The Gen Z Girls Repping the 'Tradwife' Life. A Lifestyle Used to Justify Misogyny & White Supremacy
How TikTok and a Gen Z aesthetic are selling a lifestyle used to justify misogyny and white supremacy in Americahttps://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/tradwife-gen-z
Mention the word “tradwife” and you might imagine the 1950s archetype: A “traditional wife” in a dress and an apron, smiling at her husband and three kids while presenting a gleaming beef roast at the dinner table, pleased as ever in her domestic domain. For a swath of right-wing American men, that image is part of a fantasy of how things “used to be,” in the good ol’ days before antifa and Black Lives Matter and feminist YouTubers ruined everything. The tradwife symbolizes stability — at least for those who imagine social change as an attack on their identity and being. It is the “submissive and breedable” meme, made unironic by chauvinism. It is, ultimately, a hatred of women going their own way. Which made it all the more surprising when Mariel Cooksey began noticing the Gen Z women and girls actively repping the tradwife aesthetic and lifestyle online. Cooksey, a researcher at the Institute for Research on Male Supremacy, decided to study why and how this rhetoric spreads, and found that teen girls are being attracted to the movement thanks to an evolution in how tradwife ideas are marketed and presented.
Anti-feminist women rising at various moments to support male-led movements is nothing new (see: the Ku Klux Klan). But the blend of Gen Z online culture and old-world patriarchal beliefs is harder to parse. Cooksey describes it as a pyramid scheme, with influencers able to tap into a much broader group of women, looking for counterculture in an increasingly chaotic world. “This isn’t the same phenomenon as MAGA girls, and ironically, you see some Gen Z tradwife accounts posting critically about them. Because even Trump Republicanism has modern feminism in it — women are running for Congress, you know?” Cooksey explains. “Instead, these young women are filling a niche that’s a counterpart of young male extremism in the far right.” On the surface, identifying as a tradwife doesn’t necessarily mean you align with white nationalism or other extremist political views. But the overlap in rhetoric and the whiteness of the movement is stark, and Cooksey tells me that some tradwife influencers are explicit in their sharing of extremist ideas, with personalities like Ayla Stewart (aka “Wife With A Purpose”) and Caitlin Huber (“Mrs. Midwest”) interacting openly with white nationalist accounts.
Consider it the next chapter in the story of how the alt-right has given way to niche subcultures that repackage the same toxic ideas on masculinity, gender roles, “family values” and the need for patriarchy. This isn’t just a response to modern feminism — tradwife influencers are at the intersection of white and male supremacy in America, rooted in a theory that order will return to society if women submit to men and support the family while ignoring everything else. That such old-school conservative beliefs are being held up as counterculture by Gen Z women and girls is another sign of fascism creep. I recently sat down with Cooksey for a conversation on what’s different about this version of tradwife idealism, the ways in which young women are attracted to it as a form of online counterculture and why it needs to be studied.
When did you start to investigate how some of these right-wing, deeply misogynistic ideas are gaining traction with young women again?
I graduated with my master’s in December and a large part of my thesis was the relationship between the alt-right and Christianity, and how newer Gen Z offshoots are branching out from alt-right culture over the last five, six years. It’s young people who swear they’re not part of the alt-right, but have undeniable roots in it, like the American Identity Movement or Nick Fuentes and the Groypers. These are groups that are oriented at the “campus level,” under the age of 25, generally. I’ve been keeping an eye on this cohort for a long time. It occurred to me that the female side of this movement isn’t brought into the fold a lot because, for instance, the Groypers are very exclusionary toward women. Ultra misogynistic. Yet they have these expectations for how they want their future wives and families to look. And I wondered how these incel overtones would work in relationships. Of course there’s the fundamentalists — Fundy influencers — but they tend to be older, married and more focused on a conservative Christian view. So where would younger girls fit in? And what kind of content are they putting out?
What’s the history of this subculture, and why is the Gen Z approach so different? .......................
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= new reply since forum marked as read
is honored on a pedestal or exploited and degraded, or any combination in between, is up to the people involved. The trick is making the right choice for oneself, and being allowed to. Our young friend didn't know what that was yet but eventually married nicely and settled into a very normal traditional-lite role. I've known women, though, who've been very strong believers in the superior moral dignity and worth of their very traditional choices.
