#tradwives

[balkanradfem]

So I've found Alyssa Grenfell on youtube. She shares her experience of leaving mormonism, and the inner workings of the religion. I had very little ideas about what mormonism is, only that it's a high-control religion, very difficult to leave, and has people knocking on doors trying to get converts. I've been interested to find out more, and I ended up watching almost all of her content, and some of the information I've got from it opened my eyes on other feminist topics, and I believe is relevant to the current discourse!

So if you, like me, don't know how mormonism works, it started when a guy decided that he too could be a part of the bible; he wrote a bible part two: mormon, and proclaimed himself a prophet. Then he started a religion based on his writings, decided it was more important than the bible itself because he 'translated it from gold tablets god gave him', and started gaining followers by convincing people he's the prophet. Once he had managed to get a following, he soon started to sexually exploit the wives and daughters of these followers, to the point where he had 20-40 wives and had married 14yo children. Families allowed it to happen because he would promise them to be royalty in the afterlife. He eventually got into a lot of trouble for stealing and raping children so he was killed by an angry mob, but the religion continued.

The religion is same as christianity except more rules (no coffee, no alcohol, no smoking), eternal worship of the predator who wrote it, followers are pressured to follow the rules exactly, and, the vital part, the followers have to give 10% of their income to the church. They developed a culture where once every young mormon kid comes of age, they have to go on a 'mission', which means they're removed from their home, and have to spend 2 years (1,5 for women) living in a foreign area, knocking on doors, sharing the gospel, trying to convert people. The conversion rate is extremely low, but at that point kids have invested so much time, effort, energy and passion for the religion, they become devoted to it and start to feel alienated in the world that rejects their religion. And even with the low conversion rate, every new convert means another continuous source of income for the church. So it's very profitable to send out young adults to make these sales. The kids are told that if they don't complete their missions, they will not be able to marry, and marriage is presented as their only life purpose.

So how rich is the church at this point? 230 billion dollars. I've been shocked to hear this because I had no idea. Alyssa explained that the mormon church is as rich as Pepsi, they have more money than Disney and McDonalds. So you might be wondering, like I did, well what are they doing with all that money? I've been left to wonder this for a while, until I watched the video called 'Why are so many influencers mormon?', which explained it. I didn't even realize a lot of influencers were mormon. But, this video showed me something both disturbing, and eye opening.

Before I go into that, I have to point out how patriarchal and misogynistic this religion is. Women are not given any options except marriage, and it's presented as the only righteous way to live. They're groomed for marriage from a very young age, encouraged to start writing letters to their future husbands at the age of 9. They're taught cooking, sewing and childcare, and to coddle any males in the family. It's taken for granted that m*n won't respect women, to the point where male children are allowed to harass grown women and their families will not intervene or consider it a problem. Chastity and purity are promoted to the level where members of the religion are expected to wear special underwear at all times, which hides their entire torso, shoulders, and legs down to their knees, and their clothing is expected to cover this up completely. They're rejected by the religion if they dare to have sex before marriage, or drink alcohol or coffee, or in some cases, tea. The church has a history of allowing and promoting polygamy, in the sense that a male was allowed to have as many wives as he wanted; they've since stopped this, but refused to break up the existing marriages. They're also promoting anti gay and racist propaganda, which Alyssa observed in school where she'd been teaching; a gay kid almost ended his life due to extreme homophobia.

I know all of this is somewhat common in all areas of society, all religions, and all cultures, but in mormonism it seems to be written into the core of it.

So now, why are so many influencers mormon? I didn't even know they were. The influencers themselves are not promoting the fact that they're mormon, nor does it come up in viral discussions. Ballerina farm is mormon. Tradwives are mormon. Whataboutaub, Rachel Parcel, brooklynandbailey, tanner_mann, thebucketlistfamily, Taylor Frankie Paul, Sarah Beeston, Ruby Franke, these are all mormon. Most of the Utah-based influencers are mormon, and there's a bigger amount of successful and popular influencers from Utah, than from LA or NY.

