If the average American were asked what they imagine the priorities of the feminist movement are these days, most people would likely cite concerns like “fighting abortion bans” or “getting justice for sexual violence victims” or boring mainstays like “equal pay for equal work.” But if you listen in to the world of right-wing social media influencers, they have a different answer. To them, feminists are single-mindedly obsessed with destroying women who identify as “tradwives.”
Are they also selling the fantasy you can make ends meet on a single person’s income?
It’s the same fantasy. You work on seven years I’ll work on odd ones
Right, that’s the most idiotic part. My wife has a career that I also make sacrifices for and vice versa. Even with modest career growth, she will contribute about $4M in earnings over 30 years.
Setting earnings aside, we have a child, and she is an equal partner. It would be insulting and foolish to ask her to stop working. We want our son to grow up knowing that women are just as capable as men.
They’re selling the fantasy to people still living with their parents.
In the UK childcare is so expensive that it has started to make sense for someone to take a career break while they are young. Unfortunately women appear to be most affected by this.
This is probably a luxury thought but I wonder if the opportunity cost of the career break not leading to promotions ends up costing a lot more than the childcare in the long run.
Child care is not expensive here, but women tend to “sacrifice” their economic future to spend more time with the kids. This means they work less than men, and they will suffer quite a lot when it comes to pensions when they get older.
All right wing fantasies are rotting young men’s minds.
Remember boys and men: If you can’t get a girlfriend, much less a woman of your dreams, just become radicalized by a fringe extremist group on the internet.
Worked great for the Taliban, hasn’t it?
Exactly, if you can force all women to be subservient, they’ll have to date you.
Depends on whether the 72 virgins thing is true. And if said virgins are girls.
Surprise! Your 72 virgins are other hopelessly radicalized young men from your cult!
The 72 virgins are the friends we made along the way to martyrdom.
All 72 remaining Republican voters… imagine
Did it? Sure, their buddies are in charge, but they still have to live in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, and it seems to be a shithole by virtually every definition.
In fairness, all x wing (pun intended) fantasies are rotting young minds. My extremism is mind rot, whether you’re a guy, girl or whatever you want to be in between. Yes, be progressive, but please please also be pragmatic. There is a real world put there and the pushing of left wing agendas in the past decade has caused more hand than it’s done good. People are tired of the more nonsensical parts being pushed and now we have a trump in the Netherlands. Great job.
Can we please focus on actual important rights? We fucking lost abortion in the US, thanks to trump who also had a lot of “fuck this PC police bullshit” votes, this coming from too many of my US friends and customers who voted for him back in the day even though he was bad for them, they just were done with the left wing crap…
Please be practical, focus on real and actual issues that need to be resolved.
Interested to hear what you think are not “actual important rights.” Please elaborate.
There is a real world put there and the pushing of left wing agendas in the past decade has caused more hand than it’s done good.
put? hand? wha?
Transphobia, muh both sides (but reinforcing right wing talking points) while desperately imploring us to abandon “the left wing crap”. Who the fuck do you think you are kidding, you dumbass motherfucker.
Idk man you might disagree with him but he made his point fairly respectfully and you replied trying to start a flame war.
Someone can be “fairly respectful” or “civil” about their views on gender identity & sexuality, but if their message boils down to ideology like “I don’t believe this really exists”, “Be a man or a woman, ffs”, or “These people are all just mentally ill”, it doesn’t really matter how “respectful” they are being if their message / beliefs are harmful to marginalized groups.
I don’t necessarily encourage these kinds of hostile replies, but I can absolutely see where it comes from, and it is absolutely understandable.
If your beliefs can cause or encourages harm, hostility can enforce the message that it is not welcome in these places.
I would also love to know what kind of “left wing agenda” that the commenter is claiming to “cause so much harm” actually is.
Removed by mod
charming
Removed by mod
Advocating or defending fascism “respectfully” is still advocating a hateful ideology. Fuck that guy.
