I don’t exactly know when this started but I’ve been seeing it more and more lately. Previously they were rather obviously right-wing funded propaganda masquerading as everyday women (think Mrs M*dwest) but now I’m seeing a whole other surge that is now frequently entangled with the New Age ideologies like ~feminine energy~
Look, I’m pretty “woo woo” myself and if I find this shizz disturbing, you should too. I’m seeing women on social media promote this idea of independence being a “trauma response” to whatever bad childhood experiences. I can agree hyper independence being a manifestation of childhood neglect but given how loosely we are defining trauma these days, these women are promoting an idea where if you are even remotely tired of living in our corporatist world (who tf isnt??), it must be because we are too in our ~masculine energy~ and must learn to be more soft, delicate and whatever else they’ve attributed to femininity. You have SAHM (not all) passive aggressively slam working women for “abandoning” their children to the post apocalyptic landscapes of a daycare centre. The renewed rhetoric that BC is poison and making you less of a woman. I can go on and on.
I’m POC and come from a first gen immigrant household. I did not grow up in America, but in a developed Asian country that still clings to conservatism with the veneer of modernity. I grew up in a household where my mother lived the so-called feminine lifestyle where she cooked, looked pretty and never stepped out of the comfort of home.
Guess what? She was fucking miserable. She was also trapped in an abusive, hellish marriage and had no money of her own to leave.
And she still tried to drag me down with her to live the life she had.
The brainwashing is so plainly obvious to me, and with the hellscape we are currently living in, I can see how these idealized lifestyles shown in aesthetic snippets would seem appealing to young impressionable women. To those I say, PLEASE exercise some critical thinking. If someone is encouraging you to abandon your own financial freedom and submit to another, RUN. If someone is trying to prescribe what is and is not feminine, be hypercritical of what they are really saying. Watch out for the tones. Of what characteristics they do not like. What do the elevate? What do they demonise? It’s a rare time they have good intentions.