Did Tradwives Evolve Out of BDSM?

This episode delves into the origins and cultural implications of the "tradwife" movement, suggesting it may be more influenced by BDSM community behaviors than traditional values.

1. Modern "tradwives" often represent a consumerized, unrealistic version of traditional roles.
2. These roles sometimes mimic BDSM dynamics, focusing on power dynamics rather than partnership.
3. The historical portrayal of tradwives is oversimplified and does not reflect the true complexity and empowerment involved in past familial roles.
4. The discussion highlights the danger of misinterpreting or romanticizing past cultural norms without understanding their context or implications.
5. The episode challenges listeners to reconsider how cultural roles are portrayed and adopted in modern society.

1: Introduction and Overview

Simone and Malcolm introduce the topic, linking tradwives to BDSM and critiquing the portrayal of traditional roles in modern media.
Malcolm Collins: "It is not really what it is like to be in that sort of a relationship."

2: Historical Context and Modern Misconceptions

They discuss the historical inaccuracies in the portrayal of 1950s housewives and the impact of these portrayals on modern perceptions. Simone Collins: "They're not even modern tradwives aren't even being like 1950s tradwives."

3: Consumerism and Role Playing

Discussion on how consumerism influences the perception of traditional roles and the comparison to role-playing games. Malcolm Collins: "They have covered, in the costume of traditionalism, the trad wife."

4: Communism and Family Dynamics

Exploring the analogy of communism within family dynamics, emphasizing organic role distribution over rigid structures. Malcolm Collins: "It is from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs."

5: Conclusion and Reflections

The hosts reflect on societal changes and urge a more nuanced understanding of traditional and modern family roles. Simone Collins: "It's that rule of if you see a mess, you clean it up."

1. Question the sources of your cultural role models and seek out diverse, historically accurate examples.
2. Engage in discussions about the flexibility and shared responsibilities in relationships to foster equality.
3. Recognize the influence of media and consumer culture in shaping perceptions of traditional roles.
4. Promote and practice financial empowerment and literacy regardless of gender roles.
5. Challenge and rethink the authenticity and applicability of the "tradwife" label in modern society.

In this thought-provoking discussion, Malcolm and Simone Collins delve into the phenomenon of "tradwives" and the modern misconceptions surrounding traditional relationships. They argue that much of the current "trad" movement is more akin to BDSM power exchange dynamics than genuine traditional family structures. The hosts explore the historical roles of women in traditional relationships, highlighting the importance of financial empowerment and partnership. They also discuss the dangers of idealizing consumerized fantasies of traditional relationships, which can lead to instability and dissatisfaction. Malcolm and Simone emphasize the importance of building relationships based on mutual affection, romance, and care, rather than strict, inflexible roles. They also examine the generational factors that have contributed to the fracturing of cultural norms and the challenges faced by younger generations in reconstructing healthy relationship models.

People

Simone Collins, Malcolm Collins

Content Warnings:

None

Malcolm Collins
So much of what the trad phenomenon has become, I would say, is actually more of a descendant of bdsm community behavior. Yes. Oh my gosh. Trad behavior. A live in 24/7 slave relationship.

Simone Collins
Total power exchange. Yes. Yeah. Power. Total power exchange relationship.

Malcolm Collins
They have covered, in the costume of traditionalism, the trad wife. TikTokers and tumblers and youtubers that you are seeing are to a traditional relationship what hardcore porn is to a real sexual relationship with a woman. It is a consumerized format meant to masturbate a specific subset of your sort of mental landscape. It is not really what it is like to be in that sort of a relationship. Would you like to know more?

Hello, Simone. It is wonderful to be talking to you today. Today we are going to have an episode in defense of traditionalism. And people can know. We've done some videos, anti traditionalist, where we argue that a lot of trad wifing and stuff like that is really over idealizing a model of family structure from a very limited portion of United States history that isn't really indicative of any large cultural movement.

It was more what was just being sold by Hollywood at the time. And people today, they're like, oh, Hollywood lies to us and gives us unrealistic expectations. And I'm like, they were doing that in the fifties too. Like, this isn't a new phenomenon, buddy. Then they're like, oh shit.

