Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 784: Tradwife Longform Discussion

Episode Date: August 8, 2024

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This episode of Cognitive Dissonance is brought to you by our patrons. You fucking rock. Be advised that this show is not for children, the faint of heart, or the easily offended. The explicit tag is there for a reason. Recording live from Glarehole Studios in Chicago and beyond, this is Cognitive Dissonance. Every episode we blast anyone who gets in our way, we bring critical thinking, skepticism, and irreverence to any topic that makes the news, makes it big or makes us mad. It's skeptical, it's political, and there is no welcome mat.

Today is Thursday, August the 8th when you're hearing this. Today is our long form episode. I love doing these. I like these too. I like these. Give These are really fun. Just give us a chance to branch out and do different things. Do different stuff that's not politics,

because it always feels like, because the politics cycle is so fucking robust around this time that you just wind up just strangling yourself. That's why I like doing the funny shows, the patron shows, and these shows too. Yeah, I really like this. So you found a handful of really interesting articles.

This first one's from the New Yorker and this is the rise and fall of the tradwife. So we're gonna be talking about the tradwife phenomenon. I think that's the best way to kind of put this is the phenomenon. This is mostly an online phenomenon, right? So this is being really sold to people by tradwife influencers, primarily it seems like on Instagram and TikTok, who are selling and monetizing and that's working, but they are selling, we'll get to that,

selling a lifestyle that has been abbreviated as tradwife. And that lifestyle is a lifestyle that is a lifestyle of subservience to their husband and a lifestyle that is about homemaking, not working in a traditional workplace for traditional, you know, paychecks, that kind of thing, taking care of the family, that sort of stuff. I have a whole lot of thoughts on this idea.

What were your impressions from the article? You know, interesting article here because the pieces I took away from it were about this dichotomy of women who are doing this trad wife influencing online and this traditional wife ideals, taking picture of their banana bread before they serve it, taking pictures of their family. The other story that we're going to cover in a little bit is about a beauty pageant queen who has eight kids and like a week or two weeks after she gives birth, she's in a beauty pageant and she's nursing in between skin spray paint spray tan on her and stuff.

And they're talking about these traditional wives and what they're doing and how they're influencing this sector of Instagram and getting millions and millions of followers to follow them. And they're making it, their message seems to be that women can find a very happy, healthy life at home, but there's all this toxic shit that's sort of built into it too that's also really bad,

but then very specifically, they seem to be making this claim that women can skip working and be a mom or be a homemaker, but none of these women are doing that. Yeah, man. skip working and work and be a mom or be a homemaker, but none of these women are doing that. Yeah, man. All of these women are working. Like content creation is work. And that is something that I think is one of these,

it's one of the biggest lies of this entire thing is that they make it seem like they're gonna be this traditional homemaker who's not doing anything and not providing. And in fact, the amount of money that these people are making is providing intensely for these families. Yeah, I've got so many thoughts about this because like on the one hand, right?

So on the one hand, the Tread Wife movement driven by influencers is a lie. It is a lie because what they're saying is, I don't work. This is the life that I have. Let me show you a window into my life. And then they curate and edit and manipulate these images and these videos in these professional ways

and then they monetize that. That's working. They're at work. Their job when they're at work is to lie to you about a life you don't have. They can afford this life in part because they're working. Right? When they're making banana bread, they're at work today.

That's what they did at work today. The same way Baker made banana bread and got a paycheck for it. They made banana bread and they're at work today. That's what they did at work today. The same way Baker made banana bread and got a paycheck for it. They made banana bread and then they filmed it and then they got a fucking paycheck for it. They're at work. They are not doing what they say they're doing. They're creating a house of cards that in a lot of ways,

just like many other influencers, makes people feel bad and makes people feel inferior, like they're not able to find joy and happiness in the same kind of lifestyle that somebody else is filming. It's like when you see like everybody's like beautiful fucking vacation photos in Ibiza, and it's like, oh my God, everything is beautiful everywhere you went.

It's like, no, you took a thousand pictures and you took all the ones where you're waiting in line for something and you threw them out. And then you cropped everything. So it looks like you're the only one on the beach. The beach is crowded with a half a million other fucking people. It's all bullshit.

It's all lying. All of it is lying. 100% of all of it is lying because at its core, they're getting paid to sell you something they're not doing, right? It's also like a lie in the name. There's nothing traditional about this kind of life. This was never a real thing.