Like that is realistic. Who ARE these people and what is this bizarre little fantasy world that they live in?
Ayla Stewart (mentioned in my OP article)
https://jezebel.com/youre-not-a-racist-and-neither-am-i-the-former-feminis-1844453301
As viral content goes, the photograph was a blockbuster, accumulating more than ten million likes and three hundred thousand comments on Instagram. First published on July 13, 2017, it showed music megastar Beyoncé cradling her one-month-old twins against her naked torso, standing beachside in front of an arch laced with lush flower blossoms. A pale teal veil was affixed to her rippling blond hair, and a sheer purple robe cascaded from her shoulders to her bare feet. Her head was tilted so that her face caught the sunlight beaming down from the clear blue sky. In the distance was a blurry horizon where ocean met air. The image was a visual echo of Beyoncé’s famous pregnancy photos, released earlier the same year. The aesthetic was inspired by art dating back centuries: Beyoncé was Raphael’s Madonna, Botticelli’s Venus, the Virgin of Guadalupe. She was a Black woman inserting herself into a canon that so rarely depicted figures of color, much less glorified them. “She appears as not one but many women—or, instead, maybe the universal woman and mother,” an art history professor at New York University told Harper’s Bazaar.
When she saw the photo, Ayla Stewart had a different take. She wondered why people had such reverence for Beyoncé, the kind Ayla believed should be reserved for the divine. A devoutly Christian mother of six with a round, dimpled face and wide blue eyes, Ayla decided to denounce what she saw as idolatry. As Beyoncé’s image ricocheted around the internet, Ayla screen-grabbed it. She juxtaposed the photo with a painting of the Virgin Mary and an infant Jesus, encircled by gilded haloes. Ayla captioned the side-by-side comparison “Tubillardine [sic] Whiskey (1952) vs. Kool-Aid.” Mary was the vintage; Beyoncé was the fake stuff.
Ayla shared the meme on Twitter, where she kept an account under the name Wife with a Purpose. Reactions were swift, and some were furious. “Girl, fuck you,” one Twitter user wrote. “I haven’t beat anyone up all year so I’m ready to fight.” The website Bossip included Ayla in a roundup of “mediocre mayo packets who spent their whole entire payday splattering not-very-subtle racism all over Al Gore’s world wide web” because they didn’t like Beyoncé’s photo. In Ayla’s case, the racism was in the association between Kool-Aid and African Americans, a long-standing stereotype implying that Black people enjoy—or can only afford—cheap, childish, and unhealthy things.
Ayla had established herself as one of the internet’s most vocal proponents of tradlife, short for “traditional lifestyle,” a movement advocating retrograde values and hierarchies between men and women, states and citizens, God and humankind. She believed that white, Christian, heterosexual people, who represented all that was natural and good in America, were under threat from immigrants, feminists, liberals, and LGBTQ people. “Tired,” Ayla once typed in red letters over an Instagram image of two transgender women of color; “woke,” she wrote over an adjoining photograph of a large white family.
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Response to sinkingfeeling (Reply #8)
It's a good companion to this one by Meg Conley: https://www.megconley.com/by-design/
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...Racist socialists eating food prepared in centralized kitchens staffed by underpaid people is dystopic. Gilman’s vision is chilling and violent. It’s hard to consider that dystopic, chilling, violent things have much to do with our warm reality. But if reality feels warm, it's probably because you are in a room designed for your comfort. How many white women found their consuming feminism on the unpaid and underpaid labor of others?
White communists, white socialists, white feminists, white capitalists and white supremacists all hoping to engineer whole societies by designing the kitchen. Each saw kitchens as permanently fitted with women - they just disagreed over what that meant. All kept the footprint of patriarchal understanding and most anchored deep into racist foundations. None of their blueprints made room for the meaning of the work in the kitchen. Forget the meaning, they could hardly be bothered with the function. Lihotzky, with all her research into pantry placement, didn’t seem very concerned when peasants' pantries were made fatally empty. She wanted to design a world for certain women, in a certain way. If other women starved while that world was built, maybe it was because they didn’t deserve to be part of the design...
After having watched that LulaRoe documentary LulaRich, writer Ann Helen Peterson interviewed Ms. Conley about it and it's also very good:
https://annehelen.substack.com/p/what-got-left-out-of-lularich
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