"... bestows a sense of comfort. But the promise of a tradwife is nothing more than fiction. And the idea of a womanhood that’s 'natural' has been completely determined by a white, male-centric society. Tradwife content allows young women to shrug off any sense of self-blame or responsibility for their role in society.... Tradwives get so caught up in their echo chambers that protecting the nuclear family seems like safeguarding existence itself, and they become completely insulated from what they deem 'unnatural': queerness, diversity, difference of thought. Without this exposure, they are unable to strengthen their sense of empathy.... They become so segregated from the rest of the world that they begin to believe that they will never achieve more—should not achieve more—than the conservative 'natural' role of womanhood.... Starting an article with the headline 'Did Liberal Feminism Ruin the Workplace?' does nothing more than appeal to those who try to keep lower-income women oppressed and drive young people into a tradwife future that keeps them caged."
Said Kenneal Patterson, one of the participants in a Vanity Fair conversation called
"Women of Vanity Fair Consider Ross Douthat’s Question: Did Women Ruin the Workplace? Today, The New York Times published a conversation between the conservative columnist and two writers about just how bad ladies have screwed up corporate culture with their presence. We felt we should engage."
"Today" was a few days ago. We talked about the Ross Douthat piece
here, 3 days ago (and that post has a gift link to the provocatively titled Douthat conversation).
Posts
89 comments:
Kenneal is looking forward to a satisfying future filled with cats and varieties of box wines.
1. Dear Kenneal, please don't burden yourself with reproduction. Get yourself some box wine and cats that you can love on but which don't really care about you.
2. Is segregated really the right word? I have a fairly traditional wife and she has never mentioned to me about having to use the tradwife water fountain.
Did they mention women's brains being broken.
Protecting the nuclear family per se may not be quite protecting existence itself, but until medical technology has advanced quite a bit, protecting social structures which facilitate the begetting and raising of replacement humans existence is not going to last very long.
This Kenneal gal is presumably an intelligent woman, but she doesn’t seem to be looking much further than the end of her own nose.
Of course she doesn’t have to reproduce if she doesn’t want to, but existence does depend on the great majority of women choosing reproduction.
More evidence that progressives are divorced from reality. And the more they buy into progressivist nonsense, the further from reality they get. Useless people, of exactly zero value to the rest of us.
"…the grueling 9-to-5 of our capitalist society.”
If she thinks 9-to-5 is grueling, she should try to open her own restaurant or other small business some time.
And we are a mixed economy, not a capitalist one.
Interesting she thinks "trad" women bake bread at home. Yes, what a romantic notion.
“Women of Vanity Fair Consider Ross Douthat’s Question…”
I read “Women of Vanity Fair” the same way as I would read “Women of Color” in an adjacent article.
And it’s good to see that Vanity Fair is living up to its name. Thackeray’s novel was satire after all.
"...nothing more than appeal to those who try to keep lower-income women oppressed and drive young people into a tradwife future that keeps them caged."
Kisin says the reason why somebody like Fuentes has legions of young male followers is a backlash to the feminization of everything.
Vanity fair: “how can we insult that segment of the population that doesn’t bow to our world view, and force them to listen to us because we are right?! The world should be molded in our image!”
Tradwives get so caught up in their echo chambers that protecting the nuclear family seems like safeguarding existence itself.
Shocking! Did you ever hear anything so crazy?
Without this exposure, they are unable to strengthen their sense of empathy...
For these people, life is just a series of mandatory vaccines.
They develop. You take.
What kind of people name their daughter Kenneal? (This question is rhetorical. I already know).
Queerness is divergent, including Mengele dreams, pedophilia, homosexuality, etc., celebrated with the politically congruent ("=") principle under the Pro-Choice religion in progressive sects.
Diversity is a color judgment, class bigotry including racism, sexism, ageism and other class-disordered ideologies.
Tradwife is a sexist judgment, label, and insult.
Keep women affordable, available, reusable, and taxable is a hallmark of liberal feminism.
Throw another baby on the barbie, they're done. Maybe a fetus... feature.
..." "Women of Vanity Fair Consider Ross Douthat’s Question: Did Women Ruin the Workplace? ...."
Women generally didn't ruin the workplace, but women like the 'Women of Vanity Fair' certainly did.
