Malcolm and Simone discuss the unsustainable lifestyle promoted by "trad wives" on social media. They argue these women are actually trophy wives dependent on hidden male labor.

Simone: [00:00:00] they show all this video or photos of them making pies at home and living in a very cottage core way and like doing, hanging up laundry to air dry. And picking mushrooms and they're these women for the most part, like I get this, like. Really visceral reaction to these because the lives that these women are living our lives of complete leisure and luxury.

Simone: Like they think that what they're doing is becoming a trad wife when really what they're doing is becoming a trophy wife. And what they don't realize is that the men that they're marrying. Can't afford that a man who has a trophy wife really basically should be independently wealthy

Malcolm: every time you see one of these women who is indulging in this quote unquote trad lifestyle, also see a man. Who's off camera, who's secretly working to afford all of this and is sacrificing to afford all of this. And yet the woman is acting as if she is the one making the sacrifice, living in abundant leisure.

Would you like to know more?

Simone: Hello, Malcolm.

Malcolm: Hello, Simone. [00:01:00] This is one where I had sort of a concept for a video and she didn't want to talk too much about it beforehand because she's like, Oh, I want to be surprised.

Simone: Yeah, I'll ask dumb questions and see what you say. Well,

Malcolm: we were talking, you know, in reference to the Barbie movie that it's very clear that the women are not happy in the world that they have created.

Malcolm: In the world that feminism created for women, it appears that this new model doesn't work and women are living really systemically unhappy lives.

Malcolm: Based on how, how feminized they've made the world there's some great statistics on this as well that I might be able to put on state screen showing that generally the more a woman buys into feminism or the more that she lives in a feminist environment, the less happy she will be.

Malcolm: And they, over time, women's happiness has been going down as the number of well, as, as feminism has won more and more victories in our society

Simone: happiness, or maybe it's just mental health problems.

Simone: I think it's just rates of mental health problems, which of course is like primarily depression.

Simone: Like, but it's not just happiness. It's [00:02:00] like all sorts of bad things. So I think it's, it diminishes the problem. Oh yeah, no, it's

Malcolm: women's happiness. It's declining over time.

Simone: Yeah. But I think if you also look at rates of, of women's mental health that mental health liberals and conservatives, especially among

Malcolm: women. Yes, it is. It's really terrible. This world is uniquely bad for women more worse than it was when women had less rights. When I say less rights, I don't mean like 1950s. I'm talking like 1980s, right? And that is fascinating.

Simone: I don't, I don't, first off, I want to push back a little bit and say, I don't think this is about rights.

Simone: I think this is about, Like cultural expectations and quotas and things like that. Like, I think that it's very important that men and women are treated equally under the wall, but I'm sorry, under the law. But actually right now, of course, men are not treated equally under the law. Men are much more at risk, for example, in divorces with child custody, et cetera.

Simone: So I don't even think that it's, it's like equality. That's the problem is

Malcolm: rights are responsibilities. We have [00:03:00] pointed out multiple times on the show that when people. Experience a post scarcity environment that we assume they would indulge in hedonism, but instead the most frequent thing is they indulge in self victimization because that removes responsibility from them.

Malcolm: And the thing that people hate most is responsibility and as rights changed, as it became possible for women to work and compete with men in the workplace, then became the expectation of that lifestyle. for every woman that she does in addition to other things that she wants to do with her life. And, and biologically women are just going to be more driven to do things like want to have kids and stuff like that and feel it harder when they don't do those things.

Malcolm: So. In ignoring the biology, yet giving equal expectations. Now, here's where we come in and we have a very different take than I think traditional conservatives. I think a lot of people, they want to go back to maybe the way things were before women's rights, before all this. And yet, I do not think that world was either efficacious Or an [00:04:00] ideal world for women.

Malcolm: I think that it was worse than, than less ideal. I just think it was a pretty shitty world for women. If you go back 1920s, you know, 1850s, a terrible place. I would not want that for my daughters. But then the question becomes, what does a stable vision for femininity look like? What's the way that our family is handling the different roles that men and women have?

