i'm ready to take a sledgehammer to tiktok HQ

on trad wives and social media trends rooted in conservatism, the irony epidemic and a plea to stop trying to tell me that "i'm just a girl" isn't harmful!

4 am, I lay in the dark and stared up at the ceiling, every fiber of my being dedicated to resisting the pull to check my phone. Go back to sleep, I kept telling myself, I’ll count sheep, recite song lyrics, reminisce on my worst memories all to keep me away from my phone. Paul was snoring next to me, oblivious to the war I waged in my mind. I can’t do it anymore, I have to check. I reached down for my phone and within one second, instant regret. Red Pennsylvania, red Michigan, red staring up at me from everywhere like a fresh puddle of blood, constantly expanding, unable to be staunched. Somehow I ended up in the bathroom, my head pressed against the cool shower door as if to numb everything building in me. I sat there for a while, moving my head only to vomit, the anxiety purging itself from my body.

I spent the rest of the morning completely numb. I wanted to escape my body, this mass of cells and blood completely rooted to one spot, feeling everything and nothing at once, condemned to scroll aimlessly through a mess of headlines and tweets. Scrolling and scrolling the words blurring together, I knew it was making me feel worse but I kept going, why should I stop the pain when I already ached?

Shock turned to sadness which turned to disappointment which turned to frustration which turned to anger as I asked myself over and over if I had been so blind to the possibility of this happening. There’s this bubble, full of the people I choose to surround myself with, the algorithms on my social media, the content I interact with, so of course it seemed like everyone felt the same way as me. Sometimes though, the bubble’s shiny, protective surface became transparent, the outside was comment sections full of hateful “jokes,” red hats, and pure, unfiltered bigotry. Pull the shutters down, and put those shiny walls back up; of course I wanted to keep myself shielded from that, prevent myself from lashing out and giving them the satisfaction of knowing it bothered me.

The rise of right-wing conservatism across the internet is not a surprise, especially among young Gen-Z men. I could go on about the top podcasts on Spotify hosted by men who promote the rhetoric that tells men that emotion is weakness and use language that normalizes degrading behavior towards anyone who doesn’t look or act just like them, but truth be told, I don’t want to dedicate even a morsel of my time right now to writing about men. If you want to read about men, read a newspaper.¹

I was broken out of the haze of my doom scroll when I found this tweet:

Suddenly it hit me like a ton of bricks. I finally could enunciate my frustration with the “I’m just a girl! I’m a 24-year-old teenager” trend. In January, I wrote a piece exploring the “I’m just a girl” mentality, specifically focused on the idea of “girlhobbies” and consumerism tied into those ideas and I stand by that piece 100%, but I failed to acknowledge how these trends are tied into inherently conservative values. So many of these trends use language and project ideas that encourage women to be domestic, maintain a very simple way of thinking, and indirectly contribute to the rise of conservative traditionalist values that are more and more common in young people on social media.

There’s been an emphasis over the last few election cycles on Gen-Z being “the most liberal” or a “generation full of progressive change,” mostly due to our social media presence— we are unflinching in analysis, have used platforms like TikTok to educate and spread more progressive ideas, and this generation seemingly has an openness to ideas that are further left than our parents’ generation. The reality though, is very different. Yes, there are bubbles of extremely left-leaning, progressive individuals, most of the people I see on social media fall into that demographic, but that’s the algorithm feeding me that content because it knows I’m more likely to interact with it, but the right wing and conservative content is there too, oh, it’s really there, even if it doesn’t appear to be.

I use the term conservative masking, where at the most surface level, the content being put in front of me is very neutral. It’s soft, palatable, and easy for audiences of various ages, backgrounds, and demographics to enjoy. It’s aspirational— who wouldn’t want to live in a giant house without having to work and spend all day creating content— so it reaches such a wide audience. There’s often no discussion on those pages of politics or social issues, they have massive platforms, the ones you look at and think “if they actually took a stand for something, spoke out against genocide or abortion bans or anti-trans legislation, they could make a genuine difference” but their ability to remain almost robotically bland, almost wiped clean of any and all potential controversy, makes them marketable. Their content is so neutral but the trends they partake in, the internet avenues in which they earn their livelihood, and amass these mega followings are anything but.