I know one young woman who wants to be a "tradwife." But she doesn't know how to do anything - not even laundry.. She has gleaned that "tradwife" means "I won't have to get a job and my husband [she is newly married and her husband is totally on board with this for reasons I will explain shortly] will take care of me," rather than "my husband and I will be partners in every part of our life, filling different roles but each contributing a full 100%" - which is what traditional marriage actually is. Not 50% - 100%.
The reason this girl and her boy-husband are wanting this life is, to be frank, that they're not smart enough to figure out that they don't understand what they say they want. They're both... just... stupid. I'm using that word not to denigrate them - I'm stating a fact. They're attractive and sufficiently educated - high school graduates, in an area where you can still make a life with that - but they probably clock at about 90. Not enough to look ahead effectively at the consequences of their actions. Not enough to read between lines or understand history.
This article, now. It isn't women in the workplace that are the problem, it seems to me. It's women expecting some kind of chivalric privilege for being in the workplace: you will defer to me, my ideas, my feelings, my moods, my priorities. You will create positions you didn't have before so that I can enjoy an office job that doesn't come with a steno pad and the necessity of dodging the gross guy's roving hands. In one of those positions, I will control whether you get to keep your job, whether you get a promotion, whether any more like you get hired. In others, I will create the need for more meetings, because meetings are important, because I like meetings.
And so on. If women had continued to be in the workplace as they were when I was coming up, taking it for what it was and working within that already existing framework - maybe minus the shoulder pads - I don't think things would be so bad now. But they are indeed bad.
I'd be willing to bet, that when such women utter the phrase 'Trad wife', they conjure up in their mind, a woman in one of those scarlet 'Handmaid's Tale' costumes. With the face obscured by the bonnet.
Vanity fair is illustrated kos
My wife was a stay at home Mom until the kids were in late middle school when she started working part time in our family business. This spanned the early 80's to the late 90's. All of her peers went the professional route and had kids later. She felt some pressure that she was taking the easy way out. Turns out family is the only thing that really matters, so we bet on the right horse. I feel sorry for young people today who have fewer choices about starting a family in your early 20's. Being young healthy active grandparents is the best job ever.
Men and women are equal in rights, and complementary in Nature has a limited application. A woman, a wife, a mother, a grandmother, a professional, an entrepreneur... life is not so short, reconcile, check your ego at the hearth. Men, too, in their respective family roles.
I was a stay-at-home mom for several years. I wouldn't say I was a tradwife, at least not the kind you see on Instagram or TikTok, but I did make bread a lot more often then.
I grew up believing that feminism was about women being able to make a choice as to what life they wanted. I was misinformed. Being "just a mom" was not seen by many as a legitimate choice.
I didn't do it to avoid diversity. I did it because I thought it was the right choice for me and for my family. I did not believe I would never achieve more. As my kids got older and I had more time, I began a wfh business that provided a very nice income from about 2001 to around 2015 . I earned about double what my husband did, but other women treated it as if being home and available to your kids means it's not "real" work.
“ unable to strengthen their sense of empathy”
Oh no, not enough empathy!!
Empathy today in this person’s train of thought is nothing more than selfishly saying “ I am a good person” but does no actions to actually do anything. It’s derivative is voting to spend other people’s money but thinking they did something magnanimous.
Such people weaponize empathy to avoid logic and fact-based arguments. And this empathy is also highly subjective and situational. It absolutely does not extend to those deemed icky.
Capitalism is a democratic, market-based economic system where producers and workers keep their retained earnings.
A woman can be a wife, a mother, a baker, a scientist, a leader, and bring home the oil and change it in the pan, too, if she chooses. Life is not so short and women are not Diverse, not a bloc act.
". . . and they become completely insulated from what they deem 'unnatural': queerness, diversity, difference of thought. Without this exposure, they are unable to strengthen their sense of empathy...."
Oh no! Can you IMAGINE going through life with only a sense of empathy that has not been strengthened? What a bleak living hell THAT must be!
The fear that women might make different choices if they aren't sufficiently indoctrinated is almost palpable in that quote.
The societal outcome of too much forced and insincere empathy is a rise in not giving a fuck.
You don’t want to live in a society where no one gives a fuck.
Neither are beneficial for a healthy society.
The nontrad lifestyles are often desperate and futile attempts at merely surviving reality while demanding it conform to unreal ideologies. That I have little empathy for those wanting me to participate in their suffering, which was caused through their nontrad life choices, is something I will not try to change.
