The hairy beer belly of the Tradwife movement – The Michigan Daily

The Tradwives Trilogy is a systematic investigation into a growing movement of women on the internet who identify as traditional wives. Better known as tradwives, these women romanticize their occupation as homemakers and champion traditional gender roles, which appoint men as breadwinners and women as breadmakers. In thefirst installmentof this series, I scrutinized the faces of the tradwife movement three influencers, who have built profitable careers by urging women to quit their own.

When I set out on a journey to spiral deeper into the realm of traditionalism than any other chronically online individual had gone before to become a tradwife myself I resolved to take my research beyond the performances of domesticity that influencers put on for money. Instead, I had to seek out the communal spaces of the internet where real people gathered.

And so, I took my research inquiry to Instagram, where I encountered The Tradwives Club: A community of traditionally-minded, modern-day homemakers that promotes its pro-tradition, anti-feminist, evangelical messaging with 21st-century aesthetics. Immediately, I encountered my first lesson about real feminine traditionalism: Not all tradwives cosplay the aesthetics of a barefoot homesteader or a lobotomized, 1950s housewife. I repeat: Theyre not all blonde. This marriage of antiquated ideologies with contemporary visuals has produced a feed with an aesthetic that falls somewhere between Barbie Dreamhouse, Christian Girl Autumn and the contents of an Old Money Pinterest board.

As far as traditionalist messaging goes, there was nothing original about the cheap shots The Tradwives Club takes at left-leaning, feminist girlbosses: Somehow pink hats, slut walks, frequent random hookups (and) abortions are considered womens empowerment, one post reads, while another states, My pronouns are: trad/wife, anti/feminist, (and) sandwich/maker. The jokes that tradwives make are so unfunny that they somehow justify their sideways logic that women cant make anything but babies and sandwiches. Inadvertently, I learned my second lesson about what it means to be a tradwife: To placate all of the men who are emasculated by funny women, your comedy must fall as flat as Amy Schumers stolen sex jokes.

As ground zero for young, blue-jean-wearing, brunette housewives who render first-century ideologies in millennial pink, The Tradwives Club was the closest I had ever gotten to real traditionalist women. And so, I scoured the comments section of a handful of posts to sketch out an image of what these women really looked like. From a selection of random posts, I categorized a sample of 51 female commenters by the way they identified themselves in their Instagram bio, excluding accounts with no biographical information at all. I found that 82% of female commenters identified as married, 65% as mothers, 37% as homemakers and 65% as Christian.

Above all, the most striking observation I made across these 51 accounts was that 83% of female commenters who were married identified first and foremost as wives. Yes, you heard that right: A vast majority of tradwives really do privilege their status as a wife over their identification with religion, hobbies, interests or even motherhood. This fact taught me my third lesson about feminine traditionalism: Marriage dynamics, in the eyes of a tradwife, are no different than those outlined in thousands of matrimonial unions each year. I now pronounce you man and wife is code for Men can exist as autonomous individuals outside of marriage, while a womans personhood is superseded by her role as his spouse.

One tradwife, for example, makes not one but two allusions to her marital status in her Instagram bio: Wife, Mama, Producer, + Screenwriter is immediately followed by Married. When I clicked on her spouses profile, I was disappointed but not surprised by his lack of identification with his role as a husband. Instead, his bio reads like a man who doesnt put the toilet seat down after taking a piss: Army Veteran, I love playing video games, NASCAR, and Football. But why was this the case? Why were tradwives doting on their husbands so enthusiastically? You could mistake them for a middle schooler who makes their relationship Instagram official with a in their bio.

When everythings packaged in hyper-feminine aesthetics, its easy to overlook what truly lies at the heart of the tradwife movement: the promotion of red-blooded, patriarchal masculinity. From patriarchy appreciation posts to photographs of men who are never seen without a wife or child in their arms, the prevalence of masculine messaging from The Tradwives Club taught me my fourth lesson about feminine traditionalism: Your ascension to domestic bliss is only made possible by the presence of a hot, muscular man who looks like he drinks whole milk.

