Rabbit Holes Of Extremism: Tradwife Edition
Mother Jones Melts Down About The Existence of Sanity
You might remember that I just wrote about Tradwives. I thought I was so late to the party. But it turns out, you guys, it’s still time to Freak Out. Trad Wives are coming to get you! Some of them are “henchwomen.” Mother Jones (the magazine, not the lady) has the scoop and, even though it’s entirely predictable, I feel like it’s still worth a gander.
First up, in case you thought watching a little bit of Nara Smith or Ballerina Farm was harmless, think again. This stuff is extremely dangerous:
But while it might be easy to write off the trad wives as a silly meme or a guilty pleasure, they should not be taken lightly. Given the misogynistic messaging and white-centric ideals some of these influencers peddle, they are indicative of larger forces at play—henchwomen in an ongoing effort to functionally erase modern women from the public sphere.
I expect the writer is speaking of people like me, who believe in God. Why else the unhinged cry of dereliction? Women who have gotten tired of the corporate grind, who decided they wanted to have a husband and children and a home are literally erasing modern women from the public sphere. Some of them, as we’ll go on to discover, believe in harmful religious extremism like not using birth control to suppress the horror of their biological realities.
Anyway, Trump, as usual, is to blame:
But then the vibe shifted. In 2016 and 2017, when Seyward Darby was doing research for her 2020 book, Sisters in Hate: American Women on the Front Lines of White Nationalism, she noticed an ominous subculture gaining prominence, one in which women were performing this highly curated image of wife- and motherhood. “It was aggressively anti-feminist, anti-diversity; some of it was proudly pro-white,” Darby says. Trump’s rise helped give these women a larger megaphone.
I haven’t heard of that book and, I pray to the Lord, who is my Savior, that I won’t have to read it any time soon. It sounds like skipping Purgatory and going straight to Hell.
Observe how all these things are jumbled together. “Aggressive” anti-feminism is married to anti-diversity, which creates a polecule with proud pro-whiteness. Do you suppose the writers at Mother Jones have relationships with actual people? Like, do they speak to their mothers and grandmothers? Do they greet the people in the corner shop? Do they ever go outside for a walk around the park? This is an absurd way to write, never mind to think.
Anyway, the slippery slope, when it is warned about by people like me, is a fallacy. But when Mother Jones sees it, it’s an actual thing:
Of course, many influencers bragging about being stay-at-home moms are not white supremacists, but, as Darby points out, “it is a slippery slope—and sometimes there’s no slope at all—between ‘I’m just a nice woman who wants to be a wife and mom’ and having a very white nationalist agenda. Whether they realize it or not, those are the waters they are swimming in.”
So here’s the thing—if you take the trouble to have a family and make a home, that work has rippling effects, cascading, ultimately, into a mighty flood. It’s not just your children and your husband who enjoy the benefits of your labor. As you work, you become more and more invested in what you’re doing. And when your work is people—who they are, and where they live, and how their lives unfurl—their whole world begins to matter to you more and more. And then something terrible does begin to happen, even to a modern woman if that is what you are. You begin to care about the actual community where you actually live. Your street, your town, and most importantly, your church. The relationship between the place and the people becomes more and more pronounced. It begins to dawn on you that you cannot replace one set of people and a place with another set and be happy. You begin to have a sense of, wait for it, Home.
But Home, O Best Beloved, in these latter days—especially when its deepest expression is shaped by the rhythms and assumptions of the Church—Home is actually racist and you shouldn’t ever want to have it or make it so that other people want it. The only non-racist activity for you to pursue is a soulless and soul-crushing office job grinding out content for Mother Jones. Beware lest you be tempted by beauty or sanity. That’s whiteness. Also, cue spooky muzak, “religious indoctrination:”
Watching trad wife content can pull viewers into territory they didn’t expect. “What’s scary is that there is a subtext in all these videos,” Washington Post tech columnist Taylor Lorenz tells me. For example, a trad wife might advocate for “natural living” or homeschooling, and then veer into anti–birth control rhetoric or religious indoctrination. “When you engage with these videos, because they are so adjacent to fascist, far-right content, you are quickly led down a rabbit hole of extremism.”
Taylor Lorenz—she’s so funny, and by funny I mean bad. Remember Ladies! Liking tradwife content makes you a fascist! Christianity Today is concerned:
The dream of homestead life among trad wife influencers is a bat signal for women who grew up in Christian fundamentalist spaces, as Kelsey Kramer McGinnis argued for Christianity Today: “They see it as a new way to spiritualize hyper-feminine womanhood and strictly defined gender roles. It’s content they have seen before, repackaged for a new generation.” It urges them to reminisce about a simpler time, when gender roles were firmly in place.
