Last year, on social-media accounts with names like Ballerina Farm, and in online magazines such as Evie, a new type of woman emerged to bedevil cultural observers: the “tradwife.” Depending on your sensibility, she was either a welcome example of women embracing traditional feminine roles in the household, or proof that the patriarchy had finally triumphed and forced countless women back into the kitchen to serve the needs of men and children.

But the tradwife was, in fact, not new. Popularizations of traditional womanhood have been around for decades; social-media platforms merely gave them more extensive reach and profitability. In feminist terms, however, the #tradwife is confusing. These women who embrace the appearance of regressive gender roles are also modern entrepreneurs, some of whom earn a great deal of money for their content. While traditional in appearance, many are countercultural—nay, almost hippie-like—in behavior. One of TikTok’s most successful tradwife influencers, the former model Nara Smith, named her children Whimsy Lou, Rumble Honey, and Slim Easy, and talks about wanting to grow her own food. But she looks like a Stepford Wife, always impeccably dressed in carefully curated videos that show her kneading dough or making cheese from scratch in her Texas kitchen. Similarly, the online magazine Evie markets itself as a modern, empowering outlet for Gen Z women—one that hawks wellness apps that track menstrual cycles but that also sells retro long dresses and features articles such as “How to Give a Lap Dance: A Step-by-Step Guide for Wives.”

There is, of course, nothing wrong with positive attention flowing to the crucial role of raising children and keeping an orderly and welcoming household—even if, in the case of tradwife influencers, it involves a lot of digital misdirection. As a GQ profile of Nara Smith noted, “For Nara, preparing a sandwich from scratch, filming the process, and then editing the footage can take up to seven hours,” a full-time job of its own for someone with 8 million followers. Meanwhile, her children “will actually be fed something easier, like porridge.”

For many women, there is also something appealing about the idea of escaping an unfulfilling 9-to-5 desk job for the domestic bliss pictured on these social-media accounts. Decades of feminist insistence that women match men in their ambition and public achievement have not produced happier generations of young women. Indeed, the women who are most open today to feminist “messaging”—young, self-identified progressives—are the most pessimistic about how women are treated in the United States and far more prone to anxiety and depression. The “problem that has no name,” as Betty Friedan once described it, isn’t the problem of too many women dressed as thirst-trap milkmaids on Instagram. It’s the persistence of the unhappiness of women, particularly liberal, secular women.

Tradwife content is feeding a new cultural need as well. Twentieth-century feminism’s end game was equality for women, and by numerous measurements (education, employment opportunities, political and cultural advancement), it achieved this goal. But in doing so, 20th-century feminism also ended up destroying the social contract between men and women— evidence of which is emerging only now, in the 21st century.

Perhaps the reason so many people find the tradwife trend appealing in its retro splendor is that it is so clearly a comforting fiction. Zoom out from the klatch of tradwife influencers online and you will find a society where gender relations are not at all cozy and welcoming, and where no amount of winsome and beskirted women can distract from our uncomfortable reality: Men and women are ideologically and culturally polarized and becoming averse to marriage and child-rearing. Many don’t even want to be involved at all with members of the opposite sex. A 2023 Pew survey of people found that, among those ages 18 to 29 years of age, 63 percent of men considered themselves single compared to 34 percent of women.

That men feel this way much more than women do is an important bit of information. We have lived for decades in a culture that has normalized the denigration of traditional masculinity.

Belittling men is mainstream, while women are rewarded for embracing sexual double standards. The Call Her Daddy podcast encourages its female audience to use sex as a weapon and to gaslight their boyfriends and spouses, for example. And it hailed as heroes the women who took to social media to declare themselves prepared to go on a sex strike to protest the reelection of Donald Trump.

By contrast, men have spent the past several decades being told that they benefit from male supremacy (particularly white male supremacy) even as they watch their educational opportunities and wages decline precipitously. They are chided for their “toxic masculinity” and told to “make space” for women, all while also being asked to apologize simply for being male. Is it any surprise many of them are rethinking traditional roles?

As an unmarried 38-year-old man in Brooklyn told the Wall Street Journal recently, “It feels like the instructions for how to live a good life don’t apply anymore . . . and nobody has updated them.” Men seem to care less and less what women think of them, and they find laughable the enduring truth that women exert a civilizing influence on men.

Such men can be forgiven for feeling as if they were sacrificed on the altar of gender egalitarianism. And although some (such as Andrew Tate) have sought solace in terrible models of masculinity, most don’t hate women; they are simply turning away from trying to be what women want and finding their own paths.

Instead of marriage, they optimize their health, as the range of male wellness fads—from cold plunges to intermittent fasting—suggests. Some men have found their way to forms of religious belief they consider rigorous and masculine: As the Telegraph recently noted, “Young, single men are flocking to the Orthodox church after discovering the ‘masculine’ Christian religion through online influencers.” One man observed, “What really drew me to Orthodoxy . . . was the structure, the guidance, the authenticity and the historicity.” Others found the church’s emphasis on “denial and pushing yourself physically,” including standing for services and fasting, appealing when compared with “other religious denominations where they felt the church had been ‘feminized.’”

But far too many men are choosing to spend more time alone; according to the American Time Use Survey, they are doing so at rates higher than any other group. More are also foregoing relationships and marriage. “Only about 60 percent of 35-year-old men are ever-married today, down from 90 percent in 1980,” the Institute for Family Studies has found. “This trend suggests that a growing share of Americans will not get married before their healthiest years are long past them.”

If men do settle down, they find themselves in a social arrangement with far different cultural expectations from those of previous generations. The opposite of the tradwife is the Fair Play husband. Based on a popular book and companion card game, Fair Play attempts to gamify marriage and family life to make the division of labor in a household more equitable. Writing in the Atlantic about her experience using the system, Olga Khazan notes, “It aims to help women in heterosexual relationships, who tend to take on more household cognitive and physical labor, offload tasks onto their partner.” In Khazan’s case, it failed because her husband, who was “assigned researching backup childcare,” didn’t do the work. This left her to air her grievances in the pages of a national magazine by telling readers she called her husband a “d—khead.” (Imagine the response if a male journalist wrote about his wife this way).

Ultimately this suggests that there is no longer a Battle of the Sexes; instead, in an odd echo of Victorian days, men and women are moving toward a world in which they live in separate spheres, increasingly choosing not the rewards and challenges of relationships and shared lives and families, but rather tradwife dreams and self-optimization rituals.

In other words: cultural suicide.

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