I'm 25. I have noticed a larger and larger number of my peers veer towards seeking out traditional values. I don't mean Mad Men style philandering and domestic abuse. Instead a growing cohort of my friends are leaving large metropolises and are heading out to much smaller cities and looking to buy homes.
Past that, more and more of them are looking to marry sooner rather than later, which I believe bucks the current trend.
I know that the story isn't new: college grades move to large cities for jobs and exciting opportunities, but these friends are young! Plus, we are witnessing our siblings who are about to leave college balk at the idea of paying rent in large cities (NYC, SF, Chicago, Austin, et al) and are looking more fondly at smaller, more affordable cities.
Relative to the article, I know tons of girls who are cooling to the idea of 'girlbossing,'[0] and are instead become more interested in raising a family/being a homemaker.
Anecdotal this, of course.
[0] I don't mean this in a derogatory sense. Just had lots of girl friends in college who were determined to enter the corporate workforce and become leadership/executives/etc and used the term. Most of them are now starting families (at 25!)
> I know that the story isn't new: college grades move to large cities for jobs and exciting opportunities, but these friends are young! Plus, we are witnessing our siblings who are about to leave college balk at the idea of paying rent in large cities (NYC, SF, Chicago, Austin, et al) and are looking more fondly at smaller, more affordable cities.
I've had much a similar experience, moving to a smaller town after university. Since my role allows me to work mostly remotely there's no reason to bother paying crazy rent in the city rather than occasionally commuting as necessary. There is a decent cohort of other people here in the same boat so I'm not just surrounded by older folk and its nice being closer to nature if I ever want to get out of town for a while.
It’s an incredible testament to our normalization of the contemporary American Way that “buying a home in a small city” is considered traditional.
I’m about the same age as you, and I have friends who have done the same thing. But I don’t thing they would consider what they’re doing “traditional” in remotely the same sense as the tradwife phenomenon uses the term.
That's a fair point. Perhaps the actual salient piece of what I wrote is that a very large percentage of my girl friends are doing an about-face and looking to get married, have kids, and be a homemaker. A much much larger percentage than the folks I know just a few years older (26-29)
If every woman in a man/woman relationship left the workforce, would this have the effect of deflation such that a single income of the man would become worth enough to support the woman leaving work? I’ve often wondered how much 2 income households could have contributed to inflating prices such that it only amounts to a momentary increase in quality of life. Once the culture shifts and the currency absorbs it, the majority of couples accept that this is the only way for them to afford the things they want in life.
It may raise wages if there was limited pool of workers. But given today's world with massive migration and few import taxes, that may mitigate most of the hit.
Other change would be a drop in consumption. Similar to WFH, staying-at-home reduces a lot of purchases. And you got time to do a lot of things in-house instead of buying out in the market.
Another thing what I noticed, there's what my wife and I call „mamonomics“. Stay-at-home moms running tiny grey-legal at-home operations. Orchestrating community events, helping neighbours with small services (e.g. making cakes, fixing clothes)... Otherwise good part of what goes in „mamonomics“ would be hired services.
Pretty sure I'll get downvoted for this, so I might as well start off by complaining about the downvotes that I'll probably get.
Women entering the workforce effectively doubled the available pool of workers.
When there are more workers available for a position, the cost of said labor decreases.
I'm not sure why this is such a controversial statement, but this is where we are. This is obviously an oversimplification, but doubling the available workforce effectively halves the cost.
As a result, we have families that need two incomes instead of just one.
The reason why families need two incomes nowadays is that our standards for what's "needed" have grown. You could live a crummy 1950s lifestyle in a second- or third-rate city or suburb and raise a family on the equivalent of a single income; and guess what, that's exactly what plenty of lower-income folks do already.
I have a hard time believing that our 'standards' constitute the major need for 2 salaries. A simple thought experiment seems sufficient to debunk this...
The average salary in CA is ~62k a year. To support a family of 4 (wife + 3 kids) you would need WAY more than $62k.
Even if you lived in the poorest neighborhood, and never bought frivolous things, you could still never support a family on that salary, and forget about buying a house.
