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By Marni Rose McFall
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What do beef tallow, prairie dresses and the quiet luxury trend all have in common? They're all markers of the conservative aesthetic and the resurgence of traditional gender roles online.
The seeds of aestheticized conservatism have been sewn across the past four years, and now, following the recent re-election of President Donald Trump and the ensuing cultural shift toward conservatism, it's more prevalent online than ever before.
Newsweek spoke to an expert about the trend.
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What is the Conservative Aesthetic?
The conservative aesthetic acts as something as an umbrella term to reference the milieu of micro trends that have exploded on social media in recent years. There was cottage core, there was the trad wife, there was the stay-at-home girlfriend. They go by different names but have one thing in common: a return to the revering of femininity, modesty and tradition.
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It's a far cry from the aesthetics that dominated the 2010s – millennial pink has been replaced with beige, and 'girl boss' feminism is overtaken by 'divine feminine' energy. Where social media apps would once serve up pictures of girls in hot pink bathrooms captioned with quotes like Lena Dunham's "All Adventurous Women Do," and a "We Should All Be Feminists" t-shirt, today you'll find the stay-at-home girlfriend trend, the clean girl and a loaf of sourdough bread accompanied with home-churned butter.
Poster girls include influencers like Hannah Neelman (aka Ballerina Farm), Nara Smith and Estee Williams. A pinned post on Williams' account has the text overlay: "POV: you're that wife that promotes other wives to doll themselves up before their husband comes home," Smith has made an empire by making everything, including sunscreen from scratch, while dressed in a Chanel outfit, and last year a Times profile of Neelman caused a viral sensation, and widespread concerns for her welfare, though she has maintained she is more than happy with her lifestyle.
The trend extends into the fictional and the historical too. Sex and the City's Charlotte York has become the subject of intense fascination online, as have old Hollywood starlets like Audrey Hepburn. A recent video from a business and social etiquette consultant referenced the latter directly, and came with the text overlay, "You can't act like Marilyn Monroe and expect to be treated like Audrey Hepburn."
One viral TikTok from the account asinderellastory summarized the aesthetics markers, and how it all comes together to communicate the same ideal: "The rise of soft girl feminine dating advice and dating coaches, the resurgence of trad wife ideals and content and also I'm so sorry, the obsession with glowing up and reaching maximum desirability, they all join together to show the growing embrace of conservatism, but like repackaged and highly aestheticized."
Newsweek spoke to Eviane Leidig, author of The Women of the Far Right: Social Media Influencers and Online Radicalization about the trend. She said, "Over the last few years we've seen a spike in social media content that promotes traditional gender values, from 'manfluencers' like Andrew Tate to tradwives and stay-at-home girlfriends."
Leidig describes the conservative aesthetic as a "reactionary movement," in opposition to the aforementioned girl-boss feminism. "The main argument being promoted is that trying to 'achieve it all', i.e. career and romantic relationships, is unrealistic and that women would be much happier in traditional roles as homemakers.
What's Driving the Trend?
"There is absolutely algorithmic amplification in promoting this kind of content, especially if we consider the spike in tradwife content over the last few years," Leidig said.
"The use of aesthetics has been a strategic and deliberate choice by influencers to repackage conservative ideology into palatable and relatable content," she continued. "It is part of a broader strategy to normalize more extreme ideas about gender roles into an image that is seen as desirable."
Leidig added, "Because this type of aesthetic is considered "apolitical" and simply as lifestyle content, e.g. food blogging or health and wellness, it has greater reach and visibility while effectively serving as propaganda."
The trend's rise comes at the dawn of a new political era in the U.S., and at a time of mass political polarization, and a deepening gender divide.
A 2024 survey from the American Survey Center which looked at the 2024 Election and the gender divide, found that 13 percent of Americans think the country has gone too far in granting women equal rights to men.
The survey also noted a decline in Americans' identifying with feminism, with 35 percent of Americans identifying as feminists. 42 percent of women identified with the term, and 27 percent of men did. A survey four years prior from the Pew Research Center found that 61 percent of U.S. women and 40 percent of men felt the term "feminist" described them at least somewhat well.
Leidig noted that it's not only young women consuming this content, and that "far-right female influencers were often creating content targeting young men." She said, "In the case of tradwife influencers, I suspect that a fair number of their viewers are young men, especially on TikTok."
"If these same young male viewers are also consuming content by manfluencers, this creates dangerous expectations of how they believe young women should act and behave, and reinforces ideas of male entitlement," Leidig said.
What's Next
Leidig told Newsweek, "It is difficult to make concrete claims about how this type of content is affecting young women in real life because there is rarely a direct causal explanation."
The trend is however reflective of the shifting political and cultural mood. Whether it will hold, in particular, throughout Trump's second term in office, remains to be seen.
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