"Trad Wives Be Like": This Woman Is Absolutely Roasting The Alt-Right Movement That Wants To See All Women Become Stay-At-Home Wives
In case you're not familiar, a "trad wife" ("trad" here is short for "traditional") is a woman who devotes her life to submitting to her husband and taking care of their home. Unlike the typical stay-at-home mom, wife, or even girlfriend, trad wives subscribe to conservative and far-right ideology.
Overwhelmingly white, trad wives believe in strict gender roles and can often be heard in their videos bemoaning the fact that all women can't (or just plain don't want to) live exactly the way that they do. According to them, they are living the one right way, and the rest of us are hopelessly lost. Unless we buy their course...
To be perfectly clear, as a feminist, I think it's fine for women to go to work outside or stay in the home. But saying there's only one right way for women to live? That's a red flag in my book.
Trad wife content has a glossy aesthetic sheen reminiscent of the 1950s (or The Stepford Wives). Trad wives twirl through their (often suspiciously new-looking) homes in A-line dresses, kneading bread dough or making jam from scratch without a single hair out of place.
But look beneath the pretty surface, and you're likely to find antiquated ideas about gender roles, Christian fundamentalism, white nationalism, and other regressive hallmarks of the alt-right.
We're living through a trad wife content boom, but other creators like Tyler Bender (@tyler.benderr) are pointing out the dangers of this content — and being pretty freaking hilarious in the process.
Tyler is a 21-year-old from Colorado who's been going viral for her satirical send-ups of the trad wife movement.
In her faux-trad wife videos, Tyler dons a frilly dress to deliver gems like, "Because I'm better than you, I choose to make my children fresh bread every day. I tell them as a wife and mother, it's the yeast I could do." (You butter believe she goes heavy on the puns.)
Later in the same video, she deadpans, "In all seriousness, if you don't raise your kids like I do, they'll probably be felons and be ugly." (I feel like every trad wife video I've ever seen has said this without saying it, so it's delightful to finally hear it out loud.)
In another video she says her lobotomy was "a no-brainer", and in yet another, she says, "I woke up extra early to make breakfast for my 455-month-old husband." Throughout all her trad wife-style videos, Tyler's face alternates between forced joy, suppressed rage, and glassy-eyed dazes.
Several of her trad wife parodies have been viewed over a million times.
She doesn't just poke fun at the never-ending drudgery these creators often glamorize. She also has a feel for the way they try to frame their regressive lifestyle as a rebellion against the modern world. Tyler starts one video by pouting, "It's never been harder than now to be a trad wife."
"The whole world has rallied against us, telling us that we need to be CEOs, doctors, lawyers, and yet we still choose to rebel. The only software I know about is my oven mitt."
But I think my favorite is when she quips, "I hate when people say women belong in the kitchen, because how am I supposed to clean the rest of the house?"
I also love when she drones on and on in voiceover about making things from scratch when we can plainly see she's using store-bought products.
And in the comments, people are loving Tyler's satirical take on the trad movement:
However, Tyler's not just interested in cracking jokes. She has also created a longer YouTube video essay breaking down her problems with the trad wife movement — starting with the fact that they really aren't as "trad" as they might like you to think.
"My problem with trad wife content is not that these are women choosing a different path than I do," Tyler says. "Matter of fact, a lot of them are on the same path. Because they're really not just stay-at-home wives and mothers. They're content creators. So basically, their day in the life looks pretty much the fucking same as mine does."
And she's careful to clarify that she's not making fun of stay-at-home moms in general. She's mocking trad wives in particular because of the ideology that they represent. She says, "My problem is that trad wives and this kind of content is about submitting to your husband."
"It's about taking down women who choose feminism, so much filthy stuff outside of being a stay-at-home mom, and that's not who I'm making fun of."
Tyler also gets into women's gender roles through history, rightly pointing out that the trad wife ideal of what a wife and mother "traditionally" should be didn't really come into being until the mid-20th century in America. And even then, the June Cleaver-esque trad wife ideal was only accessible to predominantly white and affluent families.
Tyler says, "Women have always been working outside of the household. Women have always had, maybe not excessive autonomy, maybe not the rights that we have today, but for a lot of human history, women have played important roles in society and the economy."
And she has so much more to say. You can watch the full video here:
Tyler told BuzzFeed that she decided to start satirizing trad wife creators because at first, she genuinely thought they were joking. "I initially thought these videos were satirical. When I realized they weren't, I saw an opportunity."
"While I appreciate content about homemaking and stay-at-home mothers, it becomes problematic for me when the messages take a politically-charged turn. As a comedian, my role is to point out the weirdness I see in the world, especially when certain videos spread negative messages or adopt anti-feminist talking points."
