Why Real Men Don't Want Trad Wives
Masculine men prefer reality. Boys prefer fantasy.
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The relationships between men and women today are, to put it mildly, rocky. I believe they have been, to one degree or the other, like this for the entirety of our existence. Men and women are different. They, at a biologically and fundamental level, can never and will never fully understand one another. This is what makes dating and romance so interesting. It’s two groups of people who don’t get the other making an attempt to do so in spite of every logical reason to not do so. It’s a big part of the reason why successful romance is wonderful and why unsuccessful romance hurts so much.
What has complicated this more in the modern times, in my estimation, is because of a new problem. Many of the problems concerning courtship and dating throughout history have always been there. Men have a tendency to be overly-assertive. Women have a tendency to pry too much. Men want respect. Women want love. When these basic things are not tended to properly by either person, there is friction that comes to the surface. However, the new problem in dating is not any of these things. It is something much more simple, and much more hard, to acknowledge:
We don’t know what men and women are anymore.
To be clear, I don’t mean this in a Matt Walsh, What is a Woman? type of way (even though that way is certainly relevant). I mean this in a very fundamental, very literal sense. What defines a man and masculinity in the modern era? What defines a woman and femininity in the modern era? What should a man do given certain scenarios and challenges? What should a woman do in those same situations? What roles should a man have? A woman? Our culture is horrendous at answering these questions from every lane they come from. The result of our inability to answer them has led to a mass confusion amongst the singles in America, particularly among young people. It is this confusion, which manifests in different ways, that has done the most damage to modern dating.
This mass confusion in the young people in our society is most apparent, as are most things pertaining to them, on social media. You will see no more rampant deluge of confusion and disorientation than the cesspool of brain dumping that constitutes most popular social media trends of the day and age. These trends, fueled by the people that use them, have evolved enough to where they can effectively shape culture given the mass usage of their products by us and the continuous innovation of the products by our technocratic overlords.
One of the trends that dominated 2023, and one that seemingly everyone had an opinion on, was the Trad Wife phenomenon. The Trad Wife trend, popularized primarily by influencer Estee Williams and others, was meant to repopularize the past traditional femininity that had supposedly been embodied by women in “better” times of the past. Things that these influencers discussed were being stay-at-home moms, baking sourdough bread, being a homemaker, and rejecting the appeals of predatory corporate work perks by refusing to go into the workforce.
There was no group in society that was offended more by the rapid rise of the Trad Wife movement than, obviously, the modern Left. The Left, obsessed with getting every woman possible out of the “oppression” of traditional femininity and into a 9-5 corporate job with a minimum 3% 401(k) match, lost their collective minds over the Trad Wife movement. They did everything they could to torpedo these influencers from gaining every type of cultural clout, ranging from boycotts to name calling to slander.
The main offense that the Left took from the Trad Wife movement were, unsurprisingly, the open shots taken at modern feminism and womanhood. Going against feminism, equivalent to heresy and sanctimony in the modern times, is a sin of grave consequences for the modern Left. So much of their agenda towards the elevation of women in society, a good thing in broad content certainly, is deemed for self-serving purposes- getting more women in soulless corporate jobs, feeding them garbage like egg freezing packages in their corporate benefits packages, doing everything they can to make children a parasite rather than a blessing, etc. Almost none of it is for a virtuous cause, no matter which way you slice it.
Expectedly, on the other hand, the Trad Wife movement was applauded by some sects within the modern Right. Some of these groups expressed joy at, at the minimum, seeing another option for women to express femininity other than being a corporate drone and delivering UberEats in the evenings. They like women who expressed traditional femininity over neo-femininity, and did their best to show their appreciation for all of the benefits that traditional femininity has provided the world.
The sect of the Right that most appreciated the Trad Wife explosion was the Manosphere/RedPill Right. In the Trad Wife movement, these “oppressed” grifters had found an oasis in a long-standing desert. These men, mostly confused, disillusioned, and young who are influenced by the charlatans that parrot the garbage between their ears, loved Trad Wives. Finally, in their eyes, they had a different flavor of woman than the “modern women” who had “wronged” them.
This trend of conservative young men applauding the Trad Wife movement falls almost directly adjacent to the Passport Bros movement. The Passport Bros, worthy of their own post (coming soon!), are young men who are going to third-world countries to find women who embody “traditional” values. The modern-day equivalent of the mail-order bride, these young men are also fed up with “modern women”, enough so to spend thousands to travel to places like Indonesia and the Phillipines to replace Western, Americanized women with a supposedly-better option.
The Passport Bro and Trad Wife movements are pacifiers to the Manosphere and RedPill sects of men. It alleviates their fears of women not meeting their standards, of dumping on them for valuing conservative and traditional things such as gender roles and household labor. They finally feel understood, worthy of attention from a sect of women who, for once, doesn’t hate on them or shame them from wanting some things that men have always wanted from women. In many ways, these men have a right to feel this way.
However, there is additional context that must be provided before marking this as a “victory” for conservative and traditional ideas around gender roles. I am the biggest fan of traditional gender roles in the world. I believe that, to alleviate much of the problems surrounding modern dating, we need to get back to basics. I believe that men and women in romantic relationships have certain duties to one another that should likely be done by either the man or the woman, obviously given average and basic circumstances. This is not a controversial thing to say. This is where the people celebrating Trad Wives are correct. But where the Trad Wife supporters go wrong is something much more fundamental:
Trad Wives are not what men should want.