So what they're also trying to sell is like, this is a traditional wife and husband, mother and father family relationship. But this was never a reality in America or anywhere else. They're selling this sort of like idealized 1950 style, leave it to be for television version of a life that literally didn't exist in America. Most women did not live this life.

This was not the traditional role for women. Women have worked. They're ever, I mean, throughout all the course of time, like if you go back and look at societies across time and culture, women work. They work their asses off. The idea that women only do this kind of work and men only do this kind of work is a lie that we tell ourselves

by idealizing a history that never occurred. And that's real fucking important because if we're going to call something traditional, it should at least have a foundation and tradition. Sure. And it doesn't. So none of this is true. None of this is actual. There's bait here, right?

And the bait is that people are going to go after it and say, you know, it's anti-feminist for you to, you know, keep your woman at home and for you to force her to do this sort of thing. I wanna come out and say, if someone has the means and ability and two people agree that this is the life they wanna lead where the woman stays at home and takes care of the kids and the man goes out and gets a job

and does all the work and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Even though none of these people are actually leading this life. I wanna make sure to mention that again. If that's life that somebody who watches these things wants to lead, I have nothing, I don't care. Like there's nothing in me that cares that that's how you wanna split up

your marital responsibilities. Like I split it up literally however you want. Like that's a, nobody, nobody should be digging into your, into your life to decide that your wife should be out there doing something when she's not, or that you should be out there doing something when you, if you guys decide on how you want to handle the work life balance of your life,

handle that in any way that you want to handle it. I don't give a shit. But I think the real insult, and I think the thing that misses on any of the criticism of the people who don't like these tradwives is that they keep on making it seem like they're attacking their tradition. And I think you very rightly point out

that's not a tradition that really exists. All it is is just basically calling out people with incredible privilege. Because in order to do this in our culture today, you have to have incredible privilege to be able to only have one person working. Yeah, this is, you know, there's so much about this stuff. You're absolutely right that it is an incredibly,

and one article points out that like, it is an act of intense privilege to have one income in a household. That is also a privilege to have somebody else manage all of the financial responsibilities, right? And then it is a privilege on the other side to have somebody manage all of your household responsibilities. And I agree with you that like,

on one hand, I don't have a problem. And this is gonna sound insane because like, this is exactly the setup I have in my home. I am the breadwinner, my wife, Hailey, does not work. So like, this is our setup. And even though I have that, one thing that like Hailey and I have talked about and that I think is really true

is that this is an incredibly dangerous setup. This is a very, very dangerous setup for the person who's not working. Because that person who's not working is not out in the workforce building a resume, networking, building contacts, building their skillset. That person is very, very vulnerable. That is a deeply financially and life vulnerable position

for that person to put themselves into. The amount of trust that you have to have that that relationship is going to be rock solid and that person will take care of you is fucking immense. It is immense because you've given all of the power in that structure to the person who controls all the financial levers, right? And like, if that's something you decide you wanna do,

that's fine. Like I don't care what other people do, but I do think it's worth pointing out and then also accommodating for and saying, all right, if we're gonna do this, I have to recognize that you are more vulnerable than I am. And so I am going to set aside a nest egg of years how you leave me money, right?

You kind of have to do something like that because you have to do something to balance that scale. You have to say like, all right, if we're gonna have this deeply imbalanced financial position that leaves you intensely vulnerable, there's only, we're gonna have to make other financial and like ethical considerations to keep the other person safe, you know, to keep the other person from

from being like preyed upon. Unfortunately, the reality is that a lot of these relationships are fetishized by men who do not have the best of intentions, who want not just to divvy up their household responsibilities in a certain way, in terms of like how the work gets done around the house or how the money comes into the bank account and the bills get paid, but what they want is to create a system

within their household of dominance and submission, of control and power. And you have, I think, a really toxic soup where you have people who want that interpersonally and then they create that same power imbalance financially. And then how is somebody going to leave somebody? How is somebody going to escape abuse? How is somebody going to, you know, find a different life if they need to find a different life? It's so dangerous. It's so dangerous. Yeah, I, I, one of the people in here,

really there's a point in one of these articles where somebody says that they were an S&M only fans person. And then they transitioned into being a trad wife. And there's a subtext there. Because really genuinely the people who are watching this and they did some studies to figure out who was sort of watching this and who's watching this are people who are like you say fetishizing this relationship. What they want is somebody who's submissive to them, who has to answer to them, who has to ask permission of them to do things. ask permission of them to do things. And there is a very real group of people out there

who are powerless, who may not be in relationships, who are upset about that and angry about that. And then they go and view these things and they view these women and they immediately think that's the kind of woman I want. And when I get into a relationship, I'm gonna try to shoehorn whoever I get into a relationship into that role because that's the dream I had.