For me it immediately explained why this viral content is like that. Why we're having such influx of highly patriarchal, anti-feminist, very dangerous and sexist content, put in front of the eyes of young women. Why it's being promoted as an ideal way of life. How are these women able to share this life as if they truly believed it was good and ideal. How could they think it's harmless? If they're using the internet to the extent that they're creating content, how would they not be exposed to any feminism at all? And they wouldn't because it's against their religion to engage with content like that, or with people talking about it. Because being raised in a high-control religion, they would truly believe their lives are the ideal. They would be presented with it as their only option, the only way of life possible for a woman.

It's heartbreaking because I can now understand why it was so easy to push Ballerina Farm to give up her entire life ambition to get married and carry children for a male she didn't even want to go out with, the pressure from the religion to do so would be immense, she would have been raised to see this as the only option, everything else in her life would be considered pointless. She wouldn't have an actual choice, she'd be groomed for this from the moment she was born. Mormons don't advertise 'looking for your soulmate', they only instruct women to marry a mormon male who completed his mission and make it work.

So how does the immensely rich mormon church play into this? I couldn't see it until Alyssa explained in a very detailed way how youtube content advertising works. I didn't know about this either, but here's the overview:

How much you get paid on youtube, instagram, tik-tok, or other online content platform, depends on what type of content it is, based on how much advertisers are willing to pay to put adverts on it. For instance, you get paid much more for finance content, because banks will pay premium prices to be advertised in a finance-related video. If you're making content on cooking, you get paid way less, because it's not such a lucrative field. If you're making content on christianity, you get similarly low price as for cooking, christian church is not that rich. But, if you're making content as a mormon, that's showcasing some aspect of a mormon life, even if you don't specifically say you're mormon, the price goes way up, to the point where it's as lucrative as finance. The mormon church is making sure that the mormon influencers are being paid premium prices for their content, because people who get massively interested in the influencers, eventually find out that it's the mormon life being advertised, and some of them consider taking on mormonism. Which gives church more converts, which means the church will earn more money. The content we're watching is one huge advert sponspored by mormon church, and we don't even know it.

Alyssa figured this out because her content falls under the keyword 'mormon', and her comments warned her that the church is advertising on her videos, even when she's making mormon-critical content. She then realized that she too was being paid a premium price for her views, just because they're mormon themed. She went on to discover that even just being an influencer in Utah will fetch a premium price, because most of mormons are based in Utah. For more detailed and comprehensive explanation on this, watch her video!

Advertising is not the only way the mormon church is spending their money, they've also built a shopping mall, and are basically spending their money by investing and gambling and everything any corporation does with their profits. It's making me mad, and also makes the members of the church mad when they discover where 10% of their income goes, because they're told it's being used for charity and community service, and not advertisments and building malls.

For me this solves a mystery of how is it possible, in this day and age to have such influx of tradwives and influencers of 'traditional life', they're being sponsored by an organization making a profit off of it, making sure that anyone making this content is so well paid, they're able to live off of it, and keep creating more of it, and in the process of doing that, groom young women into their lifestyle.

Learning more about religions, specifically high-control religions, makes me realize just how much of it is happening all around us, but invisible, not naming what it is. It's similar to MLM's, the people inside are constantly trying to lure more people in, to make profit for those on the top, while the organization keeps changing names and hides their business structure in order to save their reputation. People can get influenced by it, and sucked in, without even knowing about it. Somehow most MLM's are also in Utah.

Mormon church also asked to no longer be called that, in order to stop being associated with the words like 'cult', which people have identified it as. Now they're working under more secretive names, and hidden business practices, so we wouldn't even know what we're being influenced by, and why is the content in front of us what it is.    

