The "house intellectual" of the trad wife movement (and four other stories)

Five reads on gender (in)equality to end your week.

It’s Sunday night, it’s dark outside, and I am finally sitting down to write this newsletter. Today is six months since Hamas’ 7th October attack on southern Israel, nearly six months since the war in Gaza began. The fact that this war is still happening, that so many people have been killed, that so many hostages remain in Gaza, seems unthinkable. And yet here we are.

Yesterday I went to an exhibition here in London of British feminist art and activism from the 1970s to the 90s. There was a section about the Greenham Common Peace Camp, first set up in 1981 by a group of women activists protesting against nuclear weapons. The room’s accompanying blurb explained that “Greenham women saw their anti-nuclear position as a feminist one. They understood that government spending on nuclear missiles meant less money for public services. They used their identities as mothers and carers to fight for the protection of future generations and a more equal society.” The last protesters left the camp in 2000, 19 years after those first women arrived.

This got me thinking about the impact of the Gaza war on women and girls, and what a feminist position on this war is or could be. I don’t have the answers, but I can see that, like most viewpoints on this conflict, there is a split in feminist positions that neatly follows the more general divisions over the war. People either focus on the suffering of Palestinian women and girls or on that of Israeli women and girls. Is there a feminist response that can connect that suffering, or is the distance between Israelis and Palestinians simply too great? And if it were possible to make that link, could it be an impetus for an end to the unspeakable violence, for eventual peace?

And now for the reads….

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1) How to convict an incel terrorist

In November 2023, Oguzhan Sert became the first person in Canada — and “likely the first person in the world”, according to Lana Hall in this fascinating longread in Macleans — to be convicted on terror charges for violence inspired by incel ideology. On 24th February 2020, then aged 17, Sert entered a massage parlour in Toronto and murdered one employee with a sword “etched with the words “THOT SLAYER” (THOT is an acronym for That Ho Over There, a slur sometimes used for women, especially sex workers)” and repeatedly stabbed another. Hall, who worked in the city’s massage parlours as a student, reconstructs the day of the attack. She discusses the challenges of convicting the murder as terrorism and what the case revealed about attitudes to the vulnerability of sex workers to violence. She writes:

My interest in the case redoubled a few months later, when news broke that Sert—whose identity was then under a publication ban, since he was a minor—would be charged as a terrorist. His attack, it was alleged, was motivated by his self-identification as an incel, an “involuntary celibate,” who advocated violence against women as retribution for his inability to form intimate relationships. Sert was the first person in Canada to face terror charges based on an incel-motivated crime, and he is likely the first person in the world. The charges were poised to spark a broader reckoning on what terrorism means in Canada. Violence against women has never, historically, merited such a label. Even Marc Lépine, the shooter who killed 14 people, mostly women, at Montreal’s École Polytechnique in 1989, escaped that branding. A terror designation could mean a shift in how the courts treat offenders, and in how law enforcement pursues them. It could also mean that women like my former colleagues, and very much like me not very long ago, might no longer be regarded as simply the unfortunate victims of a disturbed individual—that their victimhood may come to signify something more

2) Afghanistan’s gender apartheid

The push for the Taliban’s repression of women and girls in Afghanistan to be recognised as “gender apartheid”, and for this to become a crime under international law, has been growing over the past year. This op-ed in the Washington Post gives a thorough explanation of why that is, and what such a move would achieve. On the costs of gender apartheid for the country the authors write:

Before the Taliban took over, there were 69 female parliamentarians, more than 250 female judges, hundreds of thousands of women-owned businesses, more than 100,000 women in universities, and about 2.5 million girls in primary schools. Now, the parliament has been replaced by a Taliban “leadership council” and women’s courts have been dissolved. Fewer than 7 percent of women are labor force participants. Only 2 in 10 school-aged girls are in school and increasingly they are in religious madrassa schools. The previous Ministry for Women’s Affairs building now houses the Taliban’s infamous Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.

And also:

Like racial apartheid, gender apartheid describes inhumane acts committed for the purpose of establishing domination of one group over another. The term enables a clearer understanding of the reality facing Afghan women under the Taliban’s unique interpretation of Islamic law, which has been described by U.N. Special Rapporteur on Afghanistan Richard Bennett as “the most comprehensive, systematic, and unparalleled assault on the rights of women and girls.” Indeed, he called it “an institutionalized framework of gender apartheid,” a legal framing that we think can help to cajole a more effective and principled international response.

