Netflix’s
Adolescence has kickstarted much-needed conversations on the
radicalisation of young men – but many young women are being taken
in by extremist narratives too.
Netflix’s Adolescence has taken the world by storm, offering a searing portrayal of a now-familiar narrative: a young boy radicalised online by misogynistic content who ultimately commits violence against a girl in his class for rejecting him. But while Adolescence explores how boys can become radicalised online, many girls of the same age have been consuming similarly harmful content.
When I was 13, the same age as the show’s protagonist Jamie, the social media website Tumblr was at the height of its popularity, with over 100 million blog posts coming out every four months. Sandwiched between GIFs of Gerard Way and fanfiction, I learnt what feminism was, became familiar with queer culture, and discovered the power of protest. But anyone familiar with the internet in the 2010s knows Tumblr was also flooded with graphic depictions of self-harm, pro-ana blogs, and so much porn. I have often joked that anyone online at that time should receive a state-funded I survived Tumblr in 2014 t-shirt. While none of this content was explicitly framed as misogyny, it contributed to normalising violence against female bodies.
We know how online misogynistic content radicalises young men: it teaches them to hate women and then they translate that hatred into real-world violence. Thankfully, Adolescence has made the UK government finally take notice of what is happening behind the closed doors of boys’ bedrooms. But what’s missing from the ongoing discourse is how young girls also absorb misogynistic content, and how seemingly innocuous private online experiences ultimately shape their public attitudes, behaviours, and desires.
Dr Catherine Tebaldi is an anthropologist and researcher. “Men do [commit] more violent acts, but women serve a really important role. By combining beauty and a perceived sexual availability with right-wing rhetoric, they are expert propagandists,” she says. “They can normalise the message as soft, feminine, caring for the (white) family.” This maternal and homesteading image of femininity has re-emerged recently in the resurgence of the “tradwife” – the ultra-feminine, homemaking woman who romanticises the submission and domesticity of 1950s Americana. But hidden beneath the kitschy aesthetic are the same patriarchal gender roles being repackaged and circulated by young women themselves. Many tradwife influencers explicitly endorse and encourage anti-feminist and white nationalist views under the guise of a rustic ‘barefoot and pregnant’ way of life. This radicalisation is quiet, aestheticised – and deeply effective.
Dr Tracy Llanera, an Associate Professor of Philosophy researching women in the far-right, tells me that this vein of female radicalisation is so difficult to challenge as it is often framed using a bioessentialist language which makes virtues out of care, motherhood, femininity, and Christian duty. As a result, many of the women involved in far-right misogyny and radicalisation don’t see their actions as violent. Unlike their male counterparts, whose radicalisation is often driven by rage or aggression, Llanera explains: “They can argue ‘but I’m not hurting anyone, my choice will not involve violence’”.
But ideology can be violent too. “There is a disconnect between the prospects of violence that one comes to expect in other extremist movements – where women come to expect physical violence – and the experiences of women joining the far-right,” Llanera continues. But women have long had active roles in the violence of far-right radicalisation. From the KKK’s women’s auxiliary, to the pro-life movement, and the rise of TERF ideology, women have played a central role in sustaining politics that result in violence. Case in point: Trump’s 2024 election, where white women voted for him in near-equal numbers to white men. Yet mainstream discussions of violent far-right radicalisation still focus overwhelmingly on men, failing to recognise the women who work to uphold these structures.
The radicalisation of women extends into their private, personal lives too. The online choke-me-daddy ‘sex positivity’ of the last decade, while attempting to encourage bodily autonomy, has arguably been incredibly harmful for young women, normalising violence during sex and conditioning both men and women to see it as desirable. Billie Eilish recently opened up about the impact early exposure to internet porn had on her sexuality: “I was watching abusive porn, to be honest, when I was like 14… It got to the point where I couldn’t watch anything else. Unless it was violent, I didn’t think it was attractive.” While it’s worth caveating that some women do enjoy rough sex, there are also countless young women like Eilish who have been socialised to accept sexual violence without considering whether it’s something they innately desire.