I don’t want to be unkind, but this is a silly thing to write let alone think. Women desiring to be women, to inhabit the life and space and troubles that have preoccupied women since the dawn of time, is not a “new way to spiritualize hyper-feminine womanhood and strictly defined gender roles.” Anything being “firmly in place” is far and away more comforting than everything up for grabs. It’s time to deconstruct deconstructing gender roles. Sometimes things happen for sensible reasons. Admitting that women are a certain way and are naturally inclined towards certain expressions of life is not subjugation. Simple is—dare I say it?—sometimes fine.
Here's the part where Mother Jones says sort of what I said, only from the other direction, like it’s a bad thing:
So why are many millennial and Gen Z women an eager part of the trad wife audience? Here’s my theory: We’ve given up. The popularity of the trad wife content is demonstrative of a psychological resignation. In the past several years, we’ve experienced a pandemic, the fall of Roe v. Wade, and the end of the Girlboss Era. The rise of the trad wives marks what Samhita Mukhopadhyay, author of the 2024 book The Myth of Making It: A Workplace Reckoning, believes is “a response to the failures of a neoliberal workplace feminism” stretching from the 1960s to the present day—one that focuses on individuality. “What women fought for was an entry into the workplace,” Mukhopadhyay explains, but “being a mother in the workplace was almost untenable.” Even after decades of supposed progress, she points out, “we’re still not paid equally, and most women still don’t have resources commensurate with how hard they work and how they contribute to their families.” According to a 2023 report from the liberal research and advocacy organization the Center for American Progress, women were 5 to 8 times more likely than men to work part time or not at all because of caregiving responsibilities. Maya Kosoff, a content strategist and writer who admits to me that she has become obsessed with trad wives herself, says their popularity is “a reaction to perceived systemic failures” that seem like they “can be easily solved by turning to the simpler life of homesteading.”
So, seeing that there are real “failures” associated with a “neoliberal workplace feminism” which, as young Gen Zers hit the workforce are becoming obvious because they are so expressive in their distaste and disapprobation for how their elders have arranged the world, what we need to do is try feminism even harder. It can’t be that certain kinds of feminism have just failed, and maybe we should admit that and think of other things. No, like socialism and communism and Marxism and late-stage empire capitalism, we will do feminism until we are so miserable and sad we give up and eat poisonous storebought bread and drink wine straight from the bottle. Women who chunk it for a happier, simpler life must be blamed and shamed out of existence.
Also, Do Not Have Children. And by no means so intertwine your life with a man—one man, for as long as you live—that you become mutually interdependent upon each other, that you cannot imagine living apart, that the specter of death is so intolerable that you finally become a Christian so that you will be able to gaze upon the sublime beauty of Christ together because that will make your citizenship vulnerable in this “democracy.” Because sure, why not call whatever system of government we have now a “democracy.” It’s working just fine:
Sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom similarly argues that attacks on reproductive rights represent an erosion of women’s place in a democracy. “Women only get to be full citizens if they have control over when and how they have babies,” she says. “When that changes, your citizenship becomes vulnerable, so you attach yourself to a citizen: men. I think this reclaiming of being the traditional wife is here so long as there’s a threat.”
So many threats! They’re everywhere! Anyway, you must not watch tradwife content. It makes you complicit in fascism:
You can never “simply enjoy things” when you log in to a social media platform. Every interest or disgust you have toward a topic is up for extraction. When you feast on trad wife videos, your eyeballs are implicated. Even if you don’t subscribe to the far-right or racist ideologies, you’ll be fed them so long as you keep watching. Believing you have no part in it is as naive as believing that touching a hot stove won’t get you burnt.
I never thought I would live to see this moment. It feels a little bit like the Berlin Wall suddenly crumbling. For Mother Jones (she must be rolling over in her grave) to perseverate about tradwife content on the internet indicates two things, at least, though possibly more.
First, it shows that, against all the desires of the people who created it, the internet is not all bad. Common Grace, in some small pockets of the world, still exists. And because real things are always more beautiful than the tortured corruption of them, some people will watch and think, ‘Gosh, I really want to make some bread this afternoon and kiss a fat baby.’ And once a woman thinks that, every time she has to face down HR, she’s going to feel more and more weary and exasperated until she gives up. Which leads me to my second point. Conservatives have been fighting an uphill battle on the matter of aesthetics. From Mary Tyler Moore to Sarah Jessica Parker, the single, funny, unhappy-in-love female was the coolest possible thing. Being a loving wife and mother was hopelessly unattractive. But as everyone is noticing since the downfall of Budlight, it’s possible to shift the frame. It’s possible to see something for what it is—that Dylan Mulvany is a grotesque mockery of femininity, and that Hannah Neeleman is a beautiful woman made more beautiful by all the children twirling around her feet.
And I’m sorry, it is not a white thing. I follow a bunch of accounts across racial and ethnic lines. Women—no matter their color—doing homey and comfortable things is the sanest content on the internet.
I think the Tradwife movement is all a conspiracy directed by the sourdough bread industry. Big Sourdough is giving the marching orders to these henchwomen, in my opinion.
A sobering thought while reading this: there is no longer any daylight between what might be a Taylor Lorenz quote or a Christianity Today article.