I’m hoping that the right-wing troll economy is bottoming out. We’re living with the dregs of a few decades of far-right hyperbole generating wealth from rage clicks, but Alex Jones is being taken to the cleaners at last, Tucker Carlson has been banished from Fox News, Steve Bannon is going to jail — maybe people will start realizing that outrageous hate is only going to tap the wallets of a minority of bigots, and that has some downsides. Still, that’s a fruitful line of grift, since the subjects are all gullible and delusional.
The latest goofy grift is tradwives: women who put on dresses and makeup and go online with videos about how they really love staying at home, taking care of their man, cooking and cleaning and popping out babies (the babies are usually not in the videos — they’re catering to men who don’t want the tedium of dealing with actual children, that’s what women are for.) It seems there is a strong market among conservatives for subservient women who are content to be servile.
There is a contradiction in that, since why are these women, who are supposed to be quietly working in the kitchen and bedroom, using media to become popular with the public? No worries, conservatives have been soaking in that contradiction since the days of Phyllis Schlafly.
Is it possible, though, that they can go too far, breaking the illusion? Maybe not — the segment of the public that was unable to see through Andrew Tate’s bullshit may be impervious to reason — but one tradwife, Lilly Gaddis, recently pushed the limits by being too transparently trollish. Amanda Marcotte explains her breakthrough moment:
In the video, Gaddis is decked out in the standard tradwife gear of a cleavage-baring sundress and a cross necklace to justify the sexualized marketing. She is vaguely arranging food while providing a rant tailor-made to tickle the reactionary male brain. She accuses immigrants and Black women of being “gold-diggers,” while insisting Christian white girls like herself will love you, pathetic male viewer, solely for your masculine might, even if you are “broke.” She is going for maximum shock value, dropping not just the n-word, but other five-dollar curses that are clearly meant to to offer a transgressive thrill, coming from a young woman playing at being a more scantily clad June Cleaver.
Some people are trying to defend her by saying she accidentally dropped some racial slurs, but how do you do that by mistake? This was an intentional ploy, and she later confirmed it by arranging interviews on Alex Jones’ show and by promoting Nick Fuentes. Being one attractive women among many making Christmas cookies is not going to make you stand out; being the attractive woman making cookies while damning immigrants with racial epithets is distinctive. For now. The next Lilly Gaddis is going to have to up her game and do much worse.
This wannabe Christian influencer is so obviously out for attention, so it’s tempting to ignore this story in hopes of not letting her have it. Still, Gaddis is an important illustration of the vicious cycle of greed and far-right radicalism driven by the social media ecosystem. The field of strivers wishing to be America’s next top troll is growing faster than can be maintained by the existing audience of incels, white supremacists and other miscreants radicalized online. Becoming the next big thing means attracting the coin of the authoritarian realm: liberal outrage. Yet as liberals get numb to the constant barrage of fascist provocation, the trolls have no choice but to up the ante. So this is how we get a woman in an apron pretending to cook on TikTok while dropping the most notorious of racial slurs.
I’d like to think it can’t go much further before the whole grift disintegrates as a parody of itself, but there is a real segment of the populace that falls for “influencers” all the time, and by their nature seem to be stupid enough to favor far-right bigotry. It’s promising, though, that Lilly Gaddis was fired from her job and banned from Tik Tok, so maybe she’s going to flame out and fall back into the obscurity she deserves.
The problem with every radical movement: it can only radicalize more. Then, it either collapses or it gains power. Despite the signs of the former I still think we’re way too close to the latter.
Fake tradwife.
Real tradwives don’t have jobs!!!
They don’t even have their own bank accounts.
From the description in the OP, she does seem to be just a troll trying to scam a few people out of a few dollars.
I’m fine with tradwives being tradwives if that’s what they want to do. Different people enjoy different things. The problem arises when they start to insist that other women do the same.
On the subject of Phyllis Schlafly, she once ran for Congress and lost. After the election her husband, John, took out advertising that said, “Phyllis thanks those who voted for her; John thanks those who didn’t.” Which strongly suggests she was not as submissive to her husband as she led us to believe.
FWIW, the tradwife lifestyle/ideology rarely works.
It’s a lot of reasons.
.1. The type of male who likes the idea of being a master to a servant also tends to be….abusive when the servant has their own mind.
.2. The finances don’t work.
These days in the USA it takes two people working just to have a minimal life, especially when children are present.
A case study of one such troll has been circulating the internet for a while.
Adam Lee on Daylight Atheism Freethoughtblogs discussed this recently.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/daylight/2024/05/09/lauren-southern-is-a-victim-of-her-own-beliefs
Lauren Southern was a tradwife troll who drank her own poison.
She married a male wannabe patriarch.
He abused her and then filed for divorce with no child support.
Daily Mail: She ended up broke and, “After living with her parents, Southern lived an ‘unconventional’ life in an ant-infested cabin without clean running water, which became ‘surprisingly the first step of what would become a beautiful healing journey’.”
