Did Tradwives Evolve Out of BDSM?

In this thought-provoking discussion, Malcolm and Simone Collins delve into the phenomenon of "tradwives" and the modern misconceptions surrounding traditional relationships. They argue that much of the current "trad" movement is more akin to BDSM power exchange dynamics than genuine traditional family structures. The hosts explore the historical roles of women in traditional relationships, highlighting the importance of financial empowerment and partnership. They also discuss the dangers of idealizing consumerized fantasies of traditional relationships, which can lead to instability and dissatisfaction. Malcolm and Simone emphasize the importance of building relationships based on mutual affection, romance, and care, rather than strict, inflexible roles. They also examine the generational factors that have contributed to the fracturing of cultural norms and the challenges faced by younger generations in reconstructing healthy relationship models.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] so much of what the trad phenomenon has become, I would say is actually more of a descendant of BDSM community behavior.

Simone Collins: Yes. In actual

Malcolm Collins: trad behavior. It is a live in 24, seven slave relationship. Little power exchange. Yes. Yeah. Power, total power exchange relationship. They have. Covered in the costume of traditionalism. The tradwife TikTokers and Tumblers and YouTubers that you are seeing are to a traditional relationship what hardcore porn is to a real sexual relationship with a woman. It is a consumerized format meant to masturbate a pacific. subset of your sort of mental landscape. It is not really what it is like to be in that sort of a relationship.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone, it is wonderful to be talking to you today. [00:01:00] Today we are going to have an episode in defense of traditionalism. And people can know we've done some videos

anti traditionalist, where we argue that a lot of, Trad wifing and stuff like that is really over idealizing a model of family structure from a very limited portion of United States history that isn't really indicative of any large cultural movement.

It was more what was just being sold by Hollywood at the time. And people today, they're like, Oh, Hollywood lies to us and gives us unrealistic expectations. And I'm like they were doing that in the fifties too. Like this. This isn't a new phenomenon, buddy. And they're like, Oh s**t, it was always a lie.

But I want to go on a few paths with this. So first I have heard people criticize trad wives and trad families as a LARP [00:02:00] recently. And this really got to me because All cultural frameworks are a LARP. You are always LARPing your culture. When you are an ultra Orthodox Jew and you are putting on your little outfit every day and you are doing all of the cultural things that you do, what makes it a LARP?

It is. Live action and roleplay as being what you are that helps remind you of who you are. Roleplaying as something that is differential from the mainstream societal expectations helps you maintain a differential value set, which is what the Trad families are often trying to do. But at the same time as I talk about how great trad families are, I also want to talk about this concept because I want to narrowly say this type of trad family is great, but there's been something that's been talked about a lot recently, which [00:03:00] is the trad wife to single mom pipeline, that recently happened with Laura Southern quite famously.

And so the question is how, why is this happening? Why, okay. Are these trad relationships not as stable as they were in a historic context in leading to really negative outcomes, particularly for women.

And this is where we're going to talk about trad wife is communism. But we'll get to that later in the video.

But for, before I go further, I want to hear your thoughts on any of this.

Simone Collins: Yeah, I've been watching a lot of the trad wife to single mom pipeline videos and my Top observation so far is that people, even when we're talking about the 1950s trad wife, which we still argue was a short term aberration and not at all representative of true trad wifery.

They're not even modern trad wives aren't even being like 1950s trad wives. I was watching Catch Me If You Can, and there's one ep er, there's a scene in Catch Me If You Can in which Tom Hanks, the FBI agent [00:04:00] trying to catch the character played by Leonardo DiCaprio, who's this kid who essentially masquerades as a pilot and surgeon and commits massive check fraud.

He's trying to explain to other FBI agents how check fraud works. And the FBI agents are like, what? Check numbers. Like you got to talk to my wife about this. She handles all my finances. They're acting like finances are women's work. And it really indicates just the extent to which. When that traditional trad wife, nuclear family model was being used.

Women weren't just educating the kids, raising the kids, managing the household, managing the cooking, managing the cleaning, they were also managing the family finances. They were managing investing. They were managing banking. They were doing all the payments. There was even this, there's some great YouTube videos on, the effect of housewives in Japan, investing in stock markets and the way that they influence stock market trends because they were so actively involved in investing even internationally, because at the time, and even still interest rates were so low, right? Like saving [00:05:00] wouldn't be enough.

So they had to invest actively and it was the women. In these traditional relations who are investing. And yet, when you look at the way that women in the now modern quote unquote, trad wife cosplay are behaving to them, it is just cooking and maybe light cleaning and maybe a little bit of light child rearing.

It is not literally being pivotal. To the life of the husband in terms of they don't have control over the finances, for example.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Many women in these actually traditional relationships, even if you go back to the 1950s their husbands were living on an allowance that the wife was giving them along with the rest of the family.

