IN WHICH I REBRAND AS A TRADWIFE LOL

on the impulse to create lifestyle content

I can’t tell you what was going through my mind when I set up my camera. I walked inside my closet with a blank, white mind to take videos of its blank, white walls.

First, I positioned my phone to record myself: hunched over with cleaning spray, paper towels, and trad-wife focus. Then I trained the camera on my fingers tracing the newly spotless white paint. Still rolling, I unfurled a ream of floral wallpaper.

I’ve been doing this repeatedly and unconsciously lately: making “content” of what I’m doing around the house. Posting pictures of the flowers I’m arranging, the food I’m making. On its face, it’s because I’m proud of these new skills. (After watching—dare I say—countless videos of florists and chefs, I’ve gone show-and-tell mode.) But catching yourself performing for a camera is like walking by a store window and, for a second, not recognizing yourself.

Certainly you don’t slouch like that. Certainly your mouth isn’t held in that puckered position. Certainly I’m not the type of person who records herself doing domestic tasks.

This line of thought isn’t exactly new for me. Through the years, I’ve often tangoed with the impulse to record my own life. As a travel journalist on assignment, I’d ask myself: “What are you photographing? Who are you doing this for?” If the answer was “Instagram,” I’d put down my phone and stare (luddite-like) into the horizon.

Still, I can’t shake the conviction that there’s something different now; this impulse has morphed. I feel weird every time I post something that might be construed as lifestyle content.

The new way I’m doing my hair or the dill pasta I made—I’ll do the job, photograph the associated items as if it’s a still life, then immediately feel sheepish and guilty. But why? It’s something about labor…something about capitalism…

Andrew Bird has this lyric “I fascinate myself when I’m alone” and I’m tempted to explain myself with that line. Perhaps I only find my new camera habits worthy of examination because I’ve been spending more time at home. In other words: when I slow my interactions with the world, I stare into my own actions like a reflecting pool for humanity itself.

But…is a cloistered life still not a life? And isn’t it a truth universally acknowledged that the unexamined life is not worth living?

Perhaps it’s not the aspect of performance that most worries me about this new impulse.

****

“The objects we are drawn to are not haphazard, they are material expressions of something intangible but vital that our soul wishes to bring to our attention,” author Claire Louise Bennett said in an interview with The Paris Review. “They are clues, in other words, and we should decipher them as such.”

Seeing your own immaterial spirit rendered material is—I suppose Bennet is arguing—a form of self-reflection. And perhaps the best (or at least most concrete) understanding of self we’ve got right now.

Once upon a time, my “lifestyle content” was pictures of cigarettes, green juice, and torn paperback copies of classic literature to prove that I was smart but not serious; I was—like any good metropolitan girl—aspiring towards something great…but also kinda a mess.

I now post pictures of refurbed furniture, tofu recipes, and bouquets as if to say: look, I’m domestic now! We made this dill pasta last weekend and now I’m wallpapering my closet and doesn’t that prove I’m not a mess anymore?

Objects represent the way we move about the marketplace—which, in neoliberal life, is the way we move about life itself.

So, logic follows: feeling weird about my new objects must mean that I feel weird about the way I’m moving through life. Why am I posting beautiful snapshots from domesticity?

…

Am I becoming a fucking trad wife?

****

Throughout my 20s, I was (indeed) kinda a mess. Once, for a period of four months¹, I used a cardboard box as a makeshift dresser for no reason other than I didn’t feel like buying furniture. I believed that the epitome of chic was to live somewhere you could abandon in a day and that a transient, perma-bachelorette lifestyle was the most feminist existence a straight girl could have.

If, during this era, you would’ve asked me if I was happy, I would’ve dodged the question.

But that’s irrelevant.

There’s this weird talking point spreading around the internet—leaking into the mainstream from conservative(/tradwife) corners—that hookup culture is the worst thing to happen to society because it’s making women unhappy. But happiness is a horrible measure of whether or not we should engage in certain behaviors.

As a perma-bachelorette, sure, I may have left some hook-ups crying and I may have ended up with some unsavory men (and many unsavory experiences), but that doesn’t mean it was time wasted or something exploitative. In fact, just the opposite. While on the circuit, I learned that my pleasure wasn’t someone else’s responsibility. I learned that sex (at least good sex) wasn’t something you did for your partner. And I learned this without any of the fears that seemed to keep my serial monogamist friends small.

