Misogynists are using AI to both sexualise tradwives and turn normal women into domestic servants

By Abby Amoakuh

Updated Oct 4, 2024 at 12:18 AM

Reading time: 2 minutes

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Images courtesy of DignifAI

We’ve firmly arrived in the age of artificial intelligence (AI) and already watched this new technology do some disturbing things. From nudify apps that enable online users to create explicit images of strangers to deepfake technology used to create pornographic video content, there seems to be no limit to the exploitative and derogatory capabilities of AI. Yet, a new online trend is taking demeaning women in a whole new and unexpected direction. AI applications like DignifAI are now allowing users to turn women into tradwives.

If you’re an avid netizen—and the likes of housewife connoisseur Nara Smith and Mormon Ballerina Farm have graced your FYP—you probably already know what a tradwife is. Still, in case you need a refresher: tradwives are a cohort of conservative, “traditional” housewives, who demonstrate to other women how to look after their homes and husbands. These women take pride in spending their days baking pastries, preparing a whole chicken for evening dinner, wearing floral frocks, and casually using words like “fresh” and “frolicking.”

The group went super viral over the last year, with the hashtag #tradwife being viewed more than 600 million times on TikTok. Slay. Yet, the trend is shrouded in controversy because idealising domesticity and hailing it as a duty rather than a choice for young women appears like a particularly regressive remnant of a past time.

Fast forward to 2024, and the tradwife phenomenon has become a trend that many young women immerse themselves in. Some of the group’s newest recruits fantasise about what it would be like to leave their job, live on a farm or in a nice city apartment, and devote their lives to making grilled cheese sandwiches, cough drops, and sunscreen from scratch.

However, it was all fun and games until some evil incels got a hold of AI and decided to target the tradwife community.

What followed were a range of AI-generated, sexualised images of women in domestic settings, while performing household chores, such as cooking, cleaning, or feeding chicken (sprung from a more specific farm fantasy, I suppose).

 

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The tradwife trend has always had some ugly, unsavoury elements and chapters to it. For example, videos centred on advice such as “four ways to honour your husband,” “reminder: masculine men like feminine women,” and “feminism is not freedom,” show that the trend heavily banks on the rigid structure of the nuclear family and antiquated gender roles.

However, combined with the powers of AI, we are now witnessing a whole artificial world where women are reduced to submissive, hyper-sexualized homemakers and held to old-fashioned standards of skinniness, whiteness, and domestic productivity.

“The pornification of motherhood needs to be studied,” one user noted, aptly describing the disturbing trend that is spreading on social media.

Indeed, AI is not just used to sexualise women and mothers but also to enforce outdated ideas around propriety on them.

Next to AI that generates outright pornographic images of subjects without their consent, there are also now AI tools that dress women in traditional clothes, remove tattoos and piercings and drop them in modest home settings. Get ready for DignifiAI, the latest AI tool designed to digitally “sanitise” women, turning them into picture-perfect versions of traditional femininity.

It’s not just about modest clothing or erasing tattoos, it’s about enforcing purity culture, all with the click of a button, amplifying the idea that a woman’s worth is tied to her adherence to outdated, patriarchal standards.

 

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So yeah, just when you thought AI couldn’t get any weirder, it’s out here slapping aprons on us and trying to transport us back to a time when women couldn’t vote or rent an apartment alone.

At the end of the day, whether it’s turning women into tradwives or something worse to fulfil some twisted 1950s fantasy, trends like these are another reminder that AI is getting increasingly dangerous in a number of ways we never dared to imagine.