And we can say, why don't modern trad? family structure themselves this way. If this was a historic way of doing it within at least this cultural context. And the answer is because so much of what the trad phenomenon has become, I would say is actually more of a descendant of BDSM community behavior.

Simone Collins: Yes. In [00:06:00] actual

Malcolm Collins: trad behavior. It is a live in 24, seven slave relationship. Little power exchange. Yes. Yeah. Power, total power exchange relationship. They have. Covered in the costume of traditionalism. And it is to an, in an extent to protect the, men's egos who are afraid of and I think rightly so for some reason, given divorce laws and stuff like that today, giving women too much power in their lives.

But. Because of this, they're not able to have the type of romance and true, partnership that traditional families had. It reminds me of a scene, when I see these, like this descendant of the red pill oh, I'm being, So attractive to women. When Gomez and Morticia are dancing and being like impossibly romantic and the woman's there, like looking at them Oh, I want this so bad.

And then her date Fester has two pretzels in his nose [00:07:00] trying to impress her.

What I'm

Oh, I see.

Malcolm Collins: And that's what they come off. Like they come off like a silly goof who has no idea how to be romantic or what women really want. Because they have based it all on these. fantasies that are more downstream of BDSM culture than they are downstream of any form of true traditionalism, which was a genuine hundred percent power exchange partnership.

Simone Collins: I think in many of these cases, one, it's women imposing themselves on their boyfriends, fiancees, husbands, and the husbands and fiancees and boyfriends don't actually want all of this. And two, I think it's just [00:08:00] people who are trophy wives. Who think that they're trad wives and that's the bigger thing.

A trophy wife is someone who only does maybe like cooking and cleaning and just is there to look good. And she is not someone who has any financial empowerment. She is not someone who contributes functionally to the family, aside from an aesthetic contribution. So I think there's just also this misconstruing or reframing of the trophy wife as the track wife, because by the way, no one really talks about trophy wives anymore.

But tradwives have slotted in to that position. People are using it as a fronting device of look at me, look at my lifestyle, but they're a tradwife.

Malcolm Collins: But here, I want to talk about what a tradwife actually is, right? And where it actually works. And this is where tradwives are communism comes from. So what do I mean by tradwives are communism?

If you look at the communist ideal, it is from each. According to their ability to each according [00:09:00] to

Simone Collins: their

Malcolm Collins: needs. To each according to their needs. And within a family structure, a trad family structure, that is generally what you were doing. You would have For example, our kids don't pay rent.

Like our infant, we give it food because it needs food. Simone produces that food because she has the body that has the ability to produce that food. I don't because I recognize that males and females are different. And that means that biologically we are In some ways structured for different roles within the family.

However, those roles are not hard set. They have some degree of flexibility within them. And that the way that you utilize those bodies and natural differences is going to change. As technology changes, as economics changes, as society changes, but it still follows the traditional system of to [00:10:00] each according to their needs.

from each according to their abilities, which can lead to some role specialization, but role specialization does not mean. So if you look at what happened with Laura Southern, where you would get the husband talking about her and saying that, she was a financial burden after he had asked her to quit her job to be a full time stay at home wife.

How can you say that to your wife? You don't get to say that if you have demanded these sorts of as the head of the household. And of course a woman in a modern context is going to go a bit crazy if she's at home doing nothing but the kids without any sort of a social outlet like you would have had in a historic context, which all women had in a historic context about or they often participated in some form of, small level industry to provide additional side income from the family.

And as you mentioned, often quite intellectual tasks like investing family income managing the family estate when the husband was off or just generally managing the [00:11:00] family estate was often a wife's role which is, often an income generator in a historic context. And so what is the family estate was in the modern world?

Maybe it's. So the family social media, maybe it's the, people always are like, Ooh, they share a Twitter account. One of them must have cheated. And I'm like, no, it's just incredibly inefficient in terms of time spent and in terms of where we can direct attention to us to redirect it all to a central account.

Like why would we have two accounts? That's what. Such a wasted effort. So what? We can have some form of conflict, so I can troll.

Going into Twitter voluntarily reminds me of the.

Tunnel of prejudice from that old south park episode. And I can only imagine that people who love being on Twitter, having like Cartman's reaction to that tunnel. Now did you know that words we use can show intolerance? Let's begin our tour with a walk through our tunnel of prejudice [00:12:00] queer! Baner! Chink! Nigger! Hebe! F****t! Cracker! Oh man, this is awesome! Now you know how it feels. I wanna ride again, I wanna ride again!

Malcolm Collins: I

get why they're like, somebody's cheating, because I guess if I wanted to cheat that would be an avenue for doing it. But that's so silly. I, yeah so I think that's it.