’I get caught up in the romantic notion that a life exists beyond the grueling 9-to-5 of our capitalist society.’
As we’re wont to say in the South: some people just need killin’.
They "felt they should engage." And the engagement appears to be trashing anyone, male or female, who questions whether "liberal feminism" has had bad effects on the workplace: insulting the women as blinkered and willfully ignorant and unkind, running the usual line about "patriarchy" for the men.
Larry Summers, wasn't it, who asked whether it was possible that women's innate, on-average capabilities and preferences might play a role in whether they choose STEM fields? And was met with grown-ass doctorate-holding women saying they were "literally shaking" and feared for their very lives, such that he had to be run out of Harvard for their safety? Instead of considering his question so that it could be dismissed (potentially*) on a factual basis?
Engage with that, Women of Vanity Fair.
* It's like when a man asks his wife if she's having an affair and she - calculatingly - says, "I can't believe you would say that to me!" instead of answering the question.
Dang that is way past stupid
“Tradwife.” Can’t you just see the contempt oozing up off the page (or dripping down off the screen)?
What does it mean to say that the role of traditional homemaker is determined by a “white, male-centric society“? Does it mean that in the circles she moves in there are no black men who’ve married the mothers of their children?
What are the odds that Kenneal Patterson even knows any stay-at-home mothers? Pretty low, I’d guess, because many women are quite happy raising their kids instead off shipping them off to daycare and school.
Of course the fundamental flaw with the 'Women in the Workplace' theme, where nearly all women will be rewarded with corporate executive careers, falls to pieces with the first glance at the organizational chart. Oh, look: There's one person at the top. Oh, look: There's five people on the executive team, next layer down. Oh, dear. A competitive meritocracy, based on survival and built on the unsparing logic of delivering something useful toward that end.
Aggie @8:42, I didn't see that problem as being limited to women's expectations any more - an awful lot of young men also seem to believe that a C-suite job is their destiny simply because of where they went to school.
But I will give you that in the Salary Wars, it was indeed women who "started it" with the high expectations regardless of achievements.
I know more non-white traditional mothers than white ones.
https://share.google/LxhltqynHn3GM51nn
Does a woman's productive life need to be a taxable activity to be considered whole? Does a man's? At least one of you does, but not necessarily simultaneously. Women were first brought into the workplace to mitigate the unaffordability of schemes that force inflation (i.e. progressive prices). With that labor resource consumed, with outsourcing a progressive commodity, and insourcing a Democratic gerrymander, what's next? A gigawatt Automaton Intelligence and robotic labor?
In the modern family, select males can be sperm donors to banks, and females will be kept on a womb farm. And others will become taxable commodities of the state and elite kings and queens. A handmade tale with Diverse, Equivocal, and Inclusive precedents.
Fuck vanity Fair - A publication for idiots with bad ideas.
The left HATE traditional child raising. Esp if mom is a white female. Again- are white leftist females exempt here? You bet they are!
These asshole leftists are perfectly and hypocritically OK if the gay mom (dad) is at home baking, cooking and caring.
Leftwing arguments are nothing but hot shit on a cracker.
Conservatives are not against helping US citizens... who need snap benefits. The left need to lie about who we "righties" want to help. A Fatherless child and mother would top our list.
Sadly - the left have doled out so many benefits to so many people - many who should not have gov handouts - the left see an opening to exploit. oh those big meanie conservatives!
Not the junkie addicted to meth and free mountain dew.
Leftists dictators who write for a living - have all the answers. You better obey them.
Me? I raise my middle finger to anyone who writes for the crap-hole that is Vanity Fair.
My doctor is a woman, a wife, a mother and grandmother. My last doctor was a man, a husband, and father. Some people just have a greater ability, a privilege? To balance work and life. A teachable moment, an empathetic choice for the green grinches, grifters, and gropers of DEIst inclination.
WTF. You're letting down the side because you want to have babies and raise them as your own? Which is what just about every woman is literally born for (as just about every man is born to be a father and provide).
This is the problem.
There is more than enough room in today's world for the exceptional to be exceptional. There are lots of truly exceptional women and men. There are many, many more for whom success and fulfillment are "traditional" (as in the traditions of millenia of human history). Stop damning them with unrealistic fantasies. Let them live how they want to live.
