The Michael Knowles Show - Tradwife Attack DEBUNKED | Michael Knowles

Episode Date: May 6, 2023

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As the crispy chicken sandwich from 7-Eleven, people always call me loud. And I'm like, yeah, I know. I'm crispy. Did you expect me to whisper? If you want quiet, go eat some soup and reflect. Like, I know I'm a handful. I'm bold, I'm juicy. Throw some pickles and barbecue sauce on me, and baby, I'm a whole meal. And with seven rewards, I'm just $4.

Quiet. No. Krispy, saucy, and $4? Very. Only at 711. Valley 3-62326, participating stores only while supplies lastly out for full terms. There's an overlap, therefore, between the tradwife trend and white nationalism. This overlap can be implicit.

Right? The libs hate trad wives. What's a trad wife? It's a traditional wife. Okay. It's a lady who thinks it's nice to be a lady and who thinks that the tried and true ways in which women have behaved for all of human history are better than the women who burn their...

bras and chop their hair off and practice witchcraft and destroy capitalism and become lesbians, to quote Pat Robertson. You don't want your children to grow up as lesbians. One of these attacks on the Trad Wives has gone viral. I will now bring my not only intellect, but my deep, deep love of Trad Wives to bear, to analyze it. Lately, I've been seeing this thing pop up on social media. We're going to talk about how you can become a traditional wife.

I went from a raging free-the-nipple feminist to becoming a traditional feminine woman. The ways that I live traditionally in our modern world. I don't understand what's the point of, you know, arguing with him. Immaculately made up women gazing wide-eyed into their phones, singing the praises of being a tradwife or traditional wife. I'll let her explain. If you are not familiar with the term tradwife, it is a woman who chooses to live a more traditional life with ultra-traditional gender

roles. So the man goes outside the house, works, provides for the family. The woman stays home and she's the homemaker. She takes care of the home. But it was. I love here this definition and now the horror that this host is raising at the prospect of the tradwives. It basically is just women being normal. Why can't you just be normal? Saying, well, a trad wife is a woman who behaves normally and like the way that men and women have behaved for all of human history. And so in our insane culture, I didn't do that for a long time, but now I'm choosing to be normal and my life improved. And the host of this video says, oh no, don't be normal, the horror. Keep going.

The woman stays home and she's the homemaker. She takes care of the home in the children, if there are any. Thanks for that. Though the idea of women being confined to the home, while men do things like go outside and work isn't exactly new. The image is the image of 1950s suburban domesticity has been given a new lease of life by the gals on TikTok. Can you imagine me, the wife of that boorish, rainless. Some younger millennials and zoomers have decided to embrace living LaVida casserole, dedicating themselves to cooking, cleaning, and child-rearing, while their husbands or girlfriends, I don't know, chop firewood or go to their job in human resources.

And look, I'm not saying there's anything inherently... Do any men work in human resources? I hate so much about the things that you choose to be. I'm not degrading human resources or if a man happens to work in it, but in my experience, human resources is made up 100% of women. I don't know. This hosts grip on reality seems to be even more tenuous than I previously thought. And look, I'm not saying there's anything inherently degrading about being a mum or making nice meals. I like cooking elaborate dinners. For that matter, my boyfriend does too. But the The Tradwife trend isn't just a way to talk about the experience of being a woman and doing domestic labor.

I love, she says, look, there's nothing inherently degrading about. Being a mother about the most beautiful, exalted thing that any person can do on this earth. There's nothing inherently degrading. About being the hand that rocks the cradle as the hand that rules the world of creating life in your very body. This unique ability that the most beautiful thing that can exist in this finite fallen world that we have. Isn't it, listen, it's not. It's obviously not nearly as impressive as working at the widget factory for a man who doesn't care about you. But you know, it's fine, it's fine. And I love it. She goes, and there's nothing wrong with cooking. I love cooking.