Wilders winning the election in the Netherlands is not the fault of the Left. Who was in power in the Netherlands for the last twenty years? It was center right liberals.
PC? You mean words and actions having consequences and previously marginalized groups having a voice in society? Why do those things upset you so much?
Why do you think that building an egalitarian society where all voices are actualized is bad?
Can you be more explicit, please? Which policies, exactly, should be pushed? Which abandoned?
I read it as them believing that the modern focus on identity politics on the left might be counterproductive. Not sure though, they would need to clarify.
I’m definitely interested in hearing from them what they mean. If that were their answer, I’d want to know what exactly is meant by “identity politics”, because it seems like a negative applause light rather than a pointer to a real thing in the territory. At least that’s how I generally see it used.
Yeah I’m curious too. Wouldn’t be surprised if we didn’t get clarification though since this thread has turned into a bit of a bun fight.
BOTH SIDES!!!1
No one:
Conservatives: WEMEN BAD
I like that there’s even an accidental confession in the spelling.
Naïve man children who need validation because being with someone their equal is scary, and the “tradwife” insofar as they exist, wants to be completely dependent on this manchild. Sounds like a great idea I’m sure it works out well all the time. The idea of being with a woman like this hell to me, and any of the associated sexual fantasies involved are hotter when power is willingly relinquished, from either person, not in some weird coercive context.
being with someone their
equalsuperiorThis is their real fear. And that if women are given a chance to live their life in freedom, the men might actually have to offer something on the relationship table that they might not be able to manage.
I think the “men” here is them specifically because they don’t have confidence in themselves, thus the need for an outside force to determine their status. If you know of the Steven Crowder article on how they got married the “right” way, that’s a great glimpse in to this mindset, especially now that him and his wife are separated. He makes it a point to highlight how they’re so much better than others, that he’s proud to say that, and how he’s writing the article while presumably on his honeymoon. Not even all these tradwife guys want to wait to marriage for sex either, like at least Crowder supposedly followed through with that part of it. I feel like the commodified tradwife brand is sort of just a secular fantasy of what religious traditional marriages would be but without the actually hard things that come with that.
Surely it’s easier to demand a submissive partner who won’t talk back rather than spend time on grooming, personal hygiene, and not being a fucking massively immature man-baby though?
It’s funny cause I grew up where the traditional husband and wife arrangement was what you were expected to perform, and I still have some friends who’ve followed through with it into adulthood. I’m talking 3+ kids, wife might be part time involved with the church, and the husband is just working so much, plus he’s involved in church activities and “leadership” stuff. I’ve basically seen the best cases of this working and worst cases too.
The thing that turned me against this initially, is it just sounded so fucking miserable as the husband, you’re expected to demonstrate leadership in the community, provide for your family, budget your household and wife’s spending, know how to be a handyman around the house, do all the yard work and heavy chores, provide your wife the “tools she needs” ie renovate and get the fancy stuff. You never see your friends and it becomes your whole life, plus you don’t even see your kids as often as you might if you were trading time with a working spouse. Oh and you likely are part of a church men’s group and bible study where you have hosting and leadership tasks, and you are as a group working through problems in marriages and providing support.
That’s not the arrangement these tradwife fetish guys want, they imagine it like the husband is just this individualist dom sex pest and the wife does all the boring stuff so they can go be “men” in a juvenile fantasy way. They don’t realize in these traditional arrangements that actually work, the commitment goes both ways and you are giving up those man fantasies. They don’t think about how you’re involved with a whole community that provides structure to your life.
insofar as they exist
They definitely do
They do, I mean the ones in the article are running online brands based on it, but I grew up in an environment with strict traditional marriage ideals and the tradwife in that context doesn’t match with this.
These are the fantasies of rich grifter assholes like Steven Crowder. They still pretend it’s the 50’s when most households could function on just one salary. The reality is that 95% of American households can’t survive on a single income. This is not the reality for most couples. These ideas are just as unpopular as abortion bans. They live in this weird bubble where they think women want to return to servitude and have prove they “deserve” a divorce. It’s a fantasy. It’s not going to happen, boys.
