Sex after Patriarchy #1 - Who’s gonna make the tradwives come?
On submission, breeding kink, and the sexual economics of dependence.
Welcome to Sex After Patriarchy! SAP is my new weekly column exploring womanhood after male approval stops being the organizing principle of our lives. It’s part field report, part cultural analysis, part personal confession. Behind it all is the belief that one day we’ll wake up and have insanely good sex — after patriarchy. Toni Cade Bambara once said that the role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible, so this column is my attempt to make a truly egalitarian society so sexy that even the most conservative person on this planet might secretly want a taste of a progressive future.
Recently, I had an odd thought: If we’re lucky enough to continue witnessing the collapse of patriarchy, who’s gonna make the tradwives come? If women’s economic survival no longer depended on marriage anywhere on earth, what would become of erotic submission? Does it still feel good when it’s not tied to security? Do tradwives know where to shop for vibrators? Do they know what turns them on outside of the fantasy of perpetual pregnancy and domestic submission?
The Breeding-Kink
What way better to induce this story than to serve you brewing hot a recent, (okay not super recent) sex story of mine? This is your informal trigger warning. Consider yourself warned. We were in the middle of it when he suddenly looked at me and said he wanted to put a baby inside me.
I gagged. Not metaphorically. Physically.
Part of me registered it as hot — primal, charged, a sentence engineered to bypass the frontal lobe entirely. Another part of me experienced something resembling war flashbacks, since my body remembers that the last time someone put “a baby inside of me” it eventually lead to “a baby outside of me.” Arguably, a baby outside of oneself tends to involve a minimum of eighteen years of logistical devotion, chronic eye bags, and the occasional €200 babysitter invoice just for the brief ability to wear heels, kiss a stranger and remember you have a personality. Tempting, truly.
As soon as he left (without putting a baby inside of me), I did what any woman with an internet connection and an uncontrollable urge to turn her dating life into amateur psychological field research would do — I disappeared into the depths of Reddit to find anything remotely verifiable about the so-called breeding kink. When it comes to understanding men, I tend to trust exactly one demographic: sex workers. They are, quite literally, the anthropologists of male desire. If anyone has seen into the unlit corners of the male psyche, it’s the women men feel safest revealing themselves to, the women they believe they’ve paid for anonymity. Luckily, this anonymity still allows for a certain kind of data gathering, the kind that tends to surface in anonymous internet forums.
I found myself on a mission to answer two existential questions:
Is it deeply unfeminist of me to find this… somewhat hot?
What is the underlying psychological architecture of the breeding kink?
One user speculated “Maybe they like the possessive aspect of it. It's almost like capturing the woman. Once she's pregnant, then she can't "get away". Some people might like the claiming part of. The man is "making her his" by putting his baby in her.”
Valid thesis. We’re starting off strong.
In another thread, a Reddit user announces she “stumbled upon a very weird subreddit in which men talked about ‘breeding’ various celebrity women.” What struck her, she writes, was that the conversations framed impregnation as a form of punishment or containment. “They were talking about breeding (i.e., impregnating) these women as a means of disempowering or grounding them,” she explains. “Not in a ‘I wish I could knock up Halle Berry so she’d be tethered to me’ kind of way — not that that isn’t problematic in and of itself — but worse.”
According to her post, male users would discuss actresses and write comments such as, “Someone should have bred her earlier so she wouldn’t have gotten into all that environmental stuff,” or, “Can’t believe she’s been allowed to do [x] for this long — she’s almost 30… she deserves a gang bang breeding to make sure she gets mothered.” The implication, she suggests, was that pregnancy would halt these women’s ambitions — that motherhood could be used to humble or neutralize them. “It’s not even rooted in insecurity about losing her,” she continues. “It’s just to tie her up with motherhood. Not even some selfish distortion of control or commitment — just for the sake of disempowering her. And that’s it.”
She concludes her post by calling it a “very bizarre way to think of procreation… like some sort of punishment for women,” adding that the subreddit appeared “weirdly obsessed with Emma Watson, so… sucks for her.”
The thread is followed by dozens of comments from other users sharing stories of what they describe as “baby-tethering” fantasies in their own social circles.
I decide it’s time for me to get the hell out of the Reddit rabbit hole.
By now, I’ve arrived at my answers.
It’s a grey zone — a bit like blasting violent rap while intellectually rejecting every lyric. Desire doesn’t always align neatly with ideology.
Misogyny.
