Mother Jones (#DUH) frets about trad wives

Fascism, sexism, racism, Christian nationalism! Cracks in the mass-media lens that offers the good life!

If you look up the term “henchman” you will find definitions resembling the following, care of Dictionary.com:

* An unscrupulous and ruthless subordinate, especially a criminal. …

* An unscrupulous supporter or adherent of a political figure or cause, especially one motivated by the hope of personal gain. …

If you look up the sort-of-word “henchwoman,” you learn that it is best understood as the female version of “henchman.” #DUH

Then again, “henchwomen” may simply be a variation on one of the hottest terms these days in social media — “trad wives.”

Maybe you remember that term from my recent post: “Concerning that digital 'trad wives' tsunami.” I found several online definitions for “trad wives” (readers will also see “tradwives”) and this one includes several of the key stereotypes:

A “recent phenomenon in western culture in which women use social media to romanticize traditional gender roles and encourage the patriarchal structure.”

The leap to the even more negative “henchwomen” label shows up near the top of a recent Mother Jones magazine essay, written by Morgan Jerkins, that ran with a dramatic headline noting, “Trad Wives Are Thriving in the Post-Dobbs Era: The influencers may seem harmless — until you consider them amid the erosion of women’s rights.”

The overture jumps right into the label wars:

Last year, despite minding other people’s business online, I didn’t know what a “trad wife” was. Now it seems like every time I log in to Instagram or TikTok, there is another video of a beautiful woman cleaning her home or making an extraordinarily long and needlessly difficult meal. These trad wives, short for traditional wives, are women who post online content showing themselves adhering to patriarchal gender roles while keeping house and raising children — and making it look easy. …

(W)hile it might be easy to write off the trad wives as a silly meme or a guilty pleasure, they should not be taken lightly. Given the misogynistic messaging and white-centric ideals some of these influencers peddle, they are indicative of larger forces at play — henchwomen in an ongoing effort to functionally erase modern women from the public sphere.

Now, I admit that it has been several decades since I was a Mother Jones subscriber. I ran into this henchwomen update by reading the always lively, and hard to label, Substack called Demotivations With Anne by Anne Kennedy. The biography link describes her this way: “Cradle Anglican, Mother of 6, Committed wife and blogger, MK/TCK, leggings aren't trousers but you know what, sometimes they might as well be.”

I would simply note that this is one wild woman. You can see that in the post, “Rabbit Holes Of Extremism: Tradwife Edition.”

The key is that, in the freewheeling world of digital content, fundamentalists on the left and right have to be very important about what they consume. You never know when you are going to run into something that could lead to unsafe thoughts about the lives and beliefs of dangerous people.

As Kennedy notes: “So many threats! They’re everywhere!”

Sounding rather like a fear-the-media conservative website, only while reading the content in a mirror, Jerkins offered this warning at Mother Jones:

You might be asking yourself at this point, Why can’t people simply enjoy things? So what if I like to watch beautiful women make marshmallows from scratch? Here’s the thing: We live in an attention economy. Your attention is currency. Every time you look at a video on Instagram or TikTok, the algorithm will keep boosting those same types of stories onto your feed. As Kyle Chayka, author of the 2024 book ­Filterworld, wrote in the New Yorker, “Algorithms would not have the power they have without the floods of data that we voluntarily produce on sites that exploit our identities and preferences for profit.”

You can never “simply enjoy things” when you log in to a social media platform. Every interest or disgust you have toward a topic is up for extraction. When you feast on trad wife videos, your eyeballs are implicated. Even if you don’t subscribe to the far-right or racist ideologies, you’ll be fed them so long as you keep watching. Believing you have no part in it is as naive as believing that touching a hot stove won’t get you burnt.

Well, let’s face it — that’s basically true.

The online choices we make are important and any parent, pastor, teacher or counselor (on the doctrinal left or right) would have to agree with this logic about life in algorithm land.

Thus, for a modern progressive, reading the wrong websites about cooking, parenting and homemaking can quickly lead to heavy doses of “white supremacy,” even if the lovely trad wife is a henchwoman of color. You could be smiling at the antics of secret supporters of Orange Man Bad, while also supporting their advertisers. Viewers could accidentally consume content linked to homeschooling, criticisms of modern birth control or (#GASP) even the pro-trad writings of J.R.R. Tolkien.

