Just when you thought there was nothing new under the sun to really despise, over the weekend, a breakthrough: anthropologist Wednesday Martin exposed the world to Glam SAHMs: glamorous, rich, Manhattan Stay-At-Home Moms who devote themselves exhaustively to looking good and advancing their children academically and economically, and who are paid handsomely for it with actual financial bonuses from their rich husbands. Cue jaw drop.
Uh huh. They get “wife bonuses.” Here’s how it works. Dishing in a New York Times op-ed advancing her upcoming memoir, Primates of Park Avenue, Martin writes:
A wife bonus, I was told, might be hammered out in a pre-nup or post-nup, and distributed on the basis of not only how well her husband’s fund had done but her own performance — how well she managed the home budget, whether the kids got into a “good” school — the same way their husbands were rewarded at investment banks. In turn these bonuses were a ticket to a modicum of financial independence and participation in a social sphere where you don’t just go to lunch, you buy a $10,000 table at the benefit luncheon a friend is hosting.
Women who didn’t get them joked about possible sexual performance metrics. Women who received them usually retreated, demurring when pressed to discuss it further, proof to an anthropologist that a topic is taboo, culturally loaded and dense with meaning.
For starters, I would seriously hope that not getting your annual bump would come with clear feedback as to how to remedy that next year—better beej or more prestigious preschool acceptance letter, whatever it takes.
Either way, this was a lot for everyone to get their head around out here in the 99 percent, a perfect storm of everything you could dare to want to despise and envy all at once, wrapped in a wife bonus. Because these mompetitors aren’t just loaded, though they are—their husbands amass great wealth running private or equity hedge funds. Glam SAHMs aren’t merely well educated, though all in the piece are described as “30-somethings with advanced degrees from prestigious universities and business schools.” And they aren’t simply beautiful, either—though most are said to look a decade younger than their age and exercise themselves “to a razor’s edge.”
It’s that they are all these things together, plus, get this: In an act of either truly admirable game-recognize-game brilliance or sad, pathetic self-imprisonment (you choose!), they have actually elected to not have careers, unless you count a life spent devoted to “intense mothering” and hustling those children up the whatever-it-is-really-rich-people do pole as a career. Say it with me: Barf/You go girl?
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