The "tradwife" archetype was a poorly masquarated BDSM fetish

AssignedWitchAtBirth

Source : https://fishmech.tumblr.com/post/629951780758913024/i-was-reading-through-a-trad-womans-blog-the

**Anonymous asked :**

i was reading through a trad woman's blog the other week and i honestly thought it seemed at times like a fetish poorly masquerading as an ideology. you've discussed politics as sublimation before and i figured you might have something interesting to say wrt this. do you think tradwives are in any way the far right equivalent to bimbos as the resident bimbo authority on this site

**birlinterrupted replied : **

I definitely think there are a few things going on. I love this conversation, I’ve been wanting to talk about these sorts of things at more length but I have infrequently had the time to really get all my thoughts out there. It feels like a really big set of moving parts, so I will just like lay out a few provisional like ideas to begin with:

Some of them very much are explicitly doing what you are talking about. There is an entire subframework of trad relationships called “Domestic Discipline” which is premised around the idea that husbands in traditional christian relationships should routinely spank their wives (and that this is biblically mandated). The entire scene itself toes a very strange and concerning line of slippage between a bdsm dynamic and just an overtly patriarchal and physically abusive perspective on relationships. While claiming that these spankings have no erotic component, the way that it is generally talked about to me betrays some sort of erotic charge from both it as well as the dynamic.

I think that a large subsection of ‘trad’ stuff has people within it who previously were very active within bdsm. They usually portray their turn from that as a disjuncture, but in reality that is a lot of continuity. Even to say that many tradwife posts basically replicate the pornographic genre (down to even having very similar forms of macros as things like sissy or bimbo macros) - to the extent that some of these images and macros get disseminated throughout various gender-based fetish communities.

There are also just a lot of people kinda doing a meld of the two. There are plenty of women at this point who are eroticizing the concept of the comfort of traditional gender roles in various ways (including so called traditional ones). The tradwife exists on a continuum with the bimbo (fetish) - simultaneously tied by a conceptual subordination and deferrence to men, objectified in different senses and sexually submissive - but at different ends of the internally contradictory messages as to what men want out of women. Both provide a sort of escape from social responsibility by attaching to a man - and both have large contingents and dynamics of white women attempting to reassert their place in heirarchical society thru a feigned ‘submission’ to archetypically white men.

Which is to say: the conservative equivalent of the bimbo is the bimbo: you will find many on the right who are sexually attracted to this archetype and to the gender messages within the fetish community. But the bimbo appeals to the ‘whore’ part of the madonna/whore divide placed upon many women, the tradwife obviously takes from the ‘madonna’ part. Engagement with either of these archetypes doesn’t necessitate that someone is conservative - engagement is around the fact that these archetypes and ideas have power witihn our society, and are things that can have a charge that attracts playing with them. But for the most part I would agree that the archetype of ‘bimbo’, being in a certain sense anti-traditional has been more popular for a sort of non-conservative detournement than ‘tradwife’/’housewife’ imagery. The tradwife stuff in all is less committment and more socially rewarded in actuality - possibly why there are more people doing it in not a fetish context. but I do very much think they come from the same place - societal anxiety around the dissolution of normative gender roles and expectations and internal anxieties about how to fit into changing social and relational landscapes

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