There is a war going on, and I’m not talking about the ones over land, drugs, or the perennial feuds rappers find themselves in when one insults the other on national TV. Footage from one side or the other splashes across my feed nearly every day. The most watched ones come with no shortage of comments capable of rage-baiting the sanest among us. You, too, have likely seen or heard one version of this or the other.
In one videoa young mom makes her kids breakfast. Except in her case, she is concocting Cinnamon Toast Crunch from scratch. It involves two different types of flour, hand-kneading dough, multiple sheets of parchment paper, a rolling pin, and two separate trips to the oven. She promises that this will be easy. Thanks to her soothing monotone, I want to believe her.
(Before seeing this in my For You Page, along with her 12 million and counting followers, I had assumed that the goal of motherhood was to get your kids to the point where they can pour their own cereal without flooding or burning the house down. On this, I must’ve been wrong.)
But before I am tempted to put down my phone and attempt this sorcery in my own kitchen with exotic flours I don’t have lying around, the next video comes on. In it, another woman in another enviable outfit walks in front of the camera. Except in her case, she appears to be walking across a tarmac toward a private plane. The audio overlay is a man asking, “What would you say if a man asks you what you bring to the table?” Our queen pantomimes the only appropriate response: “I’d say I’m not a [expletive] waitress.”
Not just vibes, but also liabilities
In the throwdown for our precious attention and occasional worship, the social media algorithms of today have elevated Nara Smith and Bethenny Frankel into cult-like status thanks to their highly compelling content on what a modern girlie could aspire to be. While Nara is busy making toasted multigrain squares for the members of her nuclear household to douse in milk in the name of Tradwifery, Bethenny is busy reminding aspiring High-Value Women (HVW) to put up with nothing and demand much from the men taking them out to dinner. (As some have argued, the one is training for the other.) Meanwhile, their haters cry foul and claim they’re setting feminism back a couple of hundred years.
While many pixels have been dedicated to unpacking this throwback (including on this very site), one thing that seems to go unnoticed is the question of what this all means for the other half of the population who self-identify as men. They may not be the target demographic for Tradwife or HVW content, but if a butterfly can flap its wings in L.A. and cause a typhoon in Laos, then surely an internet full of women consuming content about what it means to be the ideal member of their gender will have downstream consequences for the men in their midst.
After all, every famous Tradwife seems to have a husband in the background (or in Nara Smith’s case, frequently in the foreground, à la Lucky Blue), and every HVW seems to be in the market for a mate worthy of her expectations—a so-called High-Value Man. And as boomers have long warned, “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.” Evolutionary psychologists like David Buss call this the Sexual Strategies Theory: The mating preferences of one half of the population dictate how the other half competes (at least among the hetero and cis).
Men are not off the hook either
This means that the rise of the HVW and Tradwife is not just about rebranding vintage norms for women; it’s also ultimately a throwback for men, who now more than ever might have to be in their hustle era to secure a second date. After all, studies have consistently shown that modern-day women still want partners with resources independent of how much they themselves bring to the table (though this also varies by factors like age and relationship status).
If anything, the expectations for men are happening during a time when women have been making historically unprecedented gains for 70-plus years—at least in the court of public opinion. Now more than ever, women are seen as not just more communal but also more competent and just as agentic as men. This is also happening at a time when incels has become a household term for men trauma-bonded over their unlucky love lives.
Still, it’s unclear whether TikTok’s advice is working and women are actually “marrying up” (“hypergamy” in academic circles). The jury is still out: Some argue that hypergamy is and was not ever a thing, at least when examining 33 million marriages across 125 years of English history. Others suggest the opposite: that not only is hypergamy a feature of modern love, even the most gender-equal societies in the world—like Norway—can’t escape it. Other work in Latin America demonstrates that if anything, hypergamy is on the rise even as women level up in society.
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As much as people like to confuse psychologists with psychics who can foretell the future, no scientist can actually say for certain what our love lives will look like tomorrow. In the meantime, Nara, Bethenny, and their fellow high-value influencers have a new video waiting for you in your FYP.
