Trad Wife or Trans Wife: Choose Your Weird

Let’s do the time warp again.

Word of The Day: Weird

“Weird” is the word of the day. Or this US election cycle at least.

Democrat Veep nominee Tim Walz, the progressive Minnesota governor, has labelled the Republican White House hopefuls – Trump and Vance-  exactly that. Weird.

Here’s a taste of where he’s at, according to The Times:

Walz’s newest supporters have turned him into viral meme content, declaring he gives off “favourite uncle” energy. David Hogg, a prominent young gun-control activist who survived the Parkland shooting, shared a video of Walz on MSNBC in which the governor summed up the Democratic strategy in eight words: “These are weird people on the other side.”

Couple of things to say about that. First, why is it that progressives love to cast their political leaders in terms of family relationships? For me that’s just weird from the start. And as usually happens, your “favourite uncle” turns out to be the weird one anyway. And that’s the best of your uncles.

Hey Uncle Tim, when are you coming over to our place again?

And second, the idea that the opposition is weird is probably the new line of attack in this US election cycle. Especially after JD Vance had a go at “childless cat ladies”, which sounds – to my mind – a little like the vote-losing statement by Hilary Clinton in 2016 about the “deplorables”. He meant weird.

So since that’s the case, let’s get back to weird.

The funny thing is – for so much of an electoral cycle – , the Dems play up the weird.  So for example, A trans wife is something to be celebrated.  All sorts of weirdness – queering – as we might put it, are put up on display as a symbol of the freedoms that the Donkey side off the house would have its citizens celebrate. What was once considered weird is now considered the norm. It’s queering all the way down for the Dems.

But now they want to downplay it to win an election!

But unless it’s weird it’s not worth showcasing until about ten months out from the election, when suddenly they go all trad and talk about their favourite uncle.

In fact you’d have to come to the conclusion that the Dems scorn anything that is non-queer about end of life/start of life and pretty much the bit in the middle as well. Though it has to be said, Walz struck a chord with middle America when he made this comment about JD Vance:

“Go ahead and continue to denigrate people. Good luck with that. Turn on the internet and see what cat people do when you go after ‘em.

Well a couple of things there: Whoever turns OFF the internet? Where have you been these past ten years Tim?  But secondly, I didn’t dare google “What cat ladies do when you go after ’em”. Not sure what site I may have ended up at. My browser filters would have been working overtime. And besides, google it once, and Facebook is awash with cat lady after cat lady for a couple of days. And ain’t nobody got time for that.

The Denigrats

But let’s be clear, The Democrats have been going after people and denigrating them for the best part of fifteen years. Anyone who doesn’t fit the progressive mood that is. And that’s where the trans wife versus trad wife thing comes in.  You know what I mean by trans wife, I mean that’s almost NOT weird these days it’s so celebrated by the likes of the New York Times and CNN.

And true to form, given how they have promoted the weirdness over the years, the Dems are now denigrating the traditional approach to marriage that is now being supercharged by the internet with the inevitable response to their crazy ideas.

Yes folks, Trad wife is back! And in an apron that would give Superman’s cape a run for its money in terms of slickness. It was inevitable that there would be a conservative pendulum swing against  the weirdness – the almost required celebration of – queerness, pushed by the anti-Christian progressive framework.

So “trad wife” is the trending thing. And of course it’s internet driven. It is clearly a reaction to the Democrat idol/ideal of the independent, empowered woman who can have it all at work. You know the kind of woman, the one who can find meaning and legacy in her role, all the while having the ability to freeze her eggs until much later in life.

The reality is different though, isn’t it? It’s more than anecdotal evidence to say that men and women in households are under severe pressure to keep such ideals alive. Even while the average Democrat-voting woman may be in the office making corporate decisions at 3pm, , at the end of the day she is battling with her husband to see if he will do the dishes or take the kids to soccer. Unless of course, she is the childless cat lady.

The kind of woman that the Democrats drool over does not exist. And the kind of woman that the more conservative side of the fence is keen to showcase is Democrat hell. To be a stay-at-home mum these days, who looks after their own kids and does not outsource childcare to the state is anathema for Dems, something to scorn.

But of course the trad wife is not the reality either. It’s a projection of the reality; a sort-of Norman Rockwell painting come to life courtesy of the internet.

So if you want to know what the trad wife looks like, then switch on that internet and google “trad wife”. But only if you want your Facebook feed offering you the latest retro-kitchen scales for measuring the flour for the apple pie you are going to make by scratch on Tuesday morning.

The  trad wife movement is the perfect and polar opposite to the trans wife. It’s the exasperated response of a whole swathe of women whom the likes of the Democrats have no time for.

And of course, switch on that pesky internet, and there you have it: the New York Times or the New Yorker pouring scorn and hatred in multiple articles on the trad wife movement and pointing out its dangers to women.  Pointing out how weird it is.

Interesting how The New York Times article’s header is “Tradwife Content Isn’t Really For Women. It’s For Men Who Want Submissive Wives”. As if it were some sort of G-rated porn movement.  Of course the staff writers and op-ed types at the Times know all of this because they did a quick Vox-pop of the news room (or what passes for a news room in a newpaper wholly given over to opinion these days), and all those who identified as women confirmed it to be the case.

