The #TradWives Are Gloating!

We're living in the prequel to the Handmaid's Tale

For one week only I’ve lowered the ANNUAL subscription price of this newsletter to $30 (the minimum allowed!). This will end next Sunday 17th. That’s only $2.50 a month to support this newsletter and the Under the Influence podcast and to keep getting this deep dive into how social media is shaping and perhaps destroying our world.

I am also doing personalized copies of Everyone is Lying to You when you order from Bluebird Bookshop. I promise I’ll make them hilarious.

One more note. Jessica Reed Krauss of the House in Habit Instagram account is launching her own multimedia network. She had nearly a billion views in the past week. It is absolutely time to launch a deep dive into the so-called “independent “journalism on social media and I will be doing it here for paid subscribers only.

Now onto the intense gloating of the #tradwives and how the algorithm is boosting them. This is only going to get scarier my friends.

When the first season of The Handmaids Tale aired in 2017 there were a lot of conversations about how the world ended up like this in the first place. (The same conversations were had over the course of the book’s life, but on a smaller scale because let’s be honest less people read books until they’re turned into TV shows) That’s the beauty of speculative fiction. You don’t really have to provide the prequel. You can just invent the world and let the audience literally speculate.

In 2019 Margaret Atwood released The Testaments, the prequel and also the sequel to The Handmaids Tale. It’s a great read.

But I am going to make a bold argument. I would say the prequel to The Handmaids Tale might just be the right now. It has to begin with women willingly choosing to give up their rights, some women at least.

And that’s all I have been able to think about as I have watching the #tradwife #homesteading #MAHA crew gloating on the social medias this week.

Our political identities are more fractured than ever. We’re all seeking out new places to find meaning, identity and purpose and right now social media is serving up a massive platter of homesteading and tradwifery to try to fill that purposeless hole in millions of Americans.

You’re going to want to see these. In fact I think we should all see these because many of us have been in our echo chambers of grief and I think it is important to see how the other side is responding to this election.