3) Pornography and morality

Much like surrogacy (see the last edition of this newsletter), pornography and its attendant moral questions are something I can’t quite make up my mind about. In Prospect, Sasha Mudd helpfully sifts through the feminist arguments for and against watching porn. The hook for this is a new book, Women on Porn, for which researcher Fiona Vera-Gray interviewed 100 women about their relationship with pornography. Mudd writes:

So, what if porn is both a tool of the patriarchy, the consumption of which makes us complicit in sustaining a culture of violence against women, and also an important means of sexual liberation for some? This is the sort of tough question that emerges from the lived experience of women today. It should be possible to be sex-positive and porn-sceptical (or porn-negative with respect to mainstream content), many of those interviewed [in Vera-Gray’s book] seem to want to say. 

While the critical tools needed to carve out such a position may not readily be found in classic feminist debate, there is, happily, a new crop of excellent work—by Amia Srinivasan and Katherine Angel, among others—pointing us in new directions. This work takes seriously the ethical questions that remain even when sex—and its often-degrading pornographic representation—is consensual. Contemporary feminism eschews these questions at its peril.

P.s. In

The Free Press

, self-described post-liberal feminist

Louise Perry

profiles the anti-porn second-wave feminist Andrea Dworkin. “Dworkin deserves our attention,” she writes, “Because what she foresaw, with uncanny clarity, was the damage that is done to both women and men who live in a culture drenched in pornography. We are living in that culture today.”

P.p.s Speaking of surrogacy, last week a university affiliated with the Vatican hosted a two-day conference calling for a global treaty to outlaw surrogacy.

4) The “house intellectual” of the trad wife movement

In the New Yorker, Sophie Elmhirst interviews “self-proclaimed ‘trad wife’” Alena Kate Pettitt, the trad wife movement’s “house intellectual”, a rare Brit in a mostly American milieu. Pettitt’s story is the story of the movement itself, but also of the “hustle of the anti-hustle” that is the influencer economy. Elmhirst writes:

Pettitt, who is thirty-eight, is…one of the earliest and best known in a burgeoning movement of women who spend their days taking care of their homes and families and documenting their activities on social media. Her fame was assured in 2020, when, on a BBC News video, she discussed her ambition to serve her husband, but her desire long predated that moment. After all, the contours of a traditional marriage, in which the man goes out to work while the woman stays home to cook, care, and clean, were shaped many decades ago. Pettitt, like a lot of the trad wives who fill various social-media platforms with photographs of outdoor clotheslines, has an intense nostalgia for the postwar period. “If you put me in a time machine back to the fifties, I’d have it made,” she told me. “Everyone wouldn’t be asking me when I’m going back to work.” Her point ran a little deeper: that era, she believed, was the last time the housewife was celebrated. She appeared in ads. Her domestic rituals inspired magazines. Whether she was happy was not for Pettitt to say, but “at least she was seen.”

And on Pettitt’s growing disillusionment with the movement after years of documenting her life on social media and writing two books:

[She] has watched the rise of the younger trad wives with fascination, then alarm. “It’s become an aesthetic, and then it’s become politicized,” she said, of the movement in its new era. “And then it’s become its own monster.”

5) An inquiry into the growth of sexism among young men

Last week, the head of the UK’s largest teachers’ union warned that the rise in misogyny among young men is so bad that Britain needs an independent inquiry. As per the Guardian’s report:

Daniel Kebede, the general secretary of the National Education Union (NEU), said it was “a huge issue” in schools and expressed particular concern about the ease with which pupils are accessing aggressive hardcore pornography on their phones.

He said the government had “completely failed” to tackle the issue, which is affecting boys’ views of women and relationships, and urged ministers to “take on big tech” to ensure that young people cannot access damaging material.

Kebede….said the problem was widespread. He said he had first-hand experience, having personally worked with female pupils who had been repeated victims of abuse, violence and sexual assault.

Crucially, Kebede also made the point that “the problem goes well beyond just Andrew Tate”.

Bonus: A wave of female mayors in Turkey | One of the last matriarchal societies in Europe | New research on rape myths

Thank you so much for reading. See you next week.