Of Tradwives and MAGA Girlfriends. Plus . . .

It’s Friday, May 8. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Gad Saad says the West is on a suicide mission. Faye Flam on life in space. Mene Ukueberuwa on why the Trump administration is suing The New York Times. Max Raskin on “Shabbat 250.” And much more.

But first: the culture war over right-wing women.

How should a woman conduct her life? It’s a totally uncontroversial subject—whether a woman should marry as young as possible, or focus on her career; whether she should get plastic surgery, or not; if she should cook bountiful, homemade seed oil-free meals for her family; or live alone, as a childless cat lady. There seem to be no right answers, only blaring alarms from a judgmental public when some women go a little too far. Five years back, they came for the girlbosses, and now, they’re coming for the tradwives.

Tradwifery, the online trend where women document their commitment to their domestic life by posting videos of themselves making cumbersome recipes, or photos of their offspring in matching organic-cotton dresses, is the subject of a buzzy new book: Yesteryear. In it, a present-day tradwife influencer wakes up in the 19th century and has to contend with what life was actually like in the era she glorifies online. (Spoiler: It was brutal!)

Kat Rosenfield reviewed Caro Claire Burke’s book, and beyond that, dove deep into why tradwives seem to enrage liberal women so very much. Yesteryear is “parasocial hate porn for millennial feminists,” Kat writes, a book aimed at “women who can’t stand tradwives, and also can’t stop watching their every move.”

And if the ultimate culture-war figure women love to hate is the tradwife, her second cousin might be the clean-eating health nut who goes to Burning Man and votes for Republicans. Last week, The New York Times put out an article about Gerelyn Gilbert-Soto, the girlfriend of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who the Times called a “firebrand in Trump World” and “outspokenly conservative.”

Brin, who at a net worth of $300 billion is the third richest man in the world, has moved rightward in recent years, and the Times posits that Gilbert-Soto, who calls herself a “California Republican,” is to blame. I thought there was more to the story when it came to the 32-year-old former health coach who once interned for Kris Jenner, so I met up with her a few hours before she was set to appear with Brin, 52, on the stairs of the Met Gala, to see what she was all about.

Read Kat’s piece, about the difficult women who hate difficult women, and mine, on GG Soto and her yacht-tripping, clean-eating, Sergey Brin-dating life.

—Suzy Weiss

EDITORS’ PICKS

Jonni Skinner says that, when he was just 13, a therapist told him he was too feminine to be openly gay, and that transitioning to female was his only way to survive. He spent the following years on puberty blockers and hormones. He is 23 now, de-transitioned, and living with consequences he says no one warned him about. Jonni writes about the medical system that failed him, what it did to his body, and what he’s doing to ensure this doesn’t happen to another generation of children.

“When Operation Epic Fury was launched on February 28, I was confident of one thing: that it would be a short war,” writes Niall Ferguson in his latest column. “Well, here we are, nearly 10 weeks later.” So how did Trump’s short war turn into a stalemate? With the president resistant to further military operations, the U.S. is still hoping for major concessions from the Islamic Republic, most importantly an end to its nuclear ambitions. But as of right now, Tehran has all the incentive in the world to delay a final peace deal. Read Niall on how we got here, and how “wars take much less time to start than you think they will, and last much longer than you thought they could.”

Cruise ships are enjoying a renaissance, with some 38 million taking a voyage on one just last year alone. But a cruise ship off the Canary Islands is in the throes of a hantavirus outbreak that has killed three people, and has many wondering whether this is the end of the cruising boom. Jillian Lederman says no. She’s logged 10 family cruises and has a prestigious Royal Caribbean status that she’ll be able to pass down to her future children. And she argues that for big families like hers, nothing else comes close to a cruise: reasonably priced, all inclusive, and the rare vacation where everyone ends up at the same dinner table every night with nowhere else to be. “Cruises are a triumph of democratic capitalism,” she writes. “They allow millions of people to visit islands and countries they never would have seen otherwise.”

Meanwhile, every woman on the internet is apparently perimenopausal—celebrities are going on hormone replacement therapy, influencers are touting the benefits of lubricant, and fridge magnets declaring “Perimenopause Is Hot” are flying off the shelves. Kara Kennedy investigates how perimenopause went from a hushed-up fact of life to a cash cow for wellness brands and pharmaceutical companies. And she asks the essential question behind all this: At what point does all this talk of perimenopause become fearmongering?

Dating today is a mess: Only 21 percent of young adults are satisfied with their options, apps are overrun with narcissists, and the manosphere is telling men to only look out for themselves. Although it may seem bleak, Arthur Brooks makes the case that most young adults, men and women alike, still want what people have always wanted: “a permanent, loving relationship with a good person who is a loyal mate.” The real issue, he argues, is that nobody has told young people where to find each other, or what it takes to attract the right one.

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