The Agoraphobic Fantasy of Tradlife

Abstract

The Agoraphobic Fantasy of Tradlife Zoe Hu (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution (Molly Crabapple) [End Page 54] Love is the ultimate value, and love is under threat. That is the rumor we good, secular citizens are hearing, at a time when capitalism's fatal drag on human affections has become harder than ever to ignore. Love is being lost to modern promiscuity, to social alienation, to the degraded hours of work and separation that spread, like static, between the members of your average American family. If only there was a way to save love—and them! Well, respond the reactionaries: the way to rediscover true feeling and value lies in tradition—in, more specifically, tradlife. "Tradlife" is the handy neologism for a recent set of attitudes and lifestyles devoted to glorifying the nuclear family and its jolly scenery; it is often promulgated by the new right, though followers retain a confusing span of affiliations. Even as tradlife looks backward, its pursuit and its rites are communicated mostly over social media in role-playing and image-making, the principal languages of such platforms. Followers post photos and videos of their ostensibly traditional families, wreathing their content with artful connotations of romance, safety, and leisure. Wives narrate to cameras the good fortune they've found in being kept women and living alongside stoic breadwinners; they publish pictures of their houses and vacations, which are visibly expensive. The twist that makes tradlife a phenomenon of our times is that it also includes earnest criticisms of life under capitalism. Many tradlifers are young women who hate work and celebrate arrangements where men rescue their wives from the professional realm: "When my friend's mom first started dating her husband," one viral tweet reads, "he said 'Stay with me, marry me, and you'll never have to work again.'" Only tradition can salvage love from modern indignities and the early-morning commute. Like a trapdoor, the idea swings open to reveal a baby-pink fantasy too fragile and nostalgic to be taken in the open air. Regular people preoccupied with bills, healthcare premiums, and rising rents will find much of the tradlife lifestyle to be out of reach. That paradox is what makes it such potent social media fare: tradlife is, at bottom, perpetuated by "influencers" who [End Page 55] know how to make others feel desirous and frustrated in equal measure. It is a menacing advertisement jingle, for a product people may not want or be certain exists. By describing the misery of work, tradlife ennobles itself. But as an ethos it also maintains a willful stupidity about modern capitalism's historic dependence on the family, a constitutive structure of capitalism, through which property, debt, and economic interest are all consolidated (it was Milton Friedman, after all, who wrote that "the ultimate operative unit in our society is the family"). As a concept, "the family" has worked even harder than "the individual" to overshadow our ethical obligations to other people. But few have use for notions of society anymore, defined as it is by unpredictability and fear of rising crime. We want only securitized intimacy—the happy assurance of a shared mortgage. ______ Like all lore, tradlife has a central hero: the tradwife is a woman who abandons the workforce and retreats indoors to care for her husband. Unlike the suburban ideal of the 1950s, with its white broods of children, the women in these videos are only sometimes mothers. This is perhaps because babies can place strain on the tradwife's reigning aesthetic: a gauzy brand of femininity where everything, but especially marriage, is meant to be easy. Roles are spontaneously desired because housewifery is now, unlike last time, a choice to be plucked out and guarded jealously from alternatives. In their videos, tradwives drift slowly through minimalist rooms and narrate their days (morning supplements, laundry) in sedate tones: "I fill up Luke and I's [sic] water bottles to make sure we're hydrated." Perhaps it's the nature of the genre—"daily routine" videos are popular online—but the tradwife's schedule always seems viciously regimented. Unpredictability and genuine surprise are rare, as are appearances by other people...