Did Tradwives Evolve Out of BDSM？
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Summary
In this episode, we talk about the dangers of modern housewives and their impact on traditional family structures, and why they are not as stable as they were in the 1950s and 60s. We also talk about why the modern housewife is not a replacement for a traditional housewife.
Transcript
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So much of what the trad phenomenon has become, I would say, is actually more of a descendant
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of BDSM community behavior than actual trad behavior.
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They have covered in the costume of traditionalism, the trad wife TikTokers and Tumblers and YouTubers
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that you are seeing are to a traditional relationship what hardcore porn is to a real sexual relationship
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It is a consumerized format meant to masturbate a pacific subset of your sort of mental landscape.
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It is not really what it is like to be in that sort of a relationship.
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Today, we are going to have an episode in defense of traditionalism.
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And people can know we've done some videos anti-traditionalist, where we argue that a lot of trad
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wifing and stuff like that is really over-idealizing a model of family structure from a very limited
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portion of United States history that isn't really indicative of any large cultural movement.
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It was more what was just being sold by Hollywood at the time.
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And people today, they're like, oh, Hollywood lies to us and gives us unrealistic expectations.
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And I'm like, they were doing that in the 50s, too.
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So first, I have heard people criticize trad wives and trad families as a LARP recently.
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When you are an ultra-Orthodox Jew and you are putting on your little outfit every day and
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you are doing all of the cultural things that you do, what makes it a LARP?
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It is live action and role play as being what you are that helps remind you of who you are.
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Role playing as something that is differential from the mainstream societal expectations helps
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you maintain a differential value set, which is what the trad families are often trying to do.
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But at the same time as I talk about how great trad families are, I also want to talk about
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this concept because I want to narrowly say this type of trad family is great.
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But there's been something that's been talked about a lot recently, which is the trad wife
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to single mom pipeline that recently happened with Laura Southern, quite famously.
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Why are these trad relationships not as stable as they were in a historic context in leading
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to really negative outcomes, particularly for women?
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This is where we're going to talk about trad wife is communism.
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But before I go further, I want to hear your thoughts on any of this.
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Yeah, I've been watching a lot of the trad wife to single mom pipeline videos.
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And my top observation so far is that people, even when we're talking about the 1950s trad wife,
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which we still argue was a short term aberration and not at all representative true trad wifery.
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They're not even modern trad wives aren't even being like 1950s trad wives.
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I was watching Catch Me If You Can, and there's one episode or there's there's a scene in Catch
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Me If You Can, in which Tom Hanks, the FBI agent trying to catch the character played by
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Leonardo DiCaprio, who's this kid who essentially masquerades as a pilot and surgeon and commits
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He's trying to explain to other FBI agents how check fraud works.
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And the FBI agents are like, look, check numbers like you've got to talk to my wife about this.
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And it really indicates just the extent to which when that traditional trad wife nuclear
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family model was being used, women weren't just educating the kids, raising the kids,
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managing the household, managing the cooking, managing the cleaning.
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There was even this there's some great YouTube videos on the effect of housewives in Japan
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investing in stock markets and the way that they influence stock market trends because
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they were so actively involved in investing, even internationally, because at the time and
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even still interest rates were so low, right, like saving wouldn't be enough.
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And it was the women in these traditional relations who were investing.
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And yet when you look at the way that women in the now modern, quote unquote, trad wife,
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cosplay are behaving to them, it is just cooking and maybe light cleaning and maybe a little
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It is not literally being pivotal to the life of the husband in terms of they don't have control
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Many women in these actually traditional relationships, even if you go back to the 1950s, their husbands
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were living on an allowance that the wife was giving them along with the rest of the
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And we can say, why don't modern trad families structure themselves this way?
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If this was a historic way of doing it within at least this cultural context.
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And the answer is because so much of what the trad phenomenon has become, I would say, is
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actually more of a descendant of BDSM community behavior.
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They have covered in the costume of traditionalism.