She won't even say, I like the idea of having a child and raising a family. No, no, no, that's unimaginable. But cooking is fine sometimes, maybe. Okay, and here's my boyfriend. It's saying that being a woman or expressing your femininity most fully means doing all the domestic labor. Men and women are meant to have rigidly distinct roles in the home, in their relationships, and crucially, in economic activity. So this isn't just about personal choice or individual preferences. It's advancing a right-wing political ideology and dressing up. Correct. Put a pause there. That's a really important point she's landing on. She's wrong about the rigidity of these roles.

The idea of having a traditional marriage is, yes, there are distinct roles. There are distinct spheres for men and women in which we operate. But they're not rigid. I don't change most of the diapers at home, but I've changed a few. I cook almost none of the meals, but I'll cook every now and again. I don't do most of the cleaning, but I do a little bit of the cleaning. I take the trash out a lot. But my wife will sometimes take the trash out.

It's not really her job, but she'll sometimes do it. It's not as though you say, well, that's your role and that's my role and you don't do this. And that's, that whole idea is very modern and rationalist and liberal. But a traditional marriage says, men and women are different. Men and women have natural inclinations and affinities and certain things that we can't do. I cannot carry a baby inside of me. And so we're going to, rather than try to rebel against nature and rebel against reality, we're going to embrace that.

And we think that that will be more conducive to our flourishing. And she says, but to see, therefore, it means it's not entirely about consent. It's not entirely about individual autonomy. Right, it's not. Life is about more than individual autonomy. That's the point. It's really quite simple. The idea that all that matters in this whole world is individual autonomy, that the only moral

criterion is consent and nothing else matters at all. That is a very modern, crazy idea that has destroyed the distinctions between everyone in society and especially between men and women, and it's made everybody miserable. I'm miserable. I'm miserable. So, yes, life is about more than individual autonomy. It's about your role. It's about your place in society.

It's about recognizing the man is not primarily an atomized individual. Man is actually a social being, a political animal, a coupling creature that comes together with the opposite sex and has good life. So why is this important? Three things. These women are often really young in their 20. and they're preaching the values of submitting to a husband to an audience of other young women. The tradwife trend doesn't exist in isolation.

It's linked to deeply regressive political and social movements, such as Christian and white nationalism and anti-feminism. So it's obviously, yeah, it's Christian. Christianity holds it in the beginning God created man, both male and female, created he them. Christianity says that the relationship of husband and wife is a symbol of the relationship of Christ in his church. Yeah, it's Christian. It's definitely anti-feminist. Feminism says men and women are exactly the same. Women needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. That's true.

How is it white nationalist? This seems a little crazy. Yes, crazy. Whatever that means. It's funny, they put up a picture of Nick Fuentes, who's a Hispanic guy. It was named Fuentes. But anyway, put that aside for a second. You're saying that black people can't get married and have normal marriages?

You're saying Asian people can't get married and have normal marriages? I don't know. I know a lot of black people and Asian people, Hispanic people, certainly. who have gotten married and had normal marriages. She just mentions it because white nationalism is just a euphemism, or it's just a synonym rather, for bad. You're horrible. When people say white nationalist or racist or whatever, they just mean it's bad and it's a bad thing. But I don't, it doesn't, there's no connection there at all. And anti-feminism.

Feminism is an ideology which cannot be defended by feminists. It's part of a wider shift of young people being dissatisfied with neoliberalism and wanting social change. So, let's talk about the way in which tradwife culture presents the ideal relationship. Men are providers, which means that only they participate in paid work and make all the financial decisions. He is responsible for the final say in all of our financial decisions. And this is presented as a... Hold on. That's it. What the, what the trad wife just said is different from what the feminist lady just said. Sneaky-sick-law witsies. The feminist lady just said, the man makes all the financial decisions. And what the trad-wifference said,

said is he has the final say in all of our financial decisions. Those are very different things. The tradwife is correct. You won. You did it. The husband, as the head of household, has the final say in these sorts of matters. That's not to say that the man makes all the financial decisions. In fact, in the home economy, the traditional wife makes most of the financial decisions, makes the decisions on the groceries and often pays the bills and buys the clothes for the kids and deals with the school and deals with this and that and the other thing. The man makes the final decision in as much as you say, okay, we're going to live in this town, not this town. The kids, I don't like that school the kids are going to. Maybe we should consider taking them