[tarragonthedragon]

i used to read about how like marie antoinette's court would dress as milkmaids and have almost-baked bread placed in fake ovens for them to finish and pre-washed hen's eggs daintily tucked in their immaculate fake coops with fluffy prize hens briefly placed in them for the aristocrats to playact the life of the peasantry and think, wow, that's crazy, what must have been going on in their minds to make this game seem appealing, what did they think they were doing, how did the little fake world of the court make them so totally blind to how the real people whose lives they were playing at hated them with the smouldering embers that would be stoked into a flame of revolution

anyway crazy how we have tradwives all over instagram now huh

[notsomodernwoman]

[orwellsunderpants]

if women are turning themselves into Stepford Wives by choice i suppose that's a thing they're entitled to do, but it sure as hell creeps me out and shows that we haven't learned anything since the early 1970s

[elcorhamletlive]

there's so much, like, performative respect given to obviously regressive internet trends, even among people who disagree with them. "There's nothing wrong with wanting to be a tradwife," "I'm not saying homeschooling/unschooling is inherently bad," well I am saying all these things. this is all shitty, dangerous and regressive, and I think it's harmful to constantly sugar coat objections to it

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Angela Yang at NBC News:

There’s the manosphere and the Zynternet and the salt right. And then there are the Barstool conservatives and the dudebros. These are the terms that have emerged in recent years to describe a sensibility that has taken hold online, culminating with its ascension as arguably the mainstream social media aesthetic of 2024: traditionally masculine, increasingly conservative-leaning and disapproving of (or at least uninterested in) “woke” culture.

It was a year in which podcaster Joe Rogan became a central part of the presidential election, and the biggest meme centered around a then-anonymous young woman’s off-the-cuff sex joke that turned her into a social media personality. One of the internet’s biggest platforms, X, removed many of its guardrails as its owner, Elon Musk, fully embraced Donald Trump’s run for president. And one of the most popular products this year — the nicotine-packed Zyn pouch — became the addiction of choice for many of America’s young men. And it was a year of masculinity punctuated by Trump’s election win. Jess Maddox, an assistant professor of digital media technology at the University of Alabama, said this year’s renewed cultural focus on traditional masculinity is reminiscent of the reactionary shift that occurred after Trump’s 2016 election. Though his 2024 victory injected renewed vigor into these sentiments, she said these spaces have been burgeoning for years.

“There’s Barstool Sports, there’s Joe Rogan, but then I also think about things like tradwives and homesteading and even the ‘I’m just a girl’ jokes and trends that are funny,” Maddox said. “But all of these things are in service of kind of the same project, which is emboldening traditional masculinity.” These trends are the latest turn in a gender war that traces back decades but has become more recognized amid rising political polarization. And while many of them have few if any direct links with one another, they share a common cultural outlook. Whitney Phillips, an assistant professor of digital platforms and media ethics at the University of Oregon, said that as a reactionary wave of internet users reject what they perceive as a dominant left-leaning culture, many in these spaces have united behind the push to return to traditional ideas of masculinity and femininity, among other anti-“woke” ideas.

“It’s a politics that isn’t really a politics. Like, it’s not exactly partisan, and it’s not exactly taking strong policy stances on particular kinds of issues,” Phillips said. “It is just this vague sense that liberals are irritating.” Tradwives, as Maddox noted, are not new to social media but had a banner year as these gender wars continued to play out online. This type of content — in which women perform a 1950s-era housewife lifestyle, often demonstrating subservience to their husbands — has surged in popularity: Two of the biggest influencers in the genre, Nara Smith and Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm, gained millions of followers on social media this year, according to Social Blade. Additionally, President Joe Biden’s 35-point lead over Trump with young women in 2020 shrunk to a 24-point lead for Harris, according to NBC News exit polls, with some experts suggesting tradwife content helped bolster Trump.

Conservative essayist Normie Macdonald attributes much of this to a cultural pushback against the “boss girl era” that some women have grown disillusioned with. Macdonald, who asked to be identified only by his Substack display name because his critics have tried to expose his personal information before, describes himself as a classical conservative who is deeply Christian and believes in the “model American nuclear family” with multiple children and a man as the head of the household. But too many people in the right wing today, he said, have been radicalized by the “manosphere,” a network of online spaces that promote rigid notions of masculinity and espouse misogynistic stereotypes about women.

