There are two possibilities as to where to place “tradwives” – traditional wives – on the Internet. One, they either unwittingly joined the manosphere. Two, they’re a part of what seems to be a growing femverse, all of whom have either eschewed feminism, or claim to be cheekily playing up their antifeminism, albeit subversively. It’s complicated.

Tradwives are arguably the ground zero of a growing coalition of Internet creators throwing a wedge into feminist discourse. For the fortunate ones who aren’t terminally online, Tradwives, are a brand of Internet personalities who build clout off of being a traditional, beautiful, 1950s wife. Look no further than Nara Aziza Smith, whose viral video in which she made cereal from scratch for her toddlers’ breakfast, hypnotised millions in simultaneous disbelief and awe. Nara Smith is a model, who is famous for cooking in a modular white marble kitchen, her produce and food are also a part of the aesthetic. She does it in a full face of makeup, coiffed hair, lace and/or satin dressing gowns and wooden spatulas and ceramic bowls that make her hands look impossibly delicate.

Some speculate that she’s a psyop for Mormon propaganda. Others say she’s sincerely a traditional mom and wife. Feminists are mad at her for glamorising conservatism. And yet nobody can take their eyes off her reels, for they are beautiful and clean and whole.

On the Indian side of the Internet, things get a lot weirder. Tradwife content exists in the form of women washing their husbands’ feet and drinking the water, among others. The comments either valorize the woman as a “real” feminist, or a real woman, unlike the feminists.

Irrespective of which geographical tradwife locale you end up in, the overarching pattern is the same: tradwives are often conventionally attractive women who perform matrimonial bliss ceremoniously, either by performing rituals for their husbands, or by cooking or cleaning up after them – albeit aesthetically. But the tradwife phenomenon doesn’t represent a conservative strand of feminism (is there such a thing?). Instead, it is the ultimate right-wing manosphere fantasy.

The manosphere is a well-established space: it consists of men’s rights activists, incels and pick-up artists, that is, men who specialise in teaching other men how to “pick-up” women. What they all have in common is a shared resentment of women who don’t oblige their desires or fantasies – in other words, women who may not be attracted to them, or who express any kind of independence of agency. The manosphere reveres a specific type of “alpha” man: Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Elon Musk, and closer home, Beer Biceps, Fin-fluencers and startup founders. These men aren’t always politically united, but they’re always presenting themselves as symbols of strength and authority: physically, intellectually, and financially. With the manosphere having persisted for so long, it’s only a matter of time before the yin to its yang comes along: the tradwife. She’s the alpha male’s perfect companion and the feminist’s perfect foil. She’s not a “Stacy,” as the incels put it, because she’s chaste, loyal, and submissive. She’s not a feminist because she’s relinquished her independence and has fully embraced domesticity.

And so suddenly, she is everywhere. As one self-proclaimed tradwife told The New Yorker, they yearn for the postwar period, where the housewife was celebrated. Her childhood Barbie Dreamhouse, she says, was the first setting for her “trad-wifery”. As The New Yorker went on to note, many content creators find themselves rewarded by the algorithm for dressing up – being pretty, peachy and perfect – while performing their trad-wifery. It’s not far-fetched to ask: does the algorithm, primed as it is with manosphere overload, inadvertently push its ideology onto women? At what point on the momfluencer/wellness guru pipeline does one end up in trad-wife territory?

Max Read, a journalist covering social media, told The Cut, “Social networks are specifically designed to engage people in exactly this way: through the performance of political and social identity. Putting that together as a lifestyle that you show over the course of multiple videos? It’s perfect.”