to this school. I don't really like those eggs. Maybe we should get these other eggs. Okay, maybe, but in terms of practically who is running the home economy, it's the wife, almost 100% of the time. And this is presented as a kind of equality. While men and women have separate roles, they are equal in their value. Insisting on the equal value between paid employment and unpaid care work, which, by the way, is a feminist position, hence the Wages for Housework Campaign of the 1970s, gets twisted into something much more sinister, willingly giving up financial independence. Yes, put a pause.

When you get married, you give up willingly financial independence. That's true. Men and women both do it. And you get a shared bank account and you move into a house that you buy together and you're no longer independent entities in any way. You leave your father and mother, and you become one flesh with your spouse. That's marriage. Marriage.

If you want to remain a totally independent person, then don't get married. The current administration's New Year's goals are to tax, spend, and turn a blind eye to inflation. If this is at odds with your goals, you're tired of the government playing games with your savings and your retirement plan, then you need to get in touch with the experts at Birch Gold today. For over 5,000 years, gold has withstood inflation, geopolitical turmoil, stock market crashes. Now you can own gold in a tax-sheltered retirement account. Birch Gold makes it easy to convert an IRA or 401k into an IRA in precious metals. Texts, NOLES, 298-98-98 to claim your free info kit on gold and then talk to one of their precious metals specialists.

With an 8-plus rating with Better Business Bureau, thousands of happy customers, and countless five-star reviews, you can trust Birch Gold to help protect your savings. Text Knowles, Canada W-L-E-S to 98-98-98-98 and protect yourself with gold today. That is, NOLS, Canada, W-L-E-S to 98-98- Today. This isn't all soft filters and sourdough inspiration. It wasn't until the 1960s in America and the mid-1970s in the UK that women had the legal right to open their own bank accounts or access credit, which meant that many women, particularly if they didn't work, were entirely financially dependent on a man, and this dependency didn't create happy marriages. This isn't exactly true. The way the feminists write this up is that women didn't have any

rights or anything until the 70s, really. And that isn't true. The kernel of truth there is that society was oriented much more around the family as the fundamental unit than as the atomized individual. And so as a practical matter, yes, a woman was much less likely to work and live in her own apartment and, you know, just get a thousand cats and have a hundred hookups and not have ties to her family. If you don't have a job and you don't have assets, then, yeah, it's true, you're not going to be taking out huge lines of credit or anything like that. But it was, it's not because women were oppressed or there was some targeting of women by society. It's because the society was oriented in a different way, a different way that maybe just

coincidentally, it coincided with everybody being happier. Frieden found in her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique, middle-class American women who were living the suburban dream of husbands and housewifery were f***in miserable. In the 1950s, the average age of marriage for women was falling, and the number of children they were having was rising. In order to roll back on the relative social autonomy of women in the 1930s and 1940s, post-war American culture had begun to relentlessly focus on the idea that fulfillment for middle-class women meant being a housewife. For working-class women, of course, they were just meant to be the middle-class women's nannies, housekeepers, and helpmates. But even with the labor-saving technology of dishwashers, washing machines.

What is that little snide remark? She goes... And there was this idea, after everyone was extremely miserable from the Great Depression and this terrible war and social decay of the... Late 20s, really, into the 1940s. Then Americans decided they wanted to just get married and have a good life and be happy. It's not as though there were some law pass that said, Okay, now all you middle class women, you have to get married and have a good life. No, they chose to do that because it was better and nicer. And then she says, but not those working class women didn't get to do that. Well, hold on, I thought you were just telling me that what the middle class did was terrible and made them miserable.

So then why are you simultaneously complaining that the working class didn't do it? It's not as though there were some law that said the working class can't get married and have this life. There was the practical reality that in the lower classes, women had to go out and work in public as well. But notice the little slate of hand here. Oh, things were absolutely terrible for these bourgeois middle-class women who got to make a home. And the poor working-class women didn't even get to do that. Well, I thought there was witchism. It's all just terrible. We're all just going to complain about everything.

