The Bluestocking, vol 312: Tradwives and Axl

His chest hair is the color of a new penny.

Happy Friday!

As promised, the first three episodes of Helen Lewis Has Left The Chat are now available, either on BBC Sounds or the podcast player of your choice. Please enjoy the artwork, which prompted one person to say that journalism was over, now that serious people like me were doing “YouTube face.” I was delighted to be thought of as a serious journalist for once.

Helen

PS. A listener requested to hear more funny WhatsApp group names. Do leave your best in the comments below.

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The Rise And Fall of the Tradwife (New Yorker)

Like any leader, [Alena Kate] Pettitt now had a public image to maintain: a stream of podcasts and radio shows on which to appear; insatiable social-media platforms to fill with content. It was obvious what worked. When she wore jeans and a T-shirt on Instagram, the reaction was muted. When she appeared as “an idealistic, pretty, wrapped-up-in-a-bow housewife, the likes would go through the roof.” Pettitt would respond with flawless algorithmic logic and post another pretty picture. “And so it goes.”

Feed the algorithm or die. Any ambitious social-media user knows this (and if they don’t they can buy Jasmine Dinis’s guide, “The Road to 30K: A Stay-at-Home Mom’s Ultimate Guide to Growing Your Instagram,” for $14.99). Pettitt did her hair. She wore the dresses. Soon, she was living the merciless existence of a full-time influencer, without the income. Her family often found themselves unable to eat the homemade banana bread until she had captured it adequately for her feed.

Loved this Sophie Elmhirst piece on tradwives, which gets to the essential tension that all these allegedly surrendered homemakers are fiercely ambitious and working like stink: “Jasmine Dinis pointed her followers to an Amazon storefront showcasing her favorite baking accessories and vacuum cleaner. (She’ll receive a commission if you buy one.)”

Tradwives are all over TikTok, and to a lesser extent Instagram, milking goats and wearing pinnies and talking about their 9 children called Chet. I think their popularity is partly about a conservative backlash to feminism, but also just about how much those platforms reward what I think of as “hameau” content: stuff that is real hard and painstaking in real life, boiled down and transformed into an aesthetic.

Bonus factoid for the terminally online: one of the more political tradwives, Abby Roth, is Ben Shapiro’s sister.

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The Final Comeback of Axl Rose (GQ, 2006)

Then he was there. And apologies to the nice woman, but people do not go that nuts when Bon Jovi appears. People were: Going. Nuts. He is not a tall man—I doubt even the heels of his boots (red leather) put him at over five feet ten. He walked toward us with stalking, cartoonish pugnaciousness. I feel like all anybody talks about with Axl anymore is his strange new appearance, but it is hard to get past the unusual impression he makes. To me he looks like he's wearing an Axl Rose mask. He looks like a man I saw eating by himself at a truck stop in Monteagle, Tennessee, at two o'clock in the morning about twelve years ago. He looks increasingly like the albino reggae legend Yellowman. His mane evokes a gathering of strawberry red intricately braided hempen fibers, the sharply twisted ends of which have been punched, individually, a half inch into his scalp. His chest hair is the color of a new penny. With the wasp-man sunglasses and the braids and the goatee, he reminds one of the monster in Predator, or of that monster's wife on its home planet. When he first came onto the scene, he often looked, in photographs, like a beautiful, slender, redheaded 20-year-old girl. I hope the magazine will run a picture of him from about 1988 so the foregoing will seem a slightly less creepy observation and the fundamental spade-called-spade exactitude of it will be laid bare. But if not, I stand by it.

From 2006, here’s a John Jeremiah Sullivan profile of Axl Rose on his comeback tour. My, there’s a lot of stylistic techniques going on here. No one is allowed to write like this any more. I blame social media.

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Quick Links

1. The Free Press interviews a depressed 28-year-old who wants to die under Dutch euthanasia laws. Lots of interesting discussion here, including this observation about couples who die together: “It tends to be that the man goes, and the lady follows.”

2. David Aaronovitch’s Substack posed a fun challenge: predict the outcome of the next election, in terms of seats, in the comments. I’m really struggling with both the headline polls and the MRP predicting a WHOPPING Labour majority. It’s like my brain refuses to process it. So I would love it if Bluestockingers did the same here in this comments section, and put their best guess of the election result below. I will return for a reckoning when the election happens. First prize: a signed copy of Difficult Women. Second prize: two copies.

3. Gia Milinovich has a podcast! She and her charmingly Dutch co-host interview thinkers about big ideas, bad ideas and why we’re screwed. I listened to them interview Adam Rutherford about eugenics while I was deadlifting, and it was oddly perfect. I’m going for Andy Nyman on ritual next (Cluster F Theory).

4. “We live in an imaginative age! The Internet is a text-based roleplaying game.” Katherine Dee is a very fun writer on how the internet works, and here she has written out some of her starting assumptions and interests, such as “everything is downstream of fandom” (Default Friend).

5. Scott Alexander of Slate Slate Codex writes a very long post on a fun-if-impractical idea: settling live controversies by getting people to put up $100,000 stakes and making their case to independent judges. In this case, the topic is the origins of the coronavirus, and a rich guy goes up against a normie student who stakes what is presumably his entire net worth, and who then turns out to be a savant (Astral Codex Ten).

6. Who has the most Reddit karma of any human? A guy who posts hot anime chicks, duh (404 Media).

7. The playwright Trevor Griffiths died this week; his 1979 play Comedians is one of the strangest things I’ve ever seen in a theatre that still worked—it’s about the clash between idealistic young leftie comics and the old pub racists. The BBC adapted it and you can watch it here (YouTube). Trigger warning: contains mime.

8. Men who like the Second World War (you know who you are): Rob Hutton has a new book out on April 25, about a British cross-dressing spy master who tricked the Nazis with a series of illusions. If I’m totally honest, the cross-dressing does seem to have had a recreational element to it, rather than being strictly necessary for national security reasons.

9. Lovely thread about the efforts to preserve a tiny language called Wymysiöerys spoken in a small region of Poland; it has one native speaker left and she’s 102 (Twitter).

10. Caitlin Dewey has done a great public service for those of us who were online in the late 2000s and early 2010s: a list of the top 20 viral personal essays, from the classic XOJane era to the present day, where people (women) are STILL writing about how they gave away their life savings in a shoebox (Links I Would Gchat You If We Were Friends, Substack).

See you next time!