The Trad Wife, the Slutty Feminist, and the Woman Underneath Both

Sourdough starter. Linen apron. Four kids and a garden. A whole aesthetic built on submission, and somehow it's the most magnetic thing on the internet right now. Meanwhile her opposite — the slutty feminist, skin out, unbothered, "my body my choice" as a personality — has been selling just as hard for two decades.

Two women opposing each other. Two brands. And I want to talk about why both of them are for sale, and where the actual liberated woman is standing while they fight.

Because the pendulum always swings. And if you don't know which way it's swung before, you'll think wherever it lands is the truth, instead of just the backswing.

A quick, honest history of the swing

The sexual revolution of the 60s and 70s cracked something open. Real liberation, real reclamation, and like everything real, it scared people.

So the 80s swung back. Hard. The Reagan era brought the AIDS panic, the rise of the evangelical right, and a cultural message that the open door of the 70s had let something dangerous in. Shame came back into fashion. The pendulum reached the end of its arc.

Then the 90s swung forward again, but here's the part that matters: it didn't swing back at the grassroots. It swung back through the media. This wasn't women in living rooms reclaiming their bodies. This was sex re-entering the culture through screens, through marketing, through consumer pipelines. Sex education, pornography, "girl power" — Powerpuff Girls and Britney Spears and a youth culture getting sexualized and sold empowerment in Girls Rule t-shirts.

By the late 90s, explicit content wasn't a niche curiosity anymore. It was mainstream entertainment — films, TV, music videos. Then the 2000s poured glitter on all of it. Trash reality TV. Sex sells as an entire economic logic. And it trickled all the way down into the fashion, the parties, the lifestyles, the way a generation of girls learned what a woman was supposed to be.

The critic Sophie Gilbert puts the turn precisely: in the shift from 90s to 2000s media, you can watch provocation go from an intellectual exercise to a commercial one. That's the whole tragedy in one sentence. Provocation used to be artists responding to power. Then it became a product.

The misogyny was always the constant

Step back and look at the pattern, because once you see it you can't unsee it: men making money off women's bodies. Women absorbing that media as instructions — this is how you express womanhood. And the cycle repeating, each generation handed the loop and told it was a choice.

I want to be careful here, because this is tender ground. So many women — me included — want and need to move through the archetypes of the feminine. As self-expression. As exploration. As discovery. And growing up in the South, especially coming out of religious upbringings, oppressive households, the quiet misogyny baked into how I was raised; I needed to explore my sexuality. The opposite scenario is also true and good. That hunger is real and it is holy. I will never tell a woman that wanting to explore her own body, or her mind, that desire is a problem.

But here's what I've come to believe: when you wake up to your oppressor, the easiest thing in the world is to sprint in the opposite direction. And the opposite direction is also a road someone built.

A woman raised in purity culture wakes up, sees the cage, and runs — straight toward the flashy, glittery, skin-out ideology that feels like the antidote. A woman soaked in ecstasy and neon lights decides to run to the countryside and raise a family with a strict moral code. And some of it genuinely is liberation. But a lot of it is just misogyny in a different package. Same product. New branding. She didn't get free. She got re-sold.

So then the pendulum swings again — hello, trad wife

The trad wife craze is the backswing. A direct response to the over-exposure of the 2000s and 2010s — the era where everyone had seen everything, every body, every angle, all of it, all the time. So cottagecore. Homesteading. Homeschooling. Modesty. And there's a real instinct underneath it: when everyone is exposed, mystery becomes the rare thing. The withheld thing becomes the magnetic thing. That part is just pendulum physics.

But the trad wife isn't free either. She just walked all the way back to the original cage and decorated it. Same submission. Same misogyny. Same "here is the one correct way to be a woman" — just sold with linen and warm lighting instead of glitter and exposed skin. The aesthetics flipped. The architecture didn't.

That's the thing about the pendulum. Both ends are still the same arc. Both ends are still for sale.

So what is freedom, actually?

Here's where I land: True liberation is unbranded.

It doesn't have a name. It doesn't have a uniform. It doesn't have an aesthetic you can screenshot, a starter kit, a hashtag, a look. The second it can be packaged and sold back to you, it isn't liberation anymore — it's the next swing of the pendulum wearing liberation's clothes.

Real freedom is something underneath. Something felt, not seen. It's the part of you that doesn't photograph.

It's the understanding of the profane — the messy, the bodily, the unsanctioned, the parts of you that don't fit either brand — and the willingness to express it, however it wants to come through. Not how the algorithm wants it. Not how your mother wanted it. Not how the counter-culture wants it either. However it wants to. The woman underneath both

The liberated woman is just herself. Not neatly packaged. Not one thing.

She's dynamic. She's sexual. She's sacred. She's all of it, often in the same week.

She might homeschool her kids and go to the club on the weekend. She might wear a thong bikini and go to church on Sunday. She might bring home the bacon and bake the bread. She contains the contradiction without apologizing for it, because the contradiction was never actually a contradiction, it was just two brands telling her she had to pick.

She knows her worth isn't an aesthetic. She knows her expression — however it looks, however it sounds, whatever it is — is the richest part of her. And she knows it's allowed to change. Day to day. Season to season. Decade to decade.

She doesn't belong to the trad wife. She doesn't belong to the slutty feminist. She doesn't even belong to the woke spiritual woman as a costume.

She belongs to herself. That's the whole thing. That's the only thing that was ever actually free.