Sounds like feminism to me. That's not funny. Still, the suburban wives of America were not satisfied. Freedom identified high rates of depression, dissatisfaction, and dependence on barbiturists. Women being forced into a life where they were denied autonomy and the use of all of their mental faculty, was decimating their mental health. Desimating their mental health. Which is why now, after feminism,

they're much more medicated, much more applied with these drugs, right? Yeah. Though the trad wives of 2023 talk about men being in control of the household finances like it's a charitable act. Oh no, my stupid lady brain can't cook with Texas. It's a hugely dangerous thing to do.

I very much do so ask permission to spend any kind of money, even a dollar, I will ask. According to women's aid, nearly a third... I've got to talk to a lease about that. She shouldn't ask about a dollar. She said, she doesn't ask about a dollar. The relationship was controlled by the perpetrator. A quarter report that their partner did not have.

She's like, do you know in a third of cases of spousal abuse, loosely defined? They would say that their husband controlled the finances. So what you're telling me is that in the vast majority of cases, the finances were shared and were not. She's saying there's just no connection here between. Did you know that in 2% of cases? Well, right, that doesn't. That doesn't prove your point at all. I think it kind of suggests the opposite of your point.

A quarter of cases, they report that partners did not let them have money for things during their relationship. So in three quarters, they did. So in two-thirds, they didn't have to do. So the vast majority in all of these cases contradict your argument. Giving up your financial autonomy and placing it in the hands of your partner is highly risky if things do indeed go wrong. If you've ever spent time on Tradwife TikTok, you'll notice a certain irony that despite

rejecting modern womanhood, its advocates love nothing more than appropriating the language of feminism in order to advance anti-feminist goals. Because men and women are so different and that is okay. We as women just need to learn that that is okay. Stepping into your feminine side is okay. Being a mother is okay. Once more, this dresses up being... That's not the language of feminism.

No. Feminism says quite the opposite. Feminism says, as this woman is saying now, the only virtues that really matter, that really have value, are masculine virtues. I'm a man. Jerry, I'm a man. Yeah, housewifery, yeah, whatever. I'm going to make a whole long video making fun of it.

It's fine, okay, whatever. But it's not nearly as important as what the men do. And all the things that women traditionally do, yeah, all this feminine value. No, it's not nearly as important as what the men do. And what the, that's always been the feminist line. The conservative line is, no, women have something different that is very valuable. Licitly submissive to your husband as an act of individualist liberation. But the simple truth is that if it were possible for men and women to be socially equal but financially unequal,

the tradwife trend wouldn't be popular with reactionaries and the far right. The far right into normal people. ...voluntarily surrendering their autonomy by presenting it as an aspirational lifestyle, which makes it so popular, with conservatives, misogynists, white nationalists, and religious fundamentalists. I love here, she goes, perpetuating these ideas in the popular culture,

you're encouraging people to fall into these behaviors and ideologies. That's interesting. Do transgenderism. Because what I've been told about transgenderism is that... No, no, it makes no difference if young people are being bombarded with transgenderism. Transgender ideas in the classroom from the White House on TikTok, on all of social media, in the movies, on TV. No, no, that's not going to increase rates of transgender identity.

No, that's purely biological. That's a matter of individual choice and autonomy. But what? If a young girl sees a TikTok of a happy wife, that's going to ruin her life by drawing her into this cult of normality. Wife material. I had to chop and screw her mind a little bit. I was playing like operation with her brain. The Tradwife trend sits in the middle of an online content network drawing together different subcultures, movements and interests. Its focus on homemaking connects to other lifestyle content like recipes, interior decor, skincare, soft life and homesteading, which is like farming but made aesthetic. Its interest in marriage and relationships, obviously, links to dating, psychology and self-help.