The most obvious notion of this comes in the form of milkmaid dresses and made-from-scratch Skittles, faces angled perfectly towards the camera, and a soft-spoken voiceover. The trad wife movement took TikTok by storm, depicting beautiful, young, married women who promoted and embraced traditional housewife and gender roles. It’s perfectly curated social media content—baking sourdough bread from scratch every morning, kids perfectly posed for photos like they’re props. While #tradwife sounds idealistic, simple, and peaceful, the ideas are based in religious fundamentalism and reject feminism. I mentioned neutrality, but some trad wives are very open about their views on social media, specifically those pertaining to a women’s role. They crave a 1950s domestic life, and they’ll post videos homesteading and collecting eggs with Bible verses as the caption. Their views aren’t concealed at all, they’re regressing for the sake of regressing, whether that be pleasing their husband, God, or the version of society they accept as correct.

It’s ironic isn’t it; trad wives use social media, the antithesis of “traditional” to suck viewers into the perceived simplicity of their lives. And while their content is not inherently political— I’m not seeing Nara Smith endorse candidates² or discuss her views on abortion with her 10.7 million followers—the lifestyle trad wives represent is rooted in intensely conservative ideology.

ballerina farm (aka Hannah Neeleman aka the lead trad wife)

The trad wife movement, or at least the fascination with this lifestyle, represents how deeply this shift towards right-wing ideology has been engrained into the media consumed daily. Every day I wake up to news headlines about women losing their rights, their bodies becoming regulated by a government that sees them as walking wombs and child bearers, and I go on TikTok hoping for just a minute of respite from the state of the world. Instead, I’m just met with the personification of these ideas, repackaged and tied up with a pretty, homemade ribbon.

It’s no secret that these trends are fully embraced and pushed by the right. Conservative thinkers (I feel weird calling them thinkers because their lack of brain power is astonishing) discuss “high-value females” and talk about women as “the softer sex,” suited for running a home and raising children, their entire existences catered to their husbands. It makes sense how the trad wife lifestyle could resonate with such a large audience right now— every day women’s rights are pushed further back, my grandmother had more bodily autonomy than any future daughter of mine will likely have— so, of course, watching those videos, mindlessly scrolling through Ballerina Farm videos and #momtok feels like an escape from the stark reality America exists in, in a sense, it’s Gen-Z’s version of asking “have you seen The Handmaid’s Tale.”

There’s a tendency to minimize, to make everything ironic or sarcastic, that’s running rampant throughout the younger generations, my generation, and I see that seeping into engagement with online content. Fancams, edits, and ironic tweets, all circle and gain virality, often featuring or integrating a highly polarizing political figure. The Melania Trump fancams and the tweets praising her as a skinny legend or noting how she’s the hottest first lady or how “at least we have another 4 years of cunty Melania!” start as jokes. There’s a bit in there— we all know who her husband is, what he’s done, and she’s no saint— but for the sake of the joke, for coping, for likes and engagement, let’s keep up the bit that we hate her husband, everything he stands for, all of the views his followers hold, but we stan her. Maybe you know it’s a joke, but like the tweet/tumblr post from earlier mentioned, not everyone realizes that, they’ll hop on anything popular and if Melania being Brat is suddenly the trend, it will be memed, edited, and posted until its everywhere and suddenly everyone is “in on the joke.”

When I ask myself when is the bit no longer a bit? When is it just someone’s actual personal belief system coming through? I think about a certain Dimes Square internet personality/host of a podcast popular with self-described coquette girlies³/occasional actress who is the epitome of the Dimes-Square Nu-Right,⁴ a group that swapped their progressive politics for right-wing ideals as easily as they go through packs of cigarettes. Between posting on her pro-anorexia Twitter account and inspiring the coquette aesthetic lovers to become somehow even more fatphobic, transphobic, and White Lives Matter-esque, the Sailor Socialist video went viral and Red Scare took off. I spent a long time trying to untangle what was ironic and what was serious, were the populist right ideas intertwined into the framework of this subculture meant to be a joke or did they actually believe that? That belief system, call it what you want, its purposely based in irony and edginess, so whenever critiqued on the internet, the “god you guys just don’t get humor” card is played. The line between reality and persona was so blurred, the Nu-Right, the Dirtbag Left, it all sprung up as a result of nihilism and dissatisfaction with the direction the left was going, and soon enough, seemingly ironic conservative-posters turned into the poster girls for the New Right.

