The tradwife rabbit hole (and four other stories)

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

Since I wrote last week, two related things have happened. The first is that Luis Rubiales, the former president of the Royal Spanish Football Federation, finally resigned over his non-consensual kiss of Spanish forward Jenni Hermoso. On Friday (15th September), he appeared in court as part of an investigation into sexual assault over the kiss and is now subject to a restraining order to stop him contacting Hermoso.

The second is that The Times and Channel 4 have published serious allegations of sexual assault, rape and emotional abuse against the British actor, comedian, and — more recently — wellness guru Russell Brand. Brand denies everything. The 48-year-old insists all the relationships have been consensual, that it is well known he has been “promiscuous”, and that this an attack against him. The details are stomach-turning, from his alleged behaviour to the actions of those who enabled him. One alleged victim was a 16-year-old schoolgirl when she met Brand. He was 31 at the time, and very famous.

The Brand and Rubiales cases are miles apart in terms of the nature of the allegations involved. Both show, however, how deeply entrenched the behaviours highlighted by the MeToo movement, and their apologists, remain. In both cases, the accused men insist (at least publicly) that all sexual contact was consensual, and in both cases, they have lashed out at other forces (“the media”, “false feminism”) as being out to get them. The internet is currently awash with people coming out in Brand’s defence (including Elon Musk and Andrew Tate).

The winds of change are blowing slowly, it seems, despite the litany of MeToo moments since 2017. The vehemence of Brand’s defenders are one indicator of this. Another is the available evidence on the sexism and sexual harassment that girls today face from their peers (let alone older men). See, for instance, the latest Girlguiding survey on girls’ attitudes for some thoroughly disheartening data.

In the lead-up to the Brand story coming out, there were rumours (see the latest PopBitch email) that “an explosive story” was about to “open up a whole new front of #MeToo.” But what use are new fronts of MeToo if things stay the same? And where is the urgency to change things when online, in the likes of Andrew Tate for instance, and in real life, in the likes of Brand and Rubiales, the devaluing of women is so ubiquitous, so blatant, and so real?

And now to the reads….

1) The tradwife rabbit hole

Alongside the manosphere, the internet reflects contemporary struggles over shifting gender roles via the phenomenon of the tradwife.

Knocking around for a few years now, “the word tradwife,” writes Gaby del Valle in her excellent piece on this in The Baffler, is “a portmanteau of traditional wife that refers to women who eschew feminist values in favour of homemaking, child-rearing, and other conventional domestic pursuits.” Very online tradwives promote an image of domestic 1950s bliss, garnering millions of followers on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram in the process. Take Hannah, the matriarch of Ballerina Farm, who del Valle writes on at length in her piece. Hannah’s videos show her preparing homely meals from scratch while her seven children flit in and out of the frame.

Del Valle explains the ecosystem of ideas around tradwives, many of whom sit quite comfortably within a Venn Diagram of right-wing, anti-globalist, and conspiratorial beliefs. She writes:

The past that tradwives want to return to, an anachronistic pastiche of rugged pioneer individualism and midcentury familial plenty, never really existed. The lifestyle they promote is….a thoroughly modern construction: its incongruous elements are concealed behind bespoke doors and linen curtains. These aesthetic signifiers, confused as they may be, point to periods of American history in which white families were prioritised above all others. And some tradwives are explicit about their desire for racial supremacy. Ayla Stewart, the woman behind the once-popular trad blogs Wife with a Purpose and Nordic Sunrise, has said that “black, ghetto culture” will lead to the “cultural destruction” of Utah and Mormonism…. Lori Alexander, who promotes traditional gender roles on her blog The Transformed Wife, has written about how an “abundance of female preachers” are waging “war against men,” white men in particular. These women preachers, Alexander writes, do not “teach biblical womanhood” and therefore “disobey God.”

Del Valle cites a piece by Gina Florio in Evie, a conservative answer to Cosmo, which discusses the increasing popularity of tradwives on the right. She also notes, however, that in “the past”, women didn’t actually take care of everything in a family single-handed. Here’s a snippet:

The right has successfully identified something that our society needs more than anything right now: a return to tradition. The only issue is, they have substituted true tradition with trad porn. The image of a lovely virgin prancing in the fields, plucking flowers for her betrothed. The silhouette of a beautiful pregnant mother in the backyard with two young children at her heels. The figure of a well-dressed wife preparing a home-cooked meal for her husband arriving home, wearing a suit with a briefcase in his hand. These memes and social media images have taken over the internet, particularly among right-wingers. But we have to really ask ourselves if we want to truly return to tradition, or if we want to just fantasise about the perfect trad wife who is both gorgeous and domestic.

And if that wasn’t enough for you, here is a decidedly English tradwife-type channel. Enjoy.

2) “Dear men of the West”

On 16th September 2022, Mahsa Amini died due to injuries sustained in Iranian police custody after allegedly wearing her hijab incorrectly. Mass protests and state crackdowns have continued since her death. One year on, Anuscheh Amir-Khalili advises western men to “look to the Middle East for your lessons in feminism, and take notes.” In an open letter in Ms Magazine, Amir-Khalili argues that while men in the West have far less to lose than men in, for instance, Iran or Afghanistan, when fighting for women’s rights, they do far less to advance equality:

There are countless examples of men in the Middle East standing up for women’s rights. They refused to accept the degrading and dehumanising repression of women. They would not stay silent despite the danger of speaking out. They knew they could die fighting for women’s freedom, and in many cases, they did. 

