The Gen Z Girls Repping the 'Tradwife' Life. A Lifestyle Used to Justify Misogyny & White Supremacy

[Celerity]

How TikTok and a Gen Z aesthetic are selling a lifestyle used to justify misogyny and white supremacy in America

https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/tradwife-gen-z



Mention the word “tradwife” and you might imagine the 1950s archetype: A “traditional wife” in a dress and an apron, smiling at her husband and three kids while presenting a gleaming beef roast at the dinner table, pleased as ever in her domestic domain. For a swath of right-wing American men, that image is part of a fantasy of how things “used to be,” in the good ol’ days before antifa and Black Lives Matter and feminist YouTubers ruined everything. The tradwife symbolizes stability — at least for those who imagine social change as an attack on their identity and being. It is the “submissive and breedable” meme, made unironic by chauvinism. It is, ultimately, a hatred of women going their own way. Which made it all the more surprising when Mariel Cooksey began noticing the Gen Z women and girls actively repping the tradwife aesthetic and lifestyle online. Cooksey, a researcher at the Institute for Research on Male Supremacy, decided to study why and how this rhetoric spreads, and found that teen girls are being attracted to the movement thanks to an evolution in how tradwife ideas are marketed and presented.



Anti-feminist women rising at various moments to support male-led movements is nothing new (see: the Ku Klux Klan). But the blend of Gen Z online culture and old-world patriarchal beliefs is harder to parse. Cooksey describes it as a pyramid scheme, with influencers able to tap into a much broader group of women, looking for counterculture in an increasingly chaotic world. “This isn’t the same phenomenon as MAGA girls, and ironically, you see some Gen Z tradwife accounts posting critically about them. Because even Trump Republicanism has modern feminism in it — women are running for Congress, you know?” Cooksey explains. “Instead, these young women are filling a niche that’s a counterpart of young male extremism in the far right.” On the surface, identifying as a tradwife doesn’t necessarily mean you align with white nationalism or other extremist political views. But the overlap in rhetoric and the whiteness of the movement is stark, and Cooksey tells me that some tradwife influencers are explicit in their sharing of extremist ideas, with personalities like Ayla Stewart (aka “Wife With A Purpose”) and Caitlin Huber (“Mrs. Midwest”) interacting openly with white nationalist accounts.



​Consider it the next chapter in the story of how the alt-right has given way to niche subcultures that repackage the same toxic ideas on masculinity, gender roles, “family values” and the need for patriarchy. This isn’t just a response to modern feminism — tradwife influencers are at the intersection of white and male supremacy in America, rooted in a theory that order will return to society if women submit to men and support the family while ignoring everything else. That such old-school conservative beliefs are being held up as counterculture by Gen Z women and girls is another sign of fascism creep. I recently sat down with Cooksey for a conversation on what’s different about this version of tradwife idealism, the ways in which young women are attracted to it as a form of online counterculture and why it needs to be studied.



When did you start to investigate how some of these right-wing, deeply misogynistic ideas are gaining traction with young women again?

I graduated with my master’s in December and a large part of my thesis was the relationship between the alt-right and Christianity, and how newer Gen Z offshoots are branching out from alt-right culture over the last five, six years. It’s young people who swear they’re not part of the alt-right, but have undeniable roots in it, like the American Identity Movement or Nick Fuentes and the Groypers. These are groups that are oriented at the “campus level,” under the age of 25, generally. I’ve been keeping an eye on this cohort for a long time. It occurred to me that the female side of this movement isn’t brought into the fold a lot because, for instance, the Groypers are very exclusionary toward women. Ultra misogynistic. Yet they have these expectations for how they want their future wives and families to look. And I wondered how these incel overtones would work in relationships. Of course there’s the fundamentalists — Fundy influencers — but they tend to be older, married and more focused on a conservative Christian view. So where would younger girls fit in? And what kind of content are they putting out?



What’s the history of this subculture, and why is the Gen Z approach so different? .......................

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