The United States is currently under attack from within and not only is it our government that is attacking its own citizens, but our attackers have made it clear that they want to completely remake the country in an image that suits their agenda.
They want a primarily white, Christian nation. They want a nation where marginalized groups—like LGBTQ+ people, Black and brown folks, and neurodivergent populations, to name a few—are kept to a minimum. And when it comes to race, oh, they want those non-white people who do continue to exist to be aspirants to whiteness and white adjacency—the the Usha Vance or Kash Patel types who align themselves with these values. They want a nation where many women will see their highest priorities as being wives and mothers. They want a steady stream of freshly baked white babies coming out of the oven so they can reclaim the glory of whiteness with the next generation.
It might sound far-fetched on many levels, but it is also what their patron saint, the dearly departed podcaster, spoke of often and it was repeated many times at his memorial service. The one I watched in almost its entirety as penance for drinking too much the night before.
While many words have been written about how younger men, particularly young white men, have been radicalized into seeking a return to traditional values where men are fully in control (often pushed by podcasters and others online), less has been spoken about how young women, primarily young white women, are being seduced online to fervently seek marriage and motherhood. They are being conditioned to see these as goals to achieve sooner in life rather than as goals after they have properly matured, gotten educations, experienced life a bit, had a chance to discover who they are and who they really should be with, and established themselves a bit.
In recent years, we have seen the rise of tradwives online. We see their lives on TikTok and Instagram. Young, beautiful women, often well under 30, with perfect bodies despite back-to-back pregnancies. Young women who revel in the simple joys of motherhood and marriage, where having several kids under 5 is seen as beautiful and flowing instead of exhausting and overwhelming.
Young women who delight in cooking from scratch with beautiful and large kitchens, with marble counters and high-end cookware that all matches. These kitchens, despite supposedly being used daily and often, rarely show signs of wear and tear. We never seen the footage of mom scrubbing down the counters and anything like that (or the help that the more successful influencers hire that no average mom would have). In these versions of motherhood that have become heavily promoted in recent years, moms never seem to have any worries, and they have husbands who conveniently earn lots of money, so these young moms are constantly consuming and wearing expensive and beautiful clothes.
The comment sections speak of envy for these women who supposedly get up and make a full-course breakfast every day for the kids while perfectly dressed and made up, often cooking from scratch. Mom manages to not only make pancakes without an assist from the beautiful house of Bisquick or the freezer section, but also whips up fresh compote and whipped cream to accompany those homemade pancakes. In the comments, we see young women who are inspired by these women but who themselves lack the time, talents, or treasures (liked hired help in some of these cases) to live like the women they follow.
One could say, “Well this is just the online world.” But as we are learning, what happens online increasingly drives reality offline. In fact, our lives and the state of our country have become the comment section. We used to tell ourselves to ignore it because it wasn’t “real,” but it has become real.
Which is why the rise of mom influencers peddling seductive and unrealistic versions of marriage and motherhood—in a political climate where our government wants young women barefoot and pregnant—is concerning. Deeply concerning, as too many of these young women aren’t realizing that just as young men are being programmed online, they are too.
A few nights ago, my daughter (who is 20 and who goes to school and works but lives at home with me) was telling me how most of her straight friends want their boyfriends to propose to them. I was mildly buzzed after being out with friends but as she spoke about her friends’ desires, I sobered up quickly and started asking questions. Most of her local friends are young white women under 25 who, while they consider themselves to be progressive, have desires that seem more aligned with what this administration is pushing. I asked her why they want to get married and she said for some it is about the ring and the wedding but also for the commitment. They had been dating these young men for over a year and wanted them to commit.
As a 52-year-old, twice-divorced woman, a year or two isn’t a long time to be considering signing up for a life plan, especially when one is still developing. I mean, shit, we know the brain isn’t even fully developed until your mid or later 20s. Yet for her friends, there seems to be a yearning for stability that they believe marriage will bring.
Here’s the thing: That’s not how any of this works and I know because I learned from life experience.
At 18—in fact, just four months after turning eighteen—I married a boy who I had been dating for several months. We were in love, or so we thought, and the hormones and rush of first orgasms and first love were a heady combination, and we thought we wanted to be together forever. At no point did we consider the reality of what an 18- and 20-year-old marrying would look like, especially when neither of us had a good job. Hell, my then-husband didn’t even have a job. But that didn’t stop us from running off to City Hall and doing the deed and telling our parents weeks later. In less than three months after we married, I was pregnant, and we were living at his mom’s house. Weeks into living at my mother-in-law’s house was when I started to think that I had made a mistake. By the time my son was born, we were living in our own apartment that his mom helped pay for, and I had experienced the humiliation of getting public insurance and food stamps to help us survive. The glow and warm fuzzies of young love were wearing off and four months after my son was born, at age 19, I suffered my first panic attack, so severe that we called 911.
By the time we separated when I was 20, just before our son’s second birthday, I realized that love and marriage are not magical. In fact, they are downright hard if there is no plan for survival. Money doesn’t grow on trees, and there are those pesky things like rent, diapers, and food. I would spend the few years of my son’s life working multiple jobs, attempting classes at community college and wondering if I would ever have a life that wasn’t rooted in struggle. My life at that time was getting up early, preparing us for work and daycare, dropping my son off, hustling home at the end of the day, making dinner, doing laundry, trying to get in a little time with my son. Generally, by the time he went to sleep I was collapsing in exhaustion.
