President Donald Trump with Turning Point USA's Erika Kirk in Glendale, Arizona on September 21, 2025 (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)
The Manosphere, a collection of anti-feminist ideologies, isn't a single movement, but a variety of different movements. And there is plenty of infighting within the Manosphere. PUAs (pickup artists) don't get along with MGTOWs (Men Going Their Own Way), but both of them consider incels (men who identify as "involuntarily celibate") extreme.
Parts of the Manosphere embrace Christian nationalism, calling for men to marry traditional wives ("tradwives" for short) who are willing to be stay-at-home moms, keep out of the workplace, and be subservient to their husbands. But other areas of the Manosphere aren't necessarily religious. Pearl Davis, a far-right YouTuber and Manosphere influencer, is anti-feminist but believes that Christian fundamentalist tradwives are exploitive of men.
In an article published on April 8, Salon's Amanda Marcotte examines MAGA views on tradwives — arguing that although MAGA men secretly have a contemptuous view of the stay-at-home wives they claim to cherish.
"The media fascination with 'tradwives' may be fading," Marcotte explains, "but as a social media phenomenon, it's still going strong. Ballerina Farm, where former ballet dancer Hannah Neeleman makes a spectacle of her wifely submission, has over 10 million Instagram followers, despite a recent scandal over her company's raw milk sales. She's not alone. Dozens of other women draw millions of followers by performing traditional wifely duties online…. By submitting to men, tradwife proponents argue, a woman will activate his chivalric urge to protect and provide."
Marcotte continues, "Submission is portrayed as a fair trade to women. In exchange for giving up their autonomy, they will receive safety and joy beyond what feminists, with their petty demands for equality and anger at the patriarchy, can never imagine."
But the "tradwife pitch," Marcotte warns, "has been revealed as a lie" — and a new study published in Psychology of Women Quarterly, according to the Salon journalist, "shows that young men who favor the trad lifestyle don't honor and cherish tradwives — they hold them in contempt."
"After surveying nearly 600 men aged 18 to 29," Marcotte notes, "researchers expected to find that those who supported the tradwife movement to have paternalistic attitudes toward women, viewing them as fragile but beloved creatures who needed protecting. Instead, they discovered pro-tradwife men expressed a hostile form of sexism, calling women who submitted to men lazy and parasitic. This may seem like a paradox at first blush. These men loathe housewives while simultaneously believing that women should be housewives."
Marcotte notes that in the past, "contempt for housewives was a widespread theme." And she points out that "right-wing media figure" Lauren Southern was abused after becoming a tradwife and "vowing to be submissive" to her husband.
"She tried to please him by 'cooking, cleaning, putting on dresses and high heels to welcome him home,' but he came to hate her even more," Marcotte writes. "He emotionally abused her, she claimed, locking her out of the home as punishment. She eventually fled…. Now, we have one more study showing that the tradwife hype is just as empty as feminists have always suspected. Traditional patriarchy isn't some cheat code to make marriage happy. It is and always has been just an excuse for men to treat women poorly."