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Actually, this reminds me of the episode we had where Simone was reading her diary of the
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first day she met me and at the end, she's like, well, I guess I'm going to enter into
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a dom-sub relationship because growing up in San Francisco, her being the submissive partner
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in a male-female relationship, it didn't even occur to her that that's just the traditional
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She's like, ah, yeah, this is a dom-sub relationship.
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They have covered in the costume of traditionalism and it is to, in an extent, to protect the
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men's egos who are afraid of, I think rightly so for some reason, given divorce laws and
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stuff like that today, giving women too much power in their lives.
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But because of this, they're not able to have the type of romance and true partnership that
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It reminds me of a scene when I see these, like, this descendant of the red pills, oh, I'm
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being so attractive to women when Gomez and Morticia are dancing and being, like, impossibly
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romantic and the woman's there, like, looking at them, oh, I want this so bad.
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And then her date, Bester, has two pretzels in his nose and is trying to impress her.
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They come off like a silly goof who has no idea how to be romantic or what women really
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want because they have based it all on these fantasies that are more downstream of BDSM
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culture than they are downstream of any form of true traditionalism, which was a genuine
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I think in many of these cases, one, it's women imposing themselves on their boyfriends,
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fiancés, husbands, and the husbands and fiancés and boyfriends don't actually want all of
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And two, I think it's just people who are trophy wives who think that they're trad wives.
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A trophy wife is someone who only does maybe light cooking and cleaning and just is there
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And she is not someone who has any financial empowerment.
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She is not someone who contributes functionally to the family, aside from an aesthetic contribution.
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So I think there's just also this misconstruing or reframing of the trophy wife as the trad
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Because by the way, no one really talks about trophy wives anymore, but trad wives have
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People are using it as a fronting device of, look at me, look at my lifestyle, but they're
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But here, I want to talk about what a trad wife actually is, right?
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And this is where trad wives are communism comes from.
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If you look at the communist ideal, it is from each according to their ability to each according
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to their means, to each according to their needs.
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And within a family structure, a trad family structure, that is generally what you were
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You would have, for example, our kids don't pay rent.
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Like our infant, we give it food because it needs food.
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Simone produces that food because she has the body that has the ability to produce that
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I don't because I recognize that males and females are different.
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And that means that biologically, we are in some ways structured for different roles within
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They have some degree of flexibility within them.
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And that the way that you utilize those bodies and natural differences is going to change as
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technology changes, as economics changes, as society changes.
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But it still follows the traditional system of to each according to their needs, from each
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Which can lead to some role specialization, but role specialization does not mean...
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So if you look at what happened with Laura Southern, where you would get the husband talking
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about her and saying that she was a financial burden after he had asked her to quit her job
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You don't get to say that if you have demanded these sorts of sacrifices as the head of the
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And of course, a woman in a modern context is going to go a bit crazy if she's at home
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doing nothing but the kids without any sort of a social outlet like you would have had
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in a historic context, which all women had in a historic context about where they often
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participated in some form of small level industry to provide additional side income from the
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And as you mentioned, often quite intellectual tasks like investing family income, managing
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the family estate when the husband was off, or just generally managing the family estate
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was off in a wife's role, which is often an income generator in a historic context.
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And so what is a family estate within the modern world?
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People always are like, ooh, they share a Twitter account.
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And I'm like, no, it's just incredibly inefficient in terms of time spent and in terms of where
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we can direct attention to us to redirect it all to a central account.
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We can have some form of conflict so I can troll.
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Going into Twitter voluntarily reminds me of the tunnel of prejudice from that old South
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And I can only imagine the people who love being on Twitter having, like, Cartman's reaction
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Now, did you know that words we use can show intolerance?
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Let's begin our tour with a walk through our tunnel of prejudice.
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I get why they're like, somebody's cheating, because I guess if I wanted to cheat, that would
00:13:07.720
But then I also want to talk about where Tradwives went off the rails, because this
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is another thing that happened to Laura Southern with these incredibly strict roles, which
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partially led to the breakdown of her relationship.
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And in the traditional American family, the roles just were not that strict.
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The idea of every meal is made by a wife was never really the norm in American culture.
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It was when the wife didn't have another job, she might make disproportionately more meals,
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But some Tradwives have taken these roles to be like incredibly strict roles.