The reality of feminism, though, is that if a woman truly desired to be that kind of wife, they’d 100% have that choice. That is kind of the entire point of feminism. If that’s the woman they want to be, then more power to them.
But they also want to be sure women aren’t being coerced, blackmailed, etc., into that subservient position. Because that’s the most important part. It must be her decision.
Its partly a reaction against the financial freedoms women have started to enjoy since they started getting closer to male salaries and a career became a more socially acceptable option for women. In the past if you were a woman you had to marry to get your own place, it was also deeply socially unacceptable for women to remain unmarried into their twenties and thirties, so far more women had to marry men who never really the right choice for them, witness the high divorce rates for the tail end of this group as divorce became easier and more socially acceptable. I would also add its also more socially acceptable for people to be out and in relationships now, rather than marrying a beard or playing full on pretend. This further cuts the pool who needed to marry men rather than wanted to marry men.
Now women can remain single or in more flexible arrangements and a large group of men are now struggling to adapt. Large elements of this group have been targeted by the likes of Crowder for rationalisation and end up on the incel pathway. A trad wife is a fantasy that makes everything easy for this group of men, its going to be attractive to them.
They would hate my household. My wife is much better educated than I am and has always made a lot more money than I do and we have had to go down to a single income so I can help my daughter through online school. We can afford it- just barely, but we can afford it. Total reversal of gender roles.
We’ve done it twice before. Once when we kept her home and did online school during COVID and once from when she was a baby to age three. I was the one staying home with the kid those two times too.
They’d probably want to throw me in prison for that or something.
Yeah, reality ends up like my ex, who wanted a tradwife who also makes the bulk of the money for him to spend.
And no, I knew none of that beforehand.
I think the principle is popular enough - though certainly not for everyone (it’s probably not even close).
The impracticality of surviving on a single income makes the idea laughable, and I wonder how much of its popularity is actually a desire to live a comfy life on a single income - maybe a few kids too.
So really, it’s aspirational. Like a hummer in every driveway sort of thing.
I’ve heard the term “tradwife” before, and it always seems to equal “Someone who will be a new mom, but does what she’s told”.
Based on direct personal experience I recommend a witch wife. Intelligent, capable, not submissive (unless she wants to be) and definitely not helpless.
Young disillusioned men who don’t think they are getting the respect they deserve fantasize about a submissive wife and family that they can rule over as a Patriarch. They think that this is more natural or normal than marriage as a partnership of equals.
It’s fucking gross
Yuck. My wife is an adult with her own feelings, goals, fears, and strengths. Most of which compliment my own. I can’t imagine trying to keep her held down, because it’s too much fun to stand back and watch her.
Woman In Total Control of Herself. There’s a song and everything!
[off topic] There was a hilarious episode of Dharma and Greg where Greg’s mother turns 50 and starts to freak out. Dharma tries to help by getting her to embrace her “inner crone.”
Exactly who I want!
My friend couldn’t understand why I was into his sister when “she’s stubborn and thick headed!” No, she just knows what she wants and she knows when to argue. I like that she has a brain…
Fleecing these nutjobs by pandering to their fantasies is so fucking easy.
Same folks who wouldn’t walk through New York City honestly believe they’d be a badass warlord in the post apocalypse
deleted by creator
Everyone here assuming all of us know what a tradwife is…
Anyway, from the article:
" “Tradwife” is internet slang for “traditional wife.” It’s largely a social media trend of conventionally attractive white women putting out TikToks and videos gushing about the joys of submissive marriage and “modesty,” though notably this “modest” clothing often leaves little to the imagination. "
“Tradwife” is internet slang for “traditional wife.”
Thanks for clearing that up.
Dumb bitches are smart.
I also want be a trophy husband, where I don’t have to do shit. Smart
But to put up with that amount of stupidity I would work my ass off to be sure I’m out of there instead of being someone’s slave who doesn’t get an opinion. Dumb bitchess
I think you underestimate the amount of subservience involved here. You’re basically raising a baby man child that doesn’t ever grow up.
