What the Hell is a Trad Wife?

Everything Old Is New Again

I will expose my elder millennial status by admitting that Facebook and Instagram are my social media go-tos (you can easily find me there, but trigger (ha!) warning: my pages are not very interesting). I refuse to download TikTok because I do not need yet another app drawing me in to a timeless, zombie-like state. I never could get into Twitter, and especially now that it’s run by a very vocal ass of a man, menos.

And like all people on the interwebs these days, I’m shown, basically, three categories of things when I log on.

The first, and mercifully biggest category: things that are designed mostly to delight me, and to sometimes express my biases in more clever ways than I can think of. These are mostly memes, and I’ve got my algorithms trained to served me a good collection of irreverent, hilarious ones with a generous helping of anti-capitalist memes that I share regularly on my “stories.”

Ah, that hits the spot!

The second category is posts or ads to try to get me to buy things (why, I do love a nice intricately-carved Indian-style side table!). They don’t always hit the nail on the head — I sometimes get ads for things like pet psychic training, which the internet gods should know I roll my eyes incredibly hard at — but mostly, they’re embarrassingly good at putting things in front of me that I’d for sure spend money on.

The third category is made up of things meant to outrage me or at least make me frown, which I’m pretty sure is just a way to keep me in an intensely interested state so that I stay on longer and more things to buy can be pitched to me.

Okay fine, this kind of pisses me off. (See here for what this is all about).

Knowing me perhaps better than I know myself, the algorithms know how to hit me where it hurts, which I’m pretty sure for all of us is probably right at the intersection of our outrages and insecurities.

Into this category, a kind of feminine branch of the New Misogyny (in which things like podcasts by self-designated “alpha males” and rants by the types of men who comment things like “close your legs” on posts about abortion would fall), has fallen a new meme: the trad wife.

Apparently it’s short for “traditional wife.” From what I can tell, it’s a kind of newfound modern aspiration and pride in being a 1950s-style upper-middle class housewife, but aggressively so. Think Kellyanne Conway with strong opinions about what it means to be a good and subservient wife, in that kind of mean and defiant way of hers. (And she’s so good-looking and sharp, gosh, it’s hard not to be mesmerized.)

It exists in a kind of alternate reality where feminism definitively “won,” and and now we’re all suffering under its oppression. To get to this reality, you have to pretend that neither pervasive worldwide violence against women nor femicide exist, and that the majority of women are in a kind of conspiracy to hold onto some secret form of power that’s kept hidden from our statistics of women in actual leadership roles.

You also have to pretend that women entering the workforce, and not the shedding of labor laws by neocapitalist politicians and their allies since the early 1980s are responsible for your frustration and stress, the reason that Everything Went Wrong. (These same power players, incidentally, are the ones who love to promote traditional gender roles and power dynamics while they ensure that any alternative path turns into a stressful hellscape involving zero support for home duties or childcare: “Here are your choices, and the comfortable one is to find a rich man who will be your financial overlord. We know a few, and will be taking applications.”)

Sewing up a sock: the new, but actually old, “revolution.”

So trad wives, in this world, are the outspoken rebels. They’re squarely on the side of the men who want their homemade dinner hot and ready by the time they get home, the wife dolled up and preferably with sexy lingerie underneath her sexy yet modest outfit (she’d have had to be a virgin when they married, of course).

But you know what? I’m not buying it. Not as a rebellious stance, anyway.

Because I get it, especially for the young people out there who haven’t yet experienced many of the heartbreaking realities of the modern world and all its complexities and disappointments.

You’re 25 and think you’ve been through it all? Just wait. Just. wait.

It’s a harsh and scary world out there, and when we’re stressed, we long for simplicity and stability. Who doesn’t want some security and predictability? Who doesn’t want to be able to opt out of having to participate in this shitty, terrifying economy that forces you to provide for yourself on increasingly decreasing pay and benefits in an increasingly costly world?

Plus, we all want to get laid, preferably regularly, and we all want to be served and comforted and loved. And unless we’re psychopaths, we also want to serve and comfort and love. We’ve got a romantic side.

The seduction of this movement is that it gives the illusion that by following a specific yet simple formula, having all that is possible if you’re the right kind of woman: be a good, traditional wife, and you will have security, and love, and fulfillment for life.

Oh, honey. If only.

Unfortunately, as pretty much any woman who came of age in the 1950s will tell you (and many modern Mexican women will tell you, actually), things don’t always work out the way you planned. Even for those who made all the “right” moves.

Being a good and loving servant who always leaves sex on the menu does not guarantee a husband who will only ever have eyes for you (have you met humans?), who will never let his vices overtake him, who will always have a steady temper, who will not lose his job, or get sick when he’s young, or die, or simply decide he’d like a different life than the one he has with you. It will also not guarantee freedom from boredom (just ask Betty Friedan!).

In summary: hitching yourself to someone else’s wagon for financial stability with no backup plan is never the safest bet, and it leaves you vulnerable, with few options should things go south in any way.

Wishing for happily ever after is fine; we all do it, and I truly hope we all get it. But no amount of freshly-baked apple pies or tubes of red lipstick can serve as insurance against having to survive this scary, scary world alone, at least for a while.

---

The wheels of history are just that: wheels. The distinct spots might be hitting different parts of the ground as they move, but they’re still the same parts that roll over, and over, and over again.

You know the saying: history doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme.

Unfortunately, the lessons we collectively learn get forgotten pretty quickly. Humanity has a short memory. Studying history is boring to most people, and there’s just so much of it. We read about women burned as witches or sold to their much older husbands as teenagers and shrug. “That must have sucked.”

And every recycled idea, born of the bits and pieces of the society around us, feels like a novel, brilliant idea. There’s no one alive (or at least not relevant enough to be listened to) to say “hold up, we’ve been down this road before, and look, it did not end well” in our kind of society.

Well, well, well, if it isn’t the same kinds of humans we’ve always been.

So here some disillusioned yet hopeful young women go, the beneficiaries of a long and hard-fought feminist movement who have no idea the depths to which they can be stripped of their first-class citizenship nor subjected to a completely misogynist ideology that can become the sea we all swim in oh, so quickly.

Mariel Cooksey said it best (this whole article is well worth the read, by the way):

“…aspiring tradwives on TikTok also unknowingly repeat feminist rhetoric: openly promoting gender equality in relationship decision-making; pushing back against objectification and over-sexualization of women, particularly of under-age girls; and criticizing the porn industry for normalizing sexual violence and aggression against women. Much like Schlafly in the ‘70s, today’s anti-feminist tradwives use the victories of feminism to undermine the very movement that fought for them to have such agency. And as young, mostly unmarried people in middle-class America—where many aspects of basic gender equality are taken for granted—their advocacy is mostly risk-free, allowing them to push back against liberal convention and modernity without much threat of facing danger or oppression themselves.”

If history is any example — if plenty of other modern cultures are examples, actually — a pairing of sexual equality and traditional gender roles rarely go together. Let’s be so, so careful of what we wish for.

And remember this, if nothing else: you don’t need to be subservient to be deserving of love and care. Really.