‘10 Thousand Rupiah in the Right Wife’s Hand’: Romanticizing Gendered Austerity on Social Media

  • 30/10/2025
  • Category: Commentaries
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10 ribu rupiah

Author: Aisya Sabili
Editor: Ayom Mratita Purbandani

Introduction

A video recently erupted across Indonesian social media titled “10 Thousand Rupiah in the Right Wife’s Hand.” In the clip, a pregnant woman showcases a daily meal prepared with a paltry grocery budget of IDR10,000 (about USD 0.60). The meal consists of water spinach and tempeh, she asserts she can still generate savings.[1] She also notes that the fetus’ nutrition is supplemented through the Supplementary Feeding Program for Pregnant Women and Children (Pemberian Makanan Tambahan/PMT).[2] Medical professionals swiftly condemned the clip for romanticizing “simple living” while normalizing potentially severe nutrient deficits.[3] The comments surrounding the clip were highly diverse, with many viewers delving into the uploader’s personal background and motivations. Viewers also pointed to the husband’s smoking as a glaring irony. Cigarettes remain a non-negotiable expense while the pregnant woman’s nutrition is cynically reframed as a “test” of fidelity and extreme frugality. Relevant comments featured in a news article include: “10 thousand but the husband still smokes?” and “Instead of skimping this much, the husband should stop smoking.”[4]

This narrative echoes the government’s own rhetoric of efficiency. Through Presidential Instruction (Inpres) No. 1/2025, the administration announced over IDR 300 trillion in expenditure “efficiency,” framed as a move to protect public welfare.[5][6][7] Public reporting in the same period notes increases or protections for legislative allowances.[8] These moves do not directly prove bad faith, but they invite a consistency check on distributional priorities. The term starts to organize expectations in homes as much as in the government. In practice, it borrows the logic of austerity that began as a macroeconomic strategy for fiscal tightening and gradually crept into social life as a moral mandate that elevates thrift.[9] Within the household, thrift is compulsively performed as feminine competence. Loyalty is measured by the capacity to absorb cuts. The micro reflects the macro: both state and family demand sacrifice from those with the least leverage. “Efficiency” slides from neutral calculation into a coercive moral device that dictates who is granted flexibility and who must internalize scarcity.

Gendered Austerity in Neoliberalism

Neoliberalism provides the ideological infrastructure that enables the normalization of gendered austerity. Discourses of relentless self-reliance and “efficiency” function as tools to privatize risk[10], eroding public protections and shifting the responsibility for social welfare onto individuals. Welfare is reframed not as a right but as personal discipline. Within this framework, thrift is no longer a neutral value but a moral requirement.[11] Redistribution is painted as reckless, while endurance under scarcity is upheld as a marker of character. These ideological tenets justify structural withdrawal while holding individuals, especially women, accountable for absorbing its consequences.

Gendered austerity emerges when fiscal restraint is converted into forced everyday restraint. As public spending contracts, the labor of social reproduction is offloaded onto households.[12] The long-standing gendered division of labor ensures that women disproportionately shoulder the time, emotional labor, and consumption management needed to maintain domestic stability. This process transcends budget cuts: it reorganizes daily rhythms—dictating who stretches meals, who defers care for themselves, and who performs a “second shift” after paid work. Inside the household, women are trapped as unpaid curators of stability through consumption discipline and time management. Men, conversely, retain control over discretionary spending and major financial decisions. Repeated in practice, austerity ceases to signify as mere budgeting and instead becomes a regressive family ethic that systematically relocates sacrifice to those with the least leverage.[13]

Macro and micro converge on parallel axes of exploitation. At the national scale, priority choices determine who receives slack and who bears tightening. At the household scale, allocation decisions determine who controls discretionary outlays and who fills gaps with exhausting additional unpaid labor. When “efficiency” is proclaimed without clear social-outcome metrics, households close the gap by drastically cutting consumption and deferring essential care. When masculine discretionary spending persists unchecked, the entire work of managing the cuts is unilaterally assigned to domestic managers. Slack always moves upward; tightening always moves downward. That is where austerity meets neoliberalism, not as one-to-one causation but through deliberate risk offloading and a moral judgment of consumption that structures identical, detrimental decisions across scales.[14]

Romanticization of Gendered Austerity on Social Media

The romanticization mechanism of this matter can be forensically traced through “10 Thousand Rupiah in the Right Wife’s Hand” video. First, it involves polishing acute scarcity, where minimalist meals are dishonestly framed as the harmony of compromise. Second, it means aggressively making responsibility feminine, where household food security is naturalized as the exclusive domain of the “good at managing” woman; a moral standard attached almost automatically to femininity. Third, it requires purposefully obscuring the true sources of burden, where declining diet quality, protein prices, and the actual quality of assistance programs are systematically swept aside from public concern into the sanitized kitchen stage.

This romanticization thrives because social media platforms profit from legible, manufactured feelings. Everyday shortage is meticulously edited into compellingly intimate stories and presented as authentic domestic life. Research on micro-celebrity and the influencer economy shows how domestic labor, frugal recipes, and staged intimacy become lucrative convertible assets for attention and financial support.[15] These representations shamefully award social prestige to consumption discipline and stoicism rather than to structural demands for necessary redistribution.