It's not your shared dream, which is what it should be. When you're in a relationship, it should be your shared dream between the two of you. You know, my wife and I, we have very different ideals about like where we wanna live or how we wanna do things and things like that. And we have to work those things out, right? We don't have a shared idea or a shared idyllic dream.

We have to work those things out. I think there's a lot of these trad wife influencers are not, maybe it's not their intent. I have no idea what their intent is. So I can't tell you what's in their head. But from a couple of, in one of these interviews, it doesn't feel like, at least the answers they're giving, that it's their intent to make this kind of content

for people who might want this as a way to try to shoehorn somebody into this lifestyle. But that doesn't mean it's not happening and that people aren't viewing it that way. Yeah, and like a couple of things, like one, how much does this dovetail with the goals of the right wing? Of course. Right?

This is, this is absolutely just accelerating culturally. Sure. That same right wing war on women that has been part of the Republican right-wing culture now for a long time. The, you know, elimination of abortion rights, the attack on contraception, the continued calls to eliminate no-fault divorce, all of these things, like, they all play together, right? They're all in the same pot to stir up together, right? Yeah, I mean, if you were to have a puzzle, each one of those is puzzle pieces. Is a piece, yeah.

You know, have you heard the term, like if you go into like a lot of spaces, like marital advice or relationship advice or sex advice spaces online, which I do for talking ship, or I was doing for talking ship, have you heard the term bang made? No.

So there's a term many women refer to where they lament that many men that they're looking, that they find in the dating scene are not looking for a partner. What they're looking for is a bang made. They're looking for somebody that'll clean up after them and that they can fuck. And that that's really all that they want out of somebody.

What they value most is can I fuck you and will you clean up after me? The treadwife thing really seems like on the male side, that if I was somebody looking for that bang-made relationship, this plays into that sort of really patriarchal and really toxic and problematic ideal. And again, I want to point out, tradwife is not the same thing as one person works

and one person takes care of the home. That's not tread wife. Tread wife has a very specific set of submissive, dominant relationship pattern that has to be a part of it. Tread wife is not just only one person works. Whenever it's defined, it's one person works outside the house, the other person works in the house, and the man is in charge in terms of how their life functions.

And the man is in charge of their entire finances. So you could have somebody who works and we're both in charge of the finances. That's an entirely possible thing. Just because only one person works doesn't mean that this is the same thing as the tradwife kind of culture, right? Sure.

So that's part of it. One thing I wanna talk about though, cause I kinda get it, is the appeal of it. And we've talked about this before. I do understand the idea of being like, God, I don't wanna just be a cog in the fucking machine of capitalism. And like, how nice would it be to fall in love

with somebody and take care of the home and sort of check out of the capitalist grind and do a different kind of grind where I'm of service to the people that I love. I think there's a real appeal that I can understand that people would have to that. And I guess what I worry about with this treadwife thing is that those appealing parts are like glued together

with all the really dangerous parts. So that people aren't having a relationship, you know, like I hope like my wife and I have, we're like, yes, I work and she doesn't, but like, she's got a financial nest egg that is independent of mine that I've created in case she ever wants to go. Right. So like there's money, there's money for her to pack up and go, like, because I don't want her to be financially abused.

Right. And if I'm going to make all the money, there's a potential for financial abuse. So like, I don't think that that's happening. I'm like, we make our financial decisions together as a team, I'm not like, well, I made the money, it's all my choice, you know? The tradwife thing doesn't do any of that stuff. The tradwife thing says we're not doing that.

But I think there's a lot of people who might say, you know what, it's really appealing to check out of the capitalist grind. That does sound really nice. Why not fall in love and like be of service to the people that I love and check out of this capitalist grind? And it's like, yeah, why not?

Cause like there's a whole community of people that just want to find a bang made, man. It's so fucking dangerous. I have no relationship to this sort of material at all, because my wife and I, since we've met, we've both worked. Right. I'm intensely proud of my wife. Like, my wife is in a field that is for men.

