In the last few months since MAGA came into full power, it seems that the vibe shift I’ve been harping on has been taking a more definitive shape. It’s not just a vibe anymore, it actually has some prescriptiveness. The thing is, I’ve seen it all before. I mean I’m really not joking that I feel like I come from the future.
You might have noticed people talking about the TOO HOT TO WORK trend. It’s being pushed on girls at malls as part of “ironic” fashion and pumped out by conservative trad influencers. It’s the idea that if you are young and pretty, you don’t need a job — you need a man and a few kids and a nice domestic routine. Why waste your life on Excel spreadsheets and boring corporate work, when you can just be yourself — hot and pretty and a mommy, and let a man take care of you.
There are a myriad angles for me to approach this topic from. But I want to start with one that’s not being discussed at all: Being hot and maintaining hotness for a man is obviously work — a lot of work.
Coming from Moscow, I know the TOO HOT TO WORK philosophy too well. After the collapse of USSR, many women there adopted that motto and have been living it. Starting from the 1990s, the most beautiful young women from all over Russia would move to Moscow in pursuit of this work. To be fair, Russian society was in such disarray that there were very few opportunities for both men and women, and so women naturally began leveraging the only real property they owned and controlled: their bodies and their looks. They became their own means of production. (The men did too, using their bodies and muscles to go into the other side of this same business: violent crime.)
Anyway, women began moving from their provincial hometowns to Moscow because Moscow was where all the newly rich men were. The women came armed with only two things: their hotness and their natural savvy. Some of them succeeded at their mission: they captured a rich man and managed to build a life for themselves. Some got knocked up, abandoned, and had to come back to their towns defeated. (Sometimes they would leave their child with their mother and try their luck in Moscow again.) Some got lucky and became famous models like Natalia Vodyanova. But most, in the best case scenario, became trophy wives and mistresses. Their sole job was to maintain their looks. So they went all out with body modifications, beauty routines, extreme diets, and yet, despite it all, they were ultimately discarded for younger women who, in turn, after winning the race, would end up discarded, too. The lucky ones and the ones with the most brains and cunning, ended up with kids and some kind of severance package and maybe a business they started with their man’s capital. Kids are, in fact, a central part in getting a good severance package. They are the anchor women use to bind themselves to their man so he wouldn’t be able to easily discard them but would have provide financial support, even after he invariably moved on to a younger and fresher wife. The level of this support was completely up to the man — he could give you nothing or be extremely generous. It all depended on a woman’s relationship with him. Since there was (and still is) no de facto legal protections for women and the courts are subservient to rich and powerful men, women can’t depend on the system to secure alimony and child support. In fact, if you sue, he might cut you off out of spite.
As I often say on the podcast, Russia is really a Jeffrey Epstein world where youth and hotness are in large supply and for sale. And it’s not very expensive, either. It makes men satiated with it and they treat women like they treat any other desirable consumer product, like a good car — you buy it, you enjoy it, you get bored of it, it gets a few scratches and you put it back in the garage and buy a new one. That’s often the wealthy Russian man psychology. The women, in their turn, are the ultimate internalizers of this kind of hyper-consumerist male gaze, and as a result, have a dissociated, almost cannibalistic relationship with their bodies, starving them, upgrading them, forcing them into the look that they think their man wants. They objectify themselves and they objectify men — meaning men are no good to them unless they are loaded with money. So naturally, despite the trad veneer of these relationships, this symbiotic/parasitic relationship is not conducive to traditional values or to a happy and healthy family life, and it’s for sure not great for kids — as they are primarily a hedge used by women to get financial security for themselves beyond their “hot years.” It’s sort of a harem mentality that’s only good for life in a harem. In fact, many among THTW Russian women do take trips to the Emirates to briefly work with sheikhs.
But it makes sense. For these women, their bodies are the only source of their power. Working to keep their bodies looking youthful and desirable is their life’s work. Every time I visit Moscow and run into these THTW women, I’m reminded how soul crushing their life is. They have perfect botoxed and laser polished faces with huge lips, their cheekbones are edged with fillers, they have immaculate manicures and pedicures, and their hair is professionally done for every outing. But they are dead in the eyes, and they give you the coldest, meanest up-and-down stare, appraising your worth. If you are a man, they want to know if you are rich enough to be worth their time. If you are a woman, they want to know if you’re a potential competitor —a competitor for their work.