But then I also want to talk about where, Tradwives went off the rails because this is another thing that happened to Laura Southern with these incredibly strict roles Which partially led to the breakdown of her relationship and in the traditional American family the roles just were not that strict the idea of Every meal is made by a wife was never really the norm in American culture It was when the wife didn't have another job.

She might make disproportionately more meals, but not every meal but [00:13:00] Some tradwives Have taken these roles to be like incredibly strict roles. And because of that you get these market inefficiencies just like you would in a, in an overly totalitarian, like command economy, communism.

The reason why communism works at the family level is because it's organic communism instead of command economy communism. So if people don't understand what I mean by these two things in command economy, communism, everybody has strict roles and they just perform their strict roles. And then often you have some hierarchy where the person at the top of the hierarchy basically creates all the roles and says, you do this, right?

And this doesn't work because it's incredibly inefficient. In a organically formed economy you instead have people take on the roles that they are best suited for in the moment when you're dealing with an entire society. Capitalism is a good way to organically create that action.

But if you are dealing with a. Household, for example, where everybody genuinely cares about and appreciates each [00:14:00] other. I, for example, walking around the house, I know that right now it hurts Simone to bend over because she recently had a cesarean section. And so I try to pick up things on the floor whenever I see them.

And why do I do that? It's because I care about my wife. They're like why would you do that? Because it's easier for me than it is for her. And then they're like, yeah, but then why do you do it? It's because I care about her. And because she shows appreciation for me when I do it. You, you all the time tell me, Oh, I noticed you did this little thing that you didn't, that I might not have noticed, and you didn't ask for thanks for, and for that I am additionally appreciative of you doing it.

And that is organic communism where everyone is choosing to do what's right because they care about the other people. It's also not because it's

Simone Collins: their job per se, but because they, it's that rule of if you see a mess, you clean it up. It doesn't matter if you made it.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. But this is also why communism doesn't work at the societal level.

Because you get the free rider problem. And because people don't, a lot of people hate other people in their society. So then you need [00:15:00] to build it into a command economy, which leads to the collapse, but they are building. family structures as command economies, which is just stupid. And you could say, then why have they done this?

It's not just the BDSM. It's the consumerization of the concept of the trad

Simone Collins: wife.

Malcolm Collins: So let me explain.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Intriguing.

Malcolm Collins: You have learned about what a trad wife is. From TikTok, what the ideal of Elias Troutwife is from TikTok, from Instagram, from not even from 1950s movies. It's some vague concept you have of the way things were in the 1950s, then through modern bastionization, elevated within, these various social media platforms.

Everything that you see within those social media platforms is served to you because an algorithm said it needed to be served to you.

So if you are seeing it, you are seeing it because the algorithm says, Hey, I think that you are going to [00:16:00] engage with this content. And yeah, I, that is a product. That is a product that is being served to you because it knows that you like to interact with that brief second clip of somebody's life.

But, that means that the tradwife TikTokers and Tumblers and YouTubers that you are seeing are to a traditional relationship what hardcore porn is to a real sexual relationship with a woman. It is a consumerized format meant to masturbate a pacific. subset of your sort of mental landscape. It is not really what it is like to be in that sort of a relationship.

But do you have thoughts on this Simone?

Simone Collins: Yeah, I agree with you. There's nothing real about it. Obviously it works in isolated cases, but it's not in most realities, a sustainable way to go. And it's not representative of [00:17:00] any long term reality that I've ever encountered.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Okay. So now we can talk about why traditional relationships of this, I'll call them BDSM tradwives because they're not real tradwives where the woman's just submissive in all things to the man. That is. Yeah. Thanks. That's not the way American culture worked historically, maybe, as I've said, maybe some Muslim cultures were structured that way, but not classic American culture.

Simone Collins: No.

Malcolm Collins: Not if read about relationships from like the old west time period. Like again, for example, I read about my ancestor who lived during that time period and you didn't see that at all in his relationship, it's very clear that if a man had treated his wife that way in his writings, he would have looked down upon them and seen them as both low class empathetic.

Because that is traditional to Americana, like treating a woman poorly. is or are treating her as like your slave is not a positive thing. This you could say why is this creating a fundamentally unstable [00:18:00] dynamic? The way that divorce laws are structured in our country, if you treat a woman in a way that builds animosity towards you.

Which, how could this not over time, you don't actually legally have power over them. Even if you have a prenup in the US, the laws hugely favor the woman. If she doesn't have a degree of genuine admiration for you, and on top of that genuine admiration, genuine affection for you, then it's like a slave that always has a poisoned knife to your neck.

Like everything you do to target them or degrade them is idiocy. The dynamics in that relationship are not the dynamics that you are pretending they are. It is completely, and this is where the LARP accusation is true, it is completely a role play in that you do not actually have the power over this person you are pretending to yourself that you have.