These lessons were byproducts of my freedom—but I maintained this freedom by never really testing it. My greatest fear was anything that threatened my liberation.

Which meant that I kept picking more and more unsuitable men—until, finally, I reached romantic rock bottom. (The kind that ends with a long stare in the mirror, muttering, “Fuck. I have to figure out my shit.”)

I began reading Esther Perel and Katherine Woodward Thomas. I became deeply earnest. I touched myself while imagining domestic scenes: he comes in from mowing the grass, he’s sweaty, he loves me.

I didn’t tell anyone about any of this. I was ashamed that I’d started dreaming of a beautiful home.

****

A few months into dating B, I was convinced I would have to leave. I felt unable to chase the things I was used to chasing—to be hot, constantly traveling, career-focused. And when I looked through my camera roll, I saw how the pictures had changed from mirror selfies in public bathrooms to homemade pasta and boeuf bourguignon. Suddenly, I was spending all my time at home with a man. And it was with a man who would say things like, “You’re telling me what you think, not what you feel.”

Through the objects I was photographing, I saw myself undoing ways of being that had shaped 30 years of life. And scrolling through videos of wallpaper on my phone, I had this crisis: was becoming domestic an abandonment of my freedom? My sense of beauty? My ideals?

Ladies Home Journal, 1948

My definition of myself was founded in my actions. And when your definition of yourself is founded in your actions—in the things you do rather than the things you are—stopping said actions is tantamount to stopping up yourself. And what I was used to doing was, mainly, being alone.

You don’t need to do much work to convince others (and yourself) of your freedom when you’re a single, chain-smoking, paperback-toting messy girl in the city. But somewhere in the last few years, I started going on long walks. I started feeling my life to be hollow. And it began to sink in that being solitary and being liberated are two different matters entirely.

Sure, I had community—a great group of friends who would listen to me vent and to whom I’d listen in return. And I was active—out more evenings than I was in. I was engaged with the world around me—I bought coffee for the homeless men in the park and heard about their tumors. I entered into relationships outside of traditional monogamous forms. I was participating in all the decentralized forms of care that were supposed to be revolutionary in the post-pandemic, mutual aid world. And though I felt cared for, I never felt seen. I had deep conviction that if anyone knew me—“the real” me—they would find me a bore. I’d be deemed weepy or crazy or otherwise irreparably flawed. And whenever these feelings would arise, I would pay therapists. I would go traveling. I’d buy books. I’d buy drugs.

When—as Hannah Arendt has argued—authoritarian movements thrive on isolation, single-girl-in-the-city seems an awfully convenient identity. And not for the single girl herself.

That brings me to a quote from Krishnamurti:

“We have always thought freedom as something ‘from’ [...]—freedom from authority, freedom from society, freedom from the family, freedom from something. But freedom ‘from’ something is not freedom, it is only a revolt. There are many who are revolting against society and the established order, but in their revolt they are conforming to a pattern already set, and that pattern becomes the authority. Therefore there is no longer freedom.”

Or in the words of Bob Dylan: you’re gonna have to serve somebody.

I was making lifestyles the authority in my life.

****

Fighting one form of imprisonment (domesticity), I’d run straight towards another (consumer-based identity). Engaging with this lifestyle wasn’t a meaningful rebellion against the patriarchy. That’s because conforming to rebellious models is never the same thing as actual rebellion.

This realization skidded into my mental periphery when I left New York City. (I realized how I had substituted a real personality for “citizen of this place.”) It arrived a bit more clearly when I started reading books about consumerism. But the largest realization thudded into my consciousness when a man wanted to see me—the real me.

B would insist I tell him what was on my mind when I insisted I wasn’t thinking of anything. And he’d continue softly prodding until I broke down in tears. Then, when I finally broke down, he’d hold me and tell me to keep crying, to let it all out.

Eventually, the fears of someone finally seeing the real me started to fall away because someone was seeing the real me—and he said I could weep more, if anything. As the fears fell away, so did the impulses to pay therapists or book trips or run away.

