Let $S$ be a Noetherian scheme of finite dimension and denote by $\unicode[STIX]{x1D70C}\in [\unicode[STIX]{x1D7D9},\mathbb{G}_{m}]_{\mathbf{SH}(S)}$ the (additive inverse of the) morphism corresponding to $-1\in {\mathcal{O}}^{\times }(S)$ . Here $\mathbf{SH}(S)$ denotes the motivic stable homotopy category. We show that the category obtained by inverting $\unicode[STIX]{x1D70C}$ in $\mathbf{SH}(S)$ is canonically equivalent to the (simplicial) local stable homotopy category of the site $S_{\text{r}\acute{\text{e}}\text{t}}$ , by which we mean the small real étale site of $S$ , comprised of étale schemes over $S$ with the real étale topology. One immediate application is that $\mathbf{SH}(\mathbb{R})[\unicode[STIX]{x1D70C}^{-1}]$ is equivalent to the classical stable homotopy category. In particular this computes all the stable homotopy sheaves of the $\unicode[STIX]{x1D70C}$ -local sphere (over $\mathbb{R}$ ). As further applications we show that $D_{\mathbb{A}^{1}}(k,\mathbb{Z}[1/2])^{-}\simeq \mathbf{DM}_{W}(k)[1/2]$ (improving a result of Ananyevskiy–Levine–Panin), reprove Röndigs’ result that $\text{}\underline{\unicode[STIX]{x1D70B}}_{i}(\unicode[STIX]{x1D7D9}[1/\unicode[STIX]{x1D702},1/2])=0$ for $i=1,2$ and establish some new rigidity results.