Why MAGA men actually loathe tradwives [View all]

Why MAGA men actually loathe tradwives
A new study shows submissive women aren't cherished but are held in contempt

By Amanda Marcotte
Senior Writer
Published April 8, 2026 6:45AM (EDT)


(Salon) The media fascination with “tradwives” may be fading, but as a social media phenomenon, it’s still going strong. Ballerina Farm, where former ballet dancer Hannah Neeleman makes a spectacle of her wifely submission, has over 10 million Instagram followers, despite a recent scandal over her company’s raw milk sales. She’s not alone. Dozens of other women draw millions of followers by performing traditional wifely duties online.

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But once again, the tradwife pitch has been revealed as a lie. A new study published in Psychology of Women Quarterly shows that young men who favor the trad lifestyle don’t honor and cherish tradwives — they hold them in contempt. After surveying nearly 600 men aged 18 to 29, researchers expected to find that those who supported the tradwife movement to have paternalistic attitudes toward women, viewing them as fragile but beloved creatures who needed protecting. Instead, they discovered pro-tradwife men expressed a hostile form of sexism, calling women who submitted to men lazy and parasitic.

This may seem like a paradox at first blush. These men loathe housewives while simultaneously believing that women should be housewives. But sociologist Jessica Calarco, who teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is the author of “Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net,” is not surprised.

“If you hate your wife, it’s a lot easier to justify exploiting her unpaid labor for your own personal gain,” she told me. “With our modern sensibilities, we might think of love as the point of marriage.” But traditional marriage was about male power, she explained, which included “exploiting wives’ domestic labor, forcing them to bear children and using them as emotional or physical punching bags.” Underneath all the happy trappings of tradwife content is a longing to return to a time when women had no rights inside a marriage. Actual love for a “traditional” wife, Calarco concluded, gets in the way of a man “accepting the perks of patriarchy.” ...................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2026/04/08/why-maga-men-actually-loathe-tradwives/