Omg and you don’t have enough intelligence to understand what I said. Wich seems to be a satical writing. Using contradictiona and other elements for the fun of the joke. Not my fault you never had some shitty literature vourse
Based on the downvote count, you may want to reconsider where the failure in communication occurred.
What are you 12? Who expresses themselves like this?
Idk. They’re hitching their financial stability to someone else entirely.
They still going to be able to do that at 40? Good luck with job searching after you’ve just been tradwifing it for however many years.
deleted by creator
The trick is to get pregnant and marry, like this you can claim half of his stuff BC one of you sacrificed their job carrear to stay at home.
It works on courts, don’t ask how I know this
Ah yes. The not at all hidden cost of sticking your dick in someone.
You don’t
In my doomer brain…
It’s just a preview of what’s to come if the far right takes over, for every woman that is unfortunate to come across a man that is all in.
They’ll reverse no fault marriage, and then when you marry the guy (either because the guy pulls a bait and switch, or you don’t really understand what your agreeing too until after the fact) you either comply or get beat into submission, with no way out, while ypu pop out
This is a handbook, not a fad.
I’m sure I’m wrong and it’s a bunch of women that don’t want to work…but if it’s not, it could turn into some scary shit.
Well. The Handmaid’s Tale is the handbook since they literally want Gilead and have been openly working towards it
Imagine not knowing how to cook or do anything for yourself so you need a captive woman to do it all for you and not resent you at all.
My conservative friend is literally this person.
His mother was his “slave” and now he found an “asian slave.” He doesn’t cook or clean or anything really. He’s even told me to look for foreign women because “white women” don’t want to do things for you like others will.
She does all the work at home and he makes money. He’s living the 1950s conservative dream…
I dislike your friend so much, just from your description of them, that I caught myself wanting to down vote your post.
Sorry friend lemming, thanks for the hard share.
Lol thanks for resisting! Just remember the downvote button was “invented” to filter out distractions from the discussion, it’s not about what we like or don’t like but whether it’s relevant to the conversation! :)
Angry upvote
Married my Filipina last Friday! She’s the perfectly coifed and feminine “tradwife” this article is talking about, but Jesus that word makes me almost physically ill. These young men are looking for slaves, not partners. Had a gf like that once, bored me to death.
I have to note, there’s something to be said about a traditional division of labor in the household. We both cook and clean, but it’s 90% her doing. I do all the “manly” stuff she’s clueless about. It works because no one is bitching about a thing not being done. Without any real discussion, we both know who’s responsible for what and we take care of one another’s needs.
LOL, it was kinda hard to adjust to! “Baby, I can feed myself, been doing it for decades. I can also run a washing machine.” She’s never had a man that didn’t treat her like a maid. I’ve turned her around from being so submissive and now she is more open with me, less fear of offence.
tl;dr: I just married the finest women I’ve ever known, and she’s what the article describes. But she’s my partner, not my slave. If anyone’s a slave, it’s mutual. :)
Congratulations!!
I’m perpetually single so I don’t actually have a dog in this fight, but I’d like to think I would be the same as you in that situation lol
I’ve met people who live that life as a kind of kink. It’s honestly amazing that people can somehow afford it.
While our kids were little, my wife could’ve had a job that just about broke even with daycare. Maybe netted $200/mo. Why the hell would I put her through all that and spend on gas and an extra vehicle for $50/wk. That’s a buck an hour! The family was better off being supported on a single income.
It wasn’t kinky. Well okay we worked a little kink into it. I’m not saying everyone needs to try this one little hack, but we ran the math and dual income didn’t make sense for us; single income wasn’t anything we had to try to make work. Yeah we had to make choices and limit ourselves a little, but only a tiny bit less than otherwise. Our monthly budget was like $3k or something and another $200 was nothing.