One particular post illustrates how The Tradwives Club advocates so strongly for hegemonic masculinity that theyll come to the defense of the kind of man who only talks about himself on the first date. In a carousel that claims to debunk the myth of toxic masculinity, a series of nine screenshotted tweets overlay an image of a man strutting out of a restaurant in a black suit, holding his daughter in his arms like an accessory. As a term used to emasculate and feminize men, the tweets argue that the nomenclature of toxic masculinity is a form of cultural brainwashing from feminist lies that demonize masculinity and condition women to court non-threatening males. This pursuit of sheep among wolves has blinded women from what the female psyche really craves: A lion among wolves. A man amongst men. A warrior in the world and a Lover in the home. This was it: an image of the enigmatic tradhusband, the self-identified alpha male who only appoints himself as the breadwinner of his family because hes allergic to washing his sheets.

But maybe I was wrong maybe traditionalism doesnt just appeal to the men who are looking for a woman who will force them to graduate from their collegiate navy sheets. And so, to better acquaint myself with traditional men, I looked to those lurking in the comments section of The Tradwives Club, which included a Trad Catholic who uses Based/Redpilled pronouns, a PragerU personality and four separate men who are so deluded by self-importance, they offer life-coaching services. Yes, that means you can pay $74.99 for a 30-minute coaching session with the kind of man who will offer you five solutions to your wife (keeping) your balls in her nightstand drawer. After surveying the pool of eligible (touch-deprived) bachelors in the comments section of The Tradwives Club, I still felt like I had to dig deeper to understand what else governs the psyche of a traditional man besides his obsession with playing the devils advocate.

Accordingly, I relocated my investigation of traditionalism to what I can only describe as the frightening male equivalent of The Tradwives Club. If the feed of The Tradwives Club is like a meticulously organized Barbie Dreamhouse, male traditionalists, on the other hand, envision their idyllic past more like the inside of a barf bag: a gag-inducing amalgam of ran-through Chad Wojak memes, teary-eyed soyboys, nearly naked male physiques, condemned Only Fans temptresses and fantastical European architecture. But as much as I disdained the Mojo-Dojo-Casa-fication of tradwife aesthetics, it wasnt the only thing that bothered me about male traditionalists.

When I started seeing traditional values through the eyes of a man, it became obvious how women fit into their vision of the restored past they dont. At almost every juncture, male traditionalists prioritize masculine self-improvement above all else. To rally men behind hegemonic masculinity, post after post after post after post after post (seriously, I could go on) dangles the promise of perfectly chiseled abs in front of you like a carrot on a stick. If you ask me, its a little homoerotic. Women, on the other hand, are antagonized, othered or cast as props in the campaign for radical male self-improvement. On eight separate occasions, provocatively posed female bodies are intercepted by the likes of Jordan Peterson, Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, GigaChad, Jesus Christ and others who appear before you to dispense wisdom like BREASTS ARE TEMPORARY, FREEDOM IS FOREVER.

Oddly enough, male traditionalists refuse to give the same treatment to their inhumanely proportioned anime waifus, making a post that frames the rejection of them as just a joke post btw. Apart from their waifus, the only other women they cast in a remotely positive light are female Wojak memes with large breasts and stock photos of women dressed in traditional European garments. Yes, thats right the objects of male admiration belong to a class of women who arent even real humans. Theyre pure, unadulterated fantasy.

I was dumbfounded by my discovery. It felt impossible for a traditional woman to center her life around a man who cares about himself first and his waifu second. But if this was really the case, how do tradwives fit into the lives of men who only embrace these imaginary women because theyre so clearly afraid of being emasculated by the real ones? The answer to this question is not only simple but also probably the most important lesson I learned about feminine traditionalism thus far: Tradwives act as agents of the alpha-male fantasy by casting themselves as the protectors of the male ego.