And its rigid belief in fixed gender roles, its rejection of feminism and liberal, left-wing, or progressive values, and its emphasis on Christianity, means that it has lent a feminine veneer to conservative, far-right and white nationalist ideologies. One thing that comes up again and again is this idea of women submitting to their husbands as a form of submission to God. to respect your husband. It's biblical. It's in the Bible. You treat your husband as the head of the household and obey him. It's a sacrifice, but it is a sacrifice well worth it. And this is meant to be a reciprocal relationship. You, as a woman, don't have to feel degraded by submitting to your husband because the premise is that his religious beliefs stop him from behaving badly. You want your wife to follow you, be a man and follow Jesus and give her a reason to.

Hmm. Only we had any history of religion. religious men wielding their power to abuse those more vulnerable than them. I'm surrounded by idiots. Hold on, put a pause there. I love how it says these religious men. Well, hold on. All of the women who are going on TikTok here, they're speaking specifically about Christian husbands.

But then what happens? She says, well, what about these other religious men? She goes to some bizarre cults that have nothing to do with Christianity. What about that? Well, there are all sorts of religions. Satanism is a kind of religion. It's an anti-religion. Everybody has a kind of a religion in that everybody,

he's got to serve somebody. So you've got to drill down a little bit more. And what the Drad wives are saying is that, yes, we follow the Bible. We're Christian, and it says that wives ought to submit to their husbands. But don't forget the other part that this feminist is missing. It says husbands love your wives. As Christ loves his church, what does that kind of love look like? Well, it looks like the kind of love that would be battered and scourged and crucified for God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him might not perish but have everlasting life. That is a sacrificial love that this feminist seems to be totally, totally neglecting, because, of course, it undercuts her argument. Like with the example of finances, the idea of

submission is that by giving up her independence, autonomy, and power, a woman will be taken care of by a good and godly man. But the idea of a husband loving his wife, so does that undercut the idea of independence and maximizing individual autonomy, because to love is to will the good other person. And to love one's wife, as Christ loves his church, is to pour out everything for that person. So, yes, the wife gives up some of her independence when she enters into a marriage. The husband also gives up some of, most of his independence when he enters into a marriage. That's what marriage is. He serves Christ, but only one person is scrubbing out the toilet.

But the influence of fundamentalist religion extends far beyond whatever private arrangements a couple may have as part of a household. Tadwife culture is dominated by aggressively anti-abortion, anti-birth control, and anti-sex views. Put a point, that's not true. The first two are true, yeah, it's dominated by not slaughtering babies, and it's dominated by not withholding yourself from your spouse. Not engaging in sex as merely a way to satisfy your own individual pleasure sensors, but as a way to give to your spouse because the husband and the wife become one flesh and their love is so real that it becomes another person in the act of sex. That is pretty amazing, isn't it? That's the traditional view of sex. The modern liberal feminist view of sex is that sex is just about titillating yourself

for a little bit and feeling good for a little and then moving on and doing whatever you want individually. Whatever. I do what I want. And aesthetics of wellness influences, tradwife, religious and conservative advocates have taken to TikTok in order to push disinformation about birth control. This can range from falsely calling the pill a car synogenic to hyping out the rhythm or pull-out methods on social media. Just to be clear, these are less forms of contraception than they are playing pregnancy roulette.

Put a pause there. So the ignorance of feminists and liberals should not astound me anymore, but it does. But when they call it the pull-out method in a very vulgar way, what they might be referring to as natural family planning, which is a natural way of understanding a woman's, menstrual cycle, and it's practiced by a lot of Catholics, and it's extraordinarily effective. Extraordinary.

It's effective north of 98% and it's based on a much more sophisticated kind of medical science than whatever the libs say is inject a bunch of hormones into your body, and it definitely won't have any effect. It definitely won't increase the likelihood that you develop breast cancer or any other kinds of cancers, even though there have actually been studies to the effect that shows that it dramatically can increase the likelihood of those cancers. No, no, no, ignore that kind of science, just do it, and that way you can have meaningless sex with people who don't like you, and that will make you more fulfilled, right? Right? Mm, don't think so. As well as celebrating the overturn of Roe versus Wade, some tradwives have allied themselves with a conservative right

by taking aggressively transphobic stances, contrasting trans, queer, and even just feminist women to their authentic, natural and politically reactionary model of femininity. Yeah, what happens when you contrast those two things? some of the big Tradwife social media accounts. One group is happy and the other one's miserable. Anti-Mask content. To claiming that feminism and LGBT rights movements are part of a depopulation agenda.