In the 1950s you could support a family, buy a house, pay for healthcare, etc. It seems far more plausible to me that the purchasing power domestically of the dollar was effectively halved at some point in history.
My guess is that you're wildly overestimating the average 1950s standard of living. In many ways, lower-income folks have better lives today than even the wealthy did back then. You talk about healthcare, but healthcare in the 1950s was practically non-existent by modern standards. You can choose to live in a low cost-of-living area and your $62k will stretch a lot further than in any city "neighborhood".
I probably am overestimating the average 1950s standard of living. But I'd argue you're also overestimating how far $62k could take a family of 5 in CA. Even in the poorest of neighborhoods, far outside of city centers (where you probably wouldn't even be making $62k btw)... even then... I highly doubt you could support a family of 5, and I can guarantee that you would not be buying a house.
I maintain that both of these things were (generally) more accessible in the 1950s.
> The reason why families need two incomes nowadays is that our standards for what's "needed" have grown
Nope! It happened almost instantly after Bretton Woods system collapsed. And that wasn't because our living standards changed much, it's cause practically unbounded monetary inflation was embraced as the new standard.
Instead of benefitting from the price deflation afforded by technological progress, governments decided to debase their currencies to finance their centrally planned schemes. Combined with the relatively high transaction cost of finding a new job gave us a world where wages have stagnated.
Among reactionary movements, I find the “tradwife” phenomenon particularly interesting. It’s syncretic in a way that the more masculine-oriented reactionary philosophies aren’t: it relies heavily on a vision of the past that isn’t just warped in the ordinary reactionary ways, but also demands that we imagine every housewife as a laureled, white-dressed maiden with a high-speed Internet line for Instagram.
I cannot roll my eyes further if I tried. I have been told that I am conservative and dominant. However this is very far from what I want in a partner.
A wife who doesn't have her own career is not something I would ever consider. And although I might be called dominant I am also more attracted to assertive women, than women who act or are very timid. I want somebody who can also help me in life, not just depend on me.
I am definitely not a feminist either, though. I very much want a woman who has some self respect and dignity and does not jump in bed with random men, because she thinks it is some act of self-empowerment.
Anyway the impression I get and this is going to be very controversial but basically stupid people mostly have trouble forming healthy relationships, try lots of things, fuck up a lot and then join subcultures like feminism and tradwife whatever as a reaction. Smart people are more cautious, and less adventurous, take longer to find a partner, but then mostly have functional relationships and do not feel the need to start using some internet label to guide their daily life.
> I am definitely not a feminist either, though. I very much want a woman who has some self respect and dignity and does not jump in bed with random men, because she thinks it is some act of self-empowerment.
I think you misunderstand feminism. Promiscuity does not mean you’re necessarily a feminist. One does not imply the other.
It doesn’t mean that. However feminism allows for that as a choice. I think the OP doesn’t classify as feminist because they want to deny that choice in general.
No that is definitely not my view at all. Everyone should be free to do whatever they want.
I am just talking about what behaviours/views/values I find a turn-on/turn-off and what I personally seek in a partner.
I do however believe that some lifestyles are healthier than others, although maybe there is no one universal best lifestyle and it depends both on circumstances and life goals to some extent.
No it doesn't? Non-feminist women sleep around all the time as a choice. That definition of feminism makes no sense. You are confusing feminism with sex positive.
Of course feminist women that are not sex positive are exist too. Some of the people need to get out more and meet feminists in real life!
"Feminist" is a bit like "socialist", indeed some would argue it is a continuation of the same tradition. There's too many meanings and too many variations.
My mother was a feminist and I would not say I have views that contradict hers. There are certainly flavors of feminism which are more about empowerment of women which I would find no problem with.
I am admittedly more turned off by the oversexualization of today's culture (emphasizing relationships based primarily on sex), and blame all genders for this, but I do see a lot of proclaimed feminists today pushing these kinds of lifestyles, hence my comment.
You have an incredibly screwed up impression of feminism.
It's literally a movement that seeks to gain equality for women. That's it. Gaining dignity is a large part of the movement!
