Trad-Wifing Ain't Cheap

Weird how the "traditional" lifestyle influencers all seem to come from insane wealth.

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Just a short one (ish) for today, folks.

Photo by Nationaal Archief on Unsplash

Many months ago now, I wrote about the revelation the TV’s Pioneer Woman had married into a family that seems to have been intimately connected to the ring of thieves and murderers who chiseled, cheated, and sometimes killed the oil-rich Osage Indians, as depicted in Killers of the Flower Moon. I think I struggled at the time to explain preciesely why I found this story so funny, or at least edifying in some way.

Fast forward to this week, when I read this compelling profile of “queen of the trad wives” Hannah Neeleman, written by Megan Agnew in the Times.

If you frequently bookmark Instagram recipes like I do, there’s a decent likelihood that you’ve come across a “trad wife” or two, even if you didn’t know if it had a name. Usually it involves sourdough, lots of kids, flowing blonde hair, a prop husband just off screen. Agnew surely explains it better and more succinctly than I ever could:

Even before pageantgate, Neeleman was one of the most popular influencers in America, famous online for depicting her family’s wild, earthy existence. Her followers have included the actresses Jennifer Garner and Hilary Duff. A devout Mormon who was raised in a Mormon family, she bakes perfectly scored sourdough loaves, milks cows straight into her coffee cup and gives birth by candlelight with no pain relief. […]

Trad wives are an internet phenomenon; women who have rejected modern gender roles for the more traditional existence of wife, mother and homemaker — and who then promote that life online, some to millions of followers. Their lifestyle is often, though not always, bound to Christianity. They film themselves cooking mad things from scratch (chewing gum from corn syrup, waffles from a sourdough starter), their faces glowing in beams of sunlight, their voices soft and breathy, their children free range.

Just like women have Goop and men have Joe Rogan, I would argue that the “trad” phenomenon has its perfect male analog. Guys like “the Liver King” who promote eating raw meat and eating eggs with the shells still on (I’m not exaggerating) to reclaim some kind of halcyon caveman heritage that our email jobs have taken away from us (even though many of them are very obviously doing incredible quantities of steroids). Be more like caveman! Build mancave!

There’s also the slightly less paleolithic “trad cath” version, whose ranks include Mark Wahlberg, dudes who urge us to “stay prayed up” in between massive doses of protein and exhortations to stop jacking off. Lots of these dudes on Instagram talking about what type of tank tops you should wear as a real Catholic. And here I thought Catholicism was about chanting and guilt. (I love them):

markwahlberg

A post shared by @markwahlberg

Anyway, I bring this all up, and it reminds me of the Pioneer Woman example because it seems that the second you scratch the surface of any of these peoples’ “traditional” lifestyle, it turns out that their ancestral existence is actually bankrolled by insane amounts of capitalistic wealth. Shocking, I know. Predictable, certainly, but still funny.

Like Neeleman, for instance, who may bake sourdough for her seven children on a Utah homestead, but is also a Juilliard-trained ballerina married to the heir to JetBlue.

He [her husband, Daniel] was 23 and she was nearly two years his junior when they were introduced by a mutual friend at a college basketball game. “I saw her and I was ready to go,” he says. “Sign me up. I was thinking, ‘Let’s get married.’ But she wouldn’t go on a date with me for six months.”

Aw, a basketball game! How cute and normal! Then what happened?

One day she mentioned to Daniel that she was getting the five-hour flight from Salt Lake City to New York, back to Juilliard. She didn’t realise his dad owned the airline. “So Daniel was, like, ‘I’m on that same flight!’ ” she says. “I remember checking in and them saying, ‘You’re 5A and you’re 5B.’ I just thought, no way, that’s crazy!” Daniel smiles: “I made a call.” He had pulled strings at JetBlue. And so began their first date.

So adorable. So relatable. Whomst among us hasn’t met a cute girl at a basketball game and then used their billionaire father’s connections to get sat next to her in first-class on a cross country flight on the airline he founded?

“Back then I thought we should date for a year [before marriage],” she continues. “So I could finish school and whatever. And Daniel was, like, ‘It’s not going to work, we’ve got to get married now.’ ” After a month they were engaged. Two months after that they were married, moving into an apartment Daniel rented on the Upper West Side. And three months after that she was pregnant, the first Juilliard undergraduate to be expecting “in modern history”.