Ethel Cain recently published an essay on her Tumblr discussing the “irony epidemic," or the inability to engage with a post outside of joking or making witty quips. She wrote “there is such a loss of sincerity and everything has to be a joke at all times,” mostly about art and creative works, but the sentiment applies here too. In Cain’s music, dark themes jump out: cannibalism, abuse, and murder to name a few, so rather than engage critically or start conversations, a huge population of TikTok-brained individuals jumps straight to joking, because it’s what feels comfortable for them. It’s the same with obsessing over Nara Smith’s trad wife content or watching Secret Lives of Mormon Wives and joking about wanting a life like that. The information is out there, Smith’s husband, model Lucky Blue, is openly a Trump supporter, many of the cast members of Mormon Wives are deeply conservative and anti-abortion and birth control; their lifestyles are complete opposites of the values that so many that engage with their content posses, yet the desire for any sense of escapism, the need to jump to making jokes about “making my husband spearmint gum from scratch!” prevail.

That’s where girlhobbies, girl math, girl dinner, and my personal nightmare of “i’m just a girl” come in full force. They’re a direct result of all of this crashing together: the irony, escapism, the desire for simplicity and traditional values without officially being a trad wife. It manifested into this need to create something to grasp onto, a middle ground. It’s not blatantly conservative, no one is yelling “MY GIRLHOBBY IS VOTING FOR TRUMP!!!”⁵ but it’s inherently there, in the foundations that these trends are built on. I see a lot of conversation about how girlhood trends and girlhobbies and whatnot stem from women feeling overwhelmed, looking for community, and wanting to regress to easier times, and yes, two things can be true at once. When I look at it, spend more time searching “I’m just a girl” on TikTok than I ever want to, all I can see is a politicized internet. It’s everywhere I look, there’s conservatism everywhere for those with eyes to see.

In an original draft of this post, I wrote “I’m not sure that women who partake in these trends are even conservative, I’m sure many of them aren’t even aware of how deeply the conservative roots go,” but I stopped and I thought and I had to laugh to myself for a second. In the least shocking twist, the majority of internet users hopping onto the “I’m just a girl” trend are white women. I’d like to bring your attention to the chart below, the Washington Post’s breakdown of gender by race in the 2024 election:

See something? More than half of white women in America voted for Trump, even with abortion on the ballot, Gen-Z “being more liberal” and a woman being nominated. I speak directly to that demographic, MY demographic, right now and I ask: was it ironic? Were the months of reposting trad wife videos with the caption “in another life” actually ironic, or were you just sitting and biding your time until you could vote to take your own rights away and return to that 1950s housewife aesthetic you hold so dear? Was it just a joke when you started making coquette edits of the men who will always profit off of hateful rhetoric about you? But as long as you can bake a loaf of sourdough and post about it on TikTok with #girlhood, I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about.

I wish I could sit here and tell you that all’s well, that I feel hopeful and okay and I’m going about my life like normal, but that would be a lie. There’s so much rage and sadness inside of me right now and I’m hoping that writing this will get even a small bit of it out. I’m mad at the internet, I’m furious every time I open social media and see the same people who wrote “I’m just a girl” sharing “Proud to be on the RIGHT side of history #MAGA" posts. I want to wake up from this nightmare, to escape the grasp that conservatism has on the white women in America, I’m shaking them and screaming and begging, but I already know it’s fruitless, their aprons are tied too tight and the sourdough starter is fermenting.

1. or read this article! ignore that it’s from before the election and is like “could harris win???” the sentiments and data are the main purpose behind me sharing.

2. her husband on the other hand….

3. you THOUGHT i was letting the coquette trend off easy.. think again.

4. I definitely recommend giving that article a read for a more detailed dive into the dimes square nu right craziness, but a massive shoutout to my friend

griffin blue emerson

for incredible convo that helped me develop my thoughts during this part of the essay.

5. and if you are i’m actually worried for you, don’t conservatives have hobbies?