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And because of that, you get these market inefficiencies, just like you would in an overly
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The reason why communism works at the family level is because it's organic communism instead
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So if people don't understand what I mean by these two things, in command economy communism,
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everybody has strict roles, and they just perform their strict roles.
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And then often you have some hierarchy where the person at the top of the hierarchy basically
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creates all the roles and says, you do this, right?
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But this doesn't work because it's incredibly inefficient.
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In an organically formed economy, you instead have people take on the roles that they are
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When you're dealing with an entire society, capitalism is a good way to organically create
00:14:33.940
But if you are dealing with a household, for example, where everybody genuinely cares about
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and appreciates each other, I, for example, walking around the house, I know that right now
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it hurts Simone to bend over because she recently had a cesarean section.
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And so I try to pick up things on the floor whenever I see them.
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And then they're like, yeah, but then why do you do it?
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And because she shows appreciation for me when I do it.
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You all the time tell me, oh, I noticed you did this little thing that you didn't,
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And you didn't ask for thanks for, and for that, I am additionally appreciative of you
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And that is organic communism, where everyone is choosing to do what's right because they
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And not because it's their job, per se, but because they, it's that rule of, if you
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Yeah, but this is also why communism doesn't work at the societal level, because you get
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And because people don't, a lot of people hate other people in their society.
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So then you need to build it into a command economy, which leads to the collapse.
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But they are building family structures as command economies, which is just stupid.
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And you could say, then why have they done this?
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It's not just the BDSM, it's the consumerization of the concept of the trad wife.
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You have learned about what a trad wife is from TikTok, what the idealized trad wife
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is from TikTok, from Instagram, from, not even from 1950s movies.
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It's some vague concept you have of the way things were in the 1950s, then through modern
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bastardization, elevated within these various social media platforms.
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Everything that you see within those social media platforms is served to you because an
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So if you are seeing it, you are seeing it because the algorithm says, hey, I think that
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That is a product that is being served to you because it knows that you like to interact
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with that brief second clip of somebody's life.
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But that means that the trad wife TikTokers and Tumblers and YouTubers that you are seeing are to a traditional
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relationship what hardcore porn is to a real sexual relationship with a woman.
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It is a consumerized format meant to masturbate a specific subset of your sort of mental landscape.
00:17:20.160
It is not really what it is like to be in that sort of a relationship.
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Obviously, it works in isolated cases, but it's not in most realities a sustainable way to go.
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And it's not representative of any long-term reality that I've ever encountered.
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So now we can talk about why traditional relationships of this, I'll call them BDSM trad wives,
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because they're not real trad wives, they're BDSM trad wives, where the woman's just submissive in
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That is not the way American culture worked historically.
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Maybe, as I've said, maybe some Muslim cultures were structured that way, but not classic American
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Not even read about relationships from like the old west time period.
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Like again, for example, I read about my ancestor who lived during that time period,
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and you didn't see that at all in his relationship.
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It's very clear that if a man had treated his wife that way in his writings, he would have
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looked down upon them and seen them as both low-class and pathetic, because that is traditional
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Like treating a woman poorly or treating her as like your slave is not a positive thing.
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This, you could say, why is this creating a fundamentally unstable dynamic?
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The way that divorce laws are structured in our country, if you treat a woman in a way that
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builds animosity towards you, which how could this not over time, you don't actually legally
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Even if you have a prenup in the US, the laws hugely favor the woman.
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If she doesn't have a degree of genuine admiration for you, and on top of that genuine admiration,
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genuine affection for you, then it's like a slave that always has a poisoned knife to your
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The dynamics in that relationship are not the dynamics that you are pretending they are.
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It is completely, and this is where the LARP accusation is true, it is completely a roleplay
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in that you do not actually have the power over this person you are pretending to yourself that
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They can take half of your money and then take a portion of your salary for basically
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the rest of your life, and you will have to support them while they do whatever they
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And so that creates a hugely unstable dynamic, and society won't hugely punish them for that.