It was always a lie. But I want to go on a few paths with this. So first, I have heard people criticize tradwise and trad families as a LARP recently. And this really got to me because all cultural frameworks are a LArP. You are always larping your culture when you are an ultra orthodox jew and you are putting on your little outfit every day and you are doing all of the cultural things that you do.

What makes it a larP? It is live action and role play as being what you are that helps remind you of who you are. Role playing as something that is differential from the mainstream societal expectations helps you maintain a differential value set, which is what the Trad families are often trying to do. But at the same time, as I talk about how great trad families are, I also want to talk about this concept because I want to narrowly say this type of trad family is great. But there's been something that's been talked about a lot recently, which is the Trad wife to single mom pipeline that recently happened with Laura Southern quite famously.

And so the question is, how? Why is this happening? Why are these trad relationships not as stable as they were in a historic context and leading to really negative outcomes, particularly for women. This is where we're going to talk about Trad wife is communism, but we'll get to that later in the video. But before I go further, I want to hear your thoughts on any of this.

Simone Collins
Yeah, I've been watching a lot of the tradwife to single mom pipeline videos, and my top observation so far is that people, even when we're talking about the 1950s Trad wife, which we still argue was a short term aberration and not at all representative true tradwifery, they're not even modern tradwives aren't even being like 1950s tradwives. I was watching catch me if you can, and there's one ep or there's, there's a scene and catch me if you can, in which Tom Hanks, the FBI agent trying to catch the character played by Leonardo DiCaprio, who's this kid who essentially masquerades as a pilot and surgeon and commits massive check fraud. He's trying to explain to other FBI agents how check fraud works. And the FBI agents are like, what check numbers? Like, you gotta, you know, talk to my wife about this.

She handles all my finances. They're acting like finances are women's work. And it really indicates just the extent to which when that traditional trad wife nuclear family model was being used, women weren't just educating the kids, raising the kids, managing the household, managing the cooking, managing the cleaning. They were also managing the family finances. They were managing investing.

They were managing banking. They were doing all the payments. There was even this. There's some great YouTube videos on the effect of housewives in Japan investing in stock markets and the way that they influence stock market trends because they were so actively involved in investing, even internationally, because at the time, and even still, interest rates were so low. Right.

Like, saving wouldn't be enough, so they had to invest actively. And it was the women in these traditional relations who were investing. And yet when you look at the way that women in the now modern quote unquote trad wife cosplay are behaving, to them, it is just cooking and maybe light cleaning and maybe a little bit of light childrearing, it is not literally being pivotal to the life of the husband in terms of they don't have control over the finances. For example. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins
Many women in these actually traditional relationships, even if you go back to the 1950s, their husbands were living on an allowance that the wife was giving them along with the rest of the family. And we can say, why don't modern traditional families structure themselves this way? If this was a historic way of doing it within at least this cultural context. And the answer is because so much of what the trad phenomenon has become, I would say is actually more of a descendant of bdsm community behavior. Yes.

Trad behavior. A live in 24/7 slave relationship. Yes. Yeah. Power.

Total power exchange relationship. They have covered in the costume of traditionalism. Actually, this reminds me of the episode we had where Simone was reading her diary of the first day she met meme. And at the end she's like, well, I guess I'm gonna enter into a dom sub relationship because growing up in San Francisco, her being the submissive partner in a male female relationship, it didn't even occur to her that that's just the traditional structure of a male female relationship. She's like, yeah, this is a dom sub relationship, a live in 24/7 slave relationship.

They have covered in the costume of traditionalism. And it is to, in an extent, to protect the men's egos who are afraid of, and I think rightly so, for some reason, given divorce laws and stuff like that today, giving women too much power in their lives. But because of this, they're not able to have the type of romance and true partnership that traditional families had. It reminds me of a scene when I see these, like this descendant of the red pill. Oh, I'm being so attractive to women when Gomez and Morticia are dancing and being, like, impossibly romantic and the woman's there, like, looking at them, oh, I want this so bad.

And then her date fester, has two pretzels in his nose and trying to impress her.