On a good week, aka payday, if I planned well enough, we might be able to have a pizza and split a hot mocha, where I would let my son drink the whipped cream and a sip before I drank the rest, because I couldn’t afford two drinks. My wardrobe was hand-me-downs from my mom and thrift stores, and holidays and birthdays only happened because of layaway plans at stores. There was one year when his dad promised to take care of Christmas but didn’t, so I had to float checks to make Christmas happen—a decision that cost me my checking account and for years prevented me from having a checking account. For several years, I had to use check-cashing places and the bank of my sock drawer with money orders to pay bills.
Relief came when I remarried again at almost 25 to a man five years my senior who had a good job and a college degree, but even that came with struggle as it activated a custody battle with my first husband, which would become the reason I moved to Maine.
It was in my second marriage that I became determined to not have any more kids until I had a college degree and a career of some sort. I kept that promise to myself, earning my BA by going to school year-round for three years straight, I was almost 29 when I earned my undergraduate degree and 32 and pregnant with my daughter when I finished my masters’ program.
My second marriage ended in my early 40s after being married 18 years but when we made that decision to split, I had a career and the ability to start a new life—albeit with the addition of some new side hustles like writing, since my chosen career didn’t pay much and had been underwritten by having a spouse who had earned enough to be the breadwinner. But, unlike many of my peers who married early, starting over in my 40s wasn’t as backbreaking because, if nothing else, my marriage at 18 had given me some survival lessons and skills—namely that relying on a man, even a loving husband, isn’t fully secure or safe or wise.
Which is why I find this current rise in young women wanting to be married early so disturbing. I have been there and while I had my struggles, I still was able to land on my feet, but the world is changing and women’s freedom of choice is actually shrinking. We are in a time when many of the rights I was able to enjoy as a young mother are things that the administration wants to take back or already has. The right to control our bodies, for one thing—one of the reasons that I was able to pivot was because when I found myself pregnant not long after my son was born, I decided to not complete that pregnancy. I knew there was no way that I could manage two under two with a shaky relationship and scarce financial options.
Even under the best circumstances, back-to-back kids are hard, but add in the instability of young love when coupled with the reality of financial lack and, well, love doesn’t pay rent.
In the real world today, young people have a much harder time than when I was a young mom in the 1990s. Our first apartment as a married couple was $425 a month, minimum wage was $4.25 per hour. A job and a half with government insurance and food stamps meant bare survival. Today, federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour, though many states and cities have their own minimum wage. In Portland, Maine, it is $15.50 per hour, which might not sound bad until you realize you will be hard-pressed to find a small apartment in the city for under $1,500 a month. Sure, you can live in a cheaper community but that requires a car, gas, and insurance for the car.
It was last reported (before the administration nixed the jobs report) that young people are struggling in this economy. This past spring, even the young tech graduates weren’t finding good jobs. Gone were the six-figure job offers they were led to expect. Many are settling for anything and increasingly we are seeing young people return home to live with their parents.
In my circles, I have seen a lot of kids return home after graduation. It happens quietly but it is happening. Enough that whenever my daughter laments living at home, we have a reality talk. Sure, she can move out. She is 20, she is technically an adult but based on what she earns, she would need multiple roommates and still end up living in a dive with barely enough to survive on. Or, she can live at home, save money and only have to share the place with the person who brought her in the world and whose cleaning she trusts.
The current reality for young people in the United States is bleak and pushing young people into early marriage and parenthood isn’t going to change that. In fact, early parenthood increases your odds for a lifetime of poverty and hardship. The safety net that allowed me as a young mom to better my life is being decimated. While I don’t relish still having student loan debt as a grandmother in my 50s, those loans allowed me to create a better life for my family. Whatever aid I had to receive between 18 and 24, I have more than paid back with my taxes.
I love love and the idea of marriage, and while my parents married young and were together for 33 years until my mom’s death, I also bore witness to the many hardships they suffered because of early marriage, I have spoken to enough women older than myself who came of age prior to women having the full rights that this administration is now trying to claw away to know it wasn’t all rosy good times for those women. Women whose minds and bodies suffered from carrying the weight of being good homemakers and having little for themselves and the dependency of being tethered to a man who could flip a switch and leave them destitute.
I am not saying never get married or don’t have kids, but do it when you are able to provide and when your partner can fully provide because the version of marriage these people are selling—whether it is the administration, the podcasters or the willowy influencers with their perfect lives—is not going to be the reality for most of today’s young. Many of these people are being paid directly to make you yearn for a reality that is meticulously manufactured and utterly fake.
While my core demographic isn’t the young people being targeted, many of my readers have young people who are in this demographic that is being targeted and groomed. Whether they are your kids, grandkids, nieces or nephews or niblings, now more than ever, you need to talk to them. Gen Z is turning out to be far more conservative than many of us realize (or expected), and part of the reason for that is they are falling prey to the propaganda that is being funded online. What we used to see as mindless scrolling or entertainment and assume wasn’t harmful is turning out to be very harmful. The only way we push back on the indoctrination and radicalization that has become sexy and seductive is through connection and conversation.
A recent poll revealed that while both Gen Z men and women see being married and having kids as part of being “successful,” Gen Z men see it as being more important than women. This was especially the case for those who voted for the current administration. In fact, Gen Z men who voted for Trump listed having kids as their top priority—again, a visit to the world of the dead podcaster makes it clear that this is a message they have been receiving steadily. That should give us all pause and encourage us to fight their indoctrination with connection and reality.
I know it is popular to say that the kids are alright. No, the majority of them aren’t and it is incumbent upon us olds to do our part to help them.
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Image by Saif71.com vis Unsplash