I always find it interesting that the progressive side of politics never recognises the voices of women who don’t fit the progressive mood. They’re the wrong type of woman to vote for or listen to or even support.

After the 2016 Trump win I read article after article in the likes of the New York Times saying “we must get out more”, meaning they needed to listen to the other side, to hear what Trump voting women (yes many women did vote for him despite his – it has to be said  -weirdness).  Yet here we are. Eight years later there’s no sense that they did listen. Or even pretended to.  They just label everyone they don’t understand as “weird”.

As someone just said to me, Tim Walz has played the Gen-Z card perfectly: the “weird” word has huge traction with that generation. Call someone “weird”these days  and they are done, among Gen Z at least.

But then again, when the New York Times and the New Yorker have poured scorn on the stay-at-home mum for decades, why bother trying not to be weird according to their rubric? If even the mildest version of a traditional wife is something to elicit horror, and if there is no way to register your meaning and worth outside of a high-powered city job, then why bother trying to appease the Denigrats?

If being an orthodox, theological and socially conservative Christian risks you being labelled “far right”, which it increasingly does, then why not go the whole hog and become that? (Hint: cos the gospel would say otherwise!)

But The trad wife is simply the logical extension of a conservative response to this scorn. If we can’t win, we won’t play your game. We’re done being denigrated by you.  We’re going to stick your noses in it.

Of course what we have discovered is that reality hijacks us both. We can’t have it all, and neither can men. And those who try to are spending an inordinate amount of money on therapy. The stats on anxiety among both gender (did I say “both?”) clearly demonstrates this. But it sure is a good way of thumbing one’s nose at the scorn of the elites.

The Trad Wife Non-Reality

Yet as much as the trans wife is not a real thing – in fact it’s a chimera that becomes more apparent the closer you get to it – so too the trad wife is far less reality than the internet projection of a reality (assuming you switch that internet on).

For most women in the modern world of the West who live in larger cities, the trad wife is not an option even if they wished it to be. Most traditional families require both the husband and the wife to work to keep a roof over one’s head, pay the bills, sort out the kids’ schooling, and go on the occasional holiday.  Oh, and to pay the state to look after your children at an exorbitant rate, and with dubious socialising and cultural assimilation costs.

In fact I was speaking to a well known Christian blogger from Canada who said that in Toronto unless both parents are on six figure incomes they will never afford a house. That opens up a whole can of worms, especially for churches who think that somehow they are going to get some volunteer time from people who are looking at mortgages fourteen times their annual salary.

A trad wife with all the mod cons (those colourful cake-mixers don’t come cheap), will also have to have a husband earning a six figure salary that starts with a high “one” and most likely a “two”. That’s the reality.

And in terms of working women, further down the economic and social food chain, the average wife in a household is not working at the most meaningful job they can find. And even further down the food chain, the women at the school my kids went to were often working in offices, or cleaning, or stacking shelves at the grocery store after their kids had gone to bed. The further down the food chain you are the more likely you are working for a food chain.  I know, weird huh? But that’s the reality for a huge swathe of people.

Don’t get me wrong by the way, if you are a mum who wants to stay at home and have a bunch of kids and you can, do so. The stats show that that is a super healthy way to operate. I think JD Vance should have held his tongue, but the childless, high-powered couple is weird in this one way – it’s not the norm for most people in the West, and it is an alien life to the rest of the world.

But in a culture in which our meaning is drawn from what we do, in which our identity is tied to our economic cut-through, or our impressive resume, it’s hard to see our work as anything more than a way to find acceptance, whether that’s internal acceptance or external. And that is as true for men as it is for women.

And lest we think the trad wife offers us a clearer picture of reality, let’s not forget the oft-mind-numbing boredom of picking up, and cleaning up, and serving up, and following up that is so much of modern Western life for stay-at-home parents, primarily mums.

But in the context of God’s gracious gift of children to raise and families to build, these things are not wasted. And despite the fact that theologically I am a complementarian, our household definitely functions egalitarian.

We both work, my wife at a more high-powered role (if we can call it that) than I, and being the neat-freak I am with a more flexible job, I do a lot of the housework and shopping. I love nothing more than putting a good meal on the table for my tired wife and kids at the end of the day, with nary a dish left in the sink, and a dessert ready to go.

And cleaning the bathrooms? Just let me at that shower in a pair of bathers, enough chemicals to kill a small village and someone’s secondhand toothbrush.

We’re not here to compete with each other, much less compete with the New York Times, or with Tim Walz or JD Vance. We’re here to glorify God in the grind of life as much as the glory of the CBD. Ultimately it’s not about me and what I can achieve for me, It’s about how I can serve others, and not myself and my image of myself.

Trans wife or trad wife: both end up being self-justifying, self-focussed mirages of reality. The former is a rainbow parody of the God-given binary differences between the genders and the meaning of marriage. And the latter is a soft-focussed, pastel-version of the humdrum of life in the ‘burbs that we are supposed to hate, but which so many of us will spend the bulk of our years into our late fifties or early sixties eking out.

Reality has a way of hijacking your weird, whichever weird it may be.