Malcolm: Because men and women do have different biologies, different sociologies. And, and, I mean, biology is even in the brain. And this causes them to act in systemically different ways. And when you apply an exactly equal system to them apparently just doesn't work very well. However, if you apply a horrifically unequal system, I also don't think it works very well.

Malcolm: And when we look at some of the aspirational messages that are set up for women, this is one of the things that we're talking about, which is in a big way people misunderstand that a stay at home wife [00:05:00] is a trophy wife. Yeah,

Simone: I mean, so I would, I would argue that many of also like the Trad feminist caricatures I see online.

Simone: I mean, I don't think they think that they're caricatures, but they are, are also like inherently unsustainable and worse off. So, I've, I've seen like on Instagram, for example, like plenty of like little videos or photos of, of. with texts saying things along the lines of, Oh, like I, I turned away from the original feminist dream and went, you know, back to being a mother and a homemaker.

Simone: And they show all this video or photos of them making pies at home and living in a very cottage core way and like doing, hanging up laundry to air dry. And like picking mushrooms and they're these women for the most part, like I get this, like. Really visceral reaction to these because the lives that these women are living our lives of complete leisure and luxury.

Simone: Like they think that what they're doing is becoming a [00:06:00] trad wife when really what they're doing is becoming a trophy wife. And what they don't realize is that the men that they're marrying. Can't afford that a man who has a trophy wife really basically should be independently wealthy Like there should be no risk that like, oh, well, okay We're a single income family.

Simone: Like if I lose my income then we're totally screwed So basically if you are dependent on an income You cannot afford to have a trophy wife or trophy husband for that matter. And the fact that these women are, I think to a certain extent, like it's, it's just as bad as feminists who are sort of like goading their husbands into being a sole breadwinner in a family and in an economy that doesn't support sole breadwinner families anymore.

Simone: Really is

Malcolm: fascinating. So w w what you're describing here behind every, every time you see one of these women who is indulging in this quote unquote trad lifestyle, also see a man. Who's off camera, who's secretly working to afford all of this and is sacrificing to afford all of this. And yet the woman is acting as if she is the [00:07:00] one making the sacrifice, living in abundant leisure.

Malcolm: And then in addition to that

Simone: They're acting, they're not only acting like they're making a sacrifice. They act like they're being eminently humble. And, and Like imminently subservient and in the end, like they are becoming a complete dependent on someone else financially and, and basically living a luxury life, ordering that the other person around essentially spending their money.

Simone: Oh yeah.

Malcolm: And they're like this is sort of the way they approach the financial state of the family. Yeah. What they're doing when they do that. It's not like money becomes less important to living the lifestyle that they and their kids are living.

Malcolm: They are just 100 percent putting that responsibility on the man.

Simone: That's not even like traditional and many housewife cultures. So I don't know if you, you knew about this but there was this, this phenomenon actually, like at some point in, in modern trading markets where Japanese housewives who traditionally are the ones to manage all family finances, like the husbands make the money, but the housewives, you know, and this [00:08:00] is a culture that supports single breadwinner families, the housewives would manage the money.

Simone: And during periods, of course, when. Interest rates were totally gone in Japan, right? Where like literally their money was losing value if it was sitting in a savings account. All these, these housewives like learned how to make s**t tons of money on the stock market. And they were doing very, very sophisticated trades and they were like two levels of this.

Simone: There's a really interesting YouTube video about this, actually.

Malcolm: We'll talk about this. What I find interesting continue. We

Simone: were going to say something. Well, my point is that like even the fact that they're like money's not my thing. They just put so much on their husbands and we've met husbands who've like been like, well, You know, like kids are going to college now and like have to pay for the nannies and like, you know, I just, so I have to make this new job work and like, we can feel the pressure.

Simone: Like I, I can't deal with that kind of oppressive. I can't, I can't deal with

Malcolm: it. Who actually make this lifestyle possible for their wives who are related to us and you can see in their eyes, the weight of the strain, the strain, it is painful [00:09:00] to be around them. Yeah, these guys, because they have their entire family is living in this like reality that doesn't really exist and that they are making that illusion possible through the pressure they're putting on themselves.