I’ll even go a step further. Real, masculine men, not the delayed, stunted adolescent Manosphere and RedPill men, reject Trad Wives. To me, and from what I’ve observed, the men that I most respect, the ones that have their heads on straight and are doing life the way men should do them, are more annoyed by Trad Wives than they are comforted by them. They view them as a cute trinket, a dashboard bobblehead, an insignificant token of overcompensation that has no substance behind it at all.
These men are correct.
Real men don’t want a Trad Wife- a basic, cardboard cutout, off-white brand of some ideological fantasy that can never have hope of coming true. Instead, these men want someone like Jordan Peterson describes when talking about Eve. In the Bible, God creates Adam, and then takes a rib out of him to make Eve. Eve has been translated various times, and means various things as a result.
The one that Peterson prefers, which is the one that I find the most compelling, is “worthy adversary”. This is what I believe masculine men, at their core, truly want. They want someone that can push them to be better, not a doormat whose only goal is to be boring and submissive and appeal to their every whim no matter how hedonistic or stupid. These men definitely want traditional women, but the problem they, correctly, see with Trad Wives is that they are not traditional. They’re just as new as feminisms, a construct, something that immature men in the Manosphere and RedPill spaces say that they want, but have no greater context to see that their fantasy is as unrealistic as they know it deep down to be.
A few weeks back, I was having a conversation with a good friend about this exact topic. I have five non-negotiables for the women that I allow into my dating life. One of them is the need for women to be intellectually-stimulating. I need to have someone to contend with, to use Peterson’s terminology. This does not mean they need to have any sort of certification, degree, or level of IQ points. It means that they, like me, need to have a mindset of mutual investment, of being grounded in values, but at the same time not lowering yourself to fit a stereotype that, more than likely, will likely end up degrading that person.
I’m a masculine man. I’m the biggest supporter of masculine men on this planet. I wrote a whole book that shattered countless friendships on that subject for a reason. The reason why the book was so controversial was, hardly, anything that I said about women. The reason why the book was so controversial was, mostly, everything that I said about men. Modern men have become the equivalent to Trad Wives. We’re a caricature, a joke, a laughingstock. Whether it’s the incel class, “high-value man” class, or the simpleton class, the reason why men have been degraded to a stereotype is that we allowed the stereotype of masculinity to dominate masculinity itself.
This is why truly masculine men have, and should have, a problem with Trad Wives. Trad Wives are a cheap copout of women socially constructed for a lower class of men. These men are of a lower class because their view of women is intellectually-skewed. They view women as a singular thing, something to dominate, something to possess. In typical RedPill fashion, these men view women not as human beings to contend and partner with, but as something to own and control.
This is not how masculine men view women. Masculine men want women to be traditional, but also want them to be evolved. They don’t want something to step on. They want someone to help them step up. The biggest sin of the modern era between men and women is the narrative that men and women are adversaries, that they shouldn’t help each other. This is a lie. Men and women are not meant to be adversaries. They are meant to help each other. Anyone or anything that takes any position opposite to that is, by biology and by definition, suicidal.
A particularly-intense blame needs to fall on a certain type of man for allowing the Trad Wife appeal to dominate- Christian men. Christian men know that this is incorrect. We’re the largest demographic of men on this planet, hovering somewhere around a billion people around the world. The problem is that these “Christian” men are not doing the job of a Christian man by holding up the standard that other men, Christian or not, should be holding women to.
That standard of womanhood can be found in Proverbs 31, one of the most widely-cited Scriptures in the entire Bible. Proverbs 31 describes the ideal woman for a Christian man. A Proverbs 31 woman, now unfortunately a mostly-meaningless descriptor due to the watering down of Christianity and womanhood, is not a Trad Wife. In fact, a Proverbs 31 woman is the complete OPPOSITE of a Trad Wife.
Proverbs 31 women, unlike a Trad Wife, is exactly what Peterson described- someone to contend with. They are not so bad way. They’re not crazy, demeaning, or extra (everything a Trad Wife is, by the way). Instead, they are capable, industrious, and someone who you, a man, should want pushing you to be better. Trad Wives allow men to get away with everything. They allow and want men to have unchallenged authority and dominion because they don’t have the correct view of masculinity. The Manosphere and RedPill men want this as well, for the same reasons. It’s an abdication of masculine responsibility, a hitting of the ejector seat when it comes to your anointed and divine role as a man.
The reality is this. Traditionally feminine women are a blessing. They are something that women should aspire and look to be like. I will not compromise on that, and I don’t think any masculine man should. But we cannot overcorrect either to state our own hedonistic and shallow desires of what we think feminine women should be. Truly feminine women don’t care what you think. They shouldn’t care what you think. They’re too busy dealing with men who are serious, the masculine men who have no time for silly things like the RedPill and Trad Wives. Instead, they’re focused on looking for the right things, not getting caught up in the fads and lies surrounding modern dating that serve to harm far more people than they help.
As should you, if you’re mature enough to know the difference.
Sam