Tradwives trend: should the government step in?
The Irish government is launching a campaign aimed at alerting young women about the harmful messaging of the conservative tradwife trend, which is spreading on social media and promotes the ideal of women taking sole responsibility for housework and childrearing. Irish media criticise that the campaign fails to tackle the real problem.
An absurd campaign
For The Irish Times, the problem is less the tradwives' social media presence than a social imbalance:
“The thing persuading women to lean out at work and turn down economic opportunities is not that they have been indoctrinated into believing they'd prefer to spend their days clad in a gingham apron, lovingly placing a buttered cheesecloth over a broiler chicken. It's that we live in a society which ... expects us to parent like we don't have jobs and work like we don't have children. The school day and the working day are permanently and intractably out of sync. ... Warning women not to swallow retrograde messaging about care seems a bit absurd when the economy depends on us continuing to do precisely the opposite.”
The wrong target audience
This campaign puts the onus on women again, warns the Irish Independent:
“Shouldn't the targets for that concern be primarily men and boys, not women and girls, since young men are the ones most vulnerable and receptive to the malign influences of Andrew Tate and his like? They're the ones consuming porn, and internalising pornified gender roles and dangerous sexual practices, from the moment they buy their first smartphones with their holy communion money. Surely, instructing women on how to manage the consequences of dysfunctional male behaviour, and even fixing them with responsibility for mediating it, is the very definition of victim-blaming?”