Platform design of social media also enforces simple, superficial narratives. Cultural work on austerity documents how shortage is perversely cast as virtue and frugality as self-worth.[16] Feminist analyses of austerity show that public tightening invariably manifests as an everyday face like unpaid care, punishing household consumption management, and emotional containment pushed back into the home. Thereby, reinforcing gendered hierarchies.[17] Popular media amplifies this destructive movement, lavishly celebrating women’s competence while simultaneously normalizing moral expectations of care and sacrifice that ensure power relations remain utterly intact.[18]

Conclusion

The micro-narrative of “10 Thousand Rupiah in the Right Wife’s Hand” exposes a tight convergence of platform dynamics and entrenched economic ideology. By making poverty visually palatable and recoding severe frugality as feminine moral excellence, this content operates as a mechanism of ideological maintenance. The digital romanticization of gendered austerity legitimizes the status quo. It diverts scrutiny from systemic failures such as weak social protection, price instability, and ethically questionable public spending, then loads the burden of stability onto the domestic manager. In case after case, the signs of gendered austerity recur as a pattern from systematic level to individual. The viral appeal of these stories installs the structural violence of austerity in public common sense. If we keep reading this as love, austerity will keep passing as reason.

  1. Rahmadania, S.R. (2025). Viral Tren ’10 Ribu di Tangan Istri yang Tepat’, Awas Ini Wanti-wanti Dokter Gizi. [online] detikHealth. Available at: https://health.detik.com/berita-detikhealth/d-8152866/viral-tren-10-ribu-di-tangan-istri-yang-tepat-awas-ini-wanti-wanti-dokter-gizi [Accessed 11 Oct. 2025]. ↑
  2. ibid. ↑
  3. ibid. ↑
  4. Khotimah, N. (2025). Viral ‘Rp10 Ribu di Tangan Istri yang Tepat’, Berapa Uang Belanja Ideal Menurut Islam? [online] suara.com. Available at: https://www.suara.com/lifestyle/2025/09/27/154500/viral-rp10-ribu-di-tangan-istri-yang-tepat-berapa-uang-belanja-ideal-menurut-islam [Accessed 27 Oct. 2025]. ↑
  5. Instruksi Presiden (2025). Instruksi Presiden (Inpres) Nomor 1 Tahun 2025 tentang Efisiensi Belanja dalam Pelaksanaan Anggaran Pendapatan dan Belanja Negara dan Anggaran Pendapatan dan Belanja Daerah Tahun Anggaran 2025. [online] Available at: https://peraturan.bpk.go.id/Details/313401/inpres-no-1-tahun-2025 [Accessed 7 Oct. 2025]. ↑
  6. Humas Sekretariat Kabinet RI (2025). Presiden Prabowo Tekankan Efisiensi Anggaran untuk Kesejahteraan Rakyat . [online] Setkab.go.id. Available at: https://setkab.go.id/presiden-prabowo-tekankan-efisiensi-anggaran-untuk-kesejahteraan-rakyat [Accessed 7 Oct. 2025]. ↑
  7. Sekretariat Jenderal DPR RI (2025). Efisiensi Anggaran Lebih dari Rp300 Triliun Tidak Ganggu Program Prioritas untuk Rakyat. [online] Dpr.go.id. Available at: https://jdih.dpr.go.id/berita/detail/id/58419/t/Efisiensi%2BAnggaran%2BLebih%2Bdari%2BRp300%2BTriliun%2BTidak%2BGanggu%2BProgram%2BPrioritas%2Buntuk%2BRakyat [Accessed 8 Oct. 2025]. ↑
  8. Fundrika, B.A. and Yasir, M. (2025). DPR Tak Kena Pemotongan Anggaran: Manuver Prabowo Demi ‘Karpet Merah’ APBN? [online] suara.com. Available at: https://liks.suara.com/read/2025/02/04/123248/dpr-tak-kena-pemotongan-anggaran [Accessed 8 Oct. 2025]. ↑
  9. Bramall, R. (2013). The Cultural Politics of Austerity: Past and Present in Austere Times. Springer. ↑
  10. Dabrowski, V. (2021). ‘Neoliberal feminism’: Legitimising the gendered moral project of austerity. The Sociological Review, [online] 69(1), pp.90–106. doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/0038026120938289. ↑
  11. ibid. ↑
  12. Karamessini, M. and Rubery, J. (2013). Women and austerity : the economic crisis and the future for gender equality. London: Routledge. ↑
  13. Karamessini, M. and Rubery, J. (2013). Women and austerity : the economic crisis and the future for gender equality. London: Routledge. ↑
  14. Dabrowski, V. (2021). ‘Neoliberal feminism’: Legitimising the gendered moral project of austerity. The Sociological Review, [online] 69(1), pp.90–106. doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/0038026120938289. ↑
  15. Abidin, C. (2016). Please subscribe!: influencers, social media, and the commodification of everyday life. [online] Available at: https://research-repository.uwa.edu.au/en/publications/please-subscribe-influencers-social-media-and-the-commodification/fingerprints/. ↑
  16. Bramall, R. (2013). The Cultural Politics of Austerity: Past and Present in Austere Times. Springer. ↑
  17. Karamessini, M. and Rubery, J. (2013). Women and austerity : the economic crisis and the future for gender equality. London: Routledge. ↑
  18. Dabrowski, V. (2021). ‘Neoliberal feminism’: Legitimising the gendered moral project of austerity. The Sociological Review, [online] 69(1), pp.90–106. doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/0038026120938289. ↑