There's an overlap, therefore, between the Tradwife trend and white nationalism. This overlap can be implicit. What? What? What? What? What? What? What? The only tie-in I can find between any of the things she's talking about and white nationalism is the origin of Planned Parenthood.

And the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger writing to one of her directors, program directors, saying we wouldn't want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population. That is not only part of a depopulation agenda, but it's explicitly part of a white supremacist or white nationalist, whatever you want to call it, agenda. But that's on the side of the liberals and the feminists and the contrasievers. Thanks. And of course, all of these modern sexual ideas are part of a depopulation agenda. There's nothing secret about this. One of the most important books in the late 20th, century. It was a book called The Population Bomb by Paul Erlich. And the thesis of this book in the early

70s was that we have to cut population growth. And we have to do that through contraception and through abortion. And if people won't do it voluntarily, we have to do it coercively. And these policies were then adopted in India and China and had disastrous results. And they're still being promoted today, even though it's BS because since the 1970s, the world population has doubled. Malinutrition has fallen to an all-time low. But it's still being promoted by Bill Gates. It's still being promoted by over, it's still being promoted by some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in our whole culture. Is it a tinfoil hack conspiracy theory if the people promoting the conspiracy openly espouse it? I don't think so.

Taking place through aesthetics. This might be using adverts of white nuclear families from the 1950s to stand in for the universal ideal marriage, or contrasting the ideal tradwife to the stereotypical boss bitch, who's always associated with hip-hop culture and almost always black. This reinforces the idea that the ideal, most elegant, and most desirable model of femininity is white European. One of her examples was a black guy. What's she talking about? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Feminine, more aggressive and more in need of civilizing.

But the connections can also be more explicit. One mumfluencer, called Wife with a Purpose, issued a white baby challenge, calling on women to have as many white babies as possible. This is an idea central to neo-Nazism. Its adherents justify their violent and hateful ideologies by talking about the need to secure a future for white children and making sure that the beauty of the white Aryan woman, their words, does not perish from the earth. But how does this work?

Because as I just pointed out, one of her examples of a traditional married couple was a black guy with a white woman. And she got very upset because the black guy was telling jokes about how he had to go in and re-engineer his wife's brain. So how does that job? If she's saying that white identitarianism is at the heart of the tradwife concept, then how does that jive with one of the handful of examples that she's using of traditional marriages in here? It doesn't work at all.

She's just trying to pick anything she can. She's just grasping at straws. And so she finds some comment from some woman on responding to Steve King and says, See, it's all about Nazism or whatever. But that's been totally absent from her entire commentary. pushed by white nationalists. If modernity is defined by diversity, both of lifestyles and of ethnicity, then the tradwife marks the return to an era of social and racial conformity. Well, sure, put a pause. If my grandma had wheels should be a wagon, but I don't really see how that's the premise here.

The defining feature of modernity is not diversity. I mean, certainly the modern culture creates an idol out of diversity. I'm not saying that that's not part of it at all. But I think the defining feature of modernity is decadence. an idea of decay, an idea of merely consuming the cultural resources that have been built up over many generations, over centuries, rather than adding to them, rather than building things, we merely consume. We do not produce children. We just live for ourselves and go on fun trips and buy nice handbags or whatever people do with their money. We do not ask what we can do for our country. We simply ask, what can my country do for me? We don't consider the common good in our politics, we merely consider our own individual benefit. We don't consider the good of the

spouse or the good of the other. We merely consider our own individual autonomy, which she's describing. Those are all features of the libs. And she's trying to reduce that and say, it's all racist or whatever. But no, the defining feature is just a hyper focus on the self, the gratification of one's lowest appetites. And that is bad. And that's something that the trad wives are reacting against. Agency aren't usually so keen on submitting themselves to a life of reproductive captivity in the interest of furthering racism. Hence, tradwives. White nationalism, anti-choice ideology, and religious fundamentalism aside, put a pause there. I just love this idea of the white nationalism and the anti-choice ideology. Black people are disproportionately the victims of abortion

in the United States. In many states, they constitute the majority of abortions. This is not an accident. This was by design, the early proponents of abortion, specifically targeted black people. And it's a genocide. In New York City, more black babies are murdered in the womb than are born each year. The most dangerous place for a black person in New York is in his mother's own womb. She said, well, this is about white nationalism. Well, if the white supremacy, keeping the black man down, what are you talking about? These would be very poorly strategic white nationalists if they're opposing abortion because nothing advances the white supremacist agenda. quite like killing all the black people, which is happening right now through abortion.

Whether the tradwife trend is an empowering reclamation of domestic labor, or just regular old sexism made palatable TikTok aesthetics. Just look at the kind of men who approve of it. I don't like girls who are over sociable. I don't like girls who know lots of people. I don't like girls who are always out. As someone who, you know, is totally down with looking that girls have naked on Instagram, it's great.

But here are two men, both accused of sex crimes, by the way, who have made money by sexualizing women. They've crafted their professional personas around having sex with lots of different women, but here they are celebrating tradwives and denigrating modern women. And that isn't because they want to treat women as a whole better, but because it serves as an excuse to treat lots of women much worse. She admits in the very first part that these guys, like Andrew Tate, they're not participants in a traditional marriage.

And she's saying, yeah, but these guys also are criticizing modern feminists. culture and they're also admiring the trad wife culture. Yeah, that's true. I don't need to participate in something to have a point of view about it. I'm a human being with rational faculties and powers of perception, so I can perceive something. I can know something about cancer without having to have cancer. But what she's trying to do there is then say these men are standing in for what this trad wife phenomenon means. But no, if you wanted to talk about a man who is participating in the phenomenon of trad wives, you would find a traditional husband. But she's not going to point to any traditional husbands because she knows that traditional husbands have great lives

and are doing the right thing and are making their wives generally happy or as happy as can be and they're not so easily attacked. They're not the good girls or whatever. That's not about embracing tradition, respect and dignity. That's just old-fashioned misogyny. Okay, so while I think all these things explain the political impact of the tradwife trend, they don't explain why it's so appealing in the first place. The answer is simple. Modern life, in many ways, sucks. It's hard to make the case in an era of low wages, high anxiety, precarious work, and extortionate rents that women are liberated just through entering the labor market.

So she's approaching this through a Marxist lens, and she's looking at all of these aspects of modern misery-inducing society as merely consequences of capital and labor and economics. which is neglecting here, skyrocketing rates of hopelessness, skyrocketing rates of identity disorders. And that is not distillable down to merely economic consequences. We're made in the image and likeness of God. We have dreams and desires.

We have intuitions of things beyond this material world. And we long for God, ultimately. And so what would explain this misery? Well, it might be, I think, the fact that we have a God-shaped hole in our heart that's not being filled, it might be that as we turn away from God whose name is I am that I am, we're left with a pathetic question, which is who am I? And we try to seek out all sorts of absurd identities to fill that. I'm going to be a playboy. I'm going to be a boss woman. I'm going to be the opposite sex. I'm going to be this, that, or the other thing. But that's always going to

leave us unhappy. We then, as a result of that, have a breakdown in society and traditional community in the civil society. And so that takes away our roles. And because man is a political animal, we take much of our identity from our roles in society. This is why in ancient Greece, for instance, Socrates chose to drink the hemlock rather than to be ostracized. Because to be ostracized, to leave one's community is to lose one's identity. That's the traditional understanding. We've lost that understanding today. And so people, even when they're living in a community, they don't understand what their role is in that community. They don't understand what their identity is. Yes, there are some economic problems, but that doesn't even come close to explaining

it. It does explain why the liberals and the feminists keep running their heads against a wall, why they don't understand why they're so miserable. It's because life is about more than money. Now that leaning in a loan won't make you a girl boss. The relative economic security of previous decades, a job for life, housing you could afford, pensions, and a debt-free life has been obliterated in the slash and burn of neoliberalism. If you're under 45 or you don't own a house, the future can feel bleat. You add to that the experiences that many people have dating, like being ghosted or being treated like you're disposable. It's no wonder that people feel dissatisfied, intensely so, with the status quo.

There is a longing for care, for order, for security and certainty. And the fantasy being sold by tradwives is that all those things are in reach for women. It's not a fantasy. It's real, it's a real baby, you can do it. And that's the thing. The lifestyle being sold is a fantasy. It's fictitious. As my colleague, Moia Lothian McLean, has argued... Whatever helps you sleep at night, honey.

...should really show images of domestic labor. It depicts domestic leisure. Personally, I believe I'm not meant to work. I'm meant to do this all day. It's like an extended session of playing dress-up. You get to glide around, wearing floaty skirts and dresses, organizing your snack cupboard and baking bread. And look, that's my idea of a nice day, too.

Who doesn't like an opportunity to feel gorgeous? and eat nice things. You can do it. You can do it. It's within reach. You just have to give up your feminism. A lifestyle of skin care and sourdough, taking the path of least resistance and doing so aesthetically. Path of least resistance. Put a pause there. Path of least resistance? You are resisting right now. The whole culture resists having a good traditional life. You know, the real giveaway here that this woman's liberalism or leftism is a little uncertain, and that's a little shaky, is if she doesn't like what the trad wives are doing,

why doesn't she just say, okay, you do you, you live your life, what does it bother me? What does it, what does it bother you? That's what the lips always say to us. What does it bother you if a man, if a huge dude walks into the girl's changing room? What is it your problem? What do you care? Get out of my bedroom. Get out of my... In this case, this woman actually is sticking her nose into the private home of these trad wives, these trad wives who say, I want to live primarily with. within my home and within the home economy. So not in public life. So what does it bother this woman? It bothers her because I think she knows deep down that these women are onto something and they have

something that she doesn't have, that she desperately wants, and she envies them, which is a natural reaction to have, but then one should follow that to its logical conclusion, which is, huh, the life I'm living isn't working out very well. And the life those people are living seems to be pretty nice. And rather than merely write it off as a fantasy and then whine for 15 minutes on a YouTube video about it, maybe I ought to consider that more deeply, try it out, and maybe I could have a better life too. Literally, the workers' share is declining relative to asset wealth. People seek comfort in images of serenity, relaxation, quiet, and nourishment. People just seek serenity.

Whether they're trad wives or Instagram babes is tap in to that human desire for respite and channel it into something else. So for your typical wellness influencer, that'll be Wu-flavored consumerism. And for tradwives, it's an ideological insistence that if women make themselves dependent on men, they can find the ease and fulfillment they've been longing for. Women are dependent on men and men are dependent on women. That's reality. No man is an island and tire unto himself.

Emotional nourishment and, yeah, family life, which isn't predicated on the patriarchal domination of women. Work won't set women free. And neither will be ruled by men. It's freedom, equality, and reciprocal care that will. Yes, you have to give up some of your individual autonomy. And the false promise of liberalism is that you can hold on to your individual autonomy. You can be totally independent, but no man is totally independent. We are social creatures.

You will be dependent on a man some way or another. Are you going to be dependent on a man that you work for in middle management at the widget factory? He doesn't care at all about you in the moment you're not useful to him. he's going to throw you out the door? Or would you rather be dependent on a man who loves you, who is your husband, with whom you become one flesh and build a family together? It's what everybody understood for all of human history when people were a lot happier than they are right now.

Maybe we ought to consider going back to one of those ideas. Maybe we ought to consider that those old-timey people in the past had a little bit of wisdom. I'm Michael Knowles. See you next time. With USAA, you can bundle your auto and home and save up to 10%. Tap the banner to learn more and get a quote at usaa.com slash bundle. Restrictions apply.