Sarah Harte: Jools Lebron’s demure world highlights cracks in trad wife vision

TikTok creator Jools Lebron has taken the virtual world by storm with her take on what it means to be ‘demure’. Picture: @joolieanniemarie/Instagram

Are you “demure”? I hope you read this column demurely. If you are drinking a cup of tea, please do so mindfully. If you eat a biscuit, let the biscuit come to you demurely, without dropping crumbs.

The new buzzword this week is “very demure”. TikTok content creator Jools Lebron has re-appropriated the word “demure”.

Instead of referring to the original definition, she performed a switch in meaning.

“Demure” has typically been applied to women who don’t stand out, are composed, well-behaved, and modest. Yet, demure “Lebron-style” is a highly satirical play on how to be what she calls “very demure, very mindful”.

It reads like a sarcastic spoof on the performance of hyper-femininity, and is popping up all over the internet and being hopped on by brands.

In a series of memes, she discusses being “very demure” at the airport, dressing for the workplace, in hotels, and drag shows. Lebron, being a trans woman, somehow makes it more interesting.

Right now, her spoof feels like a socially valuable send-up delivered with a giant wink — one that does not encourage women to be more restrained and deferential, but is the opposite — and amen to that.

“Very demure” feels like a counter-point to the trad wife subculture that has been circulating forever, with its roots in Christianity and right-leaning ideology, but which has been re-purposed this year.

Lebron, being a trans woman, somehow makes being 'demure' more interesting. Picture: @joolieanniemarie/Instagram

Trad wife is, broadly speaking, a version of womanhood based on fertility packaged with lovely aesthetics — a soothing life of mummy and babies at home in the cosy cave, while the hunter-gather husband brings home the bacon.

Its schtick references a simpler, mythic time when women and men knew who they were.

That’s the first crack in the concept, because by “simpler time” do you mean one with no contraception, backstreet abortions, rape within marriage, and bright, frustrated women sometimes banging their foreheads against the draining board with no choices?

In the new, shiny rehashed Instagram version, well-dressed rich women — mainly, not exclusively, white — have transformed the idea in meticulously curated feeds.

Elevating gentle domesticity in soft-focus shots while making a mint, they ironically have high-earning careers as self-employed women. This is the second crack or paradox in the trad wife concept.

Don’t get me wrong, I lobbied strongly for a no vote in the last referendum and am completely supportive of women choosing to work in the home as wife, mother, and homemaker.

Plenty of women stay at home, don’t feel their lives are circumscribed, and if they are lucky enough to be with a man who respects their role and treats them like an equal partner then it can work

True freedom of choice means women establishing the parameters of their femininity, constructing their social identities and approach to motherhood.

However, every fibre in my body goes “ugh” at the trad wife normalisation of male power and control.

This is because being a trad wife includes being submissive to your husband. It’s the third, and by far the most dangerous, crack in the concept.

Trad wife influencer Hannah Neeleman helps run her family's dairy farm and raises her eight children while running her content empire. Picture: @ballerinafarm/Instagram

A recent article in a Sunday newspaper about mormon Hannah Neeleman, known to her 8.9m followers as Ballerina Farm, made for uncomfortable reading.

The 34-year-old mother of eight is a blonde former ballet dancer, married to the son of a billionaire.

Living on a farm in Utah, she helps run their dairy farm, minds her kids while running her lucrative influencer empire, gives birth without pain relief, and breastfeeds at beauty pageants.

The interviewer, Megan Agnew, wrote that she couldn’t “get an answer out of Neeleman without her being corrected, interrupted, or answered for by [either] her husband or a child” who she felt thought he knew better.

Neeleman’s husband Daniel said that sometimes she gets so ill from exhaustion that she can’t get out of bed for a week

After the article was published, Neeleman protested that it was deliberately framed to construct her as oppressed by her husband and that the angle was pre-determined by the journalist in advance.

Agnew received trenchant criticism for being a childless, unmarried woman — which is the type of dog whistle commentary one can expect in the US at the moment, especially given JD Vance’s comments about childless women.

The Republican vice presidential hopeful peddles his trad wife vision in the political arena, although his wife Usha — a highly successful corporate litigator — has quit her job in what has been described as a “radically progressive’’ law firm to support his political aspirations.

In the Culture Study Podcast, Tia Levings described trad wife as “a cult without walls” — a clever way of putting it.

She points out how fundamentalism is attractive during a time of chaos or confusion.

Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance pushes a trad wife vision, despite his wife Usha  being a highly successful corporate litigator. Picture: Julia Nikhinson/AP

A former trad wife who escaped domestic abuses, Levings has written about trad-wifery in her new memoir, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy. There’s a slew of trad wives out there who detail how their dream turned toxic. No major surprises there.

Levings argues the way we have structured the world for modern working mothers is so exhausting, that it’s no wonder the aspirational “idyllic” trad wife concept becomes more attractive to frazzled working mothers who are pushed to the limit juggling roles — unsupported by both partners and society.

Maybe if we had a functioning childcare system, and we raised men to truly share the domestic load, then women could work outside the home and not get burnt out. Levings suggests the patriarchy has no interest in facilitating this, as it wants women to remain at home.

You can argue the toss until the cows come home (which you may have to milk) about the right way to raise a family and live your life or how many children to have.

If you want to bake your bread, churn your butter (chill cabinet for me thanks), wear your Peter Pan collars ironically, or otherwise — as Gen Zers say — “you do you”.

However, don’t be under any illusions about the powerful and harmful domestic abuse-supportive social norms that this subculture pushes or the dark consequences of rolling it out to a younger, impressionable demographic.

A submissive trad wife mandates giving power and control to the man. In doing so, it leaves the door wide open to abuse and coercive control

The statistics on domestic abuse and coercive control are dire in Ireland and globally, but experts agree that we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg. Behind some picket fences, highly vulnerable women are coercively controlled and abused.

So, to go full circle, I salute Jools Lebron for her clever and valuable social truth giving two fingers to being demure. Jools, you go girl and thanks also for the laugh.