Sympathy is useful and healthy for oneself and community. Empathy is an illusion. It's sheer vanity to imagine you are feeling what another is feeling, and are therefore a good person whose actions are unquestionably moral.
My personal fave of the Vanity Fair Sex was the cumbersomely named Wisdom Iheanyichukwu: "I feel like the question itself is a sort of violence...." She finishes with: "And so, rather than asking if women are ruining the workplace, we should be asking if the workplace is ruining the people." So, yeah, kind of a confession of the basic attitude that liberal women ruined the workplace with.
I listened to the podcast. Pretty good, save for the five minutes or so where the women are talking right past each other.
Off putting though, was not including a male point of view, like Bo Winegard. Must not be important.
My son, an electrical engineer, married several years ago. She was a civil engineer working in water and airfield infrastructure, and in the process of studying for, and passing the Professional Engineer licensing exam.
Hated her job. From her female peer group, she heard plenty of denigrating stay-at-home motherhood, causing no small amount of angst.
She quit about a year ago, and is expecting a daughter in late April, and is quite visibly far happier.
Yes, I know anecdote is not data.
Tradwife content allows young women to shrug off any sense of self-blame or responsibility for their role in society.... Tradwives get so caught up in their echo chambers that protecting the nuclear family seems like safeguarding existence itself, and they become completely insulated from what they deem 'unnatural': queerness, diversity, difference of thought.
The two most arrogant and ignorant sentences ever written, save, perhaps, for the ones following.
Are there circumstances that would bring Patterson back to biological reality? Sadly, I suspect that it will take a long and empty life, along with a capacity to transcend the cognitive dissonance insulating her from self awareness.
She wrote for the basilisk so she has no clue nor interest in finding one
Nearly all the women in my circle are stay home moms wholly supported by men who work very long hours. I mean 60 - 80 hours, and some often work weeks in a row without days off, and they do it because it pays really well to be that available and they accept their responsibility to pay for everything in their family.
The women they support have no desire to work, because not working for them is a pretty good gig, and child care is unreasonably expensive. It's not really complicated, and outside of the chattering class, this is still the norm.
There is no "echo chamber" for tradwives. Do people really think they don't have internet and media telling them what they are "missing". Every one of them I know, has worked before they stopped, so they know a lot more about that than the new women know about being a tradwife.
The difference is taxable capital, not labor, not responsibility, not reconciliation, not life.
Most tradwives expect to go back to work someday, but they don't think of it as some great accomplishment they need to check off. They are in the middle of working a great goal that never really ends, and going back to work is just doing something different and getting some extra money. I don't think most men consider their jobs to be some great accomplishment either. It's just a big part of living a life mostly free and comfortable and it's a natural human drive to be doing and building. The experience imagined from work itself is not what these new women think it is.
Women have changed the workplace. I've worked with some who are absolutely brilliant and a joy to be around. I have NEVER known a single one, I would care to work for.
Men are like Republicans; waaay to nice to the other team. The Glass Ceiling was a GOOD thing!
The traditional nuclear family is still possible- you actually don't need two full time incomes to live that life but here is the thing- you have to reduce your material consumption to make it work. Women have been sold an empty future by feminists- no children, no husband, and no legacy after they die. Many men have been sold this exact same empty future but they, at least, have the biological means of fixing it well into their 50s.
So, there is tradwife, modwife, and nowife?
"Grueling" = "I don't want to do this"
Vanity Fair, proof that the people who are most responsible for attacking ,denigrating, belittling, and damaging women, are other women. This creature is a willing member of that crowd. Her cats will eat well when she kicks off.
Yes, I know anecdote is not data.
Of course not. Data is the plural of anecdote. (Actually, to a good first approximation, enough anecdotes really do give you data — the field of data science is all about teasing real information out of large piles of anecdotes.)
“Most tradwives expect to go back to work someday…”
I think most stay-at-home-moms (SAHMs) expect to go back to work someday. But a key difference between SAHMs and tradwives is that tradwives don’t plan to ever have an outside job. Maybe raising (some of) their own food is as close as it gets.
Douthat should know better how to frame the question (i laugh)
Many tradwives, who can afford to, do volunteer work outside the home. Some are PITA do-gooders, but there it is.
