how we've been socialized to behave as women, we would be like, oh you want children? Okay, well that's gonna take up this amount of my time and you need to pay me this and you need to pay me that and then you've got to pay for my trainer to get my body back in shape and I this am I that oh and then the time I've got a nurse. If we started really quantifying all of that time, I mean I have four children, uh, there's nothing that'll make you hate humanity more than having children, okay? You know, you realize all those ideas you had about them, no, they're people and they are not your people, they are their own people and if you think you know working in the service is hard, being a parent is, I don't think there's anything more hard and more of a service job than that, and I love how other people always say, well why don't you make them?

There is no way to make any other human being do anything other than violence, and we have made violence so acceptable that people can casually tell you to make other people and think that that's just the normalest thing in the world.

[53:52] Johanna Isaacson: Yeah, and the idea that all of this labor that goes into raising children has to be contained either in the nuclear family or in the family in the household of a single mom where that is, I mean, you know, the cliche is it takes a village to raise a child, but it's true. It's like that is not, it should not just be lie on this tiny group of underfunded people, this tiny household of underfunded people and time constrained people to do all that work because it's, it's like you say, it's the hardest work, it never ends and it's never really rewarded or thanked. It's, it's grueling, right? It's rewarding in its ways, but the myth around it that it's just beautiful and fun and lovely and not work even makes the fun parts hard because you just regret you're resentful, right?

Of all that time that went unacknowledged even when it's fun, you're still kind of holding on to some of those resentments, and so it's really the most, you know, and this is something I talk about in the book too, the most fundamental ideology in our culture isn't even really the individual, it's the family. It's that the family against the world that we can do anything, and that allows capitalism to externalize all this labor that it should be doing to reproduce people and to support them onto individuals who don't have the time or money to do it.

[55:25] Johanna Isaacson: So it's like, you know, it's an ideology that's very, very profitable for people to create all this free labor in the name of love and in the name of nature, right? Um, well this has been a pleasure speaking to you. I want to end with one thing that I re, I was listening to an article in Scientific America and it was talking about how our species evolved from hunter gatherer or, uh, you know, sort of the agricultural and it was through cooperative labor that, um, we, when we work to get our food, which was what most people did for a living for most of human history, uh, the surplus went to children. And when we started cooperating and working together and having more surplus, then we can have more children, and the adolescence for those children became longer because we had this surplus of food for them.

Somehow or other, all of that surplus that was supposed to serve us and serve our children has been funneled up to the top. And, uh, STEPFORD DAUGHTERS is this brilliant assessment of it inside pop culture and horror movies, which I'm a fan of. So I am so grateful to you, Johanna, for coming and talking with me.

[56:38] Tonya Pinkins: My name is Tonya Pinkins, and you're listening to You Can't SAY THAT on the Broadway Podcast Network.

[56:46] Tonya Pinkins: Thanks for listening to You Can't SAY THAT, the show where you can.

[56:51] Tonya Pinkins: I'm Tonya Pinkins, and You Can't SAY THAT is part of the Broadway Podcast Network.

[56:56] Tonya Pinkins: Produced by Dori Berinstein and Alan Seales with music by Cat Dail. If you like what you hear, don't forget to subscribe and rate this podcast highly wherever you stream.