And that's what they come off like. They come off like a silly goof who has no idea how to be romantic or what women really want because they have based it all on these fantasies that are more downstream of BDsm culture than they are downstream of any form of true traditionalism, which was a genuine hundred percent power exchange partnership. I think in many of these cases, one, it's women imposing themselves on their boyfriend's fiance's husbands, and the husbands and fiances and boyfriends don't actually want all of this. And two, I think it's just people who are trophy wives who think that they're trad wives. And that's the bigger thing.

Simone Collins
A trophy wife is someone who only does maybe light cooking and cleaning and just is there to look good. And she is not someone who has any financial empowerment. She's not someone who contributes functionally to the family, aside from an aesthetic contribution. So I think there's just also this misconstruing or reframing of the trophy wife as the trad wife. Because, by the way, no one really talks about trophy wives anymore, but trad wives have slotted in to that position.

People are using it as a fronting device of look at me, look at my lifestyle, but they're tradwife. But here I want to talk about what a tradwife actually is, right. And where it actually works. And this is where trad wives are communism comes from. So what do I mean by tradwives are communism?

Malcolm Collins
If you look at the communist ideal, it is from each according to their ability, to each according to their means, to each according to their needs. And within a family structure, a trad family structure, that is generally what you were doing. You would have, for example, our kids don't pay rent like our infant. We give it food because it needs food. Simone produces that food because she has the body that has the ability to produce that food.

I don't because I recognize that males and females are different. And that means that biologically we are in some ways structured for different roles within the family. However, those roles are not hard set. They have some degree of flexibility within them. And that the way that you utilize those bodies and natural differences is going to change as technology changes, as economics changes, as society changes.

But it still follows the traditional system of to each according to their needs, from each according to their abilities, which can lead to some role specialization. But role specialization does not mean. So if you look at what happened with Laura Southern, where you would get the husband talking about her and saying that she was a financial burden after he had asked her to quit her job to be a full time stay at home wife, how can you say that to your wife? You don't get to say that if you have demanded these sorts of sacrifices as the head of the household. And of course, a woman in a modern context is going to go a bit crazy if she's at home doing nothing but the kids, without any sort of a social outlet like you would have had in a historic context, which all women had in a historic context, about where they often participated in some form of small level industry to provide additional side income from the family.

And as you mentioned, often quite intellectual tasks like investing family income, managing the family estate when the husband was off, or just generally managing the family estate was off. And a wife's role, which is often an income generator in a historic context. And so what is a family estate within the modern world? Maybe it's the family social media. Maybe it's the people always are like, ooh, they share a Twitter account.

One of them must have cheated. And I'm like, no, it's just incredibly inefficient in terms of time spent and in terms of where we can direct attention to us to redirect it all to a central account. Like, why would we have two accounts? What? Such a wasted effort.

So what, we can have some form of conflict so I can troll. Going into Twitter voluntarily reminds me of the tunnel of prejudice from that old South park episode. And I can only imagine the people who love being on Twitter having, like, Cartman's reaction to that tunnel. Now, did you know that words we use can show intolerance? Let's begin our tour with a walk through our tunnel of prejudice.

Queer boehner. Chink nikk hebe. Faggots. Cracker. Snow.

Man, this is awesome. Now you know how it feels. I want to ride again. I want to ride again. I get why they're like, somebody's cheating.

Cause I guess if I wanted to cheat, that would be an avenue for doing it. But that's so silly. I. Yeah, so I think that's it. But then I also want to talk about where tradwives went off the rails, because this is another thing that happened to Laura Southern with these incredibly strict roles, which partially led to the breakdown of her relationship.

And in the traditional american family, the roles just were not that strict. The idea of every meal is made by a wife was never really the norm in american culture. It was when the wife didn't have another job. She might make disproportionately more meals, but not every meal. But some trad wives have taken these roles to be, like, incredibly strict roles.

And because of that, you get these market inefficiencies, just like you would in an overly totalitarian command economy communism. The reason why communism works at the family level is because it's organic communism instead of command economy communism. So if people don't understand what I mean by these two things. In command economy communism, everybody has strict roles, and they just perform their strict roles. And then often you have some hierarchy where the person at the top of the hierarchy basically creates all the roles and says, you do this right when this doesn't work because it's incredibly inefficient.

