At the Times, Gloating about the Tradwife Backlash

In the NY Times, Amanda Hess covers some recent blowups in the Tradwife social media sphere:

The first time Bernadine Barber saw the word “tradwife,” it was being used to describe her. She was not yet 30, she had three children, and her Instagram content promoting traditional gender roles was gaining a following. She had started going by Bernadine Bluntly online, a name to reflect how plainly she spoke her truth. . . . 

Onstage and online, Bluntly argued the tradwife’s cause with passionate intensity. But privately, “I was already going back and forth about leaving my marriage,” she told me recently. Soon she would have six children, 141,000 YouTube subscribers, friends at Evie Magazine and Turning Point USA, and a commitment to an ideology that she now says made her suffer. “You’re told that if you really love God, then you submit to your husband, you fight for your marriage, you forgive no matter what, and you stay for the kids,” she said. “It’s honestly a miracle of God that I woke up and got out.”

Last year, Bluntly left her husband and got a restraining order against him.

I already wrote about this phenomenon last year, so I won't elaborate my position here; suffice to say that I think most influencers are narcissists of questionable sanity, and ideology and family life make for a really bad combination.

Amanda Hess is one of several feminists I have seen who are downright gloating about this development. See? See? If you don't fight the patriarchy, next the know your trapped at home with five kids and an abusive husband. Well, sure, but two things. First, if you find yourself gloating about this failure of "traditional" family life, you might also ask why thousands of smart women are attracted to the Tradwife ideal. Life is hard for everyone, no matter how free and feminist you are. And second, if you are relying on these women, who are least high strung and possibly mentally ill, to discredit partriarchy, I don't see how that's much better than relying on them to model an ideal of patriarchal marriage.

But the new thing I learned from Amanda Hess is that there is now a whole constellation of Ex-Tradwife influencers who go on making videos no matter what happens in their lives. 

Enitza Templeton, a 43-year-old Colorado mother of four, identifies as a “former tradwife” and “current baddie” to her 247,000 TikTok followers. When she became disillusioned with her own tradlife, Templeton created an Instagram account called Sweet by the Slice.

What a world.