And I started to see that—if I wanted to be a stable adult in an unstable world—I had to stop conflating lifestyles (and their corresponding aesthetics) with ways of being. Our objects may indeed communicate something about ourselves, but this communication is (at best) stunted.

Our aesthetic choices are nothing more than our best guesses about ourselves (which are forever clouded by our own flawed self-perceptions): I am the type of person who buys cigarettes and torn paperback copies of classic literature because I am free. I am the type of person who buys kitchen aprons and local flowers because I am trapped. Neither of these interpretations about myself is correct.

****

As the rise of the 4B movement and widespread heteropessimism demonstrate, many women have no hope in an equal partnership with a man. The most empowerment they can imagine is simply dropping out of heterosexual partnership. (There are many valid reasons for this.) But I’ve been bristling against this thinking.

There are several reasons—some more unflattering than others—that I resist this thinking. But probably the most salient is that I have gotten this far in this essay and completely neglected to mention the fact that B was the one who chopped the dill for the pasta. He helped me unfurl the wallpaper and he weighs in on my floral arrangements. When I try to shut down emotionally, he pulls out a PDF of the emotions wheel and tells me to point to where I’m at.

Dating a man who insists that I’m telling him what I feel (not what I think) has changed the way I conceive of gender relations. If he makes the pasta, is it oppressive if I do the dishes? What about vice versa?

****

Writer Catherine Liu recently argued that it’s the separation of mind and hand—the loss of the artisan as the role bifurcated into Steve-Jobs-level genius and mindless-cog manual labor—that is one of the great woes of contemporary society.

I think that also makes sense on a more abstract level. Just as we’ve lost the value of creating beautiful objects, we’re losing the ability to imagine beautiful ways of relating to each other. We are no longer the artisans of our own lives. Most relationships are mindless cog, rote reenactments of painful patterns we’ve seen play out time and time again.

This is precisely what makes hetero partnership such an enticing experiment for me: I have no idea what it looks like to be both liberated and intimately connected.

I want to become an artisan of domestic relationships. I’m trying to imagine new ways of relating.

That doesn’t mean it always goes smoothly. In many ways, I am just as messy as when I was using a cardboard box as a dresser. I’m frequently doubtful. I still get sad. I am not inherently more happy because I am in a relationship.

However, by being in love, I am constantly testing my ability to keep my heart open. I am always trying to love and accept the flawed world—my boyfriend, my self, and the people and patterns around us. And that makes me happier—learning to stay compassionate and present, not just to my partner but to myself.

And I’ve learned that we are all bound to reality. We live alongside other people in their own various and messy states of oppression and repression—so the journey towards equality cannot be a frictionless glide. But I think that freedom cracks open in moments of reckoning: washing dishes or putting up wallpaper and really reckoning with the question: “Why the fuck am I doing this?”

****

Despite what trad wives may spew on social media, it is not inherently feminist to choose domesticity, just as it is not inherently feminist to spend the rest of your life single and girlbossing.

What is feminist is working towards social structures where everyone—regardless of gender—can participate in intimate domestic life while maintaining a productive creative life. Men deserve to feel the fulfillment of care and emotional connection, just as women deserve to feel powerful and autonomous.

I don’t know if I’ll ever post the videos of my new closet. (Although, honestly, the wallpaper looks sick. You should see it.) And I’ll probably never make a video with the recipe for the dill pasta. (Although, pro tip: dill pasta might just be the best fucking thing I’ve ever eaten.) But I’m inching towards a belief that lifestyle content—if we start doing it correctly—has the potential to upend our beliefs about how we’re living and why.

I’m not saying that the pursuit of beauty in an unethical marketplace doesn’t cause any harm. (I am not even arguing that my impulse to create a beautiful home doesn’t, in some way, undermine my own feminism.) I am saying that every desire is complicated by the body that contains and enacts it. It is a fact of life that we must live while navigating both our narcissism and interdependence. Everything we do for ourselves happens within the context of our relationships.

In a world pushing us ever closer towards isolation and false binaries, I think there’s something important in trying to create a beautiful home with a man you love. But more than that, I think there’s something essential in struggling with it.

1. full disclosure: I was much closer to 30 than 20