The Trad Movement Is Sputtering. Here’s What Comes Next
“Let’s not be politically correct. Let’s just admit you’re supposed to be having kids when you’re 16, 17, 18, and be done by the time you’re in your 20s,” the Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey recently said on the TBPN tech world podcast. The clip broke containment, escaping the “traditional values”–curious Silicon Valley crowd and going viral on X. But while it riled up many people, many more just rolled their eyes. Are we still doing this?
Listen to the whole clip and it’s clear that Luckey wasn’t exactly endorsing teen pregnancy (though he also wasn’t totally condemning either). Luckey—who has been with his partner since they were teens but only chose to have kids in their early 30s—says that, in retrospect, teen pregnancy would have worked out, and offers a historical aside: In an earlier time, you would have wanted your kids to take over the farm work by the time you were in your forties. Maybe it was a clumsy joke, maybe not.
The provocation, though, is all too familiar: Invoke “traditional values,” frame it as bold truth-telling, and wait for outrage to drive engagement. Each skirmish in the Gender War plays out as opposing teams reenacting the same argument. It’s a reflex of our collective social media addiction. But it no longer hits the way it did a few years ago, when the “Trad” movement burst into the mainstream. What at first seemed like a grassroots, even more deeply regressive version of the “family values” politics of the 1990s now more and more resembles a fleeting internet trend rather than an emerging counterculture.
The decline of the movement was written in its origins. “Trad” entered mainstream vocabulary through right-wing meme culture in the mid-2010s, via white nationalist elements of the alt-right: Reject modernity, embrace tradition. By 2020, the term had jumped to TikTok, where women extolled home and family, occasionally cited Scripture, and most importantly, promised relief from the burnout of that bogeyman of modern feminism.
The aesthetic’s sphere of influence would come to include lifestyle creators like Estée Williams, Nara Smith, and Hannah Neeleman, as well as the much-too-written-about “reactionary chic” posturing of downtown Manhattan’s Dimes Square. For a moment, the tradwife was everywhere: an annoyance, a hashtag, a middle finger to liberal mores.
To understand why trad resonated, you have to understand what it was reacting against. The 2010s were the decade of the girlboss. (Or at least the idea of her: She was never so much a person as a composite character built from TED Talks, Corporate Memphis–laden Instagram posts, and “self-care.”) She was feminism filtered through hustle culture. She sent Google Calendar invites for everything. She may have even blogged about her sex life with the brisk efficiency of someone who had optimized intimacy itself.
