What We Lost When Liz Wolfe Went to Work
Tradwives are on the rise. Behind the pastel veneer is a half-nostalgic, half-coercive sectarian drive to reset society to the 1950s, now gathering steam in conservative circles. Strip away the awkward, low-budget adult-content cosplay, and the tradwife aesthetic reveals itself as just one front in a wider campaign to subordinate women, persecute homosexuals, ban contraception, and gift innumerable children irreversible or deadly diseases. At their core, tradwives operate as the glassy-eyed lifestyle wing of Christian nationalism.
Yet this week, they found some unlikely cheerleaders in libertarian circles. In a recent Reason Magazine video titled at first “What We Lost When Women Went to Work”, Liz Wolfe anoints tradwives the true heirs of early feminism. She argues that “this cultural movement warrants celebration, not contempt” and that tradwives “don’t want domestic servitude, they want the roles of wife, mother, and homemaker to count as respectable options for the 21st-century woman… Tradwives are feminists, too.”
Liz Wolfe is wrong, of course. Tradwives do want domestic servitude. As one Substack writer points out, for a large share of them, it is a sexual fantasy of submission — a kink. Perfectly harmless, of course, if kept in the bedroom. The problem is that many tradwives crave exhibitionism just as many involved in BDSM dynamics do.
Driven by the one sexual fantasy their religious bondage doesn’t explicitly condemn, they start by dipping their toes into indecent exposure. They edge closer and closer to involving strangers in their sex life, feeding the appetite, until the thrill of submission isn’t enough unless everyone else is dragged into it too. Soon, it’s not just about their own servitude; it’s about binding all of us into a version of domestic bondage that most of us can’t possibly enjoy, hard-wired as we are with different temperaments and desires.
So when Liz insists that “tradwives are feminists too”, she isn’t just wrong, she’s selling us a fairy tale. They don’t care about freedom. Deep down, they’re squirming with embarrassment about their BDSM proclivities, acutely aware they are “the other,” yet trained in churches to bury their deepest desires. Having been told to repress their nature, the only way out they see is to universalise it: to demand that the entire society subjugate itself to their mode of life, so that their fetish no longer feels like a fetish at all. If all are whipped, no eyebrow is raised on those it delights.
What they want isn’t liberation; it’s uniformity. They are de-suffragettes: a movement dedicated to rolling back autonomy, not expanding it. You don’t have to be an investigative reporter to glimpse the neo-feudal fantasies coiled beneath the pastel dresses, or to notice how neatly this “choice” bleeds into demands for state-enforced BDSM moral law.
One should know better than to glorify the past. As Human Progress’ Chelsea Follett notes, in those supposed “good old days” before the sexual revolution, people often settled for ill-matched spouses, and marriage was widely seen as a kind of hell or prison, breeding a culture of bitter resentment between partners, often ending with domestic abuse or even murder.
And look, I get it: you can rent a faux-château, cosplay a feudal duchess, bake apple pies in cutesy aprons, and still, in principle, be a libertarian, as long as no one else is forced into your fairy tale. The problem isn’t the dress-up; it’s romanticising a coercive social order that was anything but voluntary for the people inside it.
Libertarians can be mothers or fathers and enjoy whatever relationship dynamic truly fulfils them, including ones that lean heavily on traditional gender norms. What’s poisonous here is the paranoid besieged fortress story that says liberal globalists stole your way of life and that you must enlist in a culture war to get it back. There is nothing forbidden about your romantic choices; you are just marinating in conservative slop. My advice to Liz would be simple: keep the kink in the bedroom; don’t parade it around as women’s liberation.
This piece solely expresses the opinion of the author and not necessarily the magazine as a whole. SpeakFreely is committed to facilitating a broad dialogue for liberty, representing a variety of opinions. Support freedom and independent journalism by donating today.
Cover Image: Fair use satire based on the original thumbnail of the ReasonTV Video.
