They sell the idea of a fantasy. There are plenty of men who joke about finding someone to make them a ‘trophy husband.’ Not having to work, being doted on by another person, having a life of luxury… these are powerful yearnings that can easily be twisted by manipulators. The short form video that has taken over everything is key to selling it as well. It hides all the negatives and just splatters you with all this positive feeling, and it works on basically everything. Recipes? Done in five seconds with the easiest cleanup (ignored). Chores? Done in six seconds by some ‘amazing’ method. Kids wrecking your peace and destroying the house? Easily solved with ten seconds of effort and supplies that magically appeared.

Now take all of those concepts and roll them up in a little package that is delivered to the frazzled, over-worked, financially struggling young person (in this case the girl who is now living on her own [without family, that is] with three roommates) and tell them if they can just find a husband who looooooves them all their worries will be gone, and being a trad wife suddenly becomes a dream. It’s not really any different than how we culturally treat the wedding day: it’s built into this giant affair that is largely promoted to be the highest peak in a relationship, and we get the stupidly expensive production and the bridezillas as a result. Now we’re getting a large amount of women who are willing to trade the long term goods (suffrage and other rights) for what they think they could get as a tradwife.

I could go on about how men are also getting sucked into this fantasy on the other end as a part of that ‘toxic masculinity’ we hear about, but since we’re on about tradwifes in this post, I’ll save it.