The Coomer's Eliberation: The Trad Wife as Reactionary Phantasy
In recent years, the figure of the “trad wife” has resurfaced as both aesthetic and ideology, circulating across social media platforms, reactionary subcultures, and online micro-celebrities. Marketed as a return to “traditional values,” this figure is less a resurrection of conservative femininity than a projection of contemporary masculine disaffection. It is a site where libidinal failure, symbolic compensation, and cultural nostalgia converge — not to reassert order, but to stage its loss. While countless critiques of the tradwife phenomenon exist, they often remain trapped in predictable feminist binaries: “Trad content isn’t really for women — it’s for men who want submissive wives.” True, perhaps, but ultimately insufficient. What is missing in these accounts is an inquiry into the male subject who produces and sustains this fantasy — not simply what he wants, but why he must want it in the first place.
The male recipient of the trad wife fantasy is not a paragon of virtue, nor of traditional masculinity. On the contrary, he is often insecure, alienated, and disempowered — a self-sustained “coomer” figure whose primary mode of authority is not action, but repetitive denigration of women as fallen, impure, or degraded. Yet, the trad wife fantasy compensates for this impotence with a symbolic reward: that despite his failures, he remains worthy of a “pure,” obedient wife.
The trad wife is the trophy of the Yes Chad. The Yes Chad is the meme-form embodiment of this logic: not the fantasy of success, but the representative culmination of failure. He is not sexually desired, not admired, not victorious; yet through irony, detachment, and ideological posturing, he transfigures failure into symbolic triumph. Despite the sexual inadequacies of the male subject, and the fact that in reality most females are repulsed by him, it is these signifiers which affirm the very condition of his “based-ness.” The less he succeeds, the more he insists he is “correct” about the world. His impotence becomes a proof of insight. In this way, “based” functions as a kind of negative transcendence: not being rewarded despite one’s failure, but because of it. His isolation is no longer pathological but prophetic. The Yes Chad, the simulacrum of the far-right movement, ironically enjoys his impotence. He knows he is excluded, and it is precisely this exclusion that becomes the site of his libidinal investment. Ironically, this figure is the absolute hypocrite. Popular within his subcultural discourse is the relentless mockery of the “beta male” or “Rainbow Wojak Girl”: the typefigure who affirms their identity only through auto-victimisation, turning their lack of power into a permanent grievance.
But is this not what the Yes Chad does, only in its inversion? He mirrors entirely the libidinal structure, but masks it with a posture of contempt.
This phantasy is precisely expressed in this meme: they wish to be called virgins as it affirms the very core of their victimary identity (“I am based precisely because I “do not care.”) It is a classic form of based-posting, where the power lies not in denial or counterattack, but in embracing the insult with such unapologetic confidence that it nullifies its sting, a pseudo-Aurelian acceptance.
Look how obscene the portrayal of the woman is here! The caricature of the “popular girl” here is reduced to a mere function of a failed interpellation (she tries to hail the chad into shame, but the subject affirms this label as his identity), and at the same time, is drawn precisely as a grotesque distortion that borders on ableist mockery.
But this is the key: it is pure phantasy. The Yes Chad never actually experiences this scenario (probably). He is not, in reality, ridiculed by a cartoonish e-girl who sneers at his sexual inadequacy. What is depicted is an imagined humiliation, retroactively constructed (it is not far from the self-flagellation practices executed by extremist Christians, such as the Congregationalist writer Sarah Osborn, who mutilated herself to “remind her of her continued sin, depravity, and vileness in the eyes of God,” also an imagined humiliation and strikingly misrepresentative of Biblical doxa). The subject may indeed have faced bullying in adolescence—but, crucially, he now reintroduces the bullying to himself. He preserves, now, this narrative of marginalisation as a condition for male redemption. In this sense, the meme stages a masochistic loop: the subject desires to be denigrated. He constructs the female as monstrous, shallow, and mocking.