In an organically formed economy, you instead have people take on the roles that they are best suited for in the moment when you're dealing with an entire society, capitalism is a good way to organically create that action. But if you are dealing with a household, for example, where everybody genuinely cares about and appreciates each other, I, for example, walking around the house, I know that right now it hurts simone to bend over because she recently had a cesarean section. And so I try to pick up things on the floor whenever I see them. And thank you, by the way. Why do I do that?

It's because I care about my wife. They're like, why would you do that? Because it's easier for me than it is for her. And then they're like, yeah, but then why do you do it? It's because I care about her and because she shows appreciation for me when I do it.

You all the time tell me, oh, I noticed you did this little thing that you didn't that I might not have noticed and you didn't ask for. Thanks for and for that. I am additionally appreciative of you doing it. And that is organic communism, where everyone is choosing to do what's right because they care about the other people. It's also not because it's their job, per se, but because they.

Simone Collins
It's that rule of if you see a mess, you clean it up. It doesn't matter if you made it. Yeah, but this is also why communism doesn't work at the societal level, because you get the free rider problem and because people don't. A lot of people hate other people in their society. So then you need to build it into a command economy, which leads to the collapse.

Malcolm Collins
But they are building family structures as command economies, which is just stupid. And you could say, then why have they done this? It's not just the bdsm, it's the consumerization of the concept of the trad wife. So let me explain. Yeah, intriguing.

You have learned about what a trad wife is from TikTok, what the idealized tradwife is from TikTok, from Instagram, from. Not even from 1950s movies. It's some vague concept you have of the way things were in the 1950s. Then through modern bastionization, elevated within these various social media platforms, everything that you see within those social media platforms is served to you because an algorithm said it needed to be served.

Okay? So if you are seeing it, you are seeing it because the algorithm says, hey, I think that you are going to engage with this content. And, yeah, that is a product. That is a product that is being served to you because it knows that you like to interact with that brief second clip of somebody's life. But that means that the trad wife, TikTokers and tumblrs and youtubers that you are seeing are to a traditional relationship what hardcore porn is to a real sexual relationship with a woman.

It is a consumerized format meant to masturbate a pacific subset of your sort of mental landscape. It is not really what it is like to be in that sort of a relationship. But do you have thoughts on this, Simone? Yeah, I agree with you. There's nothing real about it.

Simone Collins
Obviously, it works in isolated cases, but it's not, in most realities, a sustainable way to go. And it's not representative of any long term reality that I've ever encountered. Yeah. Okay, so now we can talk about why traditional relationships of this. I'll call them BDSM tradwives, because they're not real tradwives.

Malcolm Collins
They're BDSM tradwives where the woman's just submissive in all things to the man. That is not the way american culture worked historically. Maybe, as I've said, maybe some muslim cultures were structured that way, but not classic american culture. No. Not even read about relationships from, like, the old west time period.

Like, again, for example, I read about my ancestor who lived during that time period, and you didn't see that at all in his relationship. It's very clear that if a man had treated his wife that way in his writings, he would have looked down upon them and seen them as both low class and pathetic, because that is traditional to americana. Like treating a woman poorly is, or treating her as, like your slave is not a positive thing. This, you could say, why is this creating a fundamentally unstable dynamic? The way that divorce laws are structured in our country, if you treat a woman in a way that builds animosity towards you, which how could this not over time, you don't actually legally have power over them.

Even if you have a prenup in the US, the lawsuit hugely favor the woman. If she doesn't have a degree of genuine admiration for you, and on top of that genuine admiration, genuine affection for you, then it's like a slave that always has a poisoned knife to your neck. Like everything you do to target them or degrade them is idiocy. The dynamics in that relationship are not the dynamics that you are pretending they are. It is completely.

And this is where the Larp accusation is true. It is completely a role play in that you do not actually have the power over this person you are pretending to yourself that you have. They can take half your money and then take a portion of your salary for basically the rest of your life, and you will have to support them while they do whatever they want. And so that creates a hugely unstable dynamic. And society won't hugely punish them for that.

They might have trouble securing another partner after that, but they won't realize that until after they've enacted upon this. And so then both of you just live miserably, enjoy your horrible lives alone, which is not a great thing. But society, when you believe a consumerist fantasy and you confuse a consumerist fantasy with a call to action, you can end up making horrifically wrong choices. And do people deserve this? I don't know.

