Source: He Doesn’t Want a Tradwife, He Wants Collateral Publisher: Cartoons Hate Her | Author: Cartoons Hate Her Published: February 6, 2026 | Archived: March 21, 2026

Not pictured: his innocent wife and baby, because why should they be humiliated

I actually have no interest in the details of this scandal, nor do I want to spend more time than necessary covering D-list right-wing gossip. No doubt if I tried, I would screw up because I’m not very familiar with these people and would invariably get some lore wrong. (ie: “He didn’t do a racist Chinese joke, he did a racist Indian joke!! DO YOUR RESEARCH!!!”)

Anyway, what I found most interesting wasn’t any of the juicy details, but rather, people’s incredulous reaction to the fact that a man could have the ideal wife at home and still cheat. But she did everything right! She didn’t wear trashy makeup! She’s staying home with the kids and wearing a long dress! She’s simultaneously wearing a baby and cooking! She didn’t eat hot chip or lie!

But none of this is surprising. Despite its reputation for being male-gaze-oriented, the purpose of modern tradwife propaganda (often peddled by and consumed by people who weren’t raised in a traditional environment) is not to make women more attractive to men, but to trick women into doing things that make them more dependent on their husbands, and less attractive to other men. The men who further this agenda can maintain decent leverage and the upper hand in their marriages while sleeping with sexually available women they do find attractive.

Of course, not all men. I shouldn’t really have to say that, because most of the men reading this are fully aware I’m not talking about them. But there’s always one guy who’s like “hey, I’m a man and I never said this!” or “hey, why aren’t you talking about the female equivalent?” so, to clarify: I’m not talking about all men, or even most men. If you have never found yourself declaring that women should marry at seventeen, never learn to drive (except within an anti-car ideology; I’ll allow it) work or go to college, rest assured, I am not talking about you.

If you spend a lot (or even a little) time on trad Twitter, and you’re a young woman trying to figure out what virtuous, family-oriented men value in their future wives, there will be a surplus of information at your disposal.

You should ideally be as young as possible (perhaps even underage, because age of consent laws are libcucked) and choose a man much older than you who has the potential to provide for a family and the maturity to want one (remember, every man under 30 is totally worthless! No agenda here!!) You should never wear makeup—men hate makeup, we are told, even makeup that looks natural. And forget about any kind of cosmetic enhancements, which also repel men. You should dress modestly (men hate sexy clothes too.) You shouldn’t have premarital sex. You should be a virgin on your wedding night. You shouldn’t go to college or have a job. You should be submissive, shy and softspoken. You should be compliant. You should be unchallenging.

This may sound easy to ignore, but I completely understand the appeal. It’s hard not to be entranced by this idyllic image of married life when young people today are in a world where marriage is no longer the default, where they see most of their peers engaging in serial monogamy or total isolation instead of anything resembling a traditional marriage. And many young women (including myself, when I was young) do want a somewhat traditional marriage. They don’t mind their husbands being the major decision-makers. Maybe they even want it. Many might enjoy the idea of being a homemaker, or working part-time when their kids are little. (Despite my (completely unfounded) reputation as Substack’s resident man-hating, mass-castrating radfem harpy, I firmly believe that childcare is more my job than my husband’s, and I like it that way.) If these young women’s male peers are all addicted to gooning and online gambling, and if those young women are addicted to social media, it’s seductive to imagine that the off-ramp is to be as submissive and traditional as possible and be rewarded with a Good Man (not to mention the siren call of “not having to work.”)

You do not have to be a white nationalist or religious fundamentalist to see the value in monogamy and marriage, or to want to stay home with your children. Of course, a lot of this is actually a fantasy about being a rich aristocrat, not a real desire to live on a preindustrial-era farm, which would be, frankly, disgusting. But when the alternative is involuntary childlessness, situationships, or withdrawing from dating entirely, the appeal of the tradwife is obvious.