I will turn to Jacques Lacan, who distinguishes between the “enunciated content of an enunciation” and the “subjective stance implied by this enunciation”: the difference between the content and the implied. The enunciated is what the Yes Chad says: “trad values are the solution,” “I do not care about normal sexual relations,” “I am humiliated by the figure of the woman,” “she is aware of my sexual impotence,” and so on. This is the surface of the ideological message. However, his positionality reveals the true contradiction, the unconscious investment beneath the content. The act of proclaiming “basedness,” or “trad-ness” is less so about communication and more about affirming the speaker’s identity. Here, we approach a structure similar to Lacan’s reading of courtly love: the woman as inaccessible, sublime, and cruel, but also the bearer of a fantasy that allows the male subject to persist in his divided state.
In some sense, the Yes Chad is the ultimate romantic. In a world where he is denigrated and abused, there lies for him the “perfect” trad wife, one who sees past his flaws and who ultimately “submits.” The trad wife is actually a figure of the ultimate romantic desire: “someone who respects me.” But this desire for “respect” is not simply about recognition: it is the desire for desire itself, staged through a phantasmic object that retroactively gives coherence to the subject’s fragmentation. The trad wife occupies the place of Lacan’s objet petit a, the cause of desire. The Yes Chad exhibits, in the Lacanian sense, the structure of the obsessional neurotic, the type who disavows the very thing he insists upon: a truth in the guise of a lie. His demand for the nostalgic return is a phantasy of stability uttered by someone fundamentally unwilling to perform or reconstitute the conditions for that tradition: He is obsessed with feminine purity while remaining addicted to pornography, seeking out the pornified version of the very virginal archetype he idealises. In this manner, the trad wife becomes not a real partner but a fetish object: a substitute that allows the subject to avoid confronting his “lack.”
Where does the female fit into this? For after all, she is the object of this phantasy, and does not necessarily need to exist to “exist,” but still we see a material coalescence out of these distortions. The position of the object is easier to understand, and is the consequence of a deeper ideological formation, namely that of the project-ion-subject, a visceral amalgamation of identity-commodity fetishism. Identity-commodity fetishism is no longer the misrecognition of social relations but has become a necessary function of the subject and survival in consumer capitalism. In the current stage, commodities (packaged identities) are no longer fetishised because we “mistakenly” believe they have value—we must believe to participate in the symbolic Order: the fetish becomes functional. The act of purchasing an “identity” (not in the primary sense of purchase, but “embody”) is part of the affective-symbolic production, mediated primarily by the ease of display (social media). The Other provides the symbols, but the subjects are responsible for their reproduction. Identity itself is dependent on its mediation, its reproduction within groups.
In this context, the trad wife becomes an identity-signifier, a consumable aesthetic pastiche: “cottagecore, homemaker, anti-feminist,” and so on. This is not a misrecognition. It, instead, is a strategic investment in the self-production within the algorithmic Kapitalism. The woman performs the order of the Other as a form of visibility, and symbolic legibility. She becomes a participant in her own objectification, though not necessarily a willing one as this performance is often the only way to be seen at all. Of course, then, the trad wife must also be heteronormatively and conventionally attractive, is always Indo-European, who, despites being trad, is also a sex symbol in the submissive sense.
What emerges, then, is that the trad wife fantasy is not sustained by any genuine reverence for tradition or femininity, but by the libidinal economy of the socially isolated male subject — the Yes Chad — whose masculinity is experienced as wounded, humiliated, and suspended in symbolic failure. The trad wife is not a partner, but a phantasmic object — a fantasy constructed to retroactively fill the void left by alienation and sexual rejection. She does not exist in her own right; she exists only insofar as she reflects back the imagined worth of a subject who believes himself excluded. Despite the posturing, the ironic detachment, and the apparent misogyny, the Yes Chad is, as we have seen, the absolute Romantic — longing not only for recognition but for a purified, unconditional love that validates him without demand. His aggressivity toward the feminine conceals a deeper dependency on it: she must be degraded precisely because she holds the power to redeem him. And so the real question is not simply whether the Yes Chad desires the trad wife — but whether he can afford to encounter her as a subject at all. For to do so would mean abandoning the safe distance of fantasy and risking, instead, the Real of mutuality — a risk this “based” individual is structurally committed to avoiding.
