There has been a weird surge of “Trad Wife” content on social media.\u00a0 “Trad” of course is short for “traditional”.\u00a0 These accounts\/ channels show women as merry housewives tending to several photogenic children, baking goodies from scratch, often tending to chickens and a huge garden, and generally cosplaying as June Cleaver.<\/p>\n
Before we go any further, I have nothing against stay at home moms.\u00a0 For many it’s an enviable position. Lots of women would love to have been able to spend more time with their kids when they were little, but it simply wasn’t financially possible to do so.\u00a0 \u00a0We live in a time and place where for most families they need 2 incomes.\u00a0 That’s just reality.<\/p>\n
To repeat, I have nothing against stay at home moms.\u00a0 But I DO have a bone to pick with most of the “trad wife” content creators.\u00a0 Simply put, they are fake.<\/p>\n
No, I’m not saying that they aren’t married to who they say they are, or that they are hiring actors to play their kids.\u00a0 But running a successful, money generating presence on social media IS a job, and a very time consuming one at that.\u00a0 \u00a0There’s all the time spent setting up the shots\/ videos including wardrobe, the set, and the outline\/ script for the shoot.\u00a0 There’s the act of actually shooting the content, which takes plenty of time under ideal conditions, and working with kids and animals is famously less than an ideal condition.\u00a0 Then there is the editing and scheduling of the posts OR hiring someone to do that for you.\u00a0 In other words, they are generating income for the household- and some cases quite a significant amount- while pretending they aren’t anything more than a simple housewife.<\/p>\n
This should be obvious just by looking at the wardrobes of most of the women.\u00a0 Normal people don’t wear $300 pairs of jeans to feed livestock or $700 shoes to bake bread.\u00a0 Like almost everything else on social media, it’s not real.<\/p>\n
You might be asking why I care.\u00a0 If I don’t like the content I don’t have to consume it, but who it is hurting?\u00a0 Sadly, it hurts a lot of people.\u00a0 It could even be argued that it hurts me.<\/p>\n
There are millions of impressionable youth consuming social media.\u00a0 Girls can believe these carefully curated images and videos are reality and are what they should expect and that they should depend on a man to take care of them.\u00a0 We all know enough stories of men having mid-life crises and dumping their wives for younger models to understand how fragile that situation can be.\u00a0 Again, there is nothing wrong with wanting that life, but that shouldn’t be the ONLY option considered for someone’s entire adulthood.<\/p>\n
The other thing about this type of content is all of the straight, white male politicians promoting that not only is this the best way to live but it’s the ONLY way to live.\u00a0 Several of them have publicly stated that Taylor Swift isn’t a good role model for girls because she is 34 and doesn’t have a husband or any children.\u00a0 And don’t even get me started on Harrison Butker again (although if you really want to see my thoughts click here\u00a0https:\/\/beckypalmer.me\/?p=4918<\/a> \u00a0for that).<\/p>\n By these standards, I am a travesty.\u00a0 I am what is wrong with America.\u00a0 I am married, but I don’t have any children, so I am a failure as a woman.\u00a0 I am deeply offended by this.\u00a0 My worth to humanity, to my fellow Americans, to my family and friends, is not based on whether or not I have children in spite of what JD Vance or anything else in his camp says.\u00a0 I am not a uterus with legs.\u00a0 Hell, for the last 15 years I haven’t even HAD a uterus!\u00a0 I guess I might as well just curl up and die now and stop using up valuable oxygen that someone more worthy could be using.<\/p>\n So, if you agree that I’m a waste of space on this planet and this country you can go ahead and fuck all the way off right now.\u00a0 Otherwise, you understand why this kind of content bothers me and why it’s dangerous for little girls to consume without the understanding of it’s just as fake as any other “influencer” content out there.\u00a0 We need to empower the next generation to take on any and all challenges of the future, not try to go back to a time and place that never even existed outside of TV land.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There has been a weird surge of “Trad Wife” content on social media.\u00a0 “Trad” of course is short for “traditional”.\u00a0 These accounts\/ channels show women as merry housewives tending to several photogenic children, baking goodies from scratch, often tending to chickens and a huge garden, and generally cosplaying as June Cleaver. Before we go any further, I have nothing against… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4970,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[23,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4969","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-issues","category-things-that-make-you-go-huh"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/beckypalmer.me\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/housewife-scaled.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/beckypalmer.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4969","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/beckypalmer.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/beckypalmer.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beckypalmer.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beckypalmer.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4969"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/beckypalmer.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4969\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beckypalmer.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4970"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/beckypalmer.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4969"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beckypalmer.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4969"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beckypalmer.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4969"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}