Grace Miglorie, Contributing Writer
It is a simple life: wake up, cook breakfast from scratch to feed your multiple children and husband — but not before doing your hair, makeup and putting on a modest white dress. Then the rest of the day you can take care of the household, wash the dishes, do the laundry, cook two more meals — do not eat too much of the meal yourself, though, you would not want to gain weight.
Post this routine to your followers and caption it “a day in my life embracing my feminine energy.” Maybe it is more subtle, a clean girl makeup tutorial or a video encouraging viewers to “marry a provider so you can go to Pilates on a random Tuesday.”
We are being sold the fantasy of traditionalism, a “soft life” of financial dependency and home labor whilst reaping few benefits for ourselves. Misogyny is being wrapped up and handed to us in the pretty package of self-care and femininity. Under the veil of these seemingly harmless posts is one message: submit.
Influencers like Nara Smith and Hannah Neeleman have been blowing up on social media over the past few years. They preach the importance of homemaking, maintaining your beauty and serving your husband and family. This content is a more obvious form of a misogynistic narrative, most easily recognizable as a step back into traditional values and disdain for feminism. However, an influx of more covert posts displaying this same message can be seen across these platforms.
The clean girl makeup trend highlights looking natural and organic products. This is not inherently bad, but can soon lead to wanting only natural products in the home, with a direct pipeline into distrust of schools, medicine and the government and wanting a return to the antiquated natural lifestyle with core conservative values, such as small governments and traditional household roles, ultimately upholding the patriarchy.
The word “biological” is often thrown around in this content, stressing women’s “biological wiring” of having an emotional brain and men’s of having a logical one. It encourages young women to fulfill their “biological desires,” allowing themselves to be feminine by “turning their brains off around their boyfriend” and letting him make the decisions.
At first glance, it may seem natural — scientific, even — and the right thing to do, especially to a younger audience, but of course, science supports none of this. Contrary to popular belief, both men’s and women’s emotional processing centers function in the same way, and varying levels of emotional intelligence are due to outside factors, not biological ones, according to the National Institute of Health.
Along with the tradwife narrative comes the resurgence of “natural” medicine. Influencers are speaking out against birth control, citing its disruption to hormones and harmful effects on bodily chemistry, attempting to discourage young women from partaking in it due to its adverse effects on the feminine cycle.
Conservatives have long been pushing for an abortion ban, being met with much success in recent years. Discouraging contraceptives leads to an increase in unwanted pregnancies, which then leads to unplanned children, stripping you of your autonomy and control and giving it over to a child and family — a straight pipeline to a tradwife lifestyle.
Purity culture is a key player in this discourse. It describes food, skincare and women. Women participating in this culture are making their own food because processed products from the grocery store are “impure.” They use beef tallow on their faces so as not to infuse their body with chemicals and live a lifestyle of labor in the household and forever faithfulness to one man so as not to taint themselves. This traces back to biblical language, referencing the individual as pure and the devil as impure, invoking an extreme divide between those who choose to partake in the “natural” lifestyle and those who do not.
Demonizing the women who choose alternatives to this traditional lifestyle roots and upholds the narrative of the tradwife.
Last year a new trend popped up on social media: “demure.” Whilst many took it as lighthearted, it grew bigger and bigger, penetrating an audience that had never heard the word. It turned from a joke into something to aspire to. Demure: reserved, modest, quiet. Why is that something we are striving towards now, after years of fighting for a woman’s right to be heard?
These trends are cloaked under the illusion of just being trends, but what they really are is harmful propaganda.
What viewers are not seeing is the trap these women fall into. The lack of freedom. The lack of having anything to their name — no escape if something goes wrong. The standards they must uphold, both personally and in the household, to maintain this type of lifestyle.
It is easy to view this and wish you could spend $1000 at Lululemon on a Thursday afternoon too. But what happens when that money is taken away and you are left with an empty bank account and a 10-year gap in your resume?
Being a homemaker is not inherently bad. In fact, it can be incredibly fulfilling for many women and men. However, we must be able to choose if this is the life we want and we must be able to keep our freedoms and liberties while partaking in it.
Young viewers are absorbing this content without seeing the message behind it, and quickly falling down the far-right pipeline with which it is intertwined. One day it is a makeup tutorial, the next it is extreme views on medicine and eventually it is the hate of feminism and the desire to become a subservient homemaker.
As trite as it may be, knowledge is power and understanding the content you are consuming will help you make more informed decisions on what to engage with.
We must learn to recognize these messages, do research for ourselves and deny the narrative that is pushed upon us. If not, we face losing the next generation of women to this trap. We face giving up our rights, which have been tirelessly fought for for years. We face our control and autonomy being taken away from us. We face becoming a tradwife ourselves, with no choice behind it.