The fact that tradwives seem to splice ideology into unfamiliar terrains shows how feminism itself, as a progressive movement, became distorted beyond recognition. To be clear, tradwives aren’t worth scrutinising because cooking, cleaning or being a homemaker, is inherently unfeminist. It’s that these activities – and this class status – are systemically unpaid. Tradwife content cuts to the heart of what the Internet does to feminism: it makes a beautiful, mesmerising thing, and challenges you to criticise it for being unhelpful or even harmful. To say tradwives are setting feminism back sounds like a truism, but it’s not a critique that sticks because it doesn’t address the root cause: paid labour. It may have liberated some women from financial dependence, but not nearly all, and it hasn’t ultimately dismantled anything. If anything, labour is hard, gruelling, unrewarding and strenuous – doubly so for women who feel cheated out of their promised liberation because they have to consistently perform both paid and unpaid work. It also explains the rise of the personal essay boom on women being disillusioned with feminism in general – and opting out by marrying rich, having a homestead, and creating content about how blissful it all is.

The moral of the story, probably, is that we should have listened to the Marxist feminists.. They’ve been saying it for a while: capitalism is sustained by the unpaid care and labour of women. Women who “choose” to work employ underpaid women to do the labour they’ve had to abandon. It’s hard and moreover, it morally compromises feminists to ignore the feminism of poorer, more marginalised women.

Tradwives speak an implicit truth: being feminist doesn’t serve them. The feminism of movements, solidarity and collective franchise isn’t the one plastered across magazine spreads, billboards and best sellers — instead it’s the neoliberal, alienating kind of feminism that’s sold to us the most. Quite clearly, this latter model hasn’t worked. It hasn’t made women powerful or free.

If neoliberal feminism was anyway about individual rather than collective empowerment, it’s not too far off from what tradwives have tried to achieve with their own lives. Tradwives are just the internet avatars of women who make what sociologist Deniz Kandiyoti called the “patriarchal bargain.” This is when women strategically align themselves close to the power centres — men — to acquire more bargaining power and agency as a result of that proximity. In the process, they win greater autonomy by collaborating, as it were, with the enforcers of the patriarchy. They may throw other women under the bus, or perhaps not even consider other women in their goals — just as Lean In feminism also taught us to. Couldn’t tradwives then, by definition, be called empowered?

Here’s how the radical feminist Andrea Dworkin put it in Right Wing Women: “In the world men seem to exercise power, but all of that comes to nothing in the face of the lust provoked by a woman. Whatever he does to her, she is still more powerful than he is because he wants her, he needs her, he is being driven by a desire for her. In the sexual woman-superior model, power is articulated as being intrinsically female because power is redefined beyond reason, beyond coherence: as if power is in the corpse that draws the vultures.”

In an atmosphere of growing authoritarianism, where the heterosexual nuclear family is the site of asserting nationalism, identity, and racial/ethnic/caste/religious borders, women’s reproductive and sexual agency is tightly regulated. Under this new reactionary regime, it’s tough for those who break away from the nuclear family. Those who conform and submit, on the other hand, reap greater rewards: they win security, safety, approval, and power. Tradwives, as the cis-het perfectly domesticated model women, thus win the approval of other women who don’t buy into the harder, more gruelling path toward individual emancipation. Indeed, tradwives dovetail neatly into this fascist dystopia: their emphasis on tidiness, order, and homogeneity are aesthetic dogwhistles. As Eviane Leidig notes in the book The Women of the Far Right, the tradlife, as it were, is a return to traditional, homogenous gender norms in which White womanhood (or in the Indian scenario, Savarna womanhood) is the gold standard, and is ensconced in ideas of cleanliness through segregation.

We shouldn’t be surprised that tradwives have become a thing — it’s arguably a natural consequence of pulling and stretching the definition of feminism so much that it rips at the seams, and everyone holding comes apart with a piece they get to claim for themselves. The collective is broken when ‘Lean In,’ ‘Barbie,’ TikTok, and other shallow empowerment schemes promise power and prestige rather than freedom and change.

As The Cut put it, “What is irksome about Instagram tradlife isn’t the question of “How does she do it all?” It’s that the visual appeal overrides whatever ideology lives in the background — and that’s the point.” Being beautiful and submissive pays dividends not only in the form of approval from the men in their real lives, but also the men who have taken over the Internet, and generously pay in the most valuable form of currency online: attention. What could be more empowering, today, than that?