I think Russia having lived through societal collapse and going full barbarism and cannibalism in the aftermath of this collapse, is a good example of where this THTW sentiment logically leads you.
This is what I thought about when I saw this latest trend here in the US — with conservative male and female influencers arguing that women shouldn’t work, that feminism was a joke, and that we should all go back to some idyllic 1950s America.
Funny enough, only Megyn Kelly among the conservative pundit class took this as a personal attack and defended the working women who in her view need to be out there being an example to look up to for young girls. Yet her position is not consistent with the MAGA worldview she promotes. If you actually take the trad MAGA agenda to its logical conclusion — yes, women should be locked up back at home and there shouldn’t be any Megyn Kelly types on TV, delivering propaganda to the plebes plugged into their zombie TVs/phones/computers — well, not unless these woman are doing a cooking or home decorating or baby rearing show, telling girls how be good and docile. What kind of example is Megyn Kelly setting being aggressive and confident and spouting her political opinions? That women are smart enough to talk about big issues? Better not give those women any ideas!
The thing is, this whole “lock the women up at home” trend is mostly an incel fantasy. Most men haven’t been paid a family wage in decades, and so the average man can’t support his family on one income. He needs his woman in the workplace. But maybe the idea is that if women are shut back home the labor market will be more favorable to men and they would be paid better? Okay, sure. But it’s still incel 1950s nostalgia. That 1950s life maybe somewhat easier for some, but clearly unbearable for many — after all, civil rights and the women’s movement came out of this “idyllic picture-perfect world” people today like to imagine.
I feel like I have to state the obvious — the majority of women throughout history have always worked. The tradwife image that is being pushed in the media is a rich tradwife, living the kind of life that only the aristocracy could afford to live. And really, it’s not even so trad. Often tradwife influencers earn a great living and even have employees, and so they are themselves girl bosses — girl bosses in disguise, girl bosses cosplaying as demure women. Or they are obscenely rich to begin with, like Hannah Neeleman, who runs the Ballerina Farm Instagram account with 10 million followers. She is a mother of eight and lives a perfect life on a farm in Utah with her husband and animals. But see, her father-in-law is David Neeleman, founder of Jetblue and other commercial airlines. His estimated net worth is half a billion dollars.
But even if you take aside the fact that the idyllic tradwife life is not accessible to most — even when it was available, the 1950s middle class Stepford Wife life had many horrors…horrors that young people don’t ponder anymore because they grew up in a world devoid of them. Women who were locked at home, even beautiful big homes with all the appliances to make perfect pies all day and resources to go to beauty salons and look great, were often very miserable — diagnosed with depression, hysteria and other mental illnesses. They were medicated and institutionalized without consent and sometimes had their brains wiped by doctors, just because their husbands couldn’t understand why they weren’t happy with this perfect life. “What’s the matter honey? Aren’t you happy with this new GE washer/dryer I got you? It has a self cleaning mode!” Joseph Kennedy Sr. had his daughter, JFK’s sister, Rosemary Kennedy, lobotomized because she had rages and he found her “difficult.” He didn’t even inform his wife, her mother, until after the procedure. Well, if I lived in America back then, I feel I wouldn’t be able to write this essay or to communicate anything at all, because I would’ve been lobotomized long ago, since I am very difficult and contentious.
Anyway, even those women who really enjoyed their housewife existence were still working. They were not on Instagram monetizing their tradwife life, while having servants doing their work instead. They took care of the house, the kids, the husband, and did a lot reproductive labor that seems invisible to most men, and, if they were lucky with their husband and liked him well enough and didn’t have much ambition, it wasn’t such a bad deal. But what if the husband suddenly died? These women were often rather helpless after years of infantilization and were suddenly left not necessarily well provided for. So they had to find another husband — someone to provide for them and their spawn. So they were incentivized into domestic prostitution, because what were the options? They had few. So maybe just drop the decorum and become a real prostitute like Jeanne Dielman.