Malcolm: And it is almost sort of psycho and disgusting. And another thing is that this is not the way that families were traditionally run. We've done another video on this. Trad wives are a progressive conspiracy. You can look it up in our history. The point being is that historically the roles of women, women are not the roles that they have today.

Malcolm: They are not the roles that they have in a nuclear family. Nuclear families, the idea of like a husband working to earn all the money for the family. That really didn't start until the 1920s and it really ended as something popular in the 1970s. And even from the twenties to the seventies, it was only in to upper class American families only.

Malcolm: And America had a uniquely good economy during that period because it was [00:10:00] basically. Stealing the rest of the world's money after a period of war, like it had a cheesed economy at the expense of everyone else that allowed it to have just so much wealth that this insane lifestyle where entire families were able to live off of one person's income was feasible and that this was ingrained in the public consciousness through the movies and sitcoms that were produced in the 1950s.

Malcolm: But it is certainly not an actual traditional way of doing anything. The actual traditional way with the corporate family, which we talk about in that, if you want to go into that, the point being is, is this illusion of the housewife is totally predatory, but it's also bad for the woman. So everything here, we've been talking about how the woman is like living in this illusion that she's created for herself in this indulgence, but it completely depowers the woman, especially when the kids leave the house.

Malcolm: When the kids leave the house, if you are a woman who has put yourself in one of these situations, why should the guy not just upgrade to a younger model? Why not? [00:11:00] You have nothing. You bring nothing. You have made yourself disposable. It is, it is only his good graces and kindness that is keeping you around.

Malcolm: And historically, if we lived in like a stable cultural institution, there would have been societal pressures forcing him to stay married to you. But those don't exist. All you get now is alimony. Which is, I guess, something, but it's, it's certainly not a safe place to be in if he has a solid prenup and you live in a place that supports that.

Malcolm: So, it's not a great situation for these women either. Long term. I mean, it's a, it's a great sort of short term indulgence where they can get famous on TikTok before they're disposed of. But it's a, it's a bad... I think it's just sort of bad all around. And then we have this problem in our society, where when people look at what women are, like, like the ideal woman in our society, it's the woman that sells.

Malcolm: The woman that sells, like, this is what companies are going to use to sell things. This is what's going to be on billboards. This is [00:12:00]

Simone: what's going really a sex symbol.

Malcolm: Your average man, from a biological perspective, is going to be looking for a woman that looks like she can produce a lot of kids, and that typically means young and without kids already.

Malcolm: Whereas cultures, like long, thriving, historic cultures, they work through rewarding Mothers, and motherhood, and, and being a good wife, but when I talk to many, you know, people in sort of the tribe community and stuff like that, their ideal woman is almost sort of based on the stereotype progressives have of conservative cultures than what most actual conservative cultures would have as their ideal woman.

Malcolm: You know, they are looking for this hot, submissive woman that is basically a parasite off of them and they have to maintain this fantasy for it just doesn't sound very nice. And so when people look to me and they go,

Malcolm: why are you naming all your daughter's male names, right? But one, they earn more money to, they do better in their careers.

Malcolm: Like this has been done in a lot of [00:13:00] studies, but three, they can textualize themselves differently. So it's been shown that women with male names or gender neutral names that they. Get STEM degrees at much, much higher late rates and they get liberal arts degrees at much, much lower rates, which I think is really fascinating.

Malcolm: And that just shows like a different self conceptualization. So what I aim for when I'm thinking like, what is the woman's role in our family and was in our culture? And when I've talked to other people in sort of our wider network of families, many womanhood. And I really like it. Which is to say that the woman is the bulwark of the family, the D, the defender of the family.

Malcolm: She is in charge of the family financial stability and what goes on in the home. But the core thing is, is the financial stability where the man is the one making risky big plays that are meant to move the family up financial levels or are meant to advance the family in, in social

Simone: spheres. Yes.

Simone: You've got the foundation and you've got the. [00:14:00] I guess growth or risk or like in any balanced investment portfolio, you've got like CDs and savings and bonds. And then, well, at least before bonds were completely crazy and stupid to get. And then you have like high risk investments and VC and things like that.