A lot of tradwives end up escaping their traps by fleeing.
I saw a tradwife marriage long ago.
It was the 1970s and it wasn’t called a tradwife back then but that is what it was.
It didn’t work.
Xpost from Rolltodisbelieve which also commented on Lauren Southern, the troll.
https://rolltodisbelieve.com/the-zeroth-error-why-complementarianism-fails-so-hard/
Captain Cassidy is a good writer, read it yourself for fun.
I saw a marriage like that in the late 70s.
One of my old college roommates/friends was an ex-Mormon who left the religion but didn’t leave the Mormon culture behind.
She always said she wanted to find a husband to take care of her while she kept the home and took care of lots of kids.
She finally found a guy who wanted a wife to do all the cooking and cleaning and take care of the kids.
Then she got “accidently” pregnant. I don’t believe it was an accident though.
They got married quick despite not knowing each other very well.
It didn’t work. Four kids later and they ended up divorced. It was a lot of things similar to what Captain Cassidy describes. One of the big issues was that…no one had told them that children are expensive and a lot of work. They struggled on one income and then the wife went to work, not because she wanted to but because she had to, which is BTW, the norm these days.
The guy never managed to save any money for retirement because it all went for child support. He now lives in a town of 500 people in the middle of nowhere because houses cost around $100,000.
Who? (Looks)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Billingsley
Ah. That’s who.
Trashwife.
Ignoring the obvious bullshit of this claim for the moment, wouldn’t a “tradwife” want a breadwinner?
A tradwife would NEED a breadwinner, pretty much by definition. And those who don’t manage to get one will be hosed, whether or not they love their broke-ass husbands. (And if they really do love their husbands and want to live with them forever, they should probably be willing to get their own jobs if necessary to make their dream possible.)
Well, as Adam so nicely pointed out, professional tradwife Lauren Southern has found out that isn’t quite like the TikTok videos promised
A lot of those women still promoting it will have noticed the same, but since being a social media content creator cosplaying as a homemaker is their job, they’re finding it hard to quit.
June Cleaver, Schmune Schmeaver – the ultimate archetypal tradwife was/is Donna Reed, vacuuming her living room in pearls and high heels!
(She prob’ly had a fling going with Robert Young in his “Father Knows Best” role, even then a closet alcoholic.)
And it wouldn’t be a MSM critique of a Christofascist without a No True Scotsman as if Christian bigots only appeared in the 1970s and their horrendous views on race, gender, sex, and the social order were not Christian dogma since Jesus supposedly existed.
Anyway, this Stepford Wife has a fault in her The-Quiet-Part inhibitor (Vers. 3.4 Beta). They need to send her back to the factory for repair.
Hey, “trad” wife ain’t got no “trad” man!
This college dropout ‘fluencer is just another ignorant, opinionated blowhard. Bless her heart!
The funniest part of all this is how these women aren’t even representing the majority of actual tradwives, they’re basically just selling a fantasy about the 50’s housewife (conveniently ignoring things like the drug abuse and mental illness of course). Like if you were to send these guys back in time, they could be easily snapped in half by real tradwives (who were expected to do physical labor on top of everything else assigned to women).
There must be a humorous response to this…there must be…But there is no humour to be found in what conservative parties around the world are doing or planning to do.
nihilloligasan @ 15
What marked the fifties?
High anti-depressant use.
Kitchen housed no joy.
Nope. I just took a look at the video, and that’s at best a strong exaggeration.
When she leans forward, there’s a hint of cleavage for a moment. That’s it.
Kinda makes this point feeble and vapid, which is a shame, because there are other points that now are suspect absent verification.
Tsk.
Who the hell can support a wife and children on a single income? Unless you’re stupidly rich like Musk, there’s no way a single income of working class man can support a family. For a lot of mothers, they work because they can’t afford not to.
Depends on your threshold, gijoel.
cf. https://www.statista.com/statistics/203183/percentage-distribution-of-household-income-in-the-us/
John Morales, to get an idea, see https://www.statista.com/statistics/203384/us-two-bedroom-housing-wage-by-state/
No, anat. That is some quantity of dollars whereas the relevant one (the one I mentioned) is an income distribution curve. Entirely different things.
Also, that was a bad choice by me; it’s a pay site.
Point is that, depending on how you set some reasonable threshold, a certain proportion of the population will exceed it and therefore don’t need more than one income.
I gloss over the constraint that the singular income be from the husband; though, technically, two married men are functionally each other’s husband.
(I always look for edge cases)
[but yes, obviously a reasonable threshold would include housing, food, transport, recreation, health care and so forth]
FWIW, but appositely timely for this thread, sorta kinda:
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/15/salary-a-single-person-needs-to-make-ends-meet-in-every-us-state.html
This is an odd claim for a tradwife to make, considering that nonwhite women are considerably more likely to be stay-at-home moms than white women are. (Pew data from 2014, though I don’t think the numbers have changed much.) Are you a noble champion of traditional motherhood if you’re white, but a lazy gold-digger if you’re black or brown?