All week I’ve been unable to get a scene from The Testaments episode 8 out of my mind. In the scene, Agnes (Chase Infiniti) takes part in a Gilead engagement ritual where the girl has to break a plate.
The pieces of the plate are gathered up and put in a green silk bag. The girl must glue the plate back together perfectly before her wedding. The reformed plate is supposedly stronger because it has been broken and reformed. Destroyed, and resurrected. Polished on the surface, but weak underneath.
As Agnes is led away for official engagement photos after her broken plate has been collected she narrates that she’s now a “properly broken woman” and ready for marriage.
A properly broken woman. What a phrase.
The scene isn’t a significant moment in the episode, but it is significant to me. It’s impossible not to make the correlation between the rise of tradwife content on social media and The Testaments.
The cultish religious Right want to turn women into “perfectly broken women”, and they’re deploying scores of hateful red pill influencers and perfectly staged tradwife TikToks to do it.
It seems to be working. Gen Z males are more conservative than past generations. And faced with the gloomy economy, some younger women are thinking tradwifery doesn’t seem as bad as a lifetime of scrounging to get by.
Ballerina Farm Bullshit
One of the best examples of this type of traditional influencing may be Ballerina Farm, the oh-so-carefully curated tradwife that has millions of followers on TikTok and YouTube.
The content supposedly documenting the traditional life of a tall, thin, white woman who gave up her dreams of being a professional dancer after she went to Julliard to raise 9 children on a picturesque hobby farm in Utah with her down-to-earth traditional husband.
What a Conservative fairy tale right? Educated WASP poster child from the Big City leaves it all behind to follow her religious husband to Utah for the simple life…
Except, it’s all fake. The couple is fabulously wealthy independent of their brand deals and merch lines. Her husband is the son of the founder of Jet Blue. The picturesque homestead, perfectly country kitchen, and rustic home are all stages set for recording content.
And I know, most things on social media are fake. But there’s something insidious about this type of aspirational content trying to convince women that subjugation and submission are really awesome.
Convincing Women To Break Themselves
What makes tradwife content dangerous, possibly more dangerous than all the red pill incel podcasts, is that it sells female subjugation as self-care.
It tells exhausted young women, who are struggling with the pressures of impossible rent, stagnant wages, burnout, student debt, and economic hopelessness, that liberation was the mistake. That maybe feminism failed them. That maybe fulfillment comes from retreating backward.
And maybe the most frustrating part for Gen X women like me is that we already fought this battle once.
We grew up with riot grrrl feminism, punk scenes, feminist zines, women screaming into microphones about autonomy, reproductive rights, sexual violence, and refusing to exist solely as decorative objects for men. We fought cultural expectations that told girls to be quiet, compliant, thin, pretty, and grateful.
Fake Empowerment, Real Consequences
We were told becoming a wife and mother couldn’t be the only acceptable identity available to women. Our mothers before us fought to free us from the suffocating subjugation they grew up with. Unable to have a business, a bank account, or the right to say no to their husband.
Now, decades later, the same patriarchal expectations are reappearing with better lighting, $10,000 rustic looking stoves, and a whipsmart social media strategy.
The rebellion has been algorithmed into making submission look aspirational.
And that’s what makes the “perfectly broken woman” line hit so hard. In The Testaments, Gilead doesn’t just want women to obey. It wants women to internalize the idea that breaking themselves apart is noble. Beautiful, even. That is the real culture war happening online right now.
Not whether women can choose domestic lives if they genuinely want them. Of course they can. The issue is the growing machine dedicated to romanticizing dependency while disguising it as empowerment.
Because once a culture convinces girls that breaking themselves is fulfillment, it doesn’t have to force them anymore. Women will break themselves like a Gilead plate, put themselves back together, and convince themselves it’s empowering.