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Recently, something strange has been happening on TikTok: the rise of the “Trad Wives” trend, which sees married women practicing traditional gender roles. This trend has its male corollary too, with popular influencers in the manosphere urging for a return to supposedly lost values of traditional masculinity.
We live in an era of widespread rejection of traditional sex and gender norms, decreased interest in organized religion, and a rise in non-traditional relationship structures. So a retreat to traditionalism seems strange. Are we regressing back to some imagined blissful past, or is this trend just another way for us to find meaning?
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Lately, many people have been looking to tradition for meaning. We’ve seen heated discourse about sex scenes in movies, a rise of Catholic conversions among Millennials, and an increased emphasis on modesty and religious accessories in fashion. The idea of a return to tradition or to a past era of moral clarity is attractive to those who feel alienated by the present day. ’s are often so entrenched in their nostalgia that they can’t see the real cause of their discontent
Underneath spiritually saturated aesthetics is often a sideways yearning for a divine order to make sense of a world that is casually cruel and unpredictable. Whether it’s finding order in your Scorpio rising sign or in being a housewife, the underlying drive is basically the same. There’s a twin appeal of these aesthetically traditionalist movements, as Burton explains: first, they give a sense that the world has an inherently meaningful and exciting structure; second, they present the chance to participate in a movement that blends the security of belonging to a cohesive group with the thrill of cultural transgression.
In general, when society is under pressure, it becomes easier to look backwards than to forge new norms. As a story in Mark Miller puts it, one need not be a red Kierkegaard to know the anxiety that accompanies historical consciousness; that inner cramp that comes when time lurches forward and we feel ourselves catapulted into the future.
Take the example of recent criticism of sex scenes in movies and television, like the discourse over Penn Badgley’s discomfort with them or whether an explicit scene in the show Swarm was necessary. When faced with the complexities of sex work and media, as well as Hollywood’s history of mistreating actors and sex scenes, the simplest answer could reasonably seem to be: “Maybe it’s just too complicated - let’s go back in time”. But the reactive desire to limit sex scenes could have unintended consequences, like the censoring of queer representation or even the return of something like an enforced version of the old school Hays Code, which banned perversion in movies, resulting in the exclusion of queer people and healthy depictions of sex from cinema entirely.
Now, of course, concerns about sexual misconduct on film sets are valid, since the revelations of #MeToo sexual misconduct in the industry is finally being taken seriously. But sex scenes can of course be handled respectfully, as the recent rise of intimacy coordinators shows; these are professionals trained to ensure the comfort and safety of actors when they participate in sex scenes. They are so effective that the Screen Actors Guild has called for them to be mandatory.
But despite productive change, resisting the reactionary impulse can be hard. That’s because, according to Lilla, reactionary ideology is a bit different from conservative ideology: reactionaries are revolutionaries that seek to restore a mythicized past; they see progress as akin to betrayal. As Lilla puts it, “every major social transformation leaves behind a fresh Eden that can serve as the object of somebody’s nostalgia”. And nostalgic reactionism can be far more seductive than optimism for the future, as Lilla adds: “hopes can be disappointed; nostalgia is irrefutable”.
Philosopher Alain Badiou, for his part, defines reactionaries as those who refuse to recognize a new truth, whether it be artistic, political, or scientific. For Badiou, rather than being contemporary with the logic of a situation, the reactionary wants to deny and suppress the new thing that’s happening - think a monarchist during the French Revolution arguing that the peasant revolt was just a phase, or folks in the early 90s saying that hip-hop was just a fad and not real music.
Rekindling the spirit of the past may seem appealing in uncertain times; it may even be fun or comforting to play with old-fashioned styles and norms. But it can also make us miss the bigger picture and ignore the real cause of our malaise. For example, Trad Wives look to the past for solutions, but as we noted, they’re struggling with contemporary problems, specifically the outsized expectations put on women to balance their work and home lives with ease. Solutions to that problem, for many women, likely don’t lie in 1950s gender norms, but rather in meaningful economic and social reforms, like, for the love of God, universal child care.
But that raises a different problem, according to scholar Albert O. Hirschman’s analysis of the rhetoric of reaction: reactionaries are often so entrenched in their nostalgia that they can’t see the real cause of their discontent.