Female radicalisation is happening at an alarming rate, and we need to talk about it in conjunction with how we talk about the radicalisation of boys. But the solution to this crisis is not to curb women’s autonomy – either on or offline. “There’s always been this effort to prevent women from being in online spaces,” journalist Taylor Lorenz tells me. While boys are being radicalised every day, there has never been a call to get them off the internet; meanwhile, Lorenz says, people like Jonathan Haidt infantilise young women, suggesting they – not boys – should be kept offline because they’re “too neurotic” and vulnerable to handle harmful algorithms, arguing they are a danger to themselves. “The internet is liberating for women [...] it’s a crucial lifeline for them,” Lorenz continues. “Young girls see a much wider variety of body types and feminist thought on the internet today than they ever could in the past, and that’s what really scares people.”
Because while the internet may be a conduit to radicalisation, it isn’t the root cause. “We live under a patriarchy,” Lorenz argues. “Women are growing up in this hyper-capitalist hellscape and our entire society is set up for them to fail [...] If more of their offline lives were equal, then they wouldn’t be buying into these [misogynistic] fantasies.” This is true regardless of gender – in order to stop young people being radicalised, we need to break the systems which radicalise them. We need to build a world where our material conditions don’t turn us towards oppressive alternatives, where submission isn’t sold as survival – a world that gives feminism something real to hope for.
Controversial dating advice which promotes traditional gender roles is all over the internet — but why is this dated advice so popular?
Content creator Maria Bergmann first heard the term “sprinkle sprinkle” three years ago. The term originates from YouTuber Leticia Padua (known as Shera Seven), who uses it as a catchphrase and a way to say “blessings” while dishing out relationship tips online. This advice plays into traditional gender roles and is often highly controversial – telling women to reverse “anything that comes out of a man’s mouth,” laugh if a date suggests splitting the bill, use men for money alone (never emotional support), and to cheat on anyone who is “broke”. Still, to Shera’s millions of followers, her outlook perfectly captures young heterosexual women’s increasing frustration with dating today. For Bergmann, “sprinkle sprinkle” completely shifted her approach to dating. “I started watching Shera’s videos once a week and six months later I found my boyfriend,” she says.
Bergmann spoke to me over the phone from her vacation at the Four Seasons in Thailand. “We travel a lot,” she says. “And I just moved to Norway for him so he put my name on the house.” As it turns out, this is all part of the “sprinkle sprinkle” method. Now three years into the relationship, she says she set the tone early, thanks to Shera’s advice. Around their two-month anniversary, Bergmann asked her boyfriend to pay the deposit for her new apartment. “Shera says that if a man is really interested in you, he’s going to show you that he loves you financially,” she says. “So I told him it was $2,500 and he just sent it to my bank account.” Bergmann still watches Shera’s videos weekly, treating them like a dating bible. “My goal now is to get married,” she says. And, of course, Shera’s YouTube is there to help guide her to that destination.
Across social media, people like Bergmann post their aspirational lifestyle as proof that the “sprinkle sprinkle” method works while single women share resources for finding and dating rich men, including becoming a cart attendant at a golf club or visiting specific bars in New York. While the phrase “marrying up” could easily remind you of the complex social mobility dynamics of Bridgerton, the age-old practice of hypergamy still has a solid place in the modern dating scene. To luxury matchmaker and dating coach May Kalinu, “sprinkle sprinkle” has grown to represent women setting a boundary with what’s expected when dating men. “As women achieve higher levels of education and career success, they want partners who can match their level of financial ambition and emotional labour of providing for the family,” she says. “Women want men to pay for dinner – it’s the least they could do given the hurdles.”
Like Shera, Kalinu provides relationship advice for women who want to be spoiled by their male partners. She started creating videos in 2020, after getting laid off from her corporate job and receiving support from her partner. Today, her audience of over 280,000 mostly consists of 25 to 35 year old women. “These women are unapologetically prioritising their wants and needs, leading to a greater emphasis on relationships that offer both emotional fulfilment and financial security,” she says. And it’s easy to see why some women are collectively saying enough is enough (with the 4B movement encouraging the refusal of heterosexual marriage entirely). Over the past 50 years, the share of women who earn as much or more than their husbands has tripled, but even wives who outearn their spouses are still doing hours more care and housework, while their husbands enjoy more leisure time. Then there’s the gender pay gap, where the inequality is even greater for Black and Hispanic women.
