The obsession with trad wives goes on. Many yearnings meet in them but the principle one is misogyny, just not in the way you might think. When isn’t it? Antisemitism is often called the oldest hatred. Rather, it is misogyny.
The trad wife, whose leaders are on Instagram, will pretend to be a farmer’s wife — just one that no authentic farmer’s wife would recognise. Farmers’ wives drink and laugh. Simpering is unknown to them, and they can’t afford trad wife clothing, which is usually expensive oatmeal-coloured aprons in linen.
The current chief trad wife is Hannah Neeleman of Utah, who left ballet to marry the son of a billionaire and have eight children. It’s all about the aesthetics for the trad wife, and the money — they make a lot of it from selling trad wife products on Instagram.
Still, it’s popular — especially in Christian circles in America. All religious fundamentalists oppress women — I suppose it is to American Christians’ credit that they have managed to prettify and monetise it. You will find trad wives in Islam and Judaism too, of course — the way they bear, and raise, eight or so children is just less aesthetically pleasing than it appears on the Instagram feeds of media trad wives.
The trend longs for a simpler time before infrastructure, universal suffrage and reproductive rights. Lose your autonomy, hug a cow. Why not?
Are you oppressed if you collude in it? Of course. I don’t doubt that it is heartfelt conservatism. The aesthetic is fake, as aesthetics tend to be, but it longs for a simpler time before infrastructure, universal suffrage and reproductive rights. Lose your autonomy, hug a cow. Why not?
My instinct, which is all I can go on, not living in trad wife circles (though I know a fair few miserable women) is that when it isn’t about money and the clothing, it’s a sexual fetish — sanitised de Sade meets Cath Kidston by way of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.
I don’t interfere in the desires of fellow women. I wish them well as they age, go off sex and realise that their husbands aren’t smarter than them and they have been under the boot of a raving inadequate all this time who couldn’t believe his luck. Trad wifedom is a hoax, and there are many recovering trad wives to testify to it.
More worrying is the media obsession with trad wives. As the press never learnt with Donald Trump, if you just ignored him, he would be less powerful — let him pay for his own PR. (I am aware, of course, that I am colluding in my oppression here by typing his name, and also the word “apron”). The media plugs trad wives for the usual reason. They look pretty, they start fights, and they fill up pages — cheaply.
But there is something else too — a more insidious misogyny. Why cover trad wives and not domestic violence, which is rising? Or death in childbirth, which is common? Or the fact that young women are afraid to walk the streets? Or any of the dull, myriad ways in which women suffer because they are women, with or without oatmeal-coloured aprons in linen?
I see trad wife obsession less as a clear rebuke to the phenomenon, and more of a concealment. We turn our eyes to that we find interesting, and what we find interesting is pretty. But nothing lasts forever — a farmer’s wife knows that.
US election blurs line between fiction and reality
I struggle to view the American presidential election as real. Too much entertainment is made about US politics, which floats off into unseriousness and legend. The West Wing (1999-2006) was a parallel presidency for liberals who hated George W Bush — it soothed and corrupted them. Even less benevolent was House of Cards (2013-18), which had the Underwoods: two psychopath presidents murdering journalists — murdering truth — when threatened with exposure, surrounded by a cast of billionaire ghouls. These people are self-serving and wicked — they have nothing to offer us, and Donald Trump spoke to that nothingness, and ennui.
In Network (1976), Paddy Chayefsky’s masterpiece about TV news, this was all predicted. Viewers would be so corrupted by television they wouldn’t be able to distinguish between fiction and reality. With that, in their insatiable quest for drama, Kamala Harris and Trump will collude.