This revolt I’m seeing against abstract feminism feels very misplaced. Yes, I think liberal feminism sold women and men short, and did a lot of damage without delivering the goods. And by goods I mean: free childcare, maternity leave, and democratized access to things like music and art classes and sports. In a lot of ways, liberal feminism feels like a psyop meant to give just enough freedom to women to make both women and men miserable. Yes, the sexual “revolution” liberated women to have as much sex as they want before marriage or even instead of it. But everything that has to do with childrearing and maternity has remained private and unchanged, while the only thing that has progressed is the ability for women to get jobs and climb the corporate ladder like a man. Rachel Cusk had the same realization after living a big chunk of her life according to libfem values: “What I lived as feminism were in fact the male values my parents, among others, well-meaningly bequeathed me—the cross-dressing values of my father, and the anti-feminine values of my mother. So I am not a feminist. I am a self-hating transvestite.”
And liberal feminism didn’t remove the financial pressure from the men. In many cases, men are still expected to be the breadwinner of the family, especially when kids come into the picture. Because even when career women want to have kids, they often have to find a man with a better career than her own so that he would be able to provide for the family while she takes time off work. So what’s the ultimate benefit from liberal feminism for men here? There is still the cultural and financial pressure to be a patriarch — to be a one dimensional worker bee to earn respect from society, even if you hate what you do. There is not much freedom in that. And it’s not that great of a deal. But is this the fault of feminism? No. It’s the fault of not enough feminism.
It’s good to admit the failure of liberal feminism — to recognize its bourgeois bend and its hypocrisy. But what needs to be done is not to do away with feminism and pray for a good husband, but to increase feminism: to provide more state support for women and the types of labor that women have been expected to do for nothing. Peter Thiel, the famously gay misogynist scheming billionaire has lamented exactly this: that after women were allowed to vote, they voted the “nanny state” into being, and now won’t give it up — but the thing is it’s not much of a nanny state to speak of.
The new Trump’s proposal to give $5,000 to women who become mothers to increase birth rates is as ridiculous. How $5,000 for a kid helps anyone, when there is no state support for raising them otherwise. It’s a ploy to not do anything, while seeming like you’re doing something — the classic divide and conquer strategy. I mean, $5,000 is not enough to take care of a dog these days.
Most young American women probably don’t know that during WWII, when the U.S. needed its women to work because all the men were drafted into the military, the federal government enacted a universal childcare program to take care of kids while their moms were doing their factory shifts — education, food, and healthcare was provided for free. Naturally, this program was cut as soon as the war ended and women were locked back up at home. So good things can happen — and quickly, too — if there is any political will behind it. There’s no need for a war. Trump and MAGA are gaslighting women, dangling this miserable $5,000 in their faces.
WWII was the only time the universal childcare existed in America and even now it seems radical. What do women get instead? The most elite professional women working for Apple, Facebook, Google, Uber, Spotify, and many other top corps get tens of thousands of dollars so they can freeze their eggs. But they don’t get childcare.
I think the reason behind the popularity of TOO HOT TO WORK merch along with the sentiment is exhaustion. People are exhausted, overworked underpaid, and they look around and see the slow cancellation of the future, as Mark Fisher called it. No wonder it leads to nostalgia for times they have never lived through — times that seem easier, simpler…
When people are tired and glued to their phones and constantly fed culture war narratives and captured by demonic spirits (aka media influencers) of all sorts and ages, perfectly tailored just for them — there is no time to think, to make sense of your life and to ponder why you are exhausted and who is to blame. It’s easy to fall for the ready made answer — feminism is bad, that’s the root of all your problems. But no one reminds young women that only in 1974 were they allowed to open their own bank accounts, thanks to Equal Credit Opportunity Act…
Do girls really want to roll that back, too? I doubt it. And they’re not gonna be very happy if that’s where they suddenly find themselves because they base their politics on what a demonic influencer has been feeding them.
But here’s the secret American capitalist culture is keeping from you — what incels, dreaming of the 1950s, don’t understand: Men have more access to women and marriage under socialism — not capitalism.