There's no feminist creed that says "go out and have lots of sex". There are married feminists. There are asexual feminists. There are a lot of lesbian feminists.
I agree but like effective altruism, incel, and other such terms… the meaning in our culture is different now.
Effective altruism is about finding the most effective way to use your money/time to improve happiness for the most people. Yet everyone thinks it’s about crypto and AI singularity.
Incels are just involuntarily celibate people. But now everyone labels an incel as also someone who hates women and wants to be a mass murderer. Even though most men and women are all incels until they’re not! Most people are involuntarily celibate for some sustained period at some point in their life.
The way feminism is construed today is very much mixed up with identity politics and class division. It’s not just about pushing forward equality. I‘ve distanced myself being called a feminist due to the latest generations getting some whackass ideas and not actually unifying people but instead trying to segregate further and divide us up more.
For the downvoters, I'm going to paste the definition from the dictionary:
feminism (noun): the belief that women should be allowed the same rights, power, and opportunities as men and be treated in the same way, or the set of activities intended to achieve this state
(Cambridge Dictionary)
Not to mention the fact that the word dates from 1895, so it's not exactly some 'internet label'.
That is a definition that at first glance seems crystal clear, but then you realize it is meaningless, because everyone understands equality to mean something different.
For clarification, are you arguing that promiscuous women lack self respect in general, or that it’s only in the case that they believe they need to for “self empowerment”?
That is my crude understanding of such behaviour, yes. Now if you want to get into the philosophical discussion of whether that is actually a lack of self-respect or not, that's not really interesting to me.
I think to some extent one's perception of whether somebody has self-respect or not is subjective, because everyone holds different values. For example some people value a lot. Then if I turn down a job with a high salary because of moral reasons, they might perceive me as having less self-respect.
In this case, I value intimate relationships to a higher value and think sex should have meaning beyond, "I wanted to have fun that evening" ...
>I think to some extent one's perception of whether somebody has self-respect or not is subjective, because everyone holds different values.
I think just about every self identifying feminist would say that their attitudes towards promiscuity are in line with this statement.
The whole point is that there are a lot of people who want to have a say in how women have sex, and with who, and the feminist perspective is that it really isn’t any of their business.
If you find that people call you a conservative that’s really the main reason why, if you are happy in your own relationship then it really should matter to you how people view their own sex life. While you may view other peoples dysfunctional relationships to be a result of their sexual behavior, in my expertise the sexual behavior is almost always downstream of the dysfunction, whether the individual is promiscuous or not.
I dance a lot. Some people assign dancing closely with another as a form of great intimacy that should only be done with someone special.
But for some forms of dance - this is the normal way to dance with anyone.
Some folks go through a similar journey with sex. They don’t put it on a pedestal anymore and see it as something that is holy. It doesn’t mean it cannot still be incredibly special to them or pleasing. It just means that they can enjoy this aspect of life without needing an extremely involved emotional connection. Similar to dancing.
I’m a dude and I’d love to stay at home and tinker with my comp sci pet projects along with doing the chores. I see the controversy, but don’t see anything inherently wrong with staying at home.
Nah, there's nothing wrong with staying at home. And, subservience is a kink, we don't shame those, right?
The problem is when people would force this norm on others (you, dude, are not allowed to stay at home in this arrangement; my marriage would be illegal and I wouldn't be allowed to vote). Thankfully, it's pretty fringe. But it's always a little spooky to read about that side of my family in the news. The fringe is growing, and they're coming after my civil liberties.
So far it's vice versa. My wife is staying at home with our 3 y/o. It's unbelievable how many people try to push her back into workforce. Especially other women. It feels like women no longer has the right to choose.
While I agree with you that the social pressure is a bad thing; that's social pressure, not legal force. Women have the right to choose, but other women also have the right to voice their opinions -- even if we don't like them.
> I guess „work“ depends on generating GDP for many people
Exactly. If a city council hire a gardener, buy his tools and pay him 40k/yr, the nominal GDP will be 40k (+ the tool's prices for the first year and their maintenance costs).