Daniel got a job as the director of his father’s security company, moving their young family to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where before long she had three kids under four. At first she was still dancing professionally. The family eventually settled in Utah.

It was already a pretty well-established meme to skim read any article about personal finance written by a 20-something or millennial (yes those are different now, sorry) who explains how they skimped and saved their way to the American Dream, just to find the inevitable passage in which they confess that their parents paid the down payment on the dream home or that they saved on rent by living free on their namesake’s emerald farm or whatever.

The “traditional lifestyle” influencers just seem like kind of a different flavor of the same thing. And it’s not strictly to bash them for their choices, under the circumstances. Certainly moving to rural Utah and becoming sourdough influencers is a net good for a JetBlue heir, especially compared to the other things he might otherwise be doing. Such as working as “the director of his father’s security company” stationed in Brazil, for instance (have you ever read a more casually nefarious-sounding phrase?).

Great for them! Have fun! Yet the thing that makes me hate-read these kinds of profiles is the way they always treat their lifestyle as aspirational. In perhaps a slightly less overt way than the “I bought a home at 29 and you can too!” people, the trads are selling a lie. “We choose to live like the pioneers because we think it’s more spiritual” (and we can because we inherited a billion dollars).

So much about this country is built on the same kind of real estate scam, this dream that we don’t need regulations or safety nets or to invest in institutions because we don’t need them! We’ve got wide open spaces! We can all just move west and become yeoman farmers. And it sounds great, except any time you profile someone actually doing it, they’re either coming from great wealth to begin with or are the inheritors of it (usually from shady sources).

Yes, modern life is alienating. Most of us work shitty, unfulfilling jobs and don’t get enough vacation time or spend enough time with our friends, and we make it worse by eating pre-packaged, ultra-processed foods and staring at our computers and smart phones all day. There’s a lot about it you should question. But you should probably be just as skeptical of anyone who has turned their life into an elaborate cosplay of a misinterpreted historical era. I’m pretty sure you can’t cure the malaise of modernity by just picking out an era from a history book and going “that looks cool.”

Unless you have a billion dollars, of course. In which case you can just manifest your own delusion for as long as you want. Nice life if you can get it. I’m still saving up for the homestead, but I’m going to pass on having seven kids until I can afford four full-time nannies.

Recipe Recommendation Corner!

I posted this recipe I made on Twitter the other day and people seemed into it so I thought I’d share it here. It’s for chile relleno casserole. My wife (borat voice) actually found and sent this one to me. I’m a huge chile relleno piggy, but I’ve never attempted them at home, just because the stuffing and frying part always seemed onerous and overly crafty. I don’t normally make a lot of casseroles because I’m not a Mormon homesteader, but this chile relleno casserole seemed to solve all the hard parts of relleno construction. Recipe here:

lov.kari

A post shared by @lov.kari

Anyway, I made it, and it was pretty great, so I’m sharing it with you. (Here’s a brief rundown on the easy refried beans to accompany, though I’m by no means a bean expert).

RDJ As Doctor Doom!

There was a joke in Deadpool & Wolverine (which was a smash hit, by the way, no surprise there) about Marvel making Hugh Jackman play Wolverine until he’s 90. It was kind of funny but maybe too real, and sure enough, the same day, Marvel announced at Comic Con that Robert Downey Jr. will be back in the MCU. Not as Tony Stark but as Dr. Doom in the next Avengers.

So how is a franchise obsessed with continuity to the point of sickness going to rationalize an actor playing two different characters? 50:1 it’s going to involve some kind of multi-verse plot. How long do you think they can keep rebooting actors and roles like this? I’m guessing at least five more years, possibly ten.

Kevin Smith Made an Eighties Movie

Looks like Kevin Smith is getting in on the 80s-period piece craze (related: we discussed Love Lies Bleeding on the most recent Frotcast). The 4:30 Movie, which appears to be a classic story of young dudes trying to get laid, hit theaters in September. I haven’t really liked a Kevin Smith movie since Dogma, but this does at least look less esoteric than usual.