[...] X, formerly Twitter, for example, has increasingly turned into a hotbed of misogynistic harassment amid a surge in right-wing content, leading droves of liberal and left-leaning users who once regarded Twitter as the internet’s town square to leave X for alternative text-based apps like Bluesky and Threads. This happened in part because of Musk’s takeover, which has included a pullback on moderation alongside his vociferous critiques of the “woke mind virus.” Musk’s own evolution here — from eccentric billionaire embraced by some liberals to a close Trump adviser — mirrors how some other figures who once regarded themselves as anti-establishment have now found themselves at the pinnacle of the mainstream. A spokesperson for X did not respond to a request for comment. 

Rogan, whose podcast became one of the hottest topics of the election, is now so universally regarded as a standard bearer of modern media that it’s spurred debates among some on the left about how to replicate his formula of success. His show remains the most popular podcast in the United States, according to data from Edison Research. His rising success has also coincided with a growing embrace of Trump. Rogan, who supported Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., during the 2020 primaries, was one of many podcast hosts considered bro-friendly who were given a shoutout at Trump’s election night celebration.

A spokesperson for Rogan did not respond to a request for comment. Podcasting, in particular, has played an important role in the changing power dynamics of internet culture. [...] Other unlikely figures have emerged as stars in this world. Haliey Welch became one of the year’s most viral internet personalities after her raunchy “hawk tuah” joke about oral sex spread across social media.

2024 was the year that conservative-leaning and masculinist online spaces took off, ranging from Joe Rogan to the Manosphere to the tradwife trend.

[buggie-hagen]

The difference then, between a tradwife and a homemaker, is the difference between the law and the gospel. Tradwives focus on what to do and what not to do as their identity and the source of their goodness. Do the right thing, and you'll get the right result. But homemaking isn't about role-play or fulfilling some nostalgic ideal that never was. It's about loving the actual people in your actual home, not the ideal people in your ideal home. It's about providing nourishing retreat from the pressures of the world, and giving and receiving grace as lavishly as it's been given to us. ~Gretchen Ronnevik, "Homemaking, Now and Then: Edith Schaeffer Versus the Tradwives" in The Mockingbird, vol. 25: The Home Issue, 34.

[randomfoggytiger]

TRADWIVES: Ahistoric LARPing

Found some cool clips that debunk the current "tradwife" grift circulating the internet.

Clip 1: Traditional wives were not weak-willed lilies that pined away dutifully, grossly stupid and financially dependent on their husbands... working women, anyway. (Full video here-- though it mainly debunks the "godfather" of the Red Pill more broadly than his misunderstanding of the traditional family.)

Clip 2: The tradwife and Red Pill movement don't understand the 1950s. Married women chose to remain in the work force post WWII, which locked the younger women out of jobs. The younger generations then married and had kids early because the economy was good and there was nothing else to do. (Full video here. I highly recommend it in conjunction with her video carefully deconstructing the "men need sex [at the expense of women]" narrative, found here.)

Clip 3: Lastly, "modern women" who've chosen to become SAHM and SAHW have successfully done so without sacrificing their financial independence or losing their personal dignity or identity. (Full video here, which breaks down popular TikTok tradwife content.)

Obviously, no relationship is perfect; and more obviously, it's a great risk to throwaway the potential of financial freedom and independence on the false dream the trad movement is selling. Not only are they self-employed women masquerading as traditional, but most (not all) are also making a mockery of the hardworking women who juggle their lives, kids, and finances to make a SAHM role work.

At the end of the day, we can only make the best choices for ourselves-- in any area of our lives-- if we're truthfully informed.

Thanks for reading (and watching)~

Enjoy!

[khepiari]

Enough with the, "It's a Choice" card

Nope. Nope. Nope.

Enough with the, "It's a Choice" card.

It’s very convenient to pull this logic card when the subject in question expresses that their choices indeed don’t make them happy or empowered, but they still choose to sell this "tradwife lifestyle" to millions on social media. Young impressionable girls and women who are already sick of the capitalistic exhaustion buy into the words these tradwives sell them.

So, no, we are not going to say it's a choice to raise 8 kids without pain medication and give up on your dreams to live the cowboy cosplay life of your husband because that makes you happy. When let's face it, it is not.

