voorwaarts

So I’m not one for conspiracy theories (because let’s be real, it gets racist really fast when you fall down an online rabbit hole), but let me just pop on my tinfoil hat for a second.

Because my personal theory (and I will die on this hill) is that the “I’m just a girl / girl maths / men think about the Roman Empire” discourse on social media (even when it was tongue-in-cheek) helped prime the ground for the conversation that is now starting to bubble up on the American right around household voting and women’s independent political power. And because American culture-war politics rarely stays in America, this is probably going to ripple out around the world via the populist satellites of MAGA (looking at you Reform).

Because even ironic discourse can still help normalise an idea. And the idea being normalised was that women are not really serious adults: that we are too frivolous to grapple with intellectual complexity such as Diocletian’s tetrarchy (that every man apparently has on his mind 24/7 despite one of the best classicists living being the GOAT Professor Mary Beard), too silly to be trusted with money, or too helpless to perform basic adult tasks.

Then the “divine feminine”, “feminine energy”, and “sprinkle sprinkle” dating discourse adds to this, because even when it is supposedly framed as female empowerment (or as a critique of men being the source of all evil in the world- because women’s pretty little heads aren’t capable of malice) , it often ends up circling back to the same idea: that women are not really meant to stand fully on their own two feet.

That is also where tradwife content fits in, because it takes that same underlying premise and turns it into a lifestyle. If “girl maths” makes women being bad with money funny, and “sprinkle sprinkle” makes dependence on a man sound like strategy, then tradwife content sells full financial dependence as aspiration (almost a solution to the girl maths and an end point for the sprinkle).

Because although this content is all coming from different parts of Beyoncé’s internet, it has the same common thread running underneath it. And this is how a cultural milieu gets created: different strands of culture keep repeating the same premise until it starts to feel like common sense in the Gramscian sense (not common sense as in the Chanel from the back of some guy called Dave’s van is probably fake, but common sense as in the assumptions a society absorbs so thoroughly that they stop looking political).

And that is also why the gender essentialism of the current culture wars matters here, because the argument is not only that women are bad with money but that biology creates fixed social roles and that stepping outside those roles is a threat to the social order (which is why the attacks on women’s autonomy and the attacks on trans people are not separate moral panics so much as different fronts of the same project). Once you have spent years insisting that cis men and women have natural social and domestic functions, it becomes much easier to make individual rights look like a dangerous modern excess rather than the basic condition of being a free adult.

And while that is obviously horrifying to me, I think people ho are still in deep denial can sort of pretend to themselves that there must have been a very big battle there, or a massive fire, or one really big bomb. The 'oh we were fighting Hamas/Hezbollah' bullshit can somehow be wielded to stay in that deep denial.

So I think they should be showing more shit like this:

An Embroidered Shaped Silk Purse

17th century

probably Italian