Malcolm: Right. Yeah, so it's a little different from how we individually do it, which is, I don't know,

Simone: I mean, I'm, you're pretty high risk and I'm pretty

Malcolm: stable. No, no, no, it is true, but I mean, because we work together, it's a little different than a lot of families. When I talk to other families who do this, what is often the case is the woman will work like a stable nine to five job and the man will attempt to start new companies.

Malcolm: The man will attempt to run for office, you know, stuff like that, right? Things that are meant to move the family up socioeconomic levels. And the model that I had in my head for this, I mentioned this in the other video, but it was really interesting to me when I saw this because these are one such different roles is, is Shovel Knight.

Malcolm: So in Shovel Knight, it's a, it's a little, it's a great game by the If you haven't played it, it's a very good take back to the old arcade games.[00:15:00] And throughout the game, you're playing as this character called shovel night, but you know that he normally works with a female character called shield night.

Malcolm: And at the end of the game, you finally get to play with both of them sort of on screen and his move kit or his toolkit is very limited in many ways. Like you can like do a jump when he jumps on an enemy and stuff like that. And immediately, as soon as shield night comes into the scene. All of his little moves pair so well with the way that her character works.

Malcolm: Like, now he's able to jump on her shield. So many things where you're like,

Malcolm: Why was he so limited in this way? You immediately are like, Oh, he was part of this complete whole. That had a completely different moveset, but that worked together completely synergistically. And with, with, with Shovel Knight, you can almost think of it like Sword Knight and Shield Knight, I guess you could think of it.

Malcolm: The idea being that the woman within this conception of femininity is the family's shield. She is the bulwark. [00:16:00] She is tenacity incarnate. Whereas the man is ambition incarnate in how he relates to the world. And it's this pairing of sort of, I guess, Earth, right? That is the way that I would conceptualize femininity for our kids and for our cultural group.

Malcolm: And I think it's a very sustainable way to conceptualize femininity where the woman is not valued. For her beauty, right, or for her, and I think even worse you see in something for her guile, you know, her sassy has become a positive thing to say about wives to the extent where you know, many women try to embody sassiness when sassiness is often just the degradation of people around them and men around them instead of the, the fortification of men around them.

Malcolm: And so I really like this conceptualization, and we had talked a bit about it in one of our videos, and [00:17:00] these videos, they help me think through things, right? And so after talking about it, I thought about it, I talked to some other people about, like, the way our family sees women and men. It really began to solidify for me, and it feels very snug in my mind, this conception of what the man is, and what the woman is in a family.

Malcolm: Do you have thoughts on this?

Simone: And that that broadly resonates. Yeah.

Malcolm: But I mean, how do you teach like, I guess it's, it's,

Simone: it's how would we teach our daughters about

Malcolm: this, you know, the, the key feature of femininity within this model is actually endurance. It is endurance, constitution, tenacity. You know, as you said in your motto, when I first met you, which I always loved is repeated blunt force was your motto on your, on your, your page and everything like that.

Malcolm: And I love that because it wasn't, I'm going to win in the end because I'm smarter than other people or I'm cleverer. I'm going to find some underground solution. It is, I am going to win because I am [00:18:00] just going to hit my head against the wall until that wall finally breaks.

Malcolm: And when I saw that, that was to many ways, like me, the ideal wife, the ideal person I wanted as a partner. And what's also really interesting is in this model is when the woman is sort of protecting the man to be able to, you know, make these thrusts at the, the opponent being life in this point, in this, this context the man can work so much more aggressively and so much with, with such greater knowledge of purpose,

Simone: right?

Simone: Yeah, I guess what I would add to this is there are no hard and fast rules. And I think, you know, we both of us know many women who would be Really good, risky people in a relationship. And many men would be really happy to be the stable one. I think a lot of it comes down to like, rather than necessarily all this, I would [00:19:00] say a key to femininity and to masculinity is understanding where you have specialization and teaming up with someone who is a very different specialization to get more done than you'd ever get done on your own.

