THE FACT OF THE MATTER
BY PAUL HOPKINS
Apropos Marianne Heron’s column last week about Government plans to tackle online narratives nuanced by the ‘manosphere’ being welcomed if long overdue, Eoghan Cleary, an educational expert with the Sexual Exploitation Research and Policy (Serp) Institute, says misogynistic online content has “got so bad so quickly” and that there is “no question” young people in Ireland are being targeted by it.
The Government’s already-in-place National Strategy for Women and Girls says “patriarchal norms, often focused on men as decision-makers and breadwinners and on women as carers, uphold harmful stereotypes and limit life opportunities”. Cleary says female students he interacts with are being targeted on social media by explicit content.
There has also been that international rise in the prevalence of so-called ‘tradwife influencers’, predominantly based in the US, who promote traditional gender roles and women as homemakers who support their husbands as primary financial providers.
The tradwife movement sees middle-class women going on Instagram, TikTok and X with content ranging from baking fairy cakes from scratch to entering beauty contests for married women (!).
But who are these women, and what exactly are they promoting?
Generally considered the founder, American Hannah Neeleman is a stay-at-home mother of eight, her husband a rich company owner. Utah-born and still living there, her online stories are straight out of what The Waltons and The Brady Bunch once perpetuated. Having multiple children; cooking meals from scratch; doing the housework in flowing, floral dresses, with aprons a must – all the while preparing meals in time for husbands to return from work.
You get the drift.
Former ballerina Neeleman has 8.9 million Instagram followers. From what I can see, the basis of her appeal rests on the claim that the postwar period of the 1950s and 1960s was simpler and more clearly defined for women, an understanding that marries aesthetically with social media presentations of freshly baked fairy cakes or videos of cute kittens. The lifestyle includes conservative dress and grooming; morality, honesty, integrity, religious observance and dedication to families and community.
However, the reality is that in the post-war period, women had it much, much harder by way of little to no political power, appalling health care and gruelling, physical work. No mod-cons back then.
My own mother back then stayed at home and my father went out each day, clean-shaven and on his bike, and brought home the bacon. In Ireland then, women working in State or semi-State companies upon marrying had to resign from their job. That was the law.
We might like to think we have come a long way since. And in many ways we have. A lot done, but more to do – in terms of women in politics and in business.
Most couples living together today can’t have it all; in the main, women – still seen, perhaps unfairly stereotypically, as the more natural child rearer – who work outside the home because they have a professional career, or those who have to work outside the home if only to help meet the mortgage and, ironically, the exorbitant cost of childcare. And then also run the house.
Back in the Eighties, despite a decade-long recession, I was lucky enough to be able for my wife to stay at home for 14 years and primarily rear our three children. She was/is a great mother and her doing so has stood the test of time with my now adult children, still talking of the smell of freshly baked fairy cakes upon their arrival home from school.
There are, of course, many mothers today who have a similar privilege. Or, in some cases, fathers.
That this growing tradwife movement ties itself to the mast of Kardashian culture (amassing followers online, sharing lifestyle tips, offering discount codes for products they endorse) is worth a column in itself.
While the term has been around since at least 2018, it continues to change, polarise viewers, stir controversy, raise questions and sometimes serve as comfort content for those who genuinely just want to know how to make fairy cakes.
Political researcher Mariel Cooksey defines tradwifery as “a movement that’s part aesthetic and part ideology, encouraging women to embrace supposedly feminine characteristics like chastity and submissiveness, and trade feminist empowerment for a patriarchal vision of gender norms”.
Meantime, I’m off to watch the final season of The Handmaid’s Tale …
