(Elle Canada)
Lizzy Caplan has no desire to be a stay-at-home mom.
The actress, who plays sex researcher Virginia Johnson on “Masters of Sex,” often finds herself mulling over gender stigmas given her role on a show that’s set in the late 1950s.
“It’s a really conscious choice to be, say, the woman who goes out and works while the husband stays at home,” she tells Elle Canada. “It’s 2014, and if your husband makes less money than you, people ask you if that’s ‘weird’ for you. It’s pretty mind-blowing.”
Caplan notes, “I actually romanticize the idea of a stay-at-home dad. Partly because I think that’s a very sexy thing, but also because if there are two working actors and both of them get a job and they have a baby, the woman is going to stay with the baby.”
She adds, “I see it all the time. It just seems very unfair.”
Caplan says she may change her mind about being a stay-at-home mom when she has kids, but she doesn’t think it should be expected of her.
“I don’t want it to be an assumption that I will be the one to stay home and raise the kids,” she says. “Now, I could have kids and want to do that, I have no idea — but from where I sit now, that does not sound all that appealing to me.”
She explains, “I really want kids, and I want to be fully involved in their lives, but I don’t want to sacrifice my own goals to be a mother.”
Caplan also notes that our society still stigmatizes female sexuality.
“I identified with how Virginia could separate sex from love — that was something that made her an odd duck,” she says of her character. “It’s a lot less harsh these days, but that’s still something that exists.”
She continues, “We have such a long way to go before you don’t see a ‘promiscuous’ girl. I mean, people don’t even use the word promiscuous when describing men, ever.”
“I don’t think it’s my personal crusade to be this proud promiscuous person,” says Caplan, “but it’s a conversation that I’ve gotten into quite often since I started the show, and I find it fascinating.”
The Mean Girls star frequently films nude scenes for her sexually explicit Showtime show — to the point where it has become second nature.
“Only when re-entering the real world do I realize that being naked in front of lots of people is a strange way to spend your day,” she says. “I think that, in that vacuum, they probably could convince me to do quite a lot of crazy sh*t.”
As for her sexy “Masters of Sex” billboards, Caplan says, “I had this moment of ‘Wow, it must really suck for exes to see that.’ But what can you do?”
She notes, “Don’t date an actress if you don’t want to see her in bed on a billboard.”
What do you think of Caplan’s comments?