So, like, her field is financial technology, right? So she started in finance, and she worked her way to fintech stuff. That is a straight-up misogynist, shitty place for a woman to work. And she works hard, she's one of the hardest working people I know, and she's like genuinely really good at her work. And she is like, she's like a type of person who

this sort of stuff would never appeal to. Like she wants to be a person who does something and is out and doing a thing, you know? And I also don't like, when I hear about stuff, I'm like, I don't know, it doesn't appeal to me either. I wanna do work, I wanna do things. And we've always sort of managed the life stuff around that. You know what I mean?

Yeah, sure, you have traditional tasks, I guess, but we don't have, neither of us ever really wanted to have this sort of life. It's not that I don't think like other people should. Right. Like I don't mean should I live the life that they want to lead, but it never appealed to either of us, like our whole life. So I have a real disconnect when it comes to even looking or thinking

about any of this stuff, I always read it and think, wow, that's, it seems really strange and it seems really alien, but I know that's just my own take. Right. It's just my own experience in my own body. I can understand the appeal of wanting to be the person that stays at home. Sure. I don't like working in the capitalist world.

I just do it because I've done it, you know? And like, I've always had responsibilities and this is the way I've met my responsibilities. But like, yeah, I would check out of the capitalist grind tomorrow if I could. Like, I don't feel like, yeah, I would check out of the capitalist grind tomorrow if I could. Like, I don't feel like I get, like, the way I understand the appeal is the reality that I know of myself, which is, if I won the lotto tomorrow, I'd stop working fucking immediately. Like, immediately. Which tells me, like, I'm not doing this because I get a sense of satisfaction. I'm doing it for the check.

Right. Any of that stuff. So when I know that about myself, I can be like, yeah, could I understand the appeal of being of service to the people I love the most? I can understand that. You know, there's a part of me that understands that too. So I guess that's why I'm saying like, what scares me about this as a sort of like movement is that it's sold as a package of lies by liars. They're showing you a life they are not leading.

Hey, I'm not working. Yeah, you are. Right now watching your video took a lot of work. You're working right now. You're making money. You're doing a job. You're working. Well, I'm not working.

And so it's selling people a life that doesn't exist, that idealizes a time that never was, and then creates really vulnerable young ladies. Like really vulnerable people. What it also does too is, in these articles, very specifically the middle one, we didn't mention the name of this one. This one came out in the Times,

meet the queen of the tradwives and her eight children. And there's an image, I'll put it on the big screen so we can see the image of her husband and his giant hat and their million kids in front of their mountain. But this is a woman who they met young, they married, they've been shitting out kids at a regular interval about every 18 months. And they've got eight kids.

And there's this fantasy, or I don't want to call it a fantasy. It's more like a lie, but less than, where they both seem to believe that they're both in charge. They both seem to have this idea that we're co-CEOs, that both of us are running this house, and both of us, we both chip in,

and the husband does all the work outside of the house, but we both chip and they keep talking about it. But whenever the reporter tries to ask the mother a question, there's a kid who's swinging on her hair or the husband answers for her multiple times. And he's clearly a mansplainer in this article. She goes out of her way to say how he's, she's mansplaining, he's mansplaining to this reporter. But genuinely she tries to answer two or three times and each time she's kind of looking over at him, like that's what we think, right? Yeah. And, and, and this is one of those things. It's like, even when they think they're not in one of these submissive relationships and even when

they maybe try to put themselves at their, they kind of are anyway. Yeah. And like the problem with, the problem is that like the playing field is just inherently not level. Yes. It's just not. So if you're going to level out the playing field, you cannot do it implicitly. You have to do it explicitly,

meaning you have to have a plan and conversations and communication because you have to do it explicitly, meaning you have to have a plan and conversations and communication because you have to recognize out loud, this is not an even playing field. And most of these people aren't honest about it, right? Like to your point, like they're not honest about it. They're pretending that all they're doing is divvying up their household responsibilities.

Oh, you do this, I do that. But that's not what they're doing in practice. And in this article, there's a great example of it. A great example is she's like, yeah, I had all of my kids with these two without any pain meds. And the interviewer is like, oh my gosh, without any pain meds, really, why did you do that? Oh, you know, I really just,

I didn't want to have the pain meds. I'm not really into taking pain medication. You know, it's not my thing. And then like, as soon the husband's out of earshot, she's like, well, I mean, except for like Michael, who I had when fucking husband was like, not at the, not in the room, for him, I had an epidural and it was great.

