“Doomer trad wife” and reactionary culture
Ryan Broderick, writing about a growing sense of reactionaryism in some online communities (and what it could lead to), in Garbage Day:
I’ve had this feeling as if I had seen this sort of online discourse before and after seeing the “doomer trad wife” meme it finally dawned on me. It reminds me of the early days of the incel community, before it had become a full-on extremist movement. I’m not sure a lot of people remember this, but incels started on a message board called PUA Hate. The board started as a space for frustrated men to vent about how they felt ripped off by the pickup artist industry. These men had bought books or taken classes and tried to become masters of seduction or whatever, failed out, and became radicalized.
I think we’re seeing a similar reactionaryism happening in certain Gen Z online spaces right now, but instead of a pushback against the pickup artist industry and traditional ideas of masculinity, it’s a response to an oppressive and all-consuming attention economy. It’s a growing resentment of the parasocial relationships happening across social media platforms and it seems to be getting worse.
Ryan has been writing about this here and there for a while and his concern seems justified. Combine this pushback against against the attention economy with the QAnon crowd and the anti-sex community and things could be interesting pretty soon.
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