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They might have trouble securing another partner after that, but they won't realize that
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Which is not a great thing, but society, when you believe a consumerist fantasy, and you
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confuse a consumerist fantasy with a call to action, you can end up making horrifically
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Now, I say all this with the understanding that there is a real thing you can search for
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There is a real traditional relationship structure, but it is a relationship structure that is
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based on mutual affection and romance and caring, and not these little games and stuff
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I think what's so dangerous is what used to happen in the past is, one, humans are not
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great at thinking from a first principles perspective.
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You are unique in having this ability, Malcolm.
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I think the bigger issue is that what most humans do and have done throughout history
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is they are presented with examples that they're exposed to throughout their lives, and then
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they follow the example that works best for them.
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So they may see a couple of different ways of living, and then they choose the way of living
00:21:16.240
And what's problematic about the TradWife pipeline is that, as you're saying, it's this consumerist
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fantasy that's not real, that's not sustainable, but it is what is showing up in people's lives.
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And people aren't really being exposed to that many functional relationships or that many,
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you could say, traditional or comforting or alternative to the modern kind of soulless relationship
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where everyone just has their atomized life and doesn't really have an integrated marriage
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that's very romantic, that's very supportive, mutually supportive.
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And then they see this, and they assume that then this is how it's going to work.
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So I don't think people are intentionally trying to choose something uniquely indulgent or fetishized
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They just don't, they don't have any examples of what real trad relationships are outside of
00:22:10.760
some examples, which do exist in media, but just aren't framed really clearly as relationships.
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There are shows, for example, where couples work together, but the shows don't really highlight
00:22:23.780
They like to highlight the conflict or pretend that there's conflict or focus on other things,
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So I think a lot of it comes down to people just not having good examples to run by, not
00:22:48.660
And I wonder, okay, so why do people not have good models?
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I think one of the problems that people have is they blame too much of our culture's, like,
00:23:07.360
When I really put it mostly on boomers, boomers were the ones who did all that experimental
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stuff in the 70s and then ended up in these loveless relationships.
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If you look at the divorce rate within boomers, it's astoundingly high compared to every other
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This is where you get this, like, 50% divorce stat, which isn't representative of modern marriage
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And it is that they were the first generation that, like, collectively decided to live lives
00:23:38.600
And I think that you look at them, this is why I actually think American Psycho is such
00:23:42.600
a good movie in terms of depicting, like, what happened to the boomers.
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I think American Psycho shows what the boomers did to themselves.
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I know so few happy boomers in terms of the people I know.
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And it's because they structured their lives in these horrible ways in which they broke
00:23:59.440
from tradition, but they didn't think about what they were doing.
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And then the younger generation sees that things didn't work for them or is a few generations
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away from any cultural solution that really works.
00:24:13.780
And so they're trying to reconstruct what a healthy culture looks like from, unfortunately,
00:24:20.320
in a world where information and lifestyles themselves have become consumerized from what
00:24:32.220
And then people like us will say this and they're like, then you're not right wing enough
00:24:36.080
because they begin to develop parts of their identity.
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They're like, if you don't take this extremist view of what a trad wife is or a traditional
00:24:42.360
family structure is, then that means you are less right wing than me and thus lower status
00:24:49.700
And basically the response to that is, bro, are you like an idiot?
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Do you not see that you're destroying your life by choosing a stupid family structure that
00:25:00.280
never worked if you are looking at this from reality?
00:25:02.940
We're not looking at this from a right wing versus non right wing perspective.
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We're like, what's a good way to structure your life so that you end up satisfied was what
00:25:10.560
you end up creating and you actually secure a partner and you give your kids a good childhood
00:25:16.080
And these structures that they're building do not do that.
00:25:21.880
They follow these structures in these hypotheses that are easily disprovable if they search
00:25:26.400
out people who actually attempted to live these ultra originally structured systems outside
00:25:33.100
So I guess it can work if you're in like an extremist evangelical family or an extremist
00:25:43.560
But when you're trying to live adjacent to the secular world, it just doesn't work because
00:25:49.520
there is no negative externality for the fracturing of the relationship, which leads to the fracturing
00:25:54.180
of a relationship and then a woman without any skills.