Is This Trad Stuff Just BDSM?

How submissive can you be before it turns into a kink?

Yesterday, Twitter was graced with a a video of Lori Alexander, otherwise known as The Transformed Wife, or as I like to call her, Godmother of the Tradwives. I’ll give you a quick summary of the video: she describes meeting her husband of 44 years. In her words, she wasn’t physically attracted to him, she didn’t really get along with him, they argued all the time, and when he proposed he didn’t give her a ring or get down on one knee. For some reason she doesn’t quite explain why she had to say yes to this guy (surely, even the most Biblical tradwife would say you don’t have to submit yourself to every single man you meet?) But anyway, she said she felt he had “stolen her joy,” that she didn’t enjoy her wedding or her bridal shower, and that they had a rough patch for…wait for it…

the first twenty years.

This was, obviously, a terrible advertisement for Lori’s lifestyle (something about which she tweets very often.) In fact, if you didn’t know her or anything about her, you could easily see the video ending with, “And that’s why I tell my daughters to value their independence” or “And that was when I realized I was a lesbian.” But no! The conclusion of the video is that “love is not an emotion,” and basically, you just need to suck it up and hope that two decades into your marriage to a man you don’t particularly like, you might start to tolerate him a little.

But hold up—you might be wondering who Lori Alexander is, and by the way, although she inspired this piece, this isn’t a hit piece about her. But I do feel like I need to give you some background into her. If you’ve been on Twitter, you might have seen her before, doing, well, this kind of thing:

This, by the way, is why I don’t consider myself “trad,” even though the preferences I have for myself and my family are on the traditional side (The weirdest factoid here is that I haven’t gotten a real haircut in eight years. My husband cuts my hair. I also cut his, and our son’s.) But anyway, I would consider Lori the true OG of the tradwives, because part of that subculture is being super judgy about what other people do. She’s not LARPing, y’all, she really does think you’re a bad wife because you failed to be adequately meek.

How did he do?

Of course, while Lori evangelizes for being “silent in the churches,” she sure as heck isn’t silent on Twitter, and that’s the case for most tradwife influencers. Maybe there are true tradwives who are actually modest and silent, but we’re not hearing them, because they’re definitely not on Twitter! But as far as the tradwife spectrum goes, from full-on LARPer (ie: was a leftist atheist until two years ago and created tradwife content as eye candy for simps) to super-serious tradwife (literal Amish lady you’ve never seen or heard before because she’s churning butter) Lori is toward the real end of things. I believe she’s actually a devout Christian. In fact, her website has a tab titled “False Accusations Against Me,” and my first assumption was that it was related to some Twitter beef with liberal feminists, but it was, charmingly, about a dispute she’s been having with a Calvinist former friend about their beliefs in original sin.

Lori’s video about her husband is striking because one would think a trad woman would never tell anyone that she initially wasn’t attracted to her husband, let alone blast it to Twitter, but that wasn’t the only thing people noticed. Several folks also pointed out that her relationship sounded suspiciously like some kind of humiliation kink.

I’ll be honest- I don’t think that’s the case for her. But I do think it’s the case for a lot of trad folks.

If you’ve ever seen 30 Rock, perhaps you’ve seen the episodes where Jenna Maroney (the narcissistic diva actress) enters into a kinky relationship with an eccentric Jenna Maroney drag impersonator. Sexually, they try absolutely everything, and ultimately try the kinkiest thing of all—normaling. The “normaling” kink is basically just “pretending” to be normal by doing boring stuff couples do all the time but secretly finding it hot.

Obviously, this was a joke, but there’s some truth to it. Today, being kinky is actually a little mainstream, unless you’re into something extremely disgusting. Blame the Internet and the fact that we’re now numb to seeing Bowser vore porn showing up on our feeds, but hearing that a couple likes to “do bondage” is hardly exciting, let alone controversial. It’s just like, okay, that’s just the Folsom Street fair. Boring!

In a way, the “conventional” nature of the trad lifestyle adds a much-needed element to the age-old kink of dominance and submission: taboo.