It was fucking magic. And she says it like three times. It was magic, it was fucking awesome. So she's like, yeah, as soon as I'm not under someone's thumb, then I have a different idea. Because what she was saying just moments before in the article was like, yeah, as soon as I'm not under someone's thumb, then I have a different idea. Because what she was saying just moments before in the article was like, yeah, I don't do the pain meds because I'm just not into that stuff.

But as soon as he's not with an earshot, and in practice when he wasn't in the labor and delivery room, she's like, oh my God, I made a different choice. And I loved that different choice. Again, this isn't about how people divvy up their chores. This is about how people divvy up the idea of like power

and in a relationship. And if we divvy up power in deeply unequal ways, and like it is okay for people to have relationships that are not financially equal. That's not the problem. The problem I think comes when that inequality, when we pretend that that doesn't matter, when we pretend to overlook it,

when we pretend that it does not create a potential for abuse, when we sort of like idealize that and fetishize that in a way that like isn't honest about how dangerous that is for the person who is subject to potential financial abuse. In this other article, The Rise and Fall of the Tradwife, this is about a woman who started doing this stuff and then became an influencer.

And one of the comments that's made on one of the big TV stations is the lady gasps when the woman says, well, I wouldn't just be able to buy a couch without my husband's permission or something like that. And I thought like, when I read that comment, I thought, well, of course not. Like if I came home and my wife had bought a couch without buying permission, like that's an expensive thing. I would hope that she would tell me at least even just tell me now don't get me wrong, my wife picks out literally every stick of furniture

in her house. I don't get a choice. I don't be like, you know, she takes me to a place and then she says, this is the one I'm getting. And I say, yeah, that's cool. I understand that I don't have a design sense like my wife. So I recognize I'm not gonna be able to pick something out that she can pick out.

You know, once in a while I can be like, I really like the blue one, and then she'd be like, okay, the blue one's nice, and then we'll just go with that, right? But genuinely, my wife knows what's gonna look good. She knows what's gonna look good way better than I do, so I trust her with that stuff. But when it comes to the paying of that thing,

both of us are immediately like, no, I always do the same thing at Christmas when they show those commercials, the car with the bow on it. Oh my God. And I'm like, are you fucking kidding me? I would never buy a car without my wife knowing about it. Who on earth is like, I signed this up for a fucking five year, $700 a month payment

per car. Hope you like it. Who does that? And that's the thing is like, there's a, there's this sort of feeling that I think is unfair, right? To this, this woman who's on this TV show, that's an odd, cause if they would ask me the same question, I have this same reaction as this woman, right? I think it's an unfair question.

But I think like, when I think about this other woman who's in this other story, her husband's answering all her questions for her. She's, you know, I understand the first one in some ways, right, although she does say it a couple times that her husband is the CEO and makes all the decisions. So I understand that that's not, I don't agree with her in that sense, right? I think that maybe you should be making decisions together.

Maybe two heads are better than one, I don't know. Maybe you should, do you, whatever, it's your relationship. But I think like there is a little bit of outside pressure on some of these things where I don't think it's merited. Yeah, well, and in that article too, you know, it's interesting because the woman being quoted, she's the woman who's like sort of like proponent of the tradwife concept. She's like, oh, you know, we both gave stuff up. And the reporter's like, oh yeah the woman who's like sort of like proponent of the trad wife concept.

She's like, oh, you know, we both gave stuff up. And the reporter's like, oh yeah, what'd you give up? And she's like, oh, you know, I gave up my career and I gave up, you know, being living in New York, wanting to live in New York. And, you know, and it's like, well, and he gave stuff up too though. And you know, what did he give up?

Oh, well, he gave up his career, but he didn't give up his career. And she had the reporter points out, no, he got his career. He got the house and the country. He got the wife that does everything. He got all the things he wanted. And I think that's the other problem with these power structures is that

when you don't have power, your ability to advocate for yourself is inherently reduced. And as people, we tend to want to make things feel okay because we're living in them. So when we're living in situations, I think we have a tendency to make lemonade out of lemons, right, and so we're gonna like cast things in a different light, repaint and recast

and re-narraturize our own environments and our own worlds in ways that sometimes aren't necessarily honest but are self-protective. This guy in this scenario, well, he just got explicitly everything he wanted. Everything he wanted. And what she got was a series of compromises that she has sold herself are okay.