The men of the Middle East have historically been portrayed as rugged, patriarchal and violent, whose cultural and religious values and norms stand in contradiction to liberal (read: Western) values. And yet they are taking to the streets and risking their lives for women’s freedom.

….

In the so-called advanced industrialized countries such as Germany, the U.S., and the U.K., we have gender pay gaps that mean women are paid less than men for the same work. Meanwhile, right-wing judges have taken away the right to safe abortion, making decisions about women’s bodies and obliterating their bodily autonomy. All the while, an invisible unpaid care crisis is robbing women of their time and earning potential. 

These examples are well documented. They are talked by (mostly) men at high-level meetings at summits where heads are shaken. They are denounced in press releases or obfuscated in vacuous speeches. But at this rate, it will take another 300 years to achieve gender equality. 

NPR has an interview with Iranian-born journalist Golnaz Esfandiari on the situation on the ground in Iran one year after Amini’s death.

3) The chilling effect of the end of Roe v Wade

Polling conducted in August reveals how the curbing of reproductive rights in the US has made women think differently about pregnancy. Lauren Leader, CEO of the non-profit All in Together, writes:

Thirty-four percent of women aged 18-39 said they or someone they know personally has “decided not to get pregnant due to concerns about managing pregnancy-related medical emergencies.” Put another way, poor or unavailable maternal health care post-Dobbs is leading people to alter some of their most important life choices.

For young people, the maternal healthcare crisis is deeply personal. More than a third of young people and 22 percent of young women told us they have personally dealt with or know someone who has “faced constraints when trying to manage a pregnancy-related emergency.” And 23 percent of 18- to 39-year-old women say they have themselves or know someone else who has been unable to obtain an abortion in their state — a number almost three times higher than respondents in other age groups.

Fourteen US states now have complete abortion bans. The polling results were similar “regardless of whether the respondents are living in states with abortion bans or states without restrictions on abortion access.”

4) Hybrid work is not helping parents equally

A new report by the Commission on Hybrid and Remote Work, which is led by UK consultancy Public First, finds a “mixed picture for parents” when it comes to the mass hybrid working experiment ushered in by the Covid-19 pandemic. Predictably, women, on the whole, have a harder time than men:

Sixty-nine per cent of those with children under 18 reported that hybrid work had made juggling their parenting responsibilities easier. However, this was not equal across genders. Mothers were more likely than fathers to report that hybrid work had made the juggling act harder (19% vs 11%). Of those who said hybrid work made juggling parental responsibilities harder, three-quarters of women (76%) said they were expected to spend inconsistent hours in their external place of work compared to fewer than half of all men (49%), and 62% of women said they were expected to spend more time caring for their children compared to only 37% of men who reported the same. Women, particularly mothers, already face a penalty at work.

The report reminds readers that:

Research shows that they [women in hybrid/flexible working situations] are more likely to be stereotyped as being less committed to their work and careers. With women more likely to report hybrid and flexible work as being important (19% vs 14%), it is vital these two things are not conflated to create a double perception penalty.

5) The value of a global feminism

In her review of two books on South Korean and Chinese feminism (Flowers of Fire and Weibo Feminism), Nina Pasquini explains how movements for women’s rights in those countries differ from western, liberal feminism, particularly on the matter of choice. On China she writes:

This kind of decentralised, individual feminism is different from Western choice feminism, which centers a woman’s right to do as she pleases. Weibo [Chinese] feminism, as the authors theorise it, uses individuals’ collective choices to challenge and ultimately dismantle patriarchal structures. In the case of reproductive rights, the recent memory of the one-child policy underscores that fighting for the choice to have an abortion is not enough. As a result, Chinese feminists fight not only for the right to freely access abortions, Xue and Rose write, but also to have children on their own terms through “individual acts of refusing marriage and Confucian filial doctrines.”

Pasquini also makes the case for a global feminism that goes beyond solidarity to constructive comparison:

International solidarity…offers more than just strength in numbers; it also provides opportunities for comparative analysis. By considering the history of access to reproductive care in South Korea, for example, Flowers of Fire reveals the instability of frameworks that American readers may consider inherent to debates around abortion and birth control.

Abortion in the United States is often framed in terms of progressive versus conservative, “pro-choice” versus “pro-life,” secular versus religious. Flowers of Fire shows that these dichotomies are neither stable nor innate. Park, the architect of South Korea’s population-control policies, was a conservative authoritarian. Though he was a Buddhist, his policies had the backing of Christian, anti-communist evangelical megachurches. These churches worried that out-of-control population growth would exacerbate poverty, in turn making communism more appealing. To this day, Park remains a beloved figure among many of South Korea’s most conservative people.

Bonus: Rolling Stone magazine’s founder thinks black and female musicians aren't as intellectual as white male artists | Andrew Tate’s app was removed from Google Play

Thank you for reading. See you next week.