Simone: I think a big part of what has been lost in visions of idealized masculinity or feminism and femininity is the other person. Like back to the trad wives that I see posting on Instagram, they don't talk about their husbands, aside from like how I'm serving my husband and how I'm so trad and like, you know, the, the, the relationship is not the point.

Simone: The, the family is not the point. They are the point. And I think that's what we're also really missing is that our society is so atomized. And individuality is so atomized that people don't realize that the point isn't to be yourself and be your best self. The point is to serve something larger and be a part of something bigger than yourself.

Simone: So I think that's, that's a big thing that's missing in femininity as well, is that femininity is also about [00:20:00] becoming, becoming your partner, becoming your children. And to me, before meeting you and before having children, that concept. Grates a lot. Like it is not something, you know, it's like petting a cat backwards or nails on a chalkboard.

Simone: That is not something that like anyone raised in modern society wants. And yet it brings more purpose, more resolve, more ability to overcome hardship and more contentment in life than anything I could have imagined. So, you know, there you go. I think that's a big thing that's missing.

Malcolm: Oh, no, I, I think that you.

Malcolm: What was that?

Simone: Oh, that was the door opening, but that's because there's a cross breeze.

Malcolm: Sorry. There's a, there's a murderer walking around our area of Pennsylvania right now. Just.

Simone: No, he was arrested. He was arrested. Oh, they caught

Malcolm: him? Yeah. Oh, lovely.

Simone: But don't lock the doors. Damn it.

Malcolm: [00:21:00] Anyway. So, Yeah, this, this and it is interesting when people try to create iterations of femininity and masculinity that are almost sort of based on a, a like world that doesn't exist anymore where they're like, Oh, I am the protector of the family.

Malcolm: It's like, bro, you live in a society like fam, you don't, your family does not need a constant protector anymore. That's, that's not, you know, you don't need to be going out and beating people up. That is not in the best interest of it. your family within this modern society, right? Or you know, the, the wife is supposed to, you know, what, manage the farm?

Malcolm: Well, you don't have a farm, okay? You, you, you know, you've got to create an iteration that works within our existing society. And I also really love what you just said, which is to say that the idealized, I think many types of trad femininity or the trad wife is a glorification of the individual of the woman rather than The way that she engages with and [00:22:00] becomes a part of her husband and her family, which I think is the, the true side of, of, of what I would say an idealized marriage, which is that it is not about, and we actually, yeah, we were talking about this in the car and it really messed me up, you know, when I was saying, when I hear people talk about their relationships these days, like why they're getting in a relationship.

Malcolm: Yep. It is about how it makes them feel. It's about how it helps them. They're like what does he do to like, make me feel good? What does he do to like, help me? What does he do to, you know, what? Like, that's not the point. The point is how you work together for the good of the unit.

Simone: Yeah, it should be, here's what we're doing together.

Simone: Here's what we're building together. Here's our shared vision. But it's, it's, yeah, almost never that it's, here's what he did for me. Here's this gift he got from you. Here's this trip we took together or this, yeah, not ideal.

Malcolm: Well, I am so desperately fortunate that I [00:23:00] live with a woman who helped like within this iteration of femininity within, I guess I call it prairie wife femininity, you know, the hard farm working woman.

Malcolm: I love it. No, because that's where it comes from, right? Like. The woman who is the bulwark for the family, the one that allows the other family members to, to strike at life and do the types of things that I've been able to do, you know, people look at our lives, they go, you wrote five books in this time period while running a company.

Malcolm: Like, how did you do that? I would not have had time to do that. Had you not provided me with stability, right? We wouldn't have time to have built the school. We wouldn't have time to do all of these things had you not provided us with stability. And I'm just so... Grateful for that and it's a form of femininity and masculinity where both individuals have sort of full utility within a modern economic context and that also really excites me.

Malcolm: So within this [00:24:00] iteration of femininity, you are the paragon. There could not be a woman better than you. Within this iteration. And I hold that as hard as anyone could hold anything. All you have, you've lost at achieving anything close to this.

Simone: No, there are lots of women out there who do more and have more mental control and have also more children.