Stop defending this nonsense as a choice, it stops being a choice when it begins influencing people outside the life of the person who makes the choice. In this case, millions of young girls and young women!

And people who are saying we are dissing tradwives because we are jealous, jealousy my foot.

Living on a farm with 8 children is what women did in the pre-contraceptive and no voting rights era around the world.

Oh, sorry, I keep forgetting that many middle-class American women with a certain amount of privileges are really demented about how hard-won their rights are. Read your history, and know why women of previous generations went to prison for the sake of the rights you enjoy today!

For someone like me from Asia, especially India, it is not a matter of choice here. I have seen my friends being married off against their wishes and giving up on their dreams because domesticity was forced upon them. I really have no sympathy for a Juilliard dropout who chose this life of 8 kids!

Likewise, I will die single and a hater. I can’t believe my timeline is full of tradwife apologists.

Why are you all so gullible!

[tiny-pteranodon]

tradwives be like:

heres my book about what we as women must never do.

1- write a book

[bitchesgetriches]

An excerpt from:

The Disturbing and Hypocritical World of Tradwives

[spacenoirdetective]

"Say something sexy, John."

"Privacy rights should extend to our emails, Jan 6 was a setup from the communists running our country, death tax is immoral..." John kissed her neck with every admission.

"Oh! Oh, JOHN!"

"Corporations who embrace DEI probably made deals expecting a totalitarian takeover and hope that a communist America will make all their competition illegal. CBDCs are a scam but cryptocurrency is based on complexity and therefore valid."

"Oh, JOHN! John, you're so manly!"

"The Bidens are merely a symptom of lax morals and deviancy and they hope to spread their immorality in order to normalize it as a direct attack on Christianity. Satanism is for wimp losers," he growled.

"Yes! Yes! Oh, John!"

"Only men have dicks," he whispered.

Sarah fainted from John's manliness. It had been ages since she'd met a man with an actual penis. She had been around so many liberals for far too long. Her future life as a tradwife had begun.

artist: Ed Tadiello

[shamebats]

*This is not what rural anywhere looks like

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Olivia Little at MMFA:

TikTok’s “For You” page recommendation algorithm propels users who interact with “tradwife” content — which promotes “traditional values” and rigid gender roles — down far-right conspiracy theory rabbit holes. Media Matters coded and analyzed 327 recommended videos after exclusively interacting with tradwife content and documented what happened. We found TikTok’s recommendation algorithm rapidly populated our FYP with conspiracy theory content and fearmongering, which made up nearly one-third of all videos served to the FYP.

In recent years, the “tradwife” movement has shifted from far-right internet subculture to mainstream social media trend, becoming particularly popular among young people. Not every popular homemaking creator is a “tradwife,” though; tradwife influencers specifically preach the gospel of rigid gender roles and biblical submissiveness, glamorizing a 1950s housewife aesthetic while calling for some variation of a “return to tradition.”

MMFA reports on how Tradwife influencers are spreading far-right conspiracist content on TikTok.

[askgothamshitty]

https://www.tumblr.com/1percentcharge/775025555564347392/the-difference-between-a-stay-at-home-mother-and-a?source=share

What raw shit. Choice feminist nonsense.

There is no such thing as a tradwife, or at least not something that is independent of a stay at home mother.

A tradwife is a concept. A marketing ploy. They are performers. Actors. They're entire job is just perpetuate right wing gibberish. This identity does exist in the real world.

There are women who reflect these ideas and values. There are women that live the trad wife life, but they are not trad wives.

The only distinction you should be making between a SAHM and a tradwife is that the SAHM (depending on class) actually does the thing the tradwife claims.

Tradwives are not reactionaries they are grifters. They're job is to sell the tradwife life. To encourage woman to live they way they claim to while also fulfilling male fantasies of domestic work.

They have staffs of maids and nannies doing all the domestic work while they glam up and pose for a camera and send weird messages to their audience. The only thing these women do is get pregnant (some might even skip that and get a surrogate).

I don't know how to phrase it but that post basically validates their behavour and only critics the way they speak to other women. It also hinges on the idea that SAHM chose that life and don't push it onto other women.

