Yielder.
I'm Chelsea Daniels and this is the Front Page, a daily podcast presented by The New Zealand Herald. A few years ago, commentators and analysts often raised the idea of a youth quake, young first time voters coming in and shaking up the political landscape. It was after things like school strikes for climate showed the power of youth mobilizing around a common goal. Yet those youth quakes never actually happened,
at least not for left leaning politicians. Instead, there's been a shift to more conservative views amongst our youngest voters, and a yearning for the quote good old days has seen trends like tradwives and a return to traditional values skyrocket online. It's all while a recent UK survey found that fifty two percent of thirteen to twenty seven year olds believe their country would be better with a strong
leader who does not have to bother with Parliament and elections. Today, on the Front Page to discuss what's shaping the youth of today, we're joined by aut senior lecturer and Communication studies Christina Vogels. Christina, I'm just going to throw some
stats your way. Recent polling done for Channel four in the UK has found fifty two percent of gen Z believe the UK would be better if the leader did not bother with parliament and elections, forty seven percent believed the way society is organized must be radically changed through revolution, and a third believed the country would be better with
the army in charge now. According to a Harvard Youth poll as well, the US's youngest voters, those aged eighteen to twenty four, say that they're more conservative than the cohort. That's just a bit older, so millennials, and that's a new trend towards young men more likely to be conservative than liberal. Now, do these numbers surprise you at all, because when I think of the words you'd typically use with gen Z, pro authoritarian, I don't think is one of them.
I'm not surprised, but I am alarmed. I must admit I'm not surprised because there has been this shift to a more far right ideology through the Western world. And you know, people are talking about America being this post democratic state at the moment, So we are seeing a very very quick shift to this far right. And it is concerning that our young people, and I mean gen Z, I suppose they were born from nineteen ninety seven to
twenty twelve. So you know, what we're seeing is a lot of young men in their early twenties taking on these more kind of conservative views. The issue is that we've got these teenagers coming up behind them who are trying to make sense of what it's going to be like to be an adult for then those are the ones that we need to really look at in terms of why they are feeling this way.
What do you think is shaping these views in youth? Is this kind of radicalization happening online? Do you think.
I've done some work on young women and this growing trend towards the conservative and the far right, and it matches what's happening with young men. So if we look at young men in the rise of you know, Jordan Peterson and these social media influencers who are promoting this return to some kind of quote unquote real masculinity. By the way, this is not a new thing. This happens
in waves across history. So we last had a men's liberation movement in the nineteen eighties where it was really popular this idea of returning to a conservative masculinity identity.
What we are seeing at the moment is also it been complemented by a rise in young women taking on conservative gender roles, and we see this particularly through the traad wife movement, which dovetails Worth, the far right woman's movement, and simply this is a return to this ultra state of femininity which is completely subservient to men, as well as promoting white male privilege. It's an alarming trend at the moment.
I can't tell you how deeply I detest the idea that our culture is an oppressive patriarchy, that's the best way to conceptualize it, and that the appropriate way to view history is the domination, the endless domination of women by men over the course of the last several thousands of years, and that any attempt by young men to manifest any ambition or competence is equivalent to power, and all they're doing is taking their place in the pathle
logical culture. All of that, to me is it's one sided to start with, but I think it's appalling beyond description.
Well, that Channel four survey I mentioned before, it's also found that forty five percent of male respondents agreed with the idea that we have gone too far or so far in promoting women's equality that we're actually discriminating against men. They listed the likes of Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson as trusted figures. Now, you mentioned the term trad wife, and that's been trending since about twenty twenty. Hey, that's a traditional wife who stays at home while the man
goes to work. You see them online making bread from scratch and doting over their kids. I mean, what's going on here, Christina? Why are we seeing this traditional lifestyle coming back?
Do you think? I think there are a range of reasons, but I keep on coming back to this idea of onto life logical security. A very famous sociologist called Anthony Giddons first coined this term a few decades ago, and what he said was that when time is uncertain, when life seems to be confusing or problematic, like it is today, we think about all the things that people are trying
to deal with globally. You know, we've got climate emergency, we've got a post democratic Trump America, we've got the digital world, which seems to be almost going into a post digital world with artificial intelligence. People are feeling a great sense of unease, which means that they want to return to an ontological security, which is a fancy word for a stable identity. We see this with people entering cults.
I recently listened to a podcast about why cults are so desirable to people, and they use this term again about ontological security, having a secure base or identity. I think for young men, who particularly are in that white male grouping, life seems quite uncertain.
You know.
Scholars talk about the crisis of white masculinity because of the rise of things like Civil Rights movement, Black Lives Matter, Meet two campaigns, you know. So white men are feeling like their identity is in crisis. So they want to return to a stable identity. And there is nothing more stable, really than this idea of again this quote unquote real masculinity. And we're seeing it with a young woman. Now. Young woman also are feeling the effects of a very uncertain world.
And so I wonder if part of this return to a tread wife identity or the promotion of trad wife lifestyles is going back to this idea of a simple life you talked about, you know, the idea of baking bread and mend and clothes and tending to children. This is a very confined and simple identity for women to hold, and in a way I can see why it makes sense. You know, I'm a single mum, I work full time.
On any given day, my identity changes, my sense of selfhood changes, and you know, we talk about this idea of the juggle of motherhood in the modern world. So I think what's happening for tradwives is that people that are supporting them online is this kind of nostalgic sense of simplicity. The problem is is when it dovetails with this complete subservience to men and this giving over of things like decision making, financial security, or a right to
choose what to do with one's life. And this is what we're seeing with so many tradwives as well, and they are almost promoting a joy of doing this, of giving over their lives to their husbands, which is so worrying.
