Talking about trad wives at this point feels over done and like there isn’t much left to say. After hearing a lot about The Times article about one trad wife account on TikTok called Ballerina Farm (which is incredibly sad to read) I’ve felt like the ideas around femininity have been in a weird place as of late. I’m someone who has always been very against having super gendered approaches to anything in my life, but as a cis woman obviously ideas of femininity are always going to affect me even when I don't want them to. Trad wives, things like body shaming becoming a lot more socially accepted again, and a lot of conservative values on how women should or shouldn’t be have left me feeling really nervous about what the future holds.

Trad wives are one example of how femininity has been in a changing, albeit regressive, state recently. I empathize with the feeling of not wanting to work as a result of the exhausting repetition of just existing to make money. And I completely respect the choice to stay home to raise your kids, especially when maternity leave is so abysmal in the US. I have to emphasize that tradwives are not the same thing as just any stay at home mom. Trad wives are more particular than that, there’s always an emphasis on serving a husband who is ultimately in charge of finances and what trad wives can/can’t do. There’s also usually a heavy lean into 1950’s aesthetics too. It feels aggressively patriarchal and harmful for women. This approach to relationships and motherhood had only felt isolated to pretty evangelical households, but in recent years it’s become an ideal for a lot of women thanks to tradwife influencers.

An obvious reflection of all of this in a very impactful way has been Roe v. Wade being overturned. But I even think drag bans and just the general hatred of drag by conservatives has reflected femininity turning back into this thing that is seen as strictly sacred and pure yet also lesser, rather than embracing femininity in every form and expression.

Something else that I think has recently affected the way femininity is obviously TikTok in general. It has given a platform to a lot of tradwife influencers romanticizing super rigid gender roles with power imbalances, but I feel like the way it’s actually affected me personally is the way it can push horrible body ideals for women. Anytime I’ve deleted the app off my phone it has been motivated by the fact that it has just made me feel bad about my body. If you’re a woman using TikTok I swear no matter how many times you mark that you aren’t interested in weight loss content, you will still always get it.

It’s a trend I’ve felt hit me on a personal level recently. It feels reflective of body positivity falling out of favor and, I hate saying this, is curvy silhouettes being deemed as no longer “trendy”. I’ve never liked how loud body positivity feels since it feels inauthentic to me and how I view myself (I like body neutrality more) but it’s hard to deny how much it helped a lot of people come to terms with how they feel in their own bodies.

TNow the pendulum seems to be swinging back to overanalyzing women’s bodies and aestheticising being skinny. Balletcore, coquette aesthetics, and pilates being trendy all reflect that in varying ways. None of these aesthetics are inherently fatphobic or bad of course, I even like some of them myself. But there are clear trends surrounding how people playing into the aesthetics tend to look, overwhelmingly white, skinny, and hyper feminine. The rise in Ozempic usage totally plays a role too but I have zero desire to get into the nuances of that right now

It’s just been leaving me feeling scared at what being a woman means for the future. As someone who spent their entire high school/college life following along with the much louder and socially acceptable feminism of that time, it’s so weird to now be in a place where feminism within the larger culture is now backpedaling. I have a lot of critiques of what popular feminism looked like in the 2010’s, but it did often feel like there was at least some sort of progress being made. Even if it was just virtue signaling or insincere, at least people pretended to care about women. It's a weird and confusing time to be a woman.

7/29/2024