If the city council pay a company 80k/yr to take care of the same, they will hire a gardener 40k, buy tools, and the GDP will be 120k/yr (+ tools prices etc). Even though the production was the same.
If you wife worked and you had to pay a nanny, the GDP of your country would rise more than if the nanny was formed to take on your wife job.
I don’t think “staying at home is bad” is the message anybody is sending. If people want to be stay at home spouses, that’s fine.
The points of contention are finer: that the “tradwife” phenomenon is syncretic and ahistorical, and that it’s (in part) a recruitment mechanism for reactionary politics.
> it’s (in part) a recruitment mechanism for reactionary politics.
Only because "progressive" politics has forced it into that role. There's nothing inherently wrong or problematic with a stay-at-home lifestyle if that's what you prefer and you can afford it.
“Look at what you made me do” is not a generally convincing argumentative structure. There’s no particular reason why doing traditional things means you also need to dress yourself in reactionary politics.
Besides, I think if you actually went out and sampled the world, you would find plenty of stay-at-home progressives.
Interracial marriage was illegal in the 1950s because racists saw the existence of and normalization of black people in white society as a political statement and an attack on their way of life. It is the same reason why interracial kissing in movies was considered taboo back then.
This literally not true. The tradwife thing is not a reaction to progressives, it is safely within conservative christian "male head of the house with authority over partner" tradition.
It predates progressive politics you complain about. Progressive politics is response to that.
Historical gender roles were an efficient reaction to material circumstances of life, not a matter of politics. Men were more comfortable than women in the public sphere (which used to be a lot more contentious and competitive historically than it perhaps is today), and someone had to do all the crummy housework (unless you were in the upper class and could afford servants) so it fell on women to do that. Then the world, by and large, became a lot comfier and safer; and home appliances meant we could dispense with a lot of strenuous domestic labor. That's when it became possible for "lifestyle" to be a matter of choice.
That is widely ahistorical claim. Historical gender roles were as political as current and as much reaction to material life as now. Also, the roles of women and men different between social classes, periods and places, sometimes very widely.
In particular, upper middle class and riches are minority of population. Poor are most frequent ... and their women work for money unless it is illegal ... and it is illegal purely because of politics and feeling of propriety, nothing material.
And also, the small farms mean that everyone working in home, at field and with animals ... men do physically demanding work tho more. There is gender split, but not between "crummy home" and "work". The household produces a lot of what they need - candles, fabric for cloth, you name it. There are some gender exclusive areas and then a lot of basically work that needs to be done.
Or, in mining areas, men die young. They earn more then women, but they live without sun and die and then you have women having to earn for them and children - that is where some of the crafts come from.
There is some kind of patriarchy most of the time, but in some periods and places women actually can earn money, own stuff, do business in their own name. That not being fully case in 1950 America is purely result of politics. That not being case in Saudi Arabia is purely gender ideology and politics, nothing to do with anything material.
There's a massive difference between having the choice (and freedom) to stay at home -- or not -- as you wish, and pushing a movement which subjugates and flies in the face[1] of the very feminism[2] that gave women that choice to begin with.
Except that it seems a lot more people are pushing the "girlboss" lifestyle compared to the "tradwife" one. Of course, ideally, everyone would simply have the freedom to do what's best for themselves. It's not very responsive to call "girlboss" a product of modern capitalism as the Mashable article does, since one could say the exact same thing about modern stay-at-home lifestyles.
Does it? The article suffers from cherry picking and logical fallacies.
For example the article makes it seem like tradwive sentiment is problematic because it shares some views with the far right. Even if that’s true, which it isn’t inherently, it’s not enough to deem trad wife behavior problematic.
Fundamentally, modern feminism is about women being able to choose. Obviously such freedom can be used to choose to do or share “problematic” things or views, respectively.
Tradwufe is term used literally only in right wing manosphere. It is not term used by stay at home women in general. It is not a term used by left wing people. I have seen that term used only in reactionary circles and in bdsm circles (clumsily in the latter).