A couple deciding to have a shit ton of kids or, you know, divvying up the responsibilities, however they divvied them up, or somebody's a stay at home parent, like that's all fine. Like all that stuff, none of that stuff I find problematic. I find it really problematic to sell it to people and with the influencer model, right?

To sort of sell to people that this is an idealized version of how we should all live. What I think is also really, really damaging is the social media aspect of this. is the social media aspect of this. And the social media aspect of this, the reason why the trad wife in the first article seems to catch a lot of shit is because the algorithm recognizes

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Two clicks and you're at, you know, racist content. And they're so close to this stuff that it leads people down, it either leads people down into an area that we don't want people to go down into because it's a shitty place of the internet. Or they're close enough to it because the same people are watching that stuff already and it's linking to their videos because now they found this too Yep. Yeah, and it's also adjacent to all that religious quiver full for her Absolutely, like it's a hundred percent adjacent to this and some of these people are religious outwardly like Mormons or ex-Mormons or whatever

So right so like I think like social media 100% like and the and and to your point earlier, like the algorithm is set to show this tradwife stuff less to women and more to men. And that's really damaging too, because this is still a patriarchal culture. And so it matters very much what we teach men about their role and women's roles in relationships.

We're at this weird place, right? Where women increasingly are exerting more power and saying no to a lot of the bullshit that they have been forced to eat for so long. Women are graduating college at a faster rate and there are more women graduating college than men. Women are voting more. Women are starting to make more money than ever before.

Women are in higher and higher positions in higher paying jobs than ever before. Women are really putting off having kids and having less kids and some of them not having kids at all at a rate that we've never seen before. This is a moment in time where women are socially seizing control of their own lives in ways that has never happened, has never happened. So I think a lot of this

being sold primarily to men, because women aren't buying it for the most part, it's being sold primarily to men that sets people up in these relationship dynamics that are doomed to fucking fail, that are just really abusive and really problematic and set up expectations for people that cannot be healthy and can only be toxic. And it's perfect content to lead people there

because it's not offensive on its own. Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. So it's perfect content to lead people there because it's not offensive on its own. Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. So it's perfect content. It's a woman making banana bread. It's perfect content for that, but the subtext around the whole thing is this lie that they're telling, this trad wife lie that most of them are telling.

I'm not gonna say all of them because I don't know them. All of them are clearly the ones that we looked at today. They're all telling a lie. They're not telling you the truth about their life. And then it's also very, it's also harder content for people to, you know, I guess for people to stay away from, right? In a lot of ways it's really vanilla content, but it's two clicks away from something that's horrible. And it's always going to be in that spot because the algorithm will keep feeding itself and it wants people to go between those two and find the thing that they're going to dig the rabbit hole under like some asshole who's a racist or they're

going to fucking find Andrew Tate videos out for this. I mean, you know what I mean? Like this is the, the, the trad wife stuff is it's the other, it's the yang to Andrew's yin. You know what I mean? It fits perfectly with these things. Ask Andrew Tate what he wants in a woman. He's going to spout off every single thing that these tradwives are talking about.

So it does have a toxic side. It's just the side of it is that you're, that you it is that you're not hearing the toxic side. You're hearing the submissive side. Yeah. And it really puts forward an idea implicitly about what women are for rather than how people want to live their lives. Yeah. And I guess that's something that I think is how people want to live their lives, how

people want to divide up their chores, whether people feel fulfilled being part of the capitalist structure or part of, not part of the capitalist structure, all of that is fine. Like that's all individualistic, right? But like these messages are messages for men about what women are for. Yeah, exactly. And when we tell lies to men about what women are for,

we make a less safe environment for women. We make a less empowered world for women, even at the same time while women are coming up. And it's a crazy push-pull that's happening. And I can't help but feel like it is in opposition in that sort of like, you know how like, like everything in fucking society feels like a fucking Newton's cradle. It's like you elect Obama and then like you get Trump, you know,

it feels like every time we get a little progress, we get this like big swing back, this big rubber bat backward. This treadwife stuff feels like a response to the reality of the results of feminism. I think there's an interesting piece here in the sense, and they talk about it in the articles, about how some of these people get messages. So some of these people who are influencers get messages from people who are in