Tradwives and Christian Grey
Now, I’m not saying the resurgence of tradwife culture is caused by a breeding kink. However, after diving much deeper into this rabbit hole than I probably should’ve, it becomes increasingly difficult to ignore that there may be a correlation. At the very least, there’s an overlap in fantasy architecture, a shared aesthetic of male virility, female surrender and domesticity as eroticized devotion. One user said: “They’re talking about using pregnancy and child raising as a way to control women. “Barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen” is a saying for a reason.”
My immediate reflex is to put on my platform Doc Martens boots and make a mental note to get my IUD checked.
Writing this piece just days after Hannah Neelman — CEO (I mean devoted mother) of Ballerina Farm, her empire (I mean her home) — announced her ninth pregnancy in a marketing rollout as spectacular as Erika Kirk’s grieving tour feels… cosmically timed. My first reaction to seeing that ad was that this is clearly a smart PR strategy to distract from her poop milk scandal. Promoting raw milk with a dash of poop and getting pregnant not for the third or fourth, but the ninth time, is certainly an interesting choice to kick off 2026. Oh, the serene simpleness of the cottage core lifestyle.
At this point, it is glaring that the whole tradwife aesthetic feels like patriarchy’s last branding attempt. I guess if they can’t force women into motherhood any longer, they can at least repackage it in a glossy box of female submission and market it back to us as empowerment. The premise of seeing the tradwife lifestyle as some sort of anti–capitalist, anti-hustle-culture revolution would almost make sense, if only it didn’t require an enormous amount of capital to begin with. Their revolutionary “escape” from capitalism tends to rest comfortably on a foundation of inherited wealth, billionaire husbands, and/or monetized content about escaping capitalism.
Tying it back to my breeding-kink observation, there is also noticeable erotic undercurrent: fertility framed as proof of masculinity (???), submission reframed as devotion, domestic labor stylized into erotic performance. For all the women who once drooled over Christian Grey (yes, fine, I did too), this will sound familiar. The very dominant, very troubled rich dude giving the shy, fragile Anastasia her “dream life,” as long as he gets exclusive access to her vagina and control over every step she takes — that dynamic was marketed as irresistible. Hot. The prime example of if he wanted to, he would. Never mind the minor inconvenience that we never actually learn what she wants, as she’s too busy keeping up with his instructions. I do sometimes wonder how many women left their boyfriends because their broke asses couldn’t afford to gift them an Audi A8 and that isn’t very if he wanted to, he would of them. Whatever. Now, looking at this dynamic through the eyes of a 28-year-old woman who has gone down a few too many rabbit holes — and no longer through the eyes of the 16-year-old who once believed her Christian Grey would one day come and make her come — I can clearly see how troubled this portrayal of their relationship really is.
And just like the Fifty Shades trilogy is less a depiction of every woman’s dream relationship and more a projection of what men think women should fantasize about, the tradwife circus isn’t some hidden collective desire of women either. It’s a meticulously curated performance, a circus really, one that all of its most visible ambassadors don’t even live by themselves. The women presenting this as the antidote to collective girlboss burnout are running businesses, negotiating brand deals and building media empires. Domestic submission is their fucking content strategy, one that has made Hannah Neeman a revenue of $70 million in 2023. Again, the serene simpleness of the cottage core lifestyle.
What young girls seduced by the aesthetic often fail to see is that the modern tradwife is, paradoxically, a career path and for fucks sake, it’s not even an accessible one. It is disproportionately available to white, middle-class women who have the economic cushion to monetize nostalgia — who can promote total financial and emotional devotion to a man while retaining seven figure digital income streams of their own.
The tradwife fantasy can only exist in places where women already have rights. Without the women who fought for our ability to own property, make money, and speak publicly, the tradwife influencers selling submission online wouldn’t even have the right to open their goddamn mouths. Tradwife aesthetics exclusively thrive in liberal democracies where women can vote, work, divorce, own property, and monetize their own image online. Don’t believe me? Go ahead and try packaging total devotion to your husband as a lifestyle brand in Afghanistan where women are legally barred from autonomy, where they cannot leave their marriages freely, where education is restricted, where reproductive decisions are not theirs. Doesn’t sound like a great sales pitch anymore, huh? After all, the irony is: the fantasy of giving up power only exists because there was once a bunch of women putting their lives on the line to win power in the first place. And now you’re over here with your apron and your chickens and your tripod and tell us that you’re in your divine feminine. Shut the fuck up. The divine feminine is busy fighting regimes. Smuggling books into classrooms. Organizing protests.
The divine feminine is resistance.
