On Tradwifery, pt. II
Or, sometimes you get a sugar daddy and sometimes you get the guillotine
I am not doing an election post-mortem, because I actually think it’s pointless until we have the tiniest smidge of perspective. BUT. What I am willing to do is offer you another part of my tradwife series - so cinch your girdles and pull up your pantyhose, sisters.
The time has unfortunately come. We’ve gotta cut out the coquette stuff, and we’ve gotta do it with a quickness. And while we’re at it, the ‘girl dinner’ shit has to go and it’s time to start scrolling past the tearful 'I’m literally just a girl’ TikToks.
Don’t get me wrong - I love bows and Hello Kitty as much as the next Millennial/Gen Z-cusp woman, but I deeply fear the direction this obsession with the aesthetics of girlhood has been taking us in.
Alongside this desire to be literally just a girl ugh is a fantasy in which women no longer need to work, are no longer encumbered by education, and can instead live frivolously like Marie Antoinette, who is basically the coquette equivalent of Jesus. Unfortunately for the girlies of the internet, Mme. Antoinette got her head chopped off by a jeering crowd made up in no small part of women who were decidedly not rococo — the proletarian fishwives and ragpickers whose lives made up the vast majority of female experiences of the time period.
Here’s where the tradwife stuff comes in.
The impulse to simply divest oneself of the vexations of modern life (which are actually brought about by capitalism, not gender roles) precipitates the development of an alternative. Rather than imagining a new model in which no one has to do work that drains them of their lifeforce, we came up with something easier: an internal longing to return to a time when women were free to live leisurely. Nevermind that such a time did not ever exist, as I’ve discussed previously.
It can also signal a longing for a femininity that is built not around capability but incompetence; girls read romance novels because science is hard, girls are passenger princesses because driving is a boy thing, girls have a special kind of math that lets them spend money foolishly because they don’t really value it. The tradwife people also long for this, because their whole worldview is oriented towards the idea that women were created to be controlled by men, who were in turn created to understand the world better than them. As young women insist more steadfastly on our own infantilization, we lend credence to the idea that the ‘natural order’ of things is one in which someone else (our parents, our spouses, our government) chooses our paths for us.
The fluidity with which one set of ideas is transformed into another, more sinister version of itself is fairly astonishing. Simone Maddison wrote about the coquette-to-tradwife pipeline over a year ago, identifying the unifying features of the two movements: the stigmatization of ‘unpalatable’ womanhood and valorization of sexual docility.
You know who else trades off these ideas? The incel freaks of the world, who see sexual and social dominance as an inherent male right that they have been denied as a result of women’s liberation. They also subscribe to extremely restrictive views of women as intellectually/emotionally inferior to men and hold women responsible for causing the problem of their sexual and social rejection.
This is why those same incels recently reacted to Trump’s re-election* and the presumed death knell of reproductive freedoms in America as though someone had given them an infinite-free-sexual-assault pass.
Because I have chosen to burden myself with the knowledge of altogether too much history, I am aware that this is part of a longer and broader context in which rigidly-enforced and prescriptive femininity is invariably wielded as a weapon against us.**
An example: For approximately 700 years, a woman, and especially a married one, in England enjoyed essentially the same legal status as her children. She was subject to the doctrine of coverture, in which her legal identity was merged with (and subordinate to) her husband’s. This prevented her from participating in such minor indulgences as voting and owning property.
The reason typically given for this was not simply that women were ‘lesser’ than men, but that this status was justified due to their biological and intellectual inferiority - they were built for incompetence. Boys grew up to be men, but women were always literally just a girl.
Despite mighty struggles on the part of late 19th and early 20th century feminist movements, widely-held beliefs about inherent female incompetence which especially included what Anne-Marie Beller calls ‘the image of the innocent childlike woman’ presented enormous long-term impediments to women’s liberation.
Despite those who would encourage us to embrace ‘traditional femininity’ (read: femininity as an imposition of constraint) in order to reclaim our power, it’s hard to argue that clothing oneself in all the trappings of ‘traditional’ feminine innocence is really working. There is plenty of evidence to prove very little is actually being reclaimed and almost everything is being conceded.
What we’re doing when we accede to demands that women return to our imagined previous palatability is not subverting expectations, it’s lowering them. Practically every coquette on Pinterest is thin, pale, dressed like a child, and imagines a life of frivolity and decadence — this is only aspirational if what you seek is not power but the relinquishment of it.
I’m certainly not blaming women for the circumstances of our objectification, but I am saying that we don’t have to actively opt in to them. I don’t have a solution, but I do know that what we’re doing right now is not keeping us safe, and the people who most wish us harm are rejoicing in it.
*I’m sorry, I know I said this wasn’t about that. But it’s kind of about that.
** Of course, it’s also used as a weapon against anyone existing outwith the gender binary or behaving in a way which does not conform to dominant hetero/cis-normative social expectations. Why do you think people are so freaked out about the possibility of women becoming too good at women’s sports?