a capitalist hellscape job, and they hate it. And they send a message and say, man, I wish I could live the life that you live. Doesn't take into account the incredible privilege it takes to even live that life, right? But they say, man, I'd I could live the life that you live. It doesn't take into account the incredible privilege it takes to even live that life, right? But they say, man, I'd really like to live that life. And then some of the commenters are like, oh man, I was a trad wife for a little while, but I, you know, my husband, you know, just didn't make enough money. So I had to go to work in order to, you know, put, you know,

make sure that there was enough food on the table or whatever it was. But there's, there, there is this sort of feeling that people have to either be a corporate hellscape person or they have to be a trad wife and that there's no in between. You have to have feelings on one or the other. And it's this internet culture thing where you have to plant your flag in one of these.

You can't be in the middle. You can't be, I agree, I think both of them are fine. You can't be there. You've got to be, no, this is better. No, I've got to live this other way. We've got to, you know, we've got to make sure that women are able to live this other way, et cetera. And I think that there's a really interesting push pull on the internet itself because of this, because you have to identify with something. Yeah, man, a hundred percent. And like, it just occurs to me too, that like, if one of the things that we do with this kind of messaging is we tell women that this is what you're for,

then in those scenarios where both people have to work, who do you think is gonna do the working and doing the housework? Sure, yeah, yeah. Right? Like, that has been, unfortunately, the reality of most, and like the science, I've seen like a ton of surveys and science that backs this up,

like women still do most of the household labor. It's not close. Women still do most of the child rearing. It's not close, except for those women are still, they're also going to work now. They have to do all the work too. So they're waking up and going to work and working a full-time job,

and they're responsible for most of the household job and they're responsible for most of the household and they're responsible for most of the child rearing and the other associated tasks with taking care of kids. So it's like this trad wife idea, when it like intersects with the impossibility of actualizing that for most people in our capitalist system, where the very few people can afford to live on one income,

what that really means is that we're saying, well, women are for a certain kind of work. That's your work. But we also need you to get a paycheck. There's also extra work. Right. So you just get to work constantly and be exhausted all the time.

Sure. And I'll play Xbox. Actually sounds kind of good. I'm not gonna lie. time. Sure. And I'll play Xbox. It sounds actually sounds kind of good. All right. That's going to wrap it up for this week. We do want to read one quick thing about the Creator Accountability Network. Absolutely. So we have joined the Creator Accountability Network. That's CAN. CAN is a non-profit. It's dedicated to reducing harassment and abuse through ethical education and a system of restorative accountability. We join this because we care about the safety and well-being of our community members. If

you feel our behavior or content has harmed someone, please report it to CAN, either via the reporting form on their website, that's creatoraccountabilitynetwork.org, or you can call their hotline at 617-249-4255. They'll help us make it right, and avoid repeating that mistake in the future. Can also needs volunteers from our communities to help with their process. So if you have skills you think would be helpful, or time, and a desire to help,

please visit their website to find out how you can volunteer. Most importantly, get the word out to other creators who you think would be interested in getting credentialed. Help us build safer communities together. Also, Tom, in the last couple of weeks, we have been uploading things to TikTok. And our TikTok's been growing quite a bit.

We've been getting people to share our stuff. So we're gonna encourage people, if you're on TikTok and you're fine sending all your data to China and you know, that sort of thing. If you're on TikTok, definitely check us out. Dissonance Pod is our handle. And at the end of the show, I think next week, we're gonna be changing the end of the show because we wanna make sure we include a piece about the Creator and Accountability Network at the end of the show, I think next week, we're going to be changing the end of the show because we want to

make sure we include a piece about the creator and accountability network at the end of the show. So we're going to be pulling the dairy council thing down. So don't worry. Next week's when we're starting it. But at the end of the show, we're going to change after the skeptics creed because we want to add a couple of things, but we're also going to put handles to all our social media and that really helps the show if you share things that you find on there of things, but we're also going to put handles to all our social media. And that really helps

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That really helps with people finding and listening to the show for the first time. All right, that's gonna wrap it up for this week. We're gonna leave you like we always do with the Skeptics Creed. Credulity is not a virtue. It's fortune cookie cutter, mommy issue, hypno Babylon bullshit.

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