Posted by:
anybody
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Date: February 04, 2024 06:31PM
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/feb/04/sometimes-i-long-for-the-life-of-a-tradwife-then-i-remember-its-a-reactionary-fantasyI’ve been dipping pruriently into a kerfuffle that kicked off in the ruddy-cheeked and sourdough-scented world of the tradwife lifestyle influencer recently. Its brightest star, Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm, has just prepared for and then competed in a beauty pageant, two weeks after giving birth to her eighth child.
Even some fans of this corner of social media – where stay-at-home mothers document their lives as helpmeets to strong, outdoorsy gents, exalting labour-intensive domestic chores, child-rearing and churning your own butter – have found this a touch, well, much. At odds with Neeleman’s shots of folksy simplicity; a harmful and unrealistic example for other new mothers, that kind of thing. But most think it’s “so inspiring!”
It’s less the campy, colour-saturated, submissive 50s-housewife cosplay (if you aren’t familiar, check out @esteecwilliams and prepare to hear that “God designed two genders for different purposes”). That feels like fantasy or fetish, designed, I suspect, to appeal mainly to men. (Some of the women who yearn to surrender to a male provider could be, as one astute TikToker put it, “mistaking wanting to be a trad wife with wanting universal basic income.”)
"They make it look so lovely, this 19th-century drudgery. The reality of homesteading is precarious and not pretty: drought, mud, animals getting sick and dying, what one homesteader told me is “the daily game of what the hell is under my nails – shit or blood?” You can know tradwife life is fantasy – a Little House on the Prairie performance piece (after all, social-media content, not cattle, often pays the bills) – and still enjoy it. But the gorgeous aesthetics can also lull you into not noticing, what – apart from sourdough starter kit – it’s selling.
"At the extreme margins, that’s white supremacy: a fringe of tradwives enthusiastically repopulating the world with blond babies. Others sit along what’s been called the “crunchy to alt-right pipeline”, where granola-fuelled enthusiasm for organic farming, fermentation or home schooling (none of which – obviously! – is inherently alt-right) elides into anti-vaxxing, decrying contraception and woke liberal modernity.
"But even when it’s just a homesteader saying feminism makes them sad or suggesting scrubbing dishes glorifies God, it tends to celebrate a narrow vision of life: white, straight, Christian, cleaving to traditional gender roles and family structures. As a friend said: “I’ll get fascinated by a woman baking bread, then she starts talking about how feminism ruined women’s lives.” Influencers with “faith and family” in their profiles are gonna influence.
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Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 02/04/2024 06:36PM by anybody.