What do you think ? Am I being crazy for finding this post wrong and misleading? I just don't think the issue with tradwives is that they think other women should do the same. Tradwives are not distinctive of SAHM because of ideology, one is just a marketing term while the other is a job. One is a right wing dog whistle while the other is just some woman.

I think the post is saying that the people who often label themselves “tradwives” have a specific political agenda and narrative (as you said). “Tradwives” will claim that every woman secretly wants to be them but has been misled by feminists to think otherwise.

Meanwhile the people who call themselves “SAHMs” aren’t making their whole personality about proselytizing their lifestyle. At least not in the same way “tradwives” do.

And I think the poster does agree that “tradwives” aren’t actually what they say they are based on their use of quotes around the term.

[leam1983]

Peepshow

I've joined the Gaming Circlejerk subreddit as of the past few days, and it can best be summed up as a place where tolerant cis allies, the LGBTQA+ and other individuals of alternative identities all come together to shake their heads at the Gamers™ losing their marbles at the sight of Intergalactic's horribly designed actually pretty main character which serves at another great use of photogrammetry, or at the notion that you'll be playing The Witcher 4 as Ciri, as opposed to Geralt. It's given us a few pearls, like fanart of both characters sporting sunglasses while drinking Slushie-shaped tumblers of Berry Frost-colored Incel Tears™. "So DEI-licious!" crows the drink's tag line, much to the subreddit's delight.

After a few days of joining my peers in equal parts mockery and consternation, I realized why I'd set my Firefox bookmark of my CrushOn.ai user page as my main point of ingress - as I didn't want to see the first page of appallingly popular Fetish content that honestly feels like Incel fodder.

I mean, I know on which platform I am. This is the Hellsite, where all kinks are welcomed as long as said kinks are explored consensually - up to a point, obviously. The thing is, what I make an effort to glance over each and every time I want to look at my notifications or at the comments left by my bots' users is honestly degrading, in my opinion. They're always within the site's very, very lax rules regarding content moderation (no underage content, everything else is fair game) but that opens the floodgates for honestly weird fantasies like apocalyptic universes where girls are penned like cattle or implausible circumstances where anally penetrating your hypothetical sister would somehow not qualify as incest...

At first, I didn't think much of it all. I swept it under the rug as just some early-pubescent fare, basically the result of raging hormones needing some girding before proper expectations could be set for dating someone of the fairer sex.

But I kept scrolling, hoping I'd come across my usual fare - bot-powered Softcore where Context and Consent are key - and only saw screen after screen of the same kind of material, where the user either degrades someone or is on the receiving end of a particularly humiliating treatment.

So, let's play Devil's Advocate. Let's assume that in the user base, there's people for whom this qualifies as catharsis. Let's assume that there is a percentage of people who have a self-aware and healthy relationship with these kinks; while understanding that with how extreme some scenarios can be, this means that some people need more. Some people don't just want to go for sub-dom kinks in the sanctity of a shared bedroom, but have the balls to more or less generate fanfics where either base biological gender can just snatch the other and subject them to seriously scarring treatment.

It's kind of hard to not think of this, when parsing through Gaming Circlejerk on Reddit, while realizing that for plenty of men, even fictitious women should be pliable, submissive, maternal, fair-skinned and of a delicate bone structure.

Pair that with the rise of Tradwives and the horrendous toads that serve as their husbands, parading store-bought Stetsons and cowboy boots around, and you're left realizing that a ton of young men online are not well at all, lately.

I see myself as a gamer. As in, someone who values the medium's capabilities to tell stories and to relieve the player or players of their burdens, in a way that's unique to themselves and that no book or movie could match. When I play competitively, it's to eventually break down cackling with similarly-inclined sympathetic pubbers or a few close friends. If a girl other than Sarah joins our group, I don't feel pressured to add chauvinistic jokes or to check her ability before the session starts.

On the other hand, the Gamers™ haven't gotten over Abbie from The Last of Us: Part II and wax Phrenology and Eugenics when they're not hurriedly stashing their Waifu Bait dakimakuras from their parents' sight.