And the focus was very much on male leadership and authority, male right to punish a women and expectation of submission. It was not about homemaking itself absent male dominance.
Do they claim to be historically correct remake? Article says otherwise:
>> And she writes that a tradwife doesn't want to go back to the 1950s, but "she simply likes that time because it was the last time her occupation was celebrated in mainstream media."
They don’t need to make a claim to historicity in order for me to remark on their ahistoricity. If they don’t claim historical accuracy, then I’m in agreement with them on that point!
One then wonders what “traditional” refers to, of course.
> One then wonders what “traditional” refers to, of course
The “tradition” of aspiring to 1950s commercially constructed media images of the lily white, Protestant, working-class but with middle-class wealth, American culture [0], to which modern reactionary white resentment politcs aspires and for which it blames everything not White, not evangelical/fundamentalist, and not similarly reactionary for denying the White working class from being able to fully enjoy the way they did in the 1950s... fictional mass media presentations.
[0] ironically, designed specifically to drive consumerism and extract wealth from the White working class.
I guess all sides get what „traditional“ refers to. Just like „non-traditional“. While I'd say nowadays such punk wifes technically are non-traditional...
The claim is predicated on the mutual understanding that being a white nationalist is bad. If you lack that mutual understanding, there are bigger problems at hand!
There is no way to be reactionary without being a white nationalist and the two are interchangeable but you chose one instead of the other for some reason?
Sure. You can substitute “white nationalist” for “any kind of reactionary, including white nationalist” in my previous comment, if you find that more palatable.
There are certainly places in the world where there are significant local reactionary ideologies that are not White Nationalist, but the US is not among them.
> Why is it bad if it pulls people to the reactionary?
Because, and to the extent, that the thing it pulls people toward is bad.
> We might as well say the glamorization of cosmopolitanism is a recruiting tool for neoliberalism.
That's less true, though, but, yes, glamorization of cosmopolitanism feeds a bunch of ideologies that are not the same ones the “trad... ” movement feeds.
No, it's still not progressive. There's a difference between accepting trans people as valid. and pushing some 50's-era rhetoric of feminism being subservient slavery to the man of the house.
Interesting how the OP is about the whole "tradwife" ideology which is damaging for women[1] and feminism[2], but you turn it into a trans-vs.-cis argument, for no reason whatsoever.
The only "clown world" is the one where you think those two entirely disparate topics are comparable.
I didn’t say the GP was either. The observation is solely that doing traditional things doesn’t make you part of this “trad” sphere, which is largely syncretic in terms of what it actually considers traditional.
In case anyone else is wondering, the term "syncretic" can be defined as "combining or bringing together different philosophical, religious, or cultural principles and practices."
Being a tradwife (whether AMAB or AFAB) is neither progressive nor reactionary. Neither is being trans.
Advocating being a tradwife as an ideal, deviation from which in others should be viewed as inferior, is reactionary in and of itself, even if the person taking the position also has progressive views on other issues.
The real issue I find with stuff of this nature is one of aesthetic distance.
It's similar to BDSM in a way: certain people fantasies about being a 'slave' but to actually enact the thing beyond the bounds of fantasy, to go from aesthetic to actuality, requires the relinquishment of the thing that allows the engagement in the fantasy in the first place -- consent.
There is an interview series on youtube, can't remember where, of people who grew up in the 50s.
It sounds like a miserable place.
There is a reason that housewives were prescribed quaaludes in record numbers and consumed so much alcohol.
In most places, women wouldn't be allowed to open bank accounts or get a credit card alone for another two to three decades.
If people want to live one place or another, wear this or that clothing, engage in various aesthetic enactments, etc, that is one thing, but when we whitewash the underlying conditions that were the milieu in which the adopted proto-aesthetic formed, we have to be careful that this does no rehabilitate those underlying conditions.
BDSM is at little risk of this due to the nature of consent that is welded into the community, the attempt to maintain a firm division between fantasy and reality.
Palingenetic fantasies of bygone eras, however, seem to have much less of a check in place against their actualization; in fact, their actualization, I would say, is exactly the goal of a certain minority who holds such views.
