Chronicling the ongoing intersectional struggle to liberate women — inclusively defined as the legacy kind and the transgenders — from The Patriarchy™, one microaggression at a time.
Unreal anti-tradwife screed
Having read far too many intersectional third-wave feminist op-eds in major publications over the years, keeping up with their latest psychotic paroxysms or rage being my sick job, I have to say this one takes the cake for most vitriolic — a high bar, or perhaps low, depending on your perspective.
Related: HuffPo Feminist Quits Shaving to Protest for Abortion Rights
Consider how uncharitable this lady’s interpretation of traditional motherhood is:
- The concept of stay-at-home motherhood was invented by “incels” in “dank, murky” online “caves”
- Female proponents of traditional motherhood are only doing it for money and fame
- Women don’t get anything out of having children and staying at home
- The end-state of nascent tradwife culture will be the literal genocide of women
- The tradwife isn’t even a real person!
Via The Guardian (emphasis added):
Tradwife. It’s a frilly word, the kind that holds a gun to your head and demands you say it in sing-song. The media coverage of the phenomenon has been as breathless and decidedly feminised as the term itself. I have yet to find an article on the topic that was not written by a woman, which feels ironic, given that the term – as well as the vision therein – was originally coined and circulated by men, born out of the dank, murky caves of online “incel” forums, where anonymous usernames set forth the deeply unoriginal vision of a wife who would do everything the real women in their lives refused to do: manage the house, give birth to children, have sex on command, and most importantly, ask nothing in return.
Most people don’t know about these grubby origins, though. Instead, they associate tradwife with the day-bright social media presence of influencers like Hannah Neeleman and Nara Smith, two women who have managed to balloon their pre-existing wealth into eight-figure empires by broadcasting home births and making cereal and bubblegum from scratch while dressed in couture…
The escalation in gendered violence over these last few months has served as a grim reminder of the laws of narrative propulsion, famously espoused by Anton Chekhov: if a gun is onstage at the beginning of a play, it must necessarily go off by the end. Similarly, you do not reimagine a political party under which women exist only to please men if you do not eventually plan to use that party to extinguish the voices and lives of the women who dare suggest an alternative. From this angle, the birth of the tradwife could be seen as a quite literal* gun to the head. One would not create and become obsessed with a fake woman if they did not already wish the real ones were dead…
The tradwife, like the 1950s housewife, is not a real person. She is not a trend, or a cultural obsession. She is an advertisement, a curated performance of womanhood with a link in bio for purchases, who has shown up, like a 1950s advertisement, to remind women of their true purpose: serve, smile, procreate and purchase.
*When this lady, who markets herself as a professional writer, claims that “the birth of the tradwife could be seen as a quite literal gun to the head,” she means the “gun to the head” thing as a colorful metaphor.
Related: 'Shout Sisters': Feminists Meet in Parks to Scream Together, Rage Against Patriarchy
Metaphors are not literal.
In fact, the entire essence of metaphors is that they are not literal. It’s baked into the definition.
I know Valley Girl bimbos have a well-developed habit of inserting “literally” into (sometimes literally) every other sentence, but words actually mean things.
At least they did, until postmodern feminists took over the media and academia.