"... an awful lot of young men also seem to believe that a C-suite job is their destiny simply because of where they went to school."
Well, there was a time, not that long ago, when most people did not go to college, and those who did could reasonably expect a pretty good job as a result.
Ms. Patterson majored in Journalism. She's living her best life.
"But a key difference between SAHMs and tradwives is that tradwives don’t plan to ever have an outside job."
I see the distinction, that I was missing, and I agree, but I just call those lazy or gold-diggers, which is fine if you stay hot forever, but your husband won't feel like he owes you much in the long run.
""Grueling" = "I don't want to do this""
Yea, "grueling 9 to 5" is a tell. In most of history this would be considered the schedule of royalty.
Injudicious judgments and lazy labels with insidious motives.
Yea, "grueling 9 to 5" is a tell
This post isn’t worth my comment but holy carp girls the ‘capitalist society’ does NOT work 9 to 5. Go learn something…
If Tradwife is a woman who videos her life first and takes care of life later, then thee we this not a person to be with. Just a different version of the article’s author.
Here, for those interested is an expansion of Kenneal's opinions about the dangers of the tradwife pipeline that is "subtle, insidious, and hidden in wellness trends."
Oh noes (yeah shes a psycho)
So they completely refuse to address anything that was actually discussed about how the feminization of society if screwing us over
Because they understand the thesis is correct
Why would they they hate housewives
Peggy Bundy showed us that there's more to being a tradwife than just sitting on the couch eating bon-bons.
My parents raised me frugally and well. They never had a chance to go to college. They instilled a serious manual labor work ethic as well. It served me in higher education.
Kudos to them.
"tradwife" looks back to a very narrow span of time in the 1950s--1970s or so when some women could stay home with the kids and be protected. But they probably had 4 kids and were pretty busy. Many wives today have none. Go back further and women worked very hard, in the home or out of it. They sewed clothing, spun wool, had a garden and chickens, did laundry without a washing machine.
Didn't women play a role in determining what was womanhood and women's work? Did men really do that all on their own? Was every woman struggling to work outside the home or to become a CEO (or whatever the equivalent power position was at the time)? Weren't at least a few contented not to be caught up in the 9-5 grind? And why the dig at whiteness? Weren't women even more constrained and controlled in some other important cultures?
Aggie said...
Women generally didn't ruin the workplace, but women like the 'Women of Vanity Fair' certainly did.
Women in charge ruin anything bigger than a family. Because the female imperatives are "small group" focused, and do not work for larger groups, where you need rationality, competition, and the triumph of logic over feelings.
Working 9 to 5 is a "grueling" 8 hour day, 5 days a week. With lunches and breaks? At the water cooler? Online?
Eva Marie said...
Hillary Busis: “Frankly, I’m offended by this headline.”
No one cares about your feelings, Hillary. That's the point.
“I feel confident saying that if you’re a woman, you’re allowed to cyberbully Ross Douthat.”
What a retarded child she is.
Lindsey Underwood: “I’m sure Ross and his friends had a robust discussion, which I’m not going to listen to.”
Why women in charge suck, in one sentence. "Oh, it hurts my feelings to have to listen to someone make an argument I don't like, so I won't do it!"
Fuck you, lady. If that's the case, then you need to STFU, because you have nothing of value to offer.
Wisdom Iheanyichukwu: “I feel like the question itself is a sort of violence.”
Then you need to be repeatedly punched in teh face, until you understand what real violence is. Hurting your feelings isn't violence, it's reality
As the final comment of the discussion Sargeant says:
“As a married woman, I’ve loved my husband the whole time, but being pregnant meant depending on him in a way that was different than at any other part of our marriage. . . . How on earth could we have three kids, except that we trust each other and ebb and flow in strength and can do more than we can by ourselves?”
Congratulations to Sargeant for completely missing the point. Her "strengths" are family focused. His strengths are outwardly focused. Having Sargeant in charge of raising teh kids is good.
Having her in charge of an office, or a country, is not.
Because your workers, and your people, aren't your children
Men will work themselves half to death to make life better for their family. In agreement with Chris Rock, all they want is the big piece of chicken.
What's this "grueling 9 to 5"? I wish my work day was limited to that.
I’m going to try Pluribus. It looks intriguing.
By tradwife I assume you mean homemaker. And my mother. And your mother. A noble profession.
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