"Trad Wives" are Worse Than THOTs

Malcolm and Simone discuss the unsustainable lifestyle promoted by "trad wives" on social media. They argue these women are actually trophy wives dependent on hidden male labor.

Simone: [00:00:00] they show all this video or photos of them making pies at home and living in a very cottage core way and like doing, hanging up laundry to air dry. And picking mushrooms and they're these women for the most part, like I get this, like. Really visceral reaction to these because the lives that these women are living our lives of complete leisure and luxury.

Simone: Like they think that what they're doing is becoming a trad wife when really what they're doing is becoming a trophy wife. And what they don't realize is that the men that they're marrying. Can't afford that a man who has a trophy wife really basically should be independently wealthy

Malcolm: every time you see one of these women who is indulging in this quote unquote trad lifestyle, also see a man. Who's off camera, who's secretly working to afford all of this and is sacrificing to afford all of this. And yet the woman is acting as if she is the one making the sacrifice, living in abundant leisure.

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Simone: Hello, Malcolm.

Malcolm: Hello, Simone. [00:01:00] This is one where I had sort of a concept for a video and she didn't want to talk too much about it beforehand because she's like, Oh, I want to be surprised.

Simone: Yeah, I'll ask dumb questions and see what you say. Well,

Malcolm: we were talking, you know, in reference to the Barbie movie that it's very clear that the women are not happy in the world that they have created.

Malcolm: In the world that feminism created for women, it appears that this new model doesn't work and women are living really systemically unhappy lives.

Malcolm: Based on how, how feminized they've made the world there's some great statistics on this as well that I might be able to put on state screen showing that generally the more a woman buys into feminism or the more that she lives in a feminist environment, the less happy she will be.

Malcolm: And they, over time, women's happiness has been going down as the number of well, as, as feminism has won more and more victories in our society

Simone: happiness, or maybe it's just mental health problems.

Simone: I think it's just rates of mental health problems, which of course is like primarily depression.

Simone: Like, but it's not just happiness. It's [00:02:00] like all sorts of bad things. So I think it's, it diminishes the problem. Oh yeah, no, it's

Malcolm: women's happiness. It's declining over time.

Simone: Yeah. But I think if you also look at rates of, of women's mental health that mental health liberals and conservatives, especially among

Malcolm: women. Yes, it is. It's really terrible. This world is uniquely bad for women more worse than it was when women had less rights. When I say less rights, I don't mean like 1950s. I'm talking like 1980s, right? And that is fascinating.

Simone: I don't, I don't, first off, I want to push back a little bit and say, I don't think this is about rights.

Simone: I think this is about, Like cultural expectations and quotas and things like that. Like, I think that it's very important that men and women are treated equally under the wall, but I'm sorry, under the law. But actually right now, of course, men are not treated equally under the law. Men are much more at risk, for example, in divorces with child custody, et cetera.

Simone: So I don't even think that it's, it's like equality. That's the problem is

Malcolm: rights are responsibilities. We have [00:03:00] pointed out multiple times on the show that when people. Experience a post scarcity environment that we assume they would indulge in hedonism, but instead the most frequent thing is they indulge in self victimization because that removes responsibility from them.

Malcolm: And the thing that people hate most is responsibility and as rights changed, as it became possible for women to work and compete with men in the workplace, then became the expectation of that lifestyle. for every woman that she does in addition to other things that she wants to do with her life. And, and biologically women are just going to be more driven to do things like want to have kids and stuff like that and feel it harder when they don't do those things.

Malcolm: So. In ignoring the biology, yet giving equal expectations. Now, here's where we come in and we have a very different take than I think traditional conservatives. I think a lot of people, they want to go back to maybe the way things were before women's rights, before all this. And yet, I do not think that world was either efficacious Or an [00:04:00] ideal world for women.

Malcolm: I think that it was worse than, than less ideal. I just think it was a pretty shitty world for women. If you go back 1920s, you know, 1850s, a terrible place. I would not want that for my daughters. But then the question becomes, what does a stable vision for femininity look like? What's the way that our family is handling the different roles that men and women have?

Malcolm: Because men and women do have different biologies, different sociologies. And, and, I mean, biology is even in the brain. And this causes them to act in systemically different ways. And when you apply an exactly equal system to them apparently just doesn't work very well. However, if you apply a horrifically unequal system, I also don't think it works very well.

Malcolm: And when we look at some of the aspirational messages that are set up for women, this is one of the things that we're talking about, which is in a big way people misunderstand that a stay at home wife [00:05:00] is a trophy wife. Yeah,

Simone: I mean, so I would, I would argue that many of also like the Trad feminist caricatures I see online.

Simone: I mean, I don't think they think that they're caricatures, but they are, are also like inherently unsustainable and worse off. So, I've, I've seen like on Instagram, for example, like plenty of like little videos or photos of, of. with texts saying things along the lines of, Oh, like I, I turned away from the original feminist dream and went, you know, back to being a mother and a homemaker.

Simone: And they show all this video or photos of them making pies at home and living in a very cottage core way and like doing, hanging up laundry to air dry. And like picking mushrooms and they're these women for the most part, like I get this, like. Really visceral reaction to these because the lives that these women are living our lives of complete leisure and luxury.

Simone: Like they think that what they're doing is becoming a [00:06:00] trad wife when really what they're doing is becoming a trophy wife. And what they don't realize is that the men that they're marrying. Can't afford that a man who has a trophy wife really basically should be independently wealthy Like there should be no risk that like, oh, well, okay We're a single income family.

Simone: Like if I lose my income then we're totally screwed So basically if you are dependent on an income You cannot afford to have a trophy wife or trophy husband for that matter. And the fact that these women are, I think to a certain extent, like it's, it's just as bad a