When a woman is truly independent, when she is neither a prize, nor chattel — the rules of the game change. If you don’t need to buy her, you can attract her with other qualities. You might be smart and funny or good at playing instrument or athletic — no big achievements are necessary. But, yes, there is no ownership with this kind of arrangement. You don’t have control in the same way, and she can leave if you treat her badly or if she falls out of love. This might be a big blow to the male ego and maybe for some a big psychological adjustment would be necessary for this to work. But the upside is that there would be much less pressure on men to succeed financially. Men wouldn’t have to waste their lives chasing money just so they can have a good family. Men wouldn’t have to work themselves into loneliness and depression just so they wouldn’t be considered losers…just so that they can pay for good schools and piano lessons for their kid. Guess what? In the socialist world I’m talking about, all schools and piano lessons — and ballet classes and sports and chess clubs — are free.
In many ways only under socialism can women have it all.
They can have a family and kids early in life. They can work and be an equal partner to a man. Is it unfeminine? Emasculating? I don’t think so. I find it pretty hot that a man can do child care and be a real father, not just an ATM machine. And I know that men find women who are competent and who are fully developed individuals to be attractive and hot. It’s weird to even have to state this.
There was a book Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism by anthropologist Kristen Ghodsee that shows how much better relationships are under socialist conditions. She compared the sexual satisfaction of women in West and East Germany, and found that women in East Germany had better sex. Some people were outraged by the book, many mocked it. But to me it’s a no-brainer. If you can choose your partner/husband based on attraction rather than economic security, you will have better sex and a better life together.
For example, my grandmother, who came from a wealthy Jewish merchant family, grew up in Soviet Moscow and chose to marry my slav grandpa, who grew up in a village. He was not educated or sophisticated, nor did he come with any capital. But he was dashing and smart and was in the navy when they met. She married him for him — not for what he could offer her. In the old capitalist world, this marriage would have been a misalliance. But it was totally normal for the Soviet Union, and she preferred him to some bourgeois bespectacled lawyer or doctor Jewish man she would have been forced to marry if there hadn’t been a revolution. Both my grandmother and grandfather worked — she was an architect, he was a state middle manager. And yet, their relationship was “trad.” He was masculine, she was feminine. They had children…it all worked and they did live a happily ever after life.
I have an American friend, a really beautiful woman, a former model who dated billionaires and whose family comes from New England stock whose lineage dates to the pre-Mayflower America. She didn’t become a rich tradwife, even though she could. Instead she stopped modeling, studied while working and supporting herself, and became a filmmaker and a writer. She is somewhat struggling financially now, but she is happy. She does what she loves, she dates who she wants, is independent, and didn’t have a single plastic surgery done and doesn’t even do botox. Why would she? She is not part of the rich wife circle where it’s expected of you. She feels that she made the right choice. She told me recently that her grandmother struggled with alcoholism and depression. She was one of those Stepford Wives — good looking, well-dressed, and locked in the big beautiful house. My grandmother, who was born in Moscow in 1915 and worked all her life, wasn’t well-coiffed or “taken care of” like my friend’s grandmother. But she sure as hell wasn’t depressed. She was happy to work and have her own identity, while also having two kids and a husband. How many American women born in 1915 became architects? I imagine that number is in the single digits.
True feminism and equality is not on offer in America today. Here people are given a choice: Lean In liberal feminism or a 1950s tradfem fantasy. These are not great options. Still though, I bet that if most women had to really choose, they’d opt to stay with the libfem world, despite its many limitations. Because as a libfem you at least have some power. And that’s preferable to becoming a sad aging doll of a woman with no autonomy, surviving on a mix of adderall and xanax and plastic surgery or locked up in an institution against your will because your husband doesn’t understand why you’re so hysterical. Doesn’t he provide for you? Don’t you have a great house? A car? A washing machine? What’s not to love?!
—Evgenia
Work in and of itself used to have more social value. Both my grandmothers worked outside the home in education--normal career path for a woman of that era. They were able to get the necessary education themselves despite being part of larger families with varying degrees of wealth. The dream of bourgeois feminism was that women could enter different career paths, keep their money, and be seen as valuable contributors in all fields.
Now it's, oh, do we really need teachers? Do we really need engineers? Do we really need workers? There's AI and YouTube, why go into debt just so you can be seen as ChatGPT's little helper? ChatGPT doesn't have a pussy yet, though, just be glad you're not ugly or a man and you have something somebody wants!
No sooner than I read this that I see a waifish girl on the streets of Paris wearing a print t-shirt that said "Born To Slay, Forced To Work"