It is the difference between a safe practitioner of BDSM and someone who uses BDSM language as a cover for abuse.
> people who grew up in the 50s. It sounds like a miserable place.
You could literally replace "50s" there with any other time in the not-so-recent past, without affecting the truth of that statement. Technological progress is such a nice thing, isn't it? (In the case at hand, home appliances was what freed women from having to do all that house work. Not politics.)
50s women had washing machines (unless they were poor Appalachians, like my grandparents). But really when we're speaking of the 50s we're almost explicitly formulating it in terms of white suburbia.
I am speaking solely of the social situation, the psychology of the times, which in part can be summed up in one word 'conformity' (oh, and not to forget segregation, anti-gay and anti-communist hysteria, etc).
Technologically speaking, if I had the New York Library (or equiv) and a typewriter, I wouldn't take it as too much of a step down.
I hate to break it to you, but suburbia are still around in the 2020s, and still very conformist. (PG has lots of essays describing how the residential segregation of suburbia - quite aside from any specificity about race or ethnicity - ends up creating and enforcing conformity.)
It is upsetting to me that the adjective "traditional" so often carries the connotation of some particular point or period (e.g. 1950s) when particularity of point or period is precisely the antithesis of tradition. Evoking the 1950s is not "traditional", it's "retro" or "nostalgic". Evoking that which survived the 1950s on the other hand...
I know a small number of women who very much desire this lifestyle, and have since long before the current "tradwife" fad was popularized. They aren't religious or right-wing, it is just a personal preference. Many of them have expressed something along the lines that society discourages and denigrates women who want to make this choice, so the current tradwife movement is likely just tapping into an under-served existing market.
Uh, yeah, some women at least have always wanted this lifestyle. When you put these silly labels on it and overload it with importance and start shaming people who don’t share your lifestyle choices, then you start to look ridiculous.
You’re not much of a feminist if you’re going around telling women they shouldn’t live their lives the way they want to.
If you go around making your Identity about your lifestyle choices, come up with labels and groups and shame people who don’t agree with you… you’re probably just bored and need to find new hobbies that aren’t talking about yourself.
The “scientific” world full of “modern knowledge” can lead you astray. The sources of human happiness and contentment are timeless, and nothing about today changes human psychology from the ancients.
Family, friends, community, health, purpose. A job well done.
There is no need to justify the choices you make. Are you happy? Does it feel right? Being a “trad wife” simply means you want to live a certain way. Is that some sort of societal damnation?
If you don’t post it on social media then no one will ever know. Just live the way you want.
> nothing about today changes human psychology from the ancients
With the possible exceptions of all the electronics and changes in diet and greater population densities and . . . the fact that the ancients didn't have psychology. I'm sure I missed some factors.
> There is no need to justify the choices you make.
Because psychologists study how we do that so we don't have to?
> the fact that the ancients didn't have psychology
They did. They called it religion, spirituality, or community but they led happy fulfulling lives using ancient, tried and true methodology I would encourage you to re-evaluate your assumptions if you really think the fundamental human experience today is really drastically different from the time of Buddha, the Roman Stoics, or the ancient Daoists.
Nope nothing has changed in the nature of man. And nothing will be different in 10000 more years. The circumstances change but human nature and motives are constant. The sources of my happiness are fundamentally the same since the beginning of man.
While I appreciate the sentiment, I think it is somewhat superficial. People enjoy many things that were not apparent even a few hundred years ago, let alone at "the beginning of man". For example, the notion that someone would go out and expend important calories on exercise would have been unthinkable in the past, but is now a major source of happiness of a large portion of the population - and a source that is totally separate from the health benefits (for example, the health benefits of running turn negative after some distance / time run, differing by individual cardio conditioning).
Travel for the sake of travel is another - several hundred years ago travel would be considered dangerous, life threatening, and only to be undertaken for major gain - now we think nothing of doing it on a weekend for the enjoyment of seeing another place.
Happiness is related to emotions, but our emotions derive from our own needs, and as such have nothing to do with science and knowledge at all.
