#this can arguably go in my Judaism tag but it won’t

[willowcrowned]

okay I’ve blacked out the name and deleted the comment because I really don’t want to be a dick, especially since the comment was half joking, but I do think it’s indicative of a wider problem that me acknowledging in the tags that a lot of these women have a real familiarity and ease with their text of choice—and that I really admire that!—is grounds for worrying about being radicalized

it’s—idk, I could get really preachy here and I’m going to try as hard as I can not to go that way—but it’s concerning that it’s considered dangerous to recognize that there are parts of people’s cultures you can really respect and appreciate, even if you totally disagree with the framework those parts are part of. even if tradwives as a whole tend to leave a bad taste in my mouth, it’s important to me to acknowledge that the people who engage in those practices are not deluded babies who don’t see that everything they like is obviously bad. rather, it’s important that I understand that there are truly affirming and worthwhile parts of that culture that lead people to create the really horrible, terrifying frameworks to justify the rest of it.

I admire the tradwife commitment to homemaking (never an easy job) the same way I admire the conservative #christiangirl commitment to continuing to practice and understand their text of choice. I find the implication that men were intended to lead and women were intended to be helpmeets deeply disgusting, and deeply concerning for the women who believe it. I find the conservative #christiangirl reliance on God for all answers to be completely antithetical to my own religious practices and worldview. Acknowledging one doesn’t invalidate the other—and, actually, I’d argue that allowing myself to acknowledge the good embedded in practices that I find at best personally distasteful allows me to really unpack what I think is wrong with them

edit: two things. first, the flavor of christianity I’m specifically talking about here is good old American fundamentalist Protestants. second, I think it’s also important to acknowledge that the things I admire about them are present in many other cultural frameworks, many of which do not leave a bad taste in my mouth. I didn’t mean to link homemaking with sexism, nor a reliance on god with conservatism—just to say that a lot of the time, the presence of those good things is used to justify the specific, often harmful, cultural frameworks tradwives and conservative #christiangirls operate within

my new strategy for keeping myself from scrolling endlessly on youtube’s tiktok rip-off is to purposefully fill my feed with tradwife content to make watching shorts unbearable. so far today I’ve seen a video with #tradwife #peace imposed over a series of 1950s advertisements and a “christian girl morning routine” video so I think it’s going swimmingly