Searching for the “sprinkle sprinkle” experience could be seen as giving the middle finger to the pressure for women to “do it all”, but that doesn’t mean Shera’s advice isn’t rife with gendered expectations. She has strong feelings about how women should dress for men and tells her followers to use their “feminine voice”. Josie Glass, a 26-year-old entrepreneur in Fort Lauderdale, is just one of the many women implementing this advice into their everyday lives. Since discovering Shera’s videos a year ago, Glass says she’s been dressing and speaking differently – talking “more professionally” and putting more pride into her appearance. “I have been attracting what I consider to be high-value men,” she says. “Sprinkle sprinkle will ultimately benefit dating culture because men are stepping up their game and striving to be a provider while women hold themselves to higher standards.” Unfortunately, this traditionally feminine physical advice and phrases like “high value” or “provider” also overlap with the misogynistic dating advice spewed out by the likes of Andrew Tate.
For 26-year-old content L.K.P, following the “sprinkle sprinkle” guidelines has been lonely. “There’s a need to be cutthroat and unwavering in your standards to truly embody the approach,” she says. “It does weed out the men you thought you were interested in, but choosing yourself above everything else is a surprisingly difficult lifestyle to maintain.” She tried dressing up and going to an affluent restaurant by herself (per Shera’s advice) but felt “icky” about the intention of actively trying to get men to notice her, so she didn’t even leave her car. Now, she’s deleted all dating apps, stopped attending singles events, and feels strongly that she’ll meet someone once it’s time. Still, she considers “sprinkle sprinkle” to be the final straw for many women and, to her personally, a hopeful call from a fairy godmother. “It's like waking up from the cognitive belief that dating has to be hard, that you have to settle, and that what you want isn’t attainable,” she says. “Saying ‘sprinkle sprinkle’ is like saying ‘walk towards the light.’”
Sprinkle sprinkle: why hypergamy is trending on TikTok. By Laura Pitcher. Dazed, July 17, 2024.
It’s a strange chapter in late capitalism when one of the most successful influencers on social media is a Mormon tradwife who posts videos of herself making Oreos from scratch. With over 2.2 million followers on TikTok, Nara Smith, an IMG model currently living in Los Angeles with her husband – the model Lucky Blue Smith – and two young children, began surfacing on the For You Page in V1 of this year, known for her viral content that sees her make elaborate home-cooked meals in silk feathered bathrobes, narrating each video with soothing vocal fry. “I wanna be like her when I grow up,” says one user. “I aspire to be like you,” writes another with a crying face emoji.
Smith is part of a growing trend of TikTok #tradwives and #SAHG (stay-at-home girlfriends) performing domestic labour for the feed, preaching the ‘good life’ with aspirational clips of high-end skincare routines and sourdough starters. Another is Gwen the Milkmaid, who recently traded an online presence as an OnlyFans creator in exchange for tradwife TikTok, where she posts domestic clips of herself baking bread in floral tea dresses. “Once upon a time, I was a man-hating feminist,” she says, in one video that sees her carefully crafting lasagna sheets with the help of a brand new Kitchenaid. “Now I’m happily spending hours in the kitchen making my husband whatever he wants for dinner.”
On the surface, these women claim to retreat from capitalism into a slower life away from the grind. Back when women didn’t have careers but rather stayed at home to rear a family. “But the home and the family and the body of the woman herself has never really been a place to escape from capitalism,” says Rachel O’Dwyer, a lecturer in Digital Cultures at Dublin’s NCAD who spoke on the topic at this year’s transmediale festival in Berlin. “It was always ground zero, the place where the good feelings for the good life and capitalism were shored up and set afloat.” Anyone who’s shared content onto TikTok will know that filming and editing videos takes work, and tradwives are no exception. “These girls are doing a job; they’re the latest form of content creators. This work is its own hustle and produces its own income,” agrees O’Dwyer.
