I was already glad about the upcoming TikTok ban, but now I have one more reason to be happy about it: the site's minitrend of women "pranking" their husbands by saying, "I can't pay the mortgage this month." The "joke" is that the husband reacts with confusion because his wife doesn't contribute to the house payment. The goal isn't humor, though, but bragging. A woman who posts this content wants us to believe she's such a sexual dynamo she's snagged a man who is willing to pay all her bills. What's ignored is the entire history of women's financial dependence on men, which is actually about men's domination over women, not women's sexual power over men. Or the ways that women who don't have money of their own are so often trapped, abused or abandoned into poverty.
The "can't pay the mortgage" meme is just the latest in a series of social media trends that romanticize female submission to men. There are also "soft girls" and "stay-at-home girlfriends," working the same "too sexy to work" schtick. (The old term for this role, of course, is "kept woman," especially if your sugar daddy has a wife he goes home to after visiting you in his sidepiece apartment.) The biggest of all are the "tradwives": influencers who peddle idyllic images of housewifery, where women's equality is rejected in favor of obsequiousness and exaggerated domesticity. Some tradwives, like Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm, avoid explicit denunciations of feminism, simply presenting their lifestyle as a "choice" among many. Others are more overtly political, putting out rants about how feminists must all be miserable cat ladies. But they all are based on the false promise that self-abasement before men is a woman's happiness.
The ubiquity of this content, especially on TikTok, has created widespread anxiety that this is a real-life trend of everyday women rejecting feminism for "happy housewife" fantasies. In the real world, however, women are not turning their backs on decades of women's progress. The data shows the opposite. More women than ever are embracing financial independence, delaying motherhood, and choosing single life over unsatisfactory relationships. Tradwifes are a silly online fantasy, and in many cases, overt propaganda.
A 2023 study from Pew Research shows that in 45% of marriages, the wife makes as much or more money than her husband. Women on TikTok may pretend that men handle most family finances, but in reality, women do. Most studies show around 90% of women in relationships make the most financial decisions or split that duty in half with a partner. Ironically, part of the reason women dominate family checkbooks is that paying bills is a household chore, and women still unfortunately do far more of those tasks than men. But it shows that the stereotype of the bubbleheaded housewife whose husband gives her an allowance has no relationship to most women's realities. They're far more likely to be the ones signing the mortgage check than their husband.
About half of women are unmarried, which is a record high. Single women are more likely than single men to own their home. Single women without children have as much wealth on average as their male counterparts. Young women complete college at higher rates than young men, with 47% of women ages 25 to 34 having a bachelor's degree, compared to 37% of men that age. The birth rate has hit a record low, largely driven by the collapse in teen pregnancy rates.
There's no real-world tradwife trend. It's better understood as an online fantasy, which attracts so much attention precisely because it's so foreign to people's lived experiences. A not-small amount of traffic on tradwife accounts is driven by hate-watchers or gawkers. Like most reality TV, it's closer to a freak show than an attempt to reflect the average person's experiences. It's very similar to the "big family" trend on social media, where influencers with 8, 10 or a dozen kids get large amounts of traffic because of that WTF factor. It's also not likely a coincidence that this content seems more prominent on TikTok than on other platforms. One reason the U.S. government has moved to ban TikTok is it's so tightly wound up with the Chinese government, which is strongly motivated to sow politically divisive content to American audiences. Drumming up a culture war with overwrought debates over "trad" lifestyles is certainly one way to do that.
That most women's lives have no relationship to the "trad" fantasy propped up online doesn't mean it isn't dangerous propaganda. A lot of this content is deceptively alluring, either because it's aesthetically pleasing or sexually provocative. It taps into people's emotions to sell them on dangerous right-wing ideas. For instance, while Neeleman pretends to be apolitical on her feeds, she recently posed for the cover of Evie magazine, which is funded by far-right billionaire Peter Thiel and pumps out a constant stream of disinformation painting contraception as unnatural and dangerous. It's unlikely that women will encounter tradwife content and decide to quit their jobs to be submissive housewives. But it's unfortunately quite likely some will see false information demonizing birth control and skip taking the pill, leading to an unwanted pregnancy.
The good news, as I reported in a deep dive earlier this year, is that growing numbers of people are pushing back against the "trad" propaganda, often in the same social media spaces that gave rise to this online trend. Some critics are feminists exposing the sexism and the dishonesty. Others are critics of Christian nationalism, pointing out how "trad" content is often interwoven with fundamentalist Christianity. Some are escapees from "trad" lifestyles, blowing the whistle on the violence and ugliness right behind the shiny, happy veneer.
The anti-trad cause got a huge boost in 2024, when British journalist Megan Agnew published a profile in The Times of Hannah Neeleman and her husband, Jet Blue heir Daniel Neeleman. After extensive visits and interviews with the Neelemans on their farm, Agnew revealed that Hannah Neeleman's life is not at all like the bucolic fantasy she portrays online. Instead, readers met a woman who was pushed out of her ballet career, rushed into marriage, and pressured into giving birth repeatedly without even the benefit of pain relief. Even though Neeleman's husband is unbelievably wealthy, she's not even permitted a space of her own on their sprawling ranch to dance, as her studio was turned into a classroom for her eight children.
The Neelemans have angrily denounced Agnew's article, even though she produced the audio interview that showed the painstaking accuracy of her portrayal. Their protests didn't work. The article unleashed a torrent of discourse about how there is nothing romantic about the tradwife lifestyle because it's predicated on a woman abandoning her identity and selfhood to be a prop in a male fantasy of female submission. It created an opportunity for feminists to educate young audiences on how the "happy housewife" was always a myth, and that women in the 1950s often suffered from depression and drug abuse because of the self-erasure expected of women of that era. It began to dawn on more people that the "tradwives" they see online, like Neeleman, aren't even really housewives at all. They are professional content creators who make money by selling a fantasy. In some cases, their husbands seize the money they make, which only underscores how much this is not a romantic dream, but sexualized exploitation.
With TikTok having to find an American buyer or get banned in the U.S., the tradwife concept may have a short shelf life. The Chinese company's algorithm is famously a mystery, but it does seem to favor tradwife content more than American platforms. Even if the Chinese government doesn't have its thumb on the algorithm's scale — which is highly unlikely — there's good reason to think this content won't be as prevalent in other spaces. Even image-based platforms like Instagram aren't quite as dependent on circumventing the rational parts of the brain as the rapid scroll of TikTok. Tradwife content depends on audiences who absorb it uncritically, and without TikTok, that will be much harder to pull off.