What changes during ages is how we can realize our happiness without intruding on the lives of others. Modernity gave us more power over the world, and we might not realize that we are abusing it. I'm not even talking about the unfeasibility of giving everyone a racing car because that's what makes them happy. Even giving everyone the Western standard of living (assuming that it's what most need for happiness) is so disrupting to the Earth that it infringes on others' freedoms in ways that were not possible to the ancients.
People from non-"Western" backgrounds don't feature strongly enough in this piece. Other articles on similar subjects have had a lot more (and more interesting) quotes from first-generation immigrants who had cultural references to compare to and were making intentional choices. Islamic and Confucian values both featured.
Topic aside, what a strangely-composed article. It comes off like the author's not just encountering the "tradwife" phenomenon for the first time (hey, me too, hadn't heard of it before this) but also the Internet, Gen Z, and women. Which is especially odd since the author's a woman and looks to be either on the old end of Gen Z or the young end of Millennial.
The article reads like now-obviously-comically-wrong news reports about Distant Native Peoples or whatever, and like all the quotes were selected at random without checking whether they fit with the thrust of the piece, as if the author couldn't even tell whether they did or not.
Your critique doesn’t make sense, the article seemed pretty savvy in the regards you mentioned. Ad hominem comparisons are making it more difficult to understand your critique. Try again?
> Your critique doesn’t make sense. Ad hominem comparisons are making it more difficult to understand your critique.
None of that was ad hominem. Yes, it was about the sense I got of the author, but it was about the sense that the piece per se gave me of the author—that is, the piece is so strange that it gave me an impression of the author that I call out as likely not even true given some of the actual facts about them.
Writing e.g. "this article on Kubernetes reads like it was written by someone who'd never even seen a computer before" isn't ad-hom—it relates directly to the quality of the piece itself. Though, admittedly, it's a very general rather than specific criticism, and if you're not seeing the same things in the piece that I am, I can understand how that wouldn't be helpful.
> Try again?
Sure.
Was the early-in-the-piece wall of quotes that contradicted much of the article's message intended ironically? Are we expected to understand, implicitly, that the author believes those quoted were being arch, wry, or otherwise deceitful? If so, whoosh on my part. If that's not why those quotes were chosen for that spot, why do they undermine the direction of the piece's opening? Including other takes for nuance or what have you is fine, even laudable, but this placement is really odd and the article doesn't even acknowledge how odd that was, let alone address or explain it.
Meanwhile, we have lines like this:
> Five years after #MeToo sparked a global conversation around sexual violence, sexism and power, it might seem puzzling that a life of traditional gender roles and submission to a male partner is resonating with some young women.
The connection drawn here is the most "puzzling" aspect of this sentence, by a long shot. And the "might" buys the author some wiggle room, but if that aspiration resonating with some young women puzzles anyone, I'd assume they'd either not talked to many women, or had only done so in a very small, very tight bubble. This same basic criticism applies to most of the "isn't it so weird women are into this in The Year of Our Lord 2022?" implications of the piece.
Then we come back down to Earth with lines like:
> Though tradwives are a small subculture — and alt-right tradwives an even more fringe group
But the rest of the article largely acts like the alt-right part of it's the main part! It introduces the movement to us like: "Their politics, too, hearken back to that of the post-World War II boom (at least, for those who were straight, White and middle class)." Am I to understand, instead, that the author draws a fine distinction between mainstream politics of straight white middle-class Americans in the 1950s and the alt-right, so these statements aren't in opposition? I'd be pretty surprised if that's what the author's getting at. I'd not, personally, split that particular hair in this sort of context, and I'd certainly not do so without making it explicit that's what I'm doing.
Whole article's like this, as if it's being pulled in two wildly different directions while the author seems to make no attempt to reconcile of form a synthesis from the two.
The middle third is an awkward re-packaging of an email from one professor. Some of it's interesting—I'm not blaming the professor—but the way it's presented isn't great.
Et c, et c. Even stuff like:
> Women who advocate for strictly traditional gender roles aren't a new phenomenon -- anti-feminists in the early 19th and 20th centuries resisted women's suffrage, and some activists in the late 20th century opposed the Equal Rights Amendment.