I guess going back or we bet here, but hippies in the free love movement they were born as a response to that post war conservatism. Is what's happening here in any way, a response I suppose to Gen X and millennials becoming more liberal over the last twenty five to thirty years. I'm thinking that things like the Black Lives Matter, Me Too, etc. Has the pendulum swung?
That is a good question, and I think the pendulum always swings. That's the first thing. You know, we cannot just say that life was better one hundred years ago for women. It comes in waves. So we can see through history. Even if we go back to the late eighteen hundreds, with the first wave of the woman's movement, we saw this time of great promotion of women's rights,
but then it became silenced. As we went through into the nineteen twenties and thirties, and the nineteen forties and fifties, obviously women's rights were not particularly promoted, and then we had the sixties and seventies when we get this wave again into this idea of women's rights. You know, this pendulum is always swinging. I think what's happening today, and if we look even five years ago at me too,
we seem to be in a completely different world. I mean, you've got COVID, the post COVID world, which is still having an effect. But also you've got far right politics which have now become incredibly mainstream, which is allowing this kind of ground swell of ultra conservative ideas and talk to be more mainstream and social media. So it's always been there, it's just we've got this fertile ground, if you like, for people with these conservative views to promote them online.
I mean, this is the generation, the generation that we're speaking about that a few years ago Ditch School went on strikes for climate every other week, it seemed. Is it still that generation or just not hearing from that side more?
I wonder if having this blanket term of gen Z is almost making it to generalist as well. I mean I see a shift in the different age groups that went through COVID for example. You know, at the moment we've got a whole group of young gen zs who had a lot of their schooling interrupted by COVID, a lot more digital use, and then we come in with
that with this far right mainstream idea of life. It would be really interesting as a research project to actually look at a couple of samples within that generation to actually see where they are standing at the moment. I mean, what we see with social media at the moment as definitely young men and women in their very very late teens or early twenties going into that period of adulthood
who are supporting these conservative views. I think where our focus needs to be is now to talk to our even younger people a young men and women who are in high school, and to actually see what they are thinking about this, so that we can actually get them to talk as well. The thing about research is that it often doesn't privilege children's and young people's voices. It tends to be more adult centric. So we need to be going into the classrooms and talking to our young people.
When it comes to tradwives, can you be a trad wife but also enjoy everything that the women's movement has done for you? I suppose. I mean back in the fifties, you know, women couldn't have their own bank accounts, They couldn't have access to their own money, and that was their role. Now, though, is there an opportunity to I suppose, be a tradwife, look after your man, look after the house, but also be afforded those luxuries I suppose that the women of the fifties didn't have.
This is where it gets so incredibly fascinating. So one of the tradwives that I follow online is Aria Lewis now she is an ultra trad wife. She promotes that she is completely subservient to her husband and he gives her an allowance every single week. She even posts kind of celebrating when her allowance comes in and what she's been spending on it. The contradiction is that she herself is turning herself into an amazing business woman with great
kind of marketing potential as well. She's got her own merchandise line, and so we're seeing all of these different ways of being a woman that you're absolutely right. In the nineteen fifties, a woman would not able to have kind of been this trad wife as well as have an industry behind her. But now what we see with social media is that women are able to do this. My question is what actually happens to Aria's finances and
they must all go to her husband, I presume. So again we have a business woman who is afforded that because of feminism, but then returning to this pre feminist or pre second wave of feminism way of running household.
The people with the most opinions on what it means to be a tradwife are not the people in the track community, but actually people who are completely opposite and against what tradwives believe and stand for. They have this limited, oppressed view of what it means to be tracked, and they try to put us in this box.
When we break they're made up stereotypes.
They say, oh, you honor tidwife, as if they get to define who we are.
I have never had another.
Tradwife say that I'm not tried because I.
Have a side hustle.
But I have had many outside the community tell me that being traditional is not a nineteen fifties cosplay cult or a little House on the Prairie cosplay cult. Being traditional is having a set of values that you make your life decisions from.
We all do this. It's called having a worldview.
You mentioned before that this is cyclical. Do you think in ten years time that tradwives and all this will just be seen as a trend I suppose, or do you think these views could be here to stay.
I am hopeful that we will come out of this. I say that because history tells us that the only thing that is a concern is what's happening with the far right movement. Because what we're seeing in America is a new state of political play, This post democratic America is something that we haven't seen before in the Western world in this space, So that in itself is concerning.
So to be able to predict if this wave is going to, you know, obviously go down and then we will return to a much more liberal gendered space, I'm not sure, but history tells us that we have to come out of this, that we have to then have the next wave of how we make sense of masculinity and femininity and.
How should we go about educating our kids on these kind of gender roles, the masculine the feminine. Can we find a way to do that without I suppose ostracizing one gender or the other.
I think there are two things there. One it is around having conversations about social media and what people are seeing on social media. Social media, obviously, in terms of the trade wife movement has been huge. I mean, some of these trad wives have got millions and millions of followers, right, and as we know, what is portrayed on social media
is the idyllic narrative. Right, So, how do we make young people and I'm talking about school age young people incredibly literate and critically literate in how they view these influences okay. I think the other thing is having conversations with our young people, so school aged children as well, because like I said before, we don't often have the opportunity to talk with them, and so researchers really need to be having that focus on talking with young people
about this. I think it's about getting a sense of what they're thinking at the moment, instead of as adults trying to create each location programs to put into schools without doing that groundwork. You know, what are our young people thinking. I think that's the key.
Thanks for joining us, Christina.
Thank you so much for having me.
That's it for this episode of The Front Page. You can read more about today's stories and extensive news coverage at enzdherld dot co dot nz. The Front Page is produced by Ethan Sills and Richard Martin, who is also our sound engineer. I'm Chelsea Daniels. Subscribe to the Front Page on iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts, and tune in tomorrow for another look behind the headlines.