> Your critique doesn’t make sense. Ad hominem comparisons are making it more difficult to understand your critique.

None of that was ad hominem. Yes, it was about the sense I got of the author, but it was about the sense that the piece per se gave me of the author—that is, the piece is so strange that it gave me an impression of the author that I call out as likely not even true given some of the actual facts about them.

Writing e.g. "this article on Kubernetes reads like it was written by someone who'd never even seen a computer before" isn't ad-hom—it relates directly to the quality of the piece itself. Though, admittedly, it's a very general rather than specific criticism, and if you're not seeing the same things in the piece that I am, I can understand how that wouldn't be helpful.

> Try again?

Sure.

Was the early-in-the-piece wall of quotes that contradicted much of the article's message intended ironically? Are we expected to understand, implicitly, that the author believes those quoted were being arch, wry, or otherwise deceitful? If so, whoosh on my part. If that's not why those quotes were chosen for that spot, why do they undermine the direction of the piece's opening? Including other takes for nuance or what have you is fine, even laudable, but this placement is really odd and the article doesn't even acknowledge how odd that was, let alone address or explain it.

Meanwhile, we have lines like this:

> Five years after #MeToo sparked a global conversation around sexual violence, sexism and power, it might seem puzzling that a life of traditional gender roles and submission to a male partner is resonating with some young women.

The connection drawn here is the most "puzzling" aspect of this sentence, by a long shot. And the "might" buys the author some wiggle room, but if that aspiration resonating with some young women puzzles anyone, I'd assume they'd either not talked to many women, or had only done so in a very small, very tight bubble. This same basic criticism applies to most of the "isn't it so weird women are into this in The Year of Our Lord 2022?" implications of the piece.

Then we come back down to Earth with lines like:

> Though tradwives are a small subculture — and alt-right tradwives an even more fringe group

But the rest of the article largely acts like the alt-right part of it's the main part! It introduces the movement to us like: "Their politics, too, hearken back to that of the post-World War II boom (at least, for those who were straight, White and middle class)." Am I to understand, instead, that the author draws a fine distinction between mainstream politics of straight white middle-class Americans in the 1950s and the alt-right, so these statements aren't in opposition? I'd be pretty surprised if that's what the author's getting at. I'd not, personally, split that particular hair in this sort of context, and I'd certainly not do so without making it explicit that's what I'm doing.

Whole article's like this, as if it's being pulled in two wildly different directions while the author seems to make no attempt to reconcile of form a synthesis from the two.

The middle third is an awkward re-packaging of an email from one professor. Some of it's interesting—I'm not blaming the professor—but the way it's presented isn't great.

Et c, et c. Even stuff like:

> Women who advocate for strictly traditional gender roles aren't a new phenomenon -- anti-feminists in the early 19th and 20th centuries resisted women's suffrage, and some activists in the late 20th century opposed the Equal Rights Amendment.

> What sets tradwives apart from their predecessors is the visibility those social media platforms afford them

Just... what even is this juxtaposition, here? Do "tradwives", in general, hold opposition women's suffrage or the ERA as a major point that they advocate? If not, I think I'd call that out as setting the two categories apart sooner than I'd call out "TikTok exists". But the article makes no comment on that question, so the reader is left to wonder whether this was just sloppily-written, or if the author deliberately left something implicit that seems important enough to make explicit given that the author brought it up in the first place. I'd give it a pass on the basis of the second part referring only to "women who advocated for strictly traditional gender roles" but the author ties that directly to resistance of women's suffrage and opposition to the ERA and nothing else as examples of prior "advocated for strictly traditional gender roles" women, so it sure seems like a certain kind of connection is intended here, but... is it, actually? Or is this just super-sloppy writing?

And, from the "quotes from actual tradwives" block:

> Women who associate with the label exist on a spectrum of sorts, with varying ideas about what it means to be a tradwife and varying reasons for promoting those ideas. Estee C. Williams, who is 24 and posts tradwife content on TikTok, said she doesn't consider herself to be "super traditional" but implements traditional gender roles in her life and relationship -- which she frames as a personal choice. She said she isn't concerned with whether others adopt those same values, but is merely sharing her lifestyle with others who want to embark on a similar path.

Is this not representative of the kind of thing you're trying to write about? If it's not, why did you lead with it then spend most of the article running the other direction? WTF. "I do this thing, here's how it works, take it or leave it" is pretty fucking different from anti-suffragettes and other anti-feminists opposing specific legislation, right? Which is the movement more similar to? Both, it says, kind of, except that that's only a small part, even though earlier we characterized the whole movement that way and also every actual "tradwife" quote included only supports one side of that? The article offers us nothing but confusion on this point. Again, maybe that profile/quote of Williams wasn't representative of the parts of the movement the author's trying to profile, but then why lead with it!? And why follow it up with several more quotes along similar lines?

In isolation—I want to be clear—that last-quoted part is fine. In the context of the whole piece, it contributes to a complete mess.

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Overall it reads like a journalist just now discovered that some people like mineral water, and some of them think it's got major health benefits, and there's some overlap between the latter group and shitty politics, then—and I want to emphasize this next point—wrote an 8th-grade research paper on the topic and somehow that got published by CNN. I come away from it having very little sense of what's actually going on with the politics of this movement or its place in the broader political discourse, even though the article sure seems like it wants to be mainly about that. I think most reporting sucks but this piece really stood out as remarkably WTFy.

For the record, I'm way to the left of the mainstream Democratic party on basically every issue, so I'm not defending "my tribe" here and I'm sure I'd hate the politics of the same set of "tradwives" that I gather the author dislikes—this article's tone and composition just struck me as really bad. It's got a serious "smashed together at the last second to meet a deadline" vibe. Some of the details are interesting, though (again, first I'm hearing of this movement). A few bits and pieces of the article are OK, in isolation. Overall it's a mess, though. I think there's the seeds of a good, larger profile of the whole movement here, and also of a much more focused piece on just its role in alt-right propaganda, but the article can't seem to decide which it's doing, so does both very poorly.