Tradwives have admittedly been around for some time now – I recall the first wave of internet tradwives in 2022 brought on by the likes of reactionary podcasts like Red Scare and alt-right pundits. While the content itself follows the same blueprint (sharing content about what a great housewife you are), what’s different is the socio-political atmosphere surrounding them: conservatism is growing among young men, hate speech and extremist content is rampant across X (formerly known as Twitter), and censorship is on the rise. Last month, Meta announced that it’s no longer recommending posts about political and social issues, though this has less of an impact on conservative creators since their content is less explicitly politically charged (compared to, say, topics such as abortion and gun control). As influencers who make content about homemaking, tradwives do not appear explicitly political, but the conservative subtext cannot be ignored.
As with other (questionable) girl online archetypes such as the E-girl military waifu, this makes the internet tradwife a deceptive aesthetic. She appears domestic and submissive, polishing her already spotless marble countertop under the soft glow of a Diptyque candle, yet never fully having to get dirty with actual domestic labour, such as cleaning the toilet or pulling clumps of hair from the drain. She plays the role of a young, hot homemaker, positioning herself as a counter to the neoliberal girlboss, or worse, the angry millennial feminist with her purple hair and pronouns. While the former lives a life of excess – think liberal celebrities like Beyoncé and Taylor Swift flying on private jets – the tradwife adheres to a pious set of principles, like dressing modestly, mothering hoards of children, quoting Bible verses. The libs hate the tradwife because she stands for everything they despise (AKA the reversal of feminist values), yet condemning the tradwife will inevitably give ammunition to the sort of online puritans who believe liberals have ruined society along with sex scenes and gentle parenting. In short, the same 4chan bros looking to ‘dignify’ your thirst traps using AI probably love Mormon TikTokers sharing GRWM clips on their way to Sunday service.
What makes a bunch of affluent women cosplay 1950s housewives for the feed is a tricky case to unpack. Almost all of these neo-tradwives come from money – Smith married rich and Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm, another Mormon influencer, is heir to a billion-dollar fortune. As one commentator pointed out in a viral response video, “They’re not better than us because they can make their children’s cereal from scratch, they’re better than us because they are so wealthy that they have nothing more important to worry about.” Also, do I need remind you that #tradwife content pulls in digits (if the millions of page views are any indication), which is particularly useful for any aspiring businesswoman wanting to launch her personal brand.
Instead of looking at why there’s an uptick in tradwife content, perhaps we should ask ourselves why it’s so popular, even among left-leaning users who don’t necessarily believe in its values. Sure, there’s plenty of trad parodies on the feed with millions of views, but there’s clearly something about these women and their lives that keeps us coming back for more – whether that’s as an escape from the harsh demands of late capitalism, or plain voyeurism, a blemish-free peek through the curtain to the lives of the wealthy. As the viewer, there’s an obvious allure to this lobotomised vision of domesticity for the same reason that we obsess over the interior lives of the rich and famous. We know it’s unrealistic but it’s also a soothing way to tap out of our own less-than-satisfactory lives for the same reason you might tune into an ASMR video or watch an ambient show on Netflix. “I understand that I am being sold a lie but I don’t want to think. I want to vibe. I want a date night. I want to get ready with her. I want an expensive candle,” says O’Dwyer.
Ironically, the unquenching appetite for this sort of online content is getting bigger as women’s reproductive rights in the US are being stripped back in real-time – Alabama has just ruled frozen embryos are children, while in other states birth control is becoming harder to access. Clearly, the system is broken, yet we continue to hold onto the promises of capitalism against all evidence, instead funnelling our apathy into tradwife cosplay, and the illusion that our lives might be better if we resign ourselves to the care of a strong male provider.
Beyond tradwives, however, the internet is amok with capitalist fantasies, whether it’s the self-help guru instructing you on ‘how to create your dream reality’, or TikTok subliminals promising wealth and prosperity through hot girl clips and ‘444’ angel numbers. “What’s new today maybe is the hyper-commodification of this content,“ suggests O’Dwyer. From bimbos to E-girls and Pinkydoll, girls online are embracing the smooth-brained agenda, which doesn’t seem too far detached from the tradwife’s own lobotomised credentials. But perhaps we should be asking ourselves why we feel the need to relinquish our thoughts in the first place.
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