Let’s end the Kennedy content with these thoughts, in which — this is really interesting — she notes that finding the right holes in the Internet can provide information that threatens the Principalities and Powers of the age.

It feels a little bit like the Berlin Wall suddenly crumbling. For Mother Jones … to perseverate about tradwife content on the internet indicates two things, at least, though possibly more.

First, it shows that, against all the desires of the people who created it, the internet is not all bad. Common Grace, in some small pockets of the world, still exists. And because real things are always more beautiful than the tortured corruption of them, some people will watch and think, ‘Gosh, I really want to make some bread this afternoon and kiss a fat baby.’ And once a woman thinks that, every time she has to face down HR, she’s going to feel more and more weary and exasperated until she gives up.

Which leads me to my second point. Conservatives have been fighting an uphill battle on the matter of aesthetics. From Mary Tyler Moore to Sarah Jessica Parker, the single, funny, unhappy-in-love female was the coolest possible thing. Being a loving wife and mother was hopelessly unattractive. But as everyone is noticing since the downfall of Bud Lite, it’s possible to shift the frame. It’s possible to see something for what it is — that Dylan Mulvany is a grotesque mockery of femininity, and that Hannah Neeleman is a beautiful woman made more beautiful by all the children twirling around her feet.

After noting these ruminations from Kennedy, let’s end with a word of warning about several potentially troubling elements of the trad wives phenomenon. This leads me to the website of the Institute for Family Studies, an organization that is best known via the work of sociologist Brad “Get Married” Wilcox.

This article, by Ashley McGuire, is called: “What Trad Wives Are Selling Is Not Traditional Motherhood.” Here is a chunk of the overture:

Arguably, no other social movement in history had a greater effect on the norms of human behavior than the Sexual Revolution. Throughout Western civilization, the family structure was paramount. …

The Sexual Revolution didn’t just gradually etch away at social norms — it exploded them almost overnight. Divorce, promiscuity, adultery, and now even polyamory, once anathema, earned not just legal protection, but social celebration. 

Included in the wreckage was the denigration of motherhood and the remaking of fatherhood as disposable. Feminists reframed motherhood as fundamentally in conflict with what they termed “women’s empowerment.” Marriage became what Betty Friedan famously termed, a “comfortable concentration camp.” The stay-at-home mom became a subject of a decades-long shame campaign. 

Thus, the motives that helped inspire a trad wife mini-counterrevolution. As McGuire notes, “it’s tempting to want to like it” even if many of these digital superstars “dress like they are in an episode of Little House on the Prairie or Mad Men.”

The key is that — behind the images — there are some interesting realities linked to technology, entertainment skills and, yes, money.

The bottom line: Is this new streaming version of “reality TV” offering insights into what is real life for many women, even those who are clearly cultural and/or religious conservatives?

To be blunt, McGuire notes that the superstar trad wives are:

… social media influencers making money for their content. They have monetized their domestic life, which is their right, but it makes them earners by definition. Their work requires child care and filming equipment to turn their home into a studio. They are working moms, and they are essentially running a reality show that doesn’t actually depict the reality of what goes into being a so-called traditional wife, because they are making money as social media personalities using their families as props. 

Which gets to the inherent contradiction in the trad wife phenomenon — namely the notion that you are being a “traditional” wife while making your home an open book for millions of internet strangers. There is nothing traditional about filming v-logs of your morning routine with your children, embracing your husband while putting on your makeup in your bathroom, or plating dinner for your family while garnering likes, money, and comments from strangers with halo ring lights just outside the shot.  

One more thing from that essay, while veering into Seven Deadly Sins territory.

… The in-your-face-ness of the supposed traditional nature of their family life has a boastful element that seems designed, like so much of social media content, to induce envy, shame, and a sense of worthlessness and failure in those who are comparing themselves to what they are seeing. 

In other words, all of creation is both glorious and fallen, and that is so, so true when dealing with life on the Internet.

Thus, the trad wives trend does not automatically point to white supremacy. These “reality” shows may offer some lifestyle insights that are helpful (as well as valid content about the doctrines of the sourdough faith).

Then again, it is best to remember that viewers are looking through a lens that monetizes these images in the name of entertainment. Don’t take all of these cheerful sermons as Gospel Truth.

Be “in” the world, but not “of” the world? Attempt to discern the line between entertainment and real life?

Be serious online, but lighten up a bit at the same time?

Hang in there.