They can take half [00:19:00] your money and then take a portion of your salary for basically the rest of your life. And you will have to support them while they do whatever they want. And so that creates a hugely unstable dynamic. And society won't hugely punish them for that. They might have trouble securing another partner after that.

But they won't realize that until after they've enacted upon this. And so then both of you just live miserably. Enjoy your horrible lives alone. Which is not, a great thing. But, society. When you believe a consumerist fantasy and you confuse a consumerist fantasy with a call to action, you can end up making horrifically wrong choices.

And do people deserve this? I don't know. But now I say all this with the understanding that there is a real thing you can search for out there. Like there is a real traditional relationship structure. But it is a relationship structure that is based on mutual affection and [00:20:00] romance and caring and not these little games and stuff like that.

I think

Simone Collins: what's so dangerous is what used to happen in the past is, one, humans are not Great at thinking from a first principles perspective. Like you, you are unique in having this ability, Malcolm. I think the bigger issue is that what most humans do and have done throughout history is they are presented with examples that they're exposed to throughout their lives, and then they follow the example that works best for them.

So they may see a couple of different ways of living. And then they choose the way of living that is feasible and appealing to them. And what's problematic about the trad wife pipeline is that as you're saying, it's this consumerist fantasy. That's not real. That's not sustainable, but it is what is showing up in people's lives and people aren't really being exposed to that many functional relationships or that many.

You could say traditional or comforting or alternative to the modern kind of soulless [00:21:00] relationship where everyone just has their own atomized life and doesn't really have an integrated marriage. That's very romantic. That's very supportive, mutually supportive. And then they see this and they assume then this is how it's going to work.

So I don't think people are intentionally trying to choose something uniquely indulgent or fetish fetishized or whatever. They just don't. They don't have any examples of what real trad relationships are outside of some examples, which do exist in media, but just aren't framed really clearly as relationships.

There are shows, for example, where couples work together. The shows don't really highlight the good elements of their relationship. They like to highlight the conflict or pretend that there's conflict or focus on other things. But They didn't really show the real thing. So I think a lot of it comes down to people just not having good examples to run by not any good models being out there.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. I think that makes [00:22:00] sense.

I yeah, and I don't know. And I wonder okay, so why do people not have good models? I think one of the problems that people have is they blame too much of our cultures like fracturization on this generation,

Simone Collins: which generation millennials, our generation,

Malcolm Collins: Gen Z, Gen Alpha, when I really put it mostly on boomers.

Boomers were the ones who did all that experimental stuff in the seventies and then ended up in these loveless relationships. If you look at the divorce rate within boomers, it's astoundingly high compared to every other generation. This is where you get this like 50 percent divorce stat, which isn't representative of modern marriage at all.

And it is that they were the first generation that like collectively decided to live lives of hedonism instead of for the future.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And I think that you look at them, [00:23:00] this is why I actually think American Psycho is such a good movie in terms of depicting like what happened to the boomers.

I think American Psycho shows what the boomers did to themselves. I know so few happy boomers. In terms of the people I know and it's because they structured their lives in these horrible ways in which they broke from tradition, but they didn't think about what they were doing. And so much of it was self indulgent.

And then the younger generation sees that things didn't work for them. Or it's a few generations away from any cultural solution that really works. And so they're trying to reconstruct what a healthy culture looks like from, unfortunately, in a world where information and lifestyles themselves have become consumerized from what is essentially pornography.

And because of that they end up crafting and then, people like us will say this and they're like then you're not right wing enough because they begin to develop parts of their identity. They're like, if you don't take this extremist view of what a trad wife [00:24:00] is or a traditional family structure is, then that means you are less right wing than me and thus lower status was in right wing communities than me.

And basically the response to that is bro, are you like, an idiot? Do you not see that you're destroying your life by choosing a stupid family structure that never worked if you are looking at this from reality? We're not looking at this from a right wing versus non right wing perspective.

We're like, what's a good way to structure your life so that you end up satisfied with what you end up creating and you actually secure a partner and you give your kids a good childhood and blah blah blah. And the structures that they're building do not do that. And they're, And yet they do that.

They follow these structures in these hypotheses that are easily disprovable if they search out people who actually attempted to live these ultra originally structured systems, outside of ultra religious context. So I guess it can work. If you're in like an extremist evangelical family or an extremist Haredi family or something like that, okay, that can [00:25:00] work.

Or like an Amish family that can work, but when you're trying to live adjacent to the secular world, it just doesn't work because there is no negative externality for the fracturing of the relationship, which leads to the fracturing of a relationship and then a woman without any skills. And then Yeah, it's not awesome.

Simone Collins: The audience has been forewarned.

Malcolm Collins: All right. I love you, Simone. Have a spectacular day.

Simone Collins: I love you, too..