"Propaganda I'm Not Falling For"
For Gen Z, #tradlife is more fun than #feminism
Mariel Cooksey is the executive director of the Canadian Institute for Far Right Studies. Her work focuses on Christianity and far-right extremism in the United States and Canada, with an emphasis on anti-Semitic and “Radical traditionalist” Catholic groups. She's also done quite a bit of research on Gen Z's attraction to the tradwife lifestyle, which she wrote about for Political Research Associates.
Zoomers’ foray into tradwifery signals a massive change in the movement. Not only is this ideology becoming more mainstream with younger, Right-leaning female audiences, it’s becoming integrated into Gen Z internet culture, taking on timely cultural trends, political views, and concepts of gender. Tradwifery is a complicated movement, entangled in a difficult history of patriarchal religiosity, racism, and misogyny, but aspiring Zoomer tradwives are actively simplifying it, transforming tradwife ideology into fun, musical video bites, easily digested by their followers in 30 seconds or less.
I first got in touch with Mariel when I was researching my piece on Gen Z women's politics for Bustle, and I'm so excited to share more of her insights today.
Central to the conservative branding of womanhood is a demonization of feminism. Despite the fact that feminism is why writers for right-wing lady mag Evie can be denouncing feminism in a public forum in the first place. Why is it so seemingly easy for MAGA influencers to get around this paradox?
I saw a tweet recently that stuck with me. It was in response to a Republican influencer tweet asking why MAGA women always seemed happier than liberal women, and someone responded that being a feminist was hard and often painful. It requires you to be aware, at all times, of the crushing reality of patriarchy. I think this is true. Being a feminist is a promise and an oath of responsibility to the sisterhood you belong to as a woman, that you will fight oppression alongside them, and that can be a huge burden to take on. As Audre Lorde once said, “I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.”
My thinking starts here because I can see how it would be easy for young women to turn away from this responsibility. Not only would you have to take on the burden of that knowledge, but you would also have to fight the considerable meme-ification and mainstreaming of violent misogyny and anti-women politics in your own generation. Gen Z in particular are facing the derealization of politics in North America, and what I mean by that is that young people appear to see politics and political issues as just another piece of online content to be consumed, and not something that’s real and actually affects them and their community.
This started with the original wave of the alt-right in ~2015 with Richard Spencer, who’s main goal was to shift the Overton Window on what was appropriate to talk about (or more importantly, joke about) in the political sphere. Gen Z men have all but grown up on this wave of Pepe memes and Joe Rogan slowly normalizing far-right politics on his podcast, until we get to today where a President can be a rapist and invite Manosphere comedians to make racist jokes at one of his rallies. The alt-right was completely successful in their goal, and the result is a generation of kids who grew up online who see even the most egregious political opinions as jokes.
I was so struck by how prescient your 2021 piece was - and depressed by how much worse things have become since then. In 2021, when I first started writing about Hannah Neeleman, she had under 200K followers. Now she has 10 million. And 40% of Gen Z women voted for Trump in 2024 (as compared to 33% in 2020). While certainly the increase of trad propaganda can't be the ONLY reason for this uptick, I do wonder what you think about its real world impact.
Well, you have a generation (now voting bloc) of young women who have grown up in this online, de-realized political space, still facing the same anxieties I talk about in my 2021 PRA piece, surrounded by male peers who are spouting Manosphere politics and now experiencing a mainstreaming of tradwifery in a more apolitical way by influencers like Nara Smith who is clearly a fundamentalist (fundie) influencer, but doesn’t reveal her political leanings to stay advertiser friendly. TikTok then gives these young women the opportunity to form parasocial relationships with these influencers and imagine themselves building their own brand of cute dresses and nice meals which pays their bills and gets them brand freebies. The mainstream media has also normalized this by posting/including these influencers in their publications, giving them even more reach and framing them as enviable celebrities.
Is Nara Smith A Trad Wife?
Nara Smith is a young, thin, beautiful woman making beautiful food for her beautiful husband and their three beautiful children in their beautiful home. By momfluencer standards, hers is hardly a radical platform.
This fits into the generational stereotype that a majority of Gen Z feel like they can be influencers or micro-influencers and relieve some of their economic anxieties that way. What’s missing from this discourse (of course) is that successful tradwife influencers are rich, and often have help raising their kids, much like the first wave of wealthy, white feminists. They advertise themselves as working class wives, but that’s just more propaganda.
I mean, I can certainly imagine being a young person today, looking around me, and wanting to sort of give up (and give in to trad propaganda).
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Young women still have agency and want to make money, and they’re trying to figure out how to do that in an increasingly anti-intellectual political world that is progressively pushing them out of power and stripping them of their autonomy. Tradwifery is certainly a viable niche if you can be successful in it, and because so many influencers have worked to de-politicize the movement, I think a lot of young women are supporting it without even realizing they're being propagandized. I figured this out when I saw the intense shock and backlash from so many young women on TikTok who realized, after the election, that Nara Smith and her husband are Trump supporters. This proves that the Overton Window shift for women is working.
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Being engaged in politics, like being engaged in feminism, requires a lot of work, a lot of responsibility, and a lot of grieving, and I’m not sure a large portion of young people want to deal with it. Like us young millennials, they’ve already grown up in a world where they’ve been constantly hammered by older generations to “save us” from climate collapse and fascist politics and everything else, and we’re clearly seeing a regression – at least among Gen Z men – as a way to escape this perceived burden.
I agree so hard with all of this. I also think it goes hand-in-hand with the anti-abortion backlash that’s been happening for several years now.
If you get pregnant, that opens the door to an established identity. You will get a lot of admiration and flattery and affection (along with some very particular hatred.) You will get some special treatment.
You also now have a purpose to organize your life around (at least for a few years) if you haven’t happened to find an external one. No need to go soul-searching.
And exactly, as you point out, you don’t have to reckon with the outside world that hates “careerwomen,” feminists, etc. You don’t have to cope with misogynist or predatory superiors and co-workers, fight for recognition and salary, the absence of mentors, etc.
Who wouldn’t want to opt out sometimes and just get knocked up?
And all this without yet comprehending the incalculable loss of freedom and agency that comes (for most) with parenthood. It’s absolutely tragic.
It’s really interesting for me as a cis-gendered women in that I play at parts of prescribed feminity. I love to wear styled 1940s dresses, wedges and makeup. I also have most of my head buzzed, wild colors, and very obvious and large tattoos. The amount of men who comments on my appearance and tell me my hair and tattoos “just ruin the whole package”. The look of shock when I tell them I don’t create my body and looks to make myself more fuckable for them. I love that my hair style in particular turns these men off and they’re so loud about it because I know who to avoid.