Stay at home mom is one thing, but was she subservient and obedient?
There’s a difference between a woman staying at home to raise kids because it makes financial sense, and what these women are peddling.
TMI: I mean we are kinky so it felt like a natural fit at first but it didn’t take very long to get uncomfortable with household submission outside the bedroom. Especially since we have daughters and even if it was sexy for us, it sure as hell wasn’t behavior I wanted to model for them.
So as far as your point goes it really wasn’t kinky, but I have some understanding of how it can be for some folks who already decide single income is the right choice for them. But once kids enter the picture, kink has to go behind closed doors. Family dynamic has to grow beyond just what tickles two people.
I don’t think raising kids is what people are talking about here
It’s definitely part of the context. What do you imagine these stay at home wives are supposed to do while they aren’t earning money? The desire for a tradwife and the number of times per day the word “cuck” goes through their heads is closely related.
Kids are certainly part of the alpha-male fantasy package. They wants fifties household complete with kids and the husband spanking the wife if there are water spots on the dishes. Kids are both a status symbol and another layer of control.
I got a coworker who claims is wife is like that, don’t know if this is true or not but he does mention it a lot.
Interesting.
I managed to find them while exploring a related kink that I would like to avoid naming as I don’t enjoy being kinkshamed.
The experience with the discord community I had joined was positive at first but became negative over a series of poorly moderated interactions and increasingly poor community rule implementations.
That being said, the thing I found in common was that the women who were interested in that lifestyle tends to enjoy having an easier life and not having to worry about the every career bullshit. Instead getting to focus on keeping a house neat and orderly, ensuring meals were worked and other activities.
More power to them I suppose, reminds me a little too much of secret society by nofx or the 3 slogans from 1984
deleted by creator
Maybe they are in a poly relation with their bank and also indulging a findom kink?
I’m curious how all these alt-right (e.g., white supremacist/christian nationalists) think that they’re going to be able to afford a family–since the very concept of a tradwife is rooted in having a large family–when their wife is going to be entirely a stay-at-home wife? What kind of career do they think that they’re going to have? Are they in medical school, or prepping for the bar exam? Did they just finish their MBA?
The funny thing is that the GOP were the ones who destroyed the middle class. In 1968, one job supporting a family of four with a stay at home mom was the norm. Nixon’s Vietnam War inflation [he paid for the war with paper money to avoid raising taxes] combined with the Oil Boycott made more and more families dependent on a second job to keep going. After three terms or Reaganomics, the two income family was the norm. Meanwhile, $1 million in 1968 was a vast fortune, and by 1993 it was what a rich guy paid for a party.
They fantasize about being a local warlord when society breaks down.
Shhh. You’ll just confuse them. Let them have their fantasy and economic ruin.
No. That gets the rest of us economic ruin as well
If it only affected them, and not just their (potential) children, I’d be fine with that. But growing up in that kind of family ain’t no way to start life.
Honestly, if you make enough money that you can be a solid tradhusband, and you find a woman that wants to be a tradwife, that’s fine! Do that thing if that’s what you want. But slipping into poverty because you need to live out fantasy visions of masculinity, and dragging your family with you? Naw.
Oh dear, mensliberation seems to be leaning a bit far right these days if those comments are anything to go by.
Kind of strange that the top comments in this thread are referring to the fantasy of a single-income household, as if surviving on one income would make an oppressed, confined, lonely, mothers-little-helper-addicted wife acceptable.
I don’t think they’re implying it’d be acceptable, just that the current economic situation makes that fantasy even more unrealistic.
It was a much simpler time. One person could stay at home and take care of the kids. No headaches or additional costs of arranging childcare.
Classic Lemmy. They aren’t suggesting that if the income was there, the fantasy is A ok.
They are discussing a specific facet of the situation. You don’t have to acknowledge everything in every comment. There’s already many comments on how gross the fantasy is
There’s serious money in peddling fantasies of female submission online, but it may be exacerbating male loneliness
That is essentially the business model of the pornography industry.
