There’s serious money in peddling fantasies of female submission online, but it may be exacerbating male loneliness. If the average American were asked what they imagine the priorities of the feminist movement are these days, most people would likely cite concerns like “fighting abortion bans” or “getting justice for sexual violence victims” or boring mainstays like “equal pay for equal work.” But if you listen in to the world of right-wing social media influencers, they have a different answer. To them, feminists are single-mindedly obsessed with destroying women who identify as “tradwives.” “Trad Wives Are Triggering Feminists,” according to the YouTube channel for Daily Wire contributor Brett Cooper, who has 3.75 million subscribers. “Angry Feminist Compares Tradwives to Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists,” screams the headline from the YouTube channel for Michael Knowles, a far-right troll with 1.75 million subscribers. (…) By feeding conservative audiences a largely imaginary war with feminists, the tradwives are also pulling off another sleight of hand: distracting from how their content preys upon men, especially young men, by selling them a silly fantasy as reality. In the process, they’re contributing to the male loneliness epidemic, by discouraging young men from developing the skills and mindset they need to get a real girlfriend, instead of just subsisting on a steady stream of social media delusions
via salon: The insidious rise of “tradwives”: A right-wing fantasy is rotting young men’s minds
siehe auch: Meet the queen of the ‘trad wives’ (and her eight children) Hannah Neeleman, known to her nine million followers as Ballerina Farm, milks cows, gives birth without pain relief and breastfeeds at beauty pageants. Is this an empowering new model of womanhood — or a hammer blow for feminism? (…) Trad wives are an internet phenomenon; women who have rejected modern gender roles for the more traditional existence of wife, mother and homemaker — and who then promote that life online, some to millions of followers. Their lifestyle is often, though not always, bound to Christianity. They film themselves cooking mad things from scratch (chewing gum from corn syrup, waffles from a sourdough starter), their faces glowing in beams of sunlight, their voices soft and breathy, their children free range. In order to explain trad wives — and their popularity — we need to look back 15 years or so, when the fourth wave of feminism was breaking. This was the “girl boss” era, when women were told to be bolder in the workplace, to lean in further, to break glass ceilings. The poster woman for the movement at the time was the Facebook boss Sheryl Sandberg. But as the years went on women realised they’d been sold a lie: this individualistic feminism didn’t resolve anything unless you were a millionaire. For normal working mothers the girl-boss era achieved virtually nothing. After years of silence there also began a very public purging, women talking about how mind-numbing weaning is, about the isolation of maternity leave, the challenges of everyday life with irrational toddlers. Paradoxically this made it harder for women to be honest about any of motherhood’s joys. Those who succeeded were seen as smug — or saboteurs. And so, as a reaction to both the girl bosses and the frazzled mothers, along came a group of women who didn’t seem to care about any of that. They advocated for a life that rejected the drive for money, public power and success, and elevated gentle domesticity and hands-on motherhood to an almost divine state. Enter the trad wives. One of the most influential trad wives is Nara Smith, a 22-year-old Mormon model (four million Instagram followers) who talks in a voice so soft she sounds as though she has been brainwashed by a cult, and is constantly pregnant and draining something fermented through muslin. “Keep up your beauty,” says Estee C Williams (120,000 Instagram followers), who gives off more of a submissive Fifties housewife vibe. “You and your husband will benefit.”