The cosy cottage-core to alt-right pipeline
Our fetishization of traditionalism is more dangerous than we think.
You wake up and have a scroll on TikTok. Ballerina Farm has posted a video of herself making buttermilk pancakes with her swathe of eight children. She makes everything by hand, including the butter from the raw milk she’s fetched from her cows that morning. She fries the pancakes on her coal-powered Aga and serves them on an old oak farm table. What a wholesome life, you think, as you open your curtains to a view quite different to the eleven acres of bucolic pasture displayed on your screen just a moment ago.
You have a moment of ennui - but soon forget and get on with the day to day tasks. This quaint and distant life is often depicted as the pinnacle of desirability.
Have we fetishised this so-called “desired” life a little too much? Living off the land, going back to basics and looking worn and relaxed has become fashionable cultivated by lifestyle creators such as Julius Roberts and Hannah Neeleman. It is now trendy to look like you just grabbed whoever’s shirt was on the side before running out the house to tend to your lambs. This crunchy-cosy-cottage-core aesthetic was mainly popularised on TikTok and social media through the tradwife and anti-ultra-processed movement.
But is this seemingly harmless romanticisation of traditionalism a pipeline to alt-right thinking?
The tradwife movement, particularly, is contentious. Some see it as intrinsically repressive of women - whereas others see it as a new take on the traditional “housewife”, where women have independence by generating their own income via social media whilst staying within the confines of domesticity.
It is undeniable, however, that the tradwife movement is stereotypically heterosexual and stems from conservative values. Similarly, this crunchy, shabby-chic, bare-minimum aesthetic stems from having the financial privilege to invest in high quality items from the offset. Furthermore, these notions of going back to basics and grassroots living are embedded in conservatism.
Traditional Conservative notions stand for purity, community and survivalism - none innately bad of course, and are values held by more liberal thinkers too - however, these values can often develop into alt-right acts of distrust and violence - as observed in the harrowing race riots recently pervading the UK.
If you encounter “crunchy cottage-core” content that clicks through to tradwives depicting women who appear to simply be making their own butter from scratch, this can have a domino affect within the algorithm, which makes a footnote to link you up with the broader aesthetic of traditional ideology such as Mormonism, and quickly moves your algorithm on to more radical content. It’s worrying how quickly harmless content can be manipulated into political recruitment.
I’m of course not saying every content creator who engages in traditional, “crunchy” content is an alt-right activist, nor am I saying every white-power-obsessed incel believes in a macrobiotic diet and making apple-cider vinegar from scratch.
I’m merely pointing out a pipeline that can be sinisterly manipulated by powers beyond content creators: one that political juggernauts have discovered in order to peddle right-wing ideologies.
It is ultimately the perfect avenue: no one can call out the innocence of a woman posting a video cooking for her husband and children as political messaging. She’s simply exhibiting what 1950s Republicans called the “American Dream”. It is undeniable, however, that the connotations that come with this message are intrinsically outmoded in our modern day.
This journey through traditional, “crunchy” online spaces to alt-right thinking is well documented, observed by sociologists such as Cynthia Miller-Idriss in her book, Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right.
Perhaps the point of my delineation is less to convince you that this is something that’s happening - as that has already been proven - but rather to make you aware that the next time you linger on a TikTok of a women doing ten loads of laundry whilst cooking dinner, you may want to skip the interview with Ben Shapiro that follows.
Get the crunchy (not alt-right) aesthetic, here:
