Note: Sorry in advance for the Frodo bark in the beginning of the audio. Someone was rolling their trashcan up the curb across the street, and frankly, that shit is not OK. Not today, sir. Not on Frodo’s watch! Beware the dog, friends and neighbors. Beware.
Hello and welcome to the seventh week of the Yes, Misstrix audio companion. Today’s episode is called: Trad Wives, Soft Girls and Stay-at-Home Girlfriends: Is the next wave of feminism embodied by the women from the pre-color world of Pleasantville? Now, if you haven’t seen the 1998 movie Pleasantville with a young Reese Witherspoon, a pre-Spiderman Tobey Macguire, a very-much-alive Paul Walker and many other big names, you should look it up. You should then start watching the recently cancelled MAX show called The Other Two until you get to the Pleasantville episode in season two. Then you should be as devastated as I am that The Other Two is over.
And…I’m already getting off track. But the Pleasantville reference in the subtitle of the episode is important because it helps to contextualize the type of woman I’m talking about. Now, if you haven’t seen the movie in the last few minutes and still have no idea what I’m saying, think 1950s American housewife in the vein of Leave it to Beaver. I also know that we’ve got some listeners from abroad, so I don’t know if those references track across the pond, but the overall idea is that we’re talking about women who are tasked with taking care of the home, raising children, and making sure their male partner is happy and fed and properly sexed.
We’ll get more into the nuances in a minute, but the first step is to define the terms and establish what we’re exploring in this episode. So, I threw out a lot of jargon right off the bat, and if you’re anything like R., you’re wondering, “what the hell is a trad wife” and perhaps the same for “soft girl” and “stay-at-home girlfriend,” although that last one kind of defines itself. Trad wife stands for traditional wife, and the term is becoming a real thing on social media, where the tradwife category on TikTok alone has 9.1 million views.
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