> What sets tradwives apart from their predecessors is the visibility those social media platforms afford them
Just... what even is this juxtaposition, here? Do "tradwives", in general, hold opposition women's suffrage or the ERA as a major point that they advocate? If not, I think I'd call that out as setting the two categories apart sooner than I'd call out "TikTok exists". But the article makes no comment on that question, so the reader is left to wonder whether this was just sloppily-written, or if the author deliberately left something implicit that seems important enough to make explicit given that the author brought it up in the first place. I'd give it a pass on the basis of the second part referring only to "women who advocated for strictly traditional gender roles" but the author ties that directly to resistance of women's suffrage and opposition to the ERA and nothing else as examples of prior "advocated for strictly traditional gender roles" women, so it sure seems like a certain kind of connection is intended here, but... is it, actually? Or is this just super-sloppy writing?
And, from the "quotes from actual tradwives" block:
> Women who associate with the label exist on a spectrum of sorts, with varying ideas about what it means to be a tradwife and varying reasons for promoting those ideas. Estee C. Williams, who is 24 and posts tradwife content on TikTok, said she doesn't consider herself to be "super traditional" but implements traditional gender roles in her life and relationship -- which she frames as a personal choice. She said she isn't concerned with whether others adopt those same values, but is merely sharing her lifestyle with others who want to embark on a similar path.
Is this not representative of the kind of thing you're trying to write about? If it's not, why did you lead with it then spend most of the article running the other direction? WTF. "I do this thing, here's how it works, take it or leave it" is pretty fucking different from anti-suffragettes and other anti-feminists opposing specific legislation, right? Which is the movement more similar to? Both, it says, kind of, except that that's only a small part, even though earlier we characterized the whole movement that way and also every actual "tradwife" quote included only supports one side of that? The article offers us nothing but confusion on this point. Again, maybe that profile/quote of Williams wasn't representative of the parts of the movement the author's trying to profile, but then why lead with it!? And why follow it up with several more quotes along similar lines?
In isolation—I want to be clear—that last-quoted part is fine. In the context of the whole piece, it contributes to a complete mess.
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Overall it reads like a journalist just now discovered that some people like mineral water, and some of them think it's got major health benefits, and there's some overlap between the latter group and shitty politics, then—and I want to emphasize this next point—wrote an 8th-grade research paper on the topic and somehow that got published by CNN. I come away from it having very little sense of what's actually going on with the politics of this movement or its place in the broader political discourse, even though the article sure seems like it wants to be mainly about that. I think most reporting sucks but this piece really stood out as remarkably WTFy.
For the record, I'm way to the left of the mainstream Democratic party on basically every issue, so I'm not defending "my tribe" here and I'm sure I'd hate the politics of the same set of "tradwives" that I gather the author dislikes—this article's tone and composition just struck me as really bad. It's got a serious "smashed together at the last second to meet a deadline" vibe. Some of the details are interesting, though (again, first I'm hearing of this movement). A few bits and pieces of the article are OK, in isolation. Overall it's a mess, though. I think there's the seeds of a good, larger profile of the whole movement here, and also of a much more focused piece on just its role in alt-right propaganda, but the article can't seem to decide which it's doing, so does both very poorly.
Past that, more and more of them are looking to marry sooner rather than later, which I believe bucks the current trend.
I know that the story isn't new: college grades move to large cities for jobs and exciting opportunities, but these friends are young! Plus, we are witnessing our siblings who are about to leave college balk at the idea of paying rent in large cities (NYC, SF, Chicago, Austin, et al) and are looking more fondly at smaller, more affordable cities.
Relative to the article, I know tons of girls who are cooling to the idea of 'girlbossing,'[0] and are instead become more interested in raising a family/being a homemaker.
Anecdotal this, of course.
[0] I don't mean this in a derogatory sense. Just had lots of girl friends in college who were determined to enter the corporate workforce and become leadership/executives/etc and used the term. Most of them are now starting families (at 25!)