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Self-care to tradwife pipeline?

  • Writer: Alexandra Pozdarie
    Alexandra Pozdarie
  • May 2
  • 2 min read

There has been a lot of talk recently about how Gen Z are becoming more conservative, through repackaged trends that allow them to embrace traditional values, including the tradwife and the divine feminine trend. 


But recently it seems more and more that the narrative around self-care has also been shaped towards these same values (and I’m mainly referring to when self-care is used in relation to physical appearance). I’ve noticed a trend in which self-care has turned from something we do to feel good about ourselves into a hobby, which is not only promotes unnecessary consumerism but tends to reduce women (who are the majority taking part in this trend) and their hobbies to only be related to two things: how we look and what we consume, which is an outdated narrative that was used for far too long to minimise or devalue women’s capacity to do anything

 

When it comes to relationship dynamics this also reinforces the binary in which the men go to work, and the woman staying at home, on top of doing all the housework has to always look good for him while doing so

 

In the same narrative the term self-care has been weaponised to be synonymous with some moral high ground, inherently implying that anything opposite to it is bad for you.

This gives way for people to proudly say that they’d rather stay at home and do self-care than go out with their friends, go clubbing, or go dating. Which would be fine if you decide not to do these things as a standalone choice, but it further becomes problematic when it's repackaged to suggest, again especially to women, that home is where we should want to be because only there are we fulfilled and fully taking so called care of ourselves

 

The girlboss movement in the 2010s was the opposite extreme of this and that was problematic in its own way and with the economy and job market being so uncertain we are looking for some sense of stability, but we should be careful of the way we internalise these self-care soft-living narratives as empowering without understanding their underpinning values.

 
 
 

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