“The superiority of experiences has become our era’s reigning banality.”
“This new minimalism doesn’t just promise improved leisure time, but professional success, too.”
“Thus the spate of articles and posts (some explicitly pro-minimalist) about how amazing it is that Mark Zuckerberg and President Obama wear the same thing every day (as themselves, not as each other). Uniform dressing is meant to be a brilliant way that Great People (men) get ahead in the world.”
“Pare things down, and rid yourself of, if not possessions, then at least the more frivolous (that is, stereotypically feminine or domestic) ones, and you’re on your way to a more meaningful, ethical existence.”
“There’s nothing magical about favoring experiences over things, and there’s something subtly sexist about the refrain—especially in cases where the “stuff” is still plenty present, but is being dealt with by the women in a man’s life.”
“Tony’s essay in Toronto Life inadvertently highlights the sexism underlying the minimalist trend. It’s not just—as Ruth Whippman brilliantly demonstrated at The Pool—that the cool new tidying advice is aimed, much like older housekeeping advice, at women. It’s also that the very idea of experiences mattering more than things is a way of valorizing the stereotypically masculine.”
““While men are conditioned to dream big—to see their happiness in terms of adventure and travel, sex and ideas and long nights of hilarity—women are now encouraged to find deep fulfilment in staying home to origami our pants,” she wrote.”
“Whether women are being encouraged to rid our homes of useless belongings, or urged to shop for new ones, the result is the same: Society continues to associate women with the home and the material, men with the outside and experiences.”
“While the enjoyment of domestic life, of stuff, isn’t inherently negative, it is dismissed precisely because of its associations with the feminine.”
“An orientation towards stuff over experiences, moreover, gets cast either as recklessly materialist or, as Tony perceives it, an impediment to enjoying life.”
“The only constant is that what women prefer, or are imagined to prefer, is thought inferior.”
“Much like Torontonian Tony, Stillman—as presented in the piece—is a man on the go, too wrapped up in the excitement of life to concern himself with homemaking.”
“We’re meant to admire the experience-lovers for their indifference to stuff, which implies they’ve got their priorities straight: to live life to the fullest. It’s no coincidence, though, that these experience-lovers are so often male, as it’s a stereotypically male aspiration not to be “tied down”—that is, not to have domestic responsibilities.”
“But these men do have roofs over their heads. The bourgeois life they’re rejecting is simply one they’ve outsourced. After all, Tony hasn’t rejected the material life. He’s just got a woman—his mother—tidying up after him.”