As a lifelong feminist, being a stay-at-home girlfriend sounds pretty good

Over the past year, TikTok trends like the trad wife, stay-at-home girlfriend, lunchbox wife, and feminine energy have soared in popularity, each term amassing tens of millions of views.

Celebrating stereotypically feminine activities – cooking, cleaning, wearing makeup – they eschew the #girlboss era hustle culture of dedicating every waking moment to career development and climbing the corporate ladder at the expense of everything else in your life.

Equality may be closer for women than it once was, but we still have an awfully long way to go.Credit: iStock

They promote the joys of leaning into outdated tropes and celebrating the kind of old-school masculinity that could be lifted straight from an episode of Mad Men. In exchange for submitting to traditional conventions of beauty and complimenting your male partner on their ability to make you feel safe, you too can be a kept wife and have someone open car doors for you.

Collectively, these trends have amassed almost 10 billion views, meaning they are anything but niche.

The knee-jerk reaction to seeing what feels like a flashing-red regression is to condemn these women and their videos for the risk they pose to the many hard-won victories of feminism. But perhaps these women are more enlightened than we give them credit for.

Growing up, girls are told they can be and do anything they want to. For the most part, we believed it and made grand life plans accordingly. Instead, we should have taken a long hard look at the fine print and asked a question nice girls are not supposed to ask: What’s in it for us?

For, as it stands, the social contract we are handed is not worth signing. It’s not surprising women are opting out in droves.

We are told to value education, which women are doing by attending university at a higher rate than ever before. But we’re graduating with more debt than our male peers and entering a job market where we will consistently earn less than them, so much so that men will earn approximately $1 million more than us throughout the course of our careers. We’ll also be offered fewer promotions, have around $136,000 less in superannuation and have a 41 per cent chance of experiencing sexual harassment while doing our jobs.

Even when women enter a female-dominant sector like midwifery, where 98.5 per cent of the workforce is female, men still earn more than their female counterparts.

While the gender pay gap is narrowing, it’s shrinking so slowly that by the time it reaches its predicted closure date in 2056, most of the women currently working will be retired or stranded on a roof trying to survive the latest global warming flood.

The stay at home girlfriend and “traditional wife” are trends on the rise.

If you’re among the 76 per cent of Australian women who choose to have children, you’re likely to be starting later than your mother or grandmother, with the average first-time mum in Australia now aged 32.2 years old. These delays mean you’ll be inundated with advertising telling you to “play it safe” by freezing your eggs for IVF, a process that costs about $5000 a round.

Once you enter parenthood, you’ll also have to set aside almost 21 hours a week to undertake unpaid domestic chores. If you want to return to work, you’ll also have to grapple with childcare rates that, for many, increased almost as soon as the federal government introduced greater rebates to try to help women out.

The growing number of women choosing not to have kids aren’t off the hook either. You’re more likely to be required to take on caring duties for relatives. And if you’re single and without children, you face a much greater risk of homelessness in later life.

And if you really want to succeed both professionally and romantically, you’ll need to dedicate a portion of your wage for the length of your working life to dying your hair, styling your hair, removing unwanted hair, applying creams and serums that promise to reverse signs of ageing, and having micro-amounts of toxins injected into your skin to paralyse your muscles when the lotions invariably don’t work. Be sure to a gym membership to “keep it tight” and, if you wear sculpting underwear to further the illusion that cellulite doesn’t exist, don’t forget to find a good masseuse because your back will be in constant pain. You’re also more likely to have a chronic health condition and experience medical misogyny, so don’t forget to put some money aside for that, too.

Add all of this to a cost-of-living crisis, growing class inequality and the earth burning and flooding itself on a terrifyingly regular basis and suddenly, it doesn’t seem so surprising that women aren’t eagerly signing on the dotted line.

The social bargain has been rigged and stacked and seriously broken for a long time. The problem now is that some women aren’t willing to buy into it anymore.

Depending on where you live and the colour of your skin, things have gotten infinitely better for women thanks to the tireless efforts of the feminists who came before us. In Australia, we can vote and get divorced and have a credit card and access birth control and live with someone before getting married.

Feminism isn’t to blame for this dumpster fire that modern women find themselves in but neither are the trad wives spruiking the joys of frilled aprons. Maybe dusting ornaments and wearing pearls isn’t for you, but when the alternative is a system that’s both thankless and near impossible to conquer, who are we to condemn those choosing the path of leisure?

Katy Hall is deputy opinion editor at The Age.

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