From Cottagecore to Tradwife: The Secret Social Media Pipeline Radicalizing Young Women 🌸
I’ve written a few articles about how the radical radical right uses online games like Hell Divers 2 and ROBLOX to recruit young men to buy into an ideology of division, misogyny and anti-social beliefs. It’s easy to picture the radical right recruiting boys online with angry memes, un-monitored chat rooms and shouting matches on obscure message boards.
But the problem is bigger than we think. And the problem isn’t just with our sons. There’s also a dangerous pipeline for recruiting our daughters. For young women, the rabbit hole doesn’t look like a hate forum. It looks like an inviting TikTok about homemade jam.
The radical far right is sliding into your daughters’ feeds with something wholesome looking… gardening, natural remedies and homemaking tips. Tik Toks about herbal remedies, alternative stress relief and “living natural” look harmless, even inviting and beneficial.
But like many online channels, there’s usually an ulterior motive and a dark underbelly. Underneath that wholesome surface, there’s a clear strategy to hook her in.
Step 1: The Hook: It’s Just Gardening. Present a Soft, Wholesome Aesthetic. Make them earn for “when times were simple”.
The first step is to sell comfort and nostalgia, a longing for “simpler times,” a rejection of the stress and noise of the modern world. Its content that’s non-confrontational, especially for young women who are overwhelmed by pressures of school, work, dating, or just the general anxiety of being a teenager in 2025. The message is gentle at first: slow down, enjoy nature, bake your own bread.
It starts innocent enough. Your daughter will find a few online accounts that showcase beautiful, aspirational content focusing on gardening, nature, baking, homesteading, or “slow living.” She may be looking for a post about growing healthy basil that’s good for the complexion. The feed is filled with soft-focus pictures of wildflowers and homemade jam. It’s a perfectly curated world where the evils of modern society don’t exist. It sells a dream, an escape. But soon, the encouragement to “embrace the old ways” starts to tilt into a rejection of everything modern.
The aesthetic is known as Cottagecore or Dark Academia, and the posts feature handmade goods, floral dresses, well-tended homes, and wholesome activities.
This content creates a sense of “safe space community” making the influencers seem authentic, relatable, and trustworthy. Your daughters are drawn in by a desire for a peaceful, simpler life. But, she’s now entered the echo chamber. They’ll tell her exactly what she wants to hear, then twist it.
Step 2. Introduce the Wedge of Skepticism.
Once she’s hooked on the aesthetic and the community, the conversation starts to shift. Little by little, the influencers introduce skepticism about modern life. It starts with questions about food, “Why are big corporations pushing pesticides?” Then it slides into distrust of medicine and science, “Modern doctors ignore natural cures” and “Don’t let them control your health.”
Reddit is FILLED with young women, just like her, looking for a place to belong, a community. The Reddit Community Red Pill Women (now banned) was a major pipeline telling young women to awaken to the “truth” that feminism has ruined society and women’s happiness. These forums explicitly promoted the idea that women’s “single most important goal is to learn to please men” and that submission and obedience to a husband are the keys to a happy life.
Although that specific community has been banned, its ideas have splintered and migrated to other platforms and subreddits, where they are blended with the aesthetics of gardening, homemaking, and traditional religion to form the insidious “Tradwife” pipeline. The “Tradwife” movement spreads by blending the cozy vibe of homemaking with an agenda that’s anything but harmless. Eventually the soft, aspirational content starts to blend with the hard, misogynistic ideology.
Deeper into the community the message gets sharper: science is suspect, experts are lying, and you’ve got to “detox” from modernity if you want to be truly healthy. The influencer starts to introduce a subtle critique of modern society. “Don’t believe everything they tell you.” or “Do your own research” reinforces a rejection of modern times and encourages a return to when things were better (MAGA). They’ve successfully inserted a wedge between modern reality and an unrealistic pipedream of better days.
The hook has sunk deeper. The message: Science is suspect. Experts are lying to you.
The conversation now shifts from “this is a beautiful garden” to “you must go organic” eventually ending on “stop trusting corporations and pesticides.” From here it’s an easy step from “don’t trust pesticides” to “don’t trust vaccines.”
Step 3 The Pivot: Anti-Science and Anti-Authority Agendas 🧪
Once her Tradwife community plants the seed of skepticism, the unmonitored conversations and content accelerates the shift toward outright anti-science and anti-establishment ideology.
Your daughter is now focused “true and pure living.” She’ll be told she’s been lied to. It’s all fake (news). It is up to her to “detox” from the modern world. She will embrace the idea that the system is poisoning her. This step subtly plants the idea that established institutions and modern science are untrustworthy. It reframes a simple lifestyle choice into a rebellious, enlightened act of self-preservation.
She’s scrolling through threads (fed to her by algorithm) about how doctors are secretly poisoning us, how society is collapsing, and how the only path to safety is to reject everything “modