I cannot handle the “trad wife” discourse that has been swirling around online. I don’t even have to tap into the hundreds of think pieces or TikToks with floating heads explaining, excusing, rejecting this “trend” to know what it is and why I hate it. More than the actual content, which I reject simply because crafting personas that co-mingle with the aesthetics of our own repression is delusional to me, but also simply the term “trad” which is a shortening of “traditional” reeks of repression.
Using the word traditional to describe anything lends itself legitimacy. Lines of questioning stop when something is a “tradition”. Why do we do things this way? Well, it’s tradition. It implies others did it before and that means there is something familiar and vetted and therefor acceptable. It also implies a naturalness. It implies an evolution, a linear succession of time. Framing it this way removes responsibility for those implementing this traditional actions. It makes it sound like there is a natural progression forward that is constantly being built upon, and we are either accepting or straying from and rejecting these foundations of experience. In the case of the “trad wife”, the language itself reinforces the repression by saying anything “non-traditional” is outside that natural foundation and is deviating from contributing to that inevitable evolution.
I feel like using the term “tradition” here, also somehow erases history. There are countless example throughout actual history that show us the varied ways humans have lived. From female-run societies, equality in leadership, lineage and education, to genderless or multi-gender spectra cultures. We have already, essentially, done it all (and probably more that just haven’t been uncovered yet because historians have tended to look at ancient societies through their current lens only, so perhaps misinterpreting by categorizing things in a contemporary way.)
I was chatting with my friend who recently wrote an excellent piece about the much-distressing queen of the trad-wives, (she whomst shall not be named but has to do with dance and agriculture), about how really, this type of repression (and it is repression even if the repressed party feels they have agreed to be repressed) is a contemporary crafting. The version we see now where women sacrifice their autonomy to conform to something the see as “traditional” has very little ground to stand on. For example, the Catholic church created our contemporary idea of land ownership and value associated with that land was cleverly made unquestionable by a divine right. This divine right was extended to anything that may also come into possession and what better way to say you also own the thing someone else has than by saying, well I also own that person. Hence, the idea of human property.
That hierarchy was created and whether or not you believe in god, the very nature of it being explained, implemented and enforced proves to me that it’s a construct. No one tells the male seahorse why it has to carry its fertilized embryos, outlining examples of what will happen if it doesn’t, it just does. The need to instruct women and convince them to participate and even romanticize their own repression itself creates the reality that without that instruction, something else would be happening naturally. So there is not inherent tradition, it is simply something else being leverage to gain control.
I suppose that is soothing, to me. Knowing that just because these appear to be choices but no means makes them the only way I can act. I can look at them and examine them and simply watch them float by and choose to be however I actually am. A category is not essential. A rejection does not mean much except I feel like this is another sneaky way to take our attention away from cultivating who we really are and fanning the flames of our inherent power and desire to live in harmony.