But now I say all this with the understanding that there is a real thing you can search for out there. Like there is a real traditional relationship structure, but it is a relationship structure that is based on mutual affection and romance and caring and not these little games and stuff like that. I think what's so dangerous is what used to happen in the past is one. Humans are not great at thinking from a first principles perspective. Like, you are unique in having this ability.

Simone Collins
Malcolm. I think the bigger issue is that what most humans do and have done throughout history is they are presented with examples that they're exposed to throughout their lives and then they follow the example that works best for them. So they may see a couple of different ways of living and then they choose the way of living that is feasible and appealing to them. And what's problematic about the trad life pipeline is that, as you're saying, it's this consumerist fantasy that's not real, that's not sustainable, but it is what is showing up in people's lives. And people aren't really being exposed to that many functional relationships or that many, you could say traditional or comforting or alternative to the modern kind of soulless relationship where everyone just has their atomized life and doesn't really have an integrated marriage.

That's very romantic, that's very supportive, mutually supportive. And then they see this and they assume then this is how it's going to work. So I don't think people are intentionally trying to choose something uniquely indulgent or fetishized or whatever. They just don't. They don't have any examples of what real trad relationships are outside of some examples which do exist in media, but just aren't framed really clearly as relationships.

There are shows, for example, where couples work together, but the shows don't really highlight the good elements of their relationship. They like to highlight the conflict or pretend that there's conflict or focus on other things, but they don't really show the real thing. So I think a lot of it comes down to people just not having good examples to run by. Not any good models being out there. Yeah, yeah, I think that makes sense.

Malcolm Collins
Yeah. And I don't know. And I wonder, okay, so why do people not have good models? I think one of the problems that people have is they blame too much of our cultures, like fracturization, on this generation. Which generation?

Simone Collins
Millennial? Our generation. Gen Z? Gen Alpha. When I really put it mostly on boomers, boomers were the ones who did all that experimental stuff in the seventies and then ended up in these loveless relationships.

Malcolm Collins
If you look at the divorce rate within boomers, it's astoundingly high compared to every other generation. This is where you get this, like, 50% divorce stat, which isn't representative of modern marriage at all. And it is that they were the first generation that, like, collectively decided to live lives of hedonism instead of for the future. Yeah. And I think that you look at them, this is why I actually think american psycho is such a good movie in terms of depicting, like, what happened to the boomers.

I think american psycho shows what the boomers did to themselves. I know so few happy boomers in terms of the people I know, and it's because they structured their lives in these horrible ways in which they broke from tradition, but they didn't think about what they were doing, and so much of it was self indulgent. And then the younger generation sees that things didn't work for them, or is a few generations away from any cultural solution that really works. And so they're trying to reconstruct what a healthy culture looks like from, unfortunately, in a world where information and lifestyles themselves have become consumerized from what is essentially pornography. And because of that, they end up crafting.

And then people like us will say this, and they're like, then you're not right wing enough, because they begin to develop parts of their identity. They're like, if you don't take this extremist view of what a trad wife is or a traditional family structure is, then that means you are less right wing than me, and thus lower status within right wing communities than me. And basically the response to that is, bro, are you, like, an idiot? Do you not see that you're destroying your life by choosing a stupid family structure that never worked? If you are looking at this from reality, we're not looking at this from a right wing versus non right wing perspective.

We're like, what's a good way to structure your life so that you end up satisfied with what you end up creating and you actually secure a partner, and you give your kids a good childhood, and blah, blah, blah. And these structures that they're building do not do that. And they're. And yet they do that. They follow these structures and these hypotheses that are easily disprovable if they search out people who actually attempted to live these ultra rigidly structured systems outside of ultra religious context.

So I guess it can work if you're in, like, an extremist evangelical family or an extremist heritage family or something like that. Okay, that can work. Amish family, that can work. But when you're trying to live adjacent to the secular world, it just doesn't work because there is no negative externality. Further the fracturing of the relationship, which leads to the fracturing of a relationship, and then a woman without any skills.

And then, yeah, it's not awesome. The audience has been forewarned. All right. I love you, Simone. Have a spectacular day.

Simone Collins
I love you, too.