Simone: So just saying, but thank you, Malcolm. I really appreciate that. Anything also, like, I think that a really interesting thing that is missing from many men who are like. You know, where, where are all the good women? You know, where, where are these perfect women? They're not there. You know, I, I don't see any of them.

Simone: You know, and they, they also will like try to go like they'll, what do they call it, like passport dating where they'll like go find a wife from some other culture who's like more conservative is they don't realize that it's up to them to be the person to bring that out in their [00:25:00] spouse. And it's also up to them to create that kind of relationship.

Simone: And I think a lot of men expect that they're going to get. The kind of partner that really co invests in life with them just out of the bag that they're just going to meet some woman who's like, Oh, like you're fishing and everything that you think that's how I started out with Malcolm, like totally not Malcolm, you, you gave, you gave us something to live for together.

Simone: First off, you had a very inspirational vision for what life together could be like, for what we could build together. If we really coordinated and went all in. So one, you, you were inspiring and you had to do that. You had to be someone with the capability of actually selling that story and executing on it.

Simone: And then you also invested a huge amount in being like, no, this is not how we're going to resolve conflict in a relationship. This is not how we're going to do this in the relationship. Like let's do things this way. Let's do things this way. Like constantly, constantly correcting. And honestly, like taking the harder path.

Simone: Many, many times when other guys would just be like, nah, like this isn't something

Malcolm: I'm going to worry about that. You [00:26:00] know, what you just said is really the key. The man has to be the inspiration and the flame of ambition for the family, but a flame of ambition that can catch other people's excitement. If you are just ambitious about something that your wife has no interest in, then you are not providing her with any value.

Malcolm: You need to be the type of ambitious, the type of passionate, or when your wife sees that she gets excited in it and invested in it, and she is excited to play a role in seeing that realized. And if you're a guy and you're like, well, women don't do that for me, they're just not interested in what I'm interested in either.

Malcolm: Then you might not be inspiring enough. And this is the key thing. When I talk about like how to be a good woman, many women will be like, well. I can't be like that, you know, I've got all these problems and I just want to stay at home and be super obese and not do anything. And it's like, well, then maybe you shouldn't be breeding, you know, even when we talk about like, like, maybe you shouldn't have a family, maybe you won't be a good mom.

Malcolm: Like maybe you are not [00:27:00] good enough for any man to actually want and create a family with. And that is harsh, but it is true. We live in a world where maybe not everyone in us, as per enablers, as people who want other people having kids. Even we say, yeah, but we want like people who will be good parents to have tons of kids, not like your average schmo to have like one or two kids, right?

Malcolm: Because they'll live pretty shitty lives. But the same is true for men. Men can go and they can look at women and they can be like, well, you're just not really good enough for anyone to really want. But the same is true for men. Many women just are incapable of inspiring anyone.

Simone: Well, but also like I, I technically, I technically wasn't good enough for you.

Simone: When we met. Oh yeah, and I gave you metrics and I think many, many men would... Like, had they had your standards, never would have dated me. And I think that's another thing is that many men won't deign to get a fixer upper wife. And they just expect like someone to come out of the box perfect. So.

Malcolm: Well, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Malcolm: And that's, [00:28:00] that's absolutely true as well. So, you know, also you've got to, you've got to build the person, you've got to inspire the person. There are many things that you have to do as a man, many, many skill checks, I've been playing Baldur's Gate 3 recently, where you may not, as it's based on the D& D system, many skill checks where the dice rolls may have not turned out in your favor.

Malcolm: And we will do another video sometime on how to get a, a great wife. Because I, I, I would love to sort of go through the steps on how to obtain that because a lot of people are trying to get wives in the same, using the same systems that they perfected to pick up sex partners or short term relationships.

Simone: It's a different, different strategy, different playbook. Different, totally different playbook. Well, that'll be fun to talk about. I'm looking forward to it. But I really enjoyed this conversation

Malcolm: too, Malcolm. I loved this conversation. This was fantastic.

Simone: Looking forward to our next one already. And I'm so

Malcolm: glad that I found you the single most perfect woman to ever be born or exist within any timeline.

Simone: I'm so glad you settled.[00:29:00]

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