If this fact wasnt already made obvious by their vilification of man-hating feminists, just look at the marital advice tradwives prescribe to one another. When broaching conflict, tradwives are so scared of emasculating their husband with criticism that theyll advise each other to do just about anything but have a real, adult conversation. Seeking advice about a man who puts zero effort into his appearance/hygiene, one female commenter from The Tradwives Club asked how she could confront her husband when she cant have a serious conversation with him because no matter how gently (she approaches) the subject, he will see it as a personal attack. The best her fellow tradwives could offer in the way of advice was a lethal combination of prayer and mind games. Im being completely serious. One tradwife recommended dress(ing) like a hot mess for a month to let him know thats how (she feels) about him most of the time. Another suggested using sex as an ultimatum: I really dont think I can get in the mood right now unless you do A, B, or C, she wrote. A third tradwife advised her to maybe try setting out his hygiene products for him. To the fourth tradwife, if prayer wasnt enough to compel this man to take a shower, a conversation could act as the last resort, but only on the condition that instead of criticizing what hes doing wrong, try to let him know what you DO appreciate about him/his appearance. Evidently, this aversion to confrontation demonstrates how the alpha male ego is so fragile, tradwives will sacrifice everything, including their dignity, to shield it from a boo-boo.

If my immersion into The Tradwives Club taught me anything, it was the extreme lengths that real women go to in service of the male ego. Maybe this was it: The key to domestic bliss never depended on how well you could bake a loaf of sourdough or how neatly you could fold your husbands boxers. Instead, this ascension hinges on your willingness to shelter your alpha from seeing himself for what he really is: a man-baby. When you cast the tradwife movement in such a masculine light, it starts to lose its pink veneer.

Since the beginning of the 2010s, the internet has played a crucial role in the mobilization of mens rights activism, providing the substrate onto which misogynistic rhetoric has given birth to what scholars call the Manosphere. By now, the origins of the Manospheres subgroups like the red pill, involuntary celibates and MGTOWs are well documented. The origins of the tradwife movement, however, live in relative obscurity.

With a sudden uptick in popularity at the beginning of 2020, the tradwife movements overnight growth seems anything but coincidental. Its possible to trace the proliferation of female traditionalism to Alena Pettitt a tradwife who made headlines in January of 2020 following appearances in British media where she publicly avowed ultra-traditional gender roles. Even then, things still werent adding up. Pettitts radically traditionalist views couldnt have come from nowhere. As I suspected, the progenitor of the online tradwife movement wasnt a real woman like Pettitt. It was a 4chan meme. Trad Girl, also known as Tradwife, made her 4chan debut on July 9, 2019, bearing blonde hair and a blue floral dress. In the same month, her likeness multiplied across 4chan boards, where she became the face of debates surrounding traditional values. Trad Girl broke into the mainstream in October of 2019, when she appeared on Twitter for the first time as a meme and later fan art.

Suddenly, everything started to click: The initial push for feminine traditionalism had nothing to do with real, flesh-and-bone women. Instead, the tradwife movement descended directly from the Manosphere. By packaging their misogynistic, anti-feminist beliefs in girly aesthetics, the Manosphere has successfully marketed itself to communities of women who were predisposed to traditionalist ideologies by their fundamentalist interpretation of religion and politics. Its bad enough that ordinary women have become the target of the Manospheres contagious ideologies, but its even worse when you consider that a vast majority of these women are mothers. Yes, that means the Manosphere is infecting the way mothers are raising the next generation of promising young women young women who will be taught to follow men instead of lead them; to stop yelling and soften your tone; to allow him to speak first; or, worst of all, to offer to take off his shoes.

Having exposed the hairy beer belly of feminine traditionalism, I knew I had entered the late stages of my tradwife evolution. And so, I was finally ready to enter the mothership: Facebook.

Daily Arts Writer Bela Kellogg can be reached atbkellogg@umich.edu.

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The hairy beer belly of the Tradwife movement - The Michigan Daily