I fell into this trap multiple times myself, as a young woman in a secular setting who wanted something more valuable than meaningless hookups (a problem among my generation, not so much the youth of today) or long-term dead-end relationships that wasted my prime childbearing years. I believed that to evade bad men and find good men, the key was to lean into my natural inclination to be submissive and compliant. This was what men liked right? But the men around me didn’t actually like this. When I expressed my desire to be a homemaker, thinking it would earn me brownie points, men bristled and told me they wanted to marry women with some degree of ambition. I had boyfriends complain that I never argued with them or disagreed with them, and requested that I “call them on their shit.” As young as thirteen, my boyfriend complained to my mother that I was “too agreeable.” (Not sure why he thought she was the ideal audience for this—he also proposed she help him get me drunk.) When I made myself too available and unchallenging, men lost interest. I found myself repeatedly passed over for girls who were aggressive, overtly sexual, brash, if not a tad masculine in their attitude and behavior, who were not clearly more physically attractive than I was. Granted, I have a pretty small sample size here, but even my now-husband, who arguably likes a more submissive woman than your average guy, found this schitck extremely tiresome and told me to grow a backbone early on in our relationship. When I wore 1950s-inspired clothing, figuring this was what men really liked, he immediately corrected me that actually, he liked tight jeans.

Of course, in the 1800s, all men were “trad.” A man who said he valued a woman who cooked, cleaned, and cared for children over anything else was par for the course. A man who said he preferred women who wore long dresses and bonnets would have raised nary an eyebrow. People may have asked, “Uh…Jeremiah, as opposed to what?” It may sound unfair that these things should raise orange flags in 2025, but I would venture almost everyone would find it incredibly weird for a man in 2025 to insist a woman bring a dowry of goats to a marriage. If that man said, “What’s the big deal? Loads of guys expected goat dowries in Victorian times!” you’d probably still suspect he either wanted to have sex with the goats, or was a broke idiot who grossly miscalculated the monetary value of goats. Whether you like it or not, social norms change over time. A guy who seems incredibly invested in women having fewer rights is probably not normal, and I don’t believe for a second that he’s selflessly advocating for these things because oh no, the birth rate!

Again, I know men are not a monolith. I am sure that there are some Good Trad Men, probably devoutly religious themselves, who hold themselves to the same standards of chastity, modesty and fidelity to which they hold their wives. These are men who have reverence for motherhood—who love their wives’ postpartum bodies instead of grimacing, closing their eyes, and imagining college girls in short-shorts that they saw on Instagram. If you are one of these men, or married to one of these men, I am not invalidating your lived experience. But when everything a man claims to find attractive is something that conveniently makes women less appealing to other men, less available to other men, more isolated, and less capable of independence, it sounds like an agenda, not attraction.

And Elijah Schaffer is one of those men with an agenda. Before his affair was exposed, he posted that “women don’t become women until they are married with children,” giving a whole new meaning to the popular right-wing question, “What is a woman?” He posted that he hates to see “pretty white girls working” because they need husbands to take care of them. (That’s one way to say we need more women of color in leadership!) Unsurprisingly, he says the answer to the birth rate is banning women from the workplace. He wants to repeal women’s right to vote. I could go on.

His concern isn’t for the daycare babies who may or may not have nebulous “attachment disorders,” the birth rate, the sanctity of the family, or anything else. Men like this (again, #notallmen) don’t really care about those things. They care about improving their own relative leverage and have the upper hand. They want to do drugs, watch porn, cheat on their wives (if not worse) and face no consequences for it. The only shocking thing here is how so many people still take them at face value.

Steven Crowder also said things like this, and probably didn’t really believe most of it. He claimed that mothers should be the primary caregivers and that fathers were useless, but that didn’t stop him from demanding 100% custody of his infant twins during his divorce even though he wasn’t present for their birth. It’s obviously unsurprising that Steven Crowder has advocated for the abolition of no-fault divorce. His wife divorced him after she experienced mental and emotional abuse while heavily pregnant, which was caught on camera, and condemned by Christian outlets.

And let’s not forget the most trad man of all—Osama Bin Laden (if anything, fundamentalist Islam is some of the most up-front about the desire for relative male leverage and power.) Anyway, this pervert bitched about America for our depravity and lax sexual mores, then went into hiding for ten years in a literal goon cave, prompting the best-ever cover of The New York Post:

Listen to what they do, not what they say, to borrow a phrase from the red pill. (To be clear, when I say “listen to what Osama Bin Laden does,” I’m talking about the porn, not 9/11, although some people say he was better-known for the latter.) A lot of the guys who insist that sexy clothes and makeup, or other signs of modern degeneracy, are repugnant turnoffs have browser histories full of surgically enhanced cirus-boobs, G-strings and cheekbone implants. They will venerate the homemaker online, but then cheat with their girlboss coworker. They will say the most important thing a woman can do is bear eight children, but find the sight of stretch marks disgusting and whine that their postpartum wives aren’t fun and carefree. They bitch about the birth rate but can’t stand to spend time with their own kids. Their “family values” exist insofar as they can enjoy leverage to get away with their own sexual depravity. It’s not even about the “patriarchy” at large, or other men. It’s about themselves, their power, and their pleasure. They would sooner defect and vote in favor of a totalitarian communist Matriarchy if it meant they were given immunity and an unlimited harem full of nubile Onlyfans girls.

I don’t blame the women who believe what these men are saying and get hoodwinked. I feel bad for them. I also think young women need to think critically about any man who seems really invested in reducing women’s options. I’m not saying “never date a traditional man.” Some traditional men are great. But ask yourself…in which way is he traditional?

Just think logically for a moment. Let’s say a man talks repeatedly about how a woman’s only value is her youth and beauty. If marrying a much younger women matters so much him, why would you expect a man like this to stay attracted to you when you are no longer young and beautiful? Several men explained Elijah Schaffer’s affair by pointing out that his affair partner was “younger and prettier” than his wife (who, just to be clear, was also young and pretty—kinda splitting hairs here.) And while it’s perfectly normal to be attracted to young, pretty woman (*Trump RBG death face* I’m hearing this now for the first time) it’s not normal to believe these are the only things that matter, or repeatedly say these things to guilt women into settling down younger and lowering their standards. This behavior should immediately disqualify you from marriage.

You don’t have to be a radical “abolish the family” feminist to see why women fought for the right to vote, or the right to their own bank accounts. I’ve heard some young women (who may or may not refer to themselves as trad) snidely dismiss their boomer and Gen X moms’ beliefs about the importance of a financial backup plan, or a safety net, as cringe resist lib pussy hat feminist dipshittery. Perhaps they know these terminally online trad guys are weirdos, but they still believe the propaganda about women’s financial independence being a silly 1970s buzzword because they’ve never lived in an era before women had the same rights as men. They believe that their predecessors opted into feminism for no reason other than to dick around in offices, dooming future generations of women—including hot ones, if you can believe it!—to the toil of white collar work. But the most trad thing of all is listening to the wisdom of one’s elders, and these women shouldn’t be ignored. Becoming a homemaker can be a wonderful experience that brings tremendous value to your family. It can also be a major financial risk, especially if you become a homemaker without any career history, side income, marketable skills (that employers would actually recognize) or safety plan. Even if it’s not fair, it is incredibly hard to find gainful employment after a ten-year absence, especially if you never had employment history before then. While marrying a good man doesn’t eliminate all bad outcomes, and while plenty of bad things can still happen to working women, it’s important for young women to think critically about why “traditional” men claim to believe or prefer certain things. Is this a devoutly religious or otherwise family-oriented man who wants a woman who shares his values, who believes raising children is sacred and important work? Or is this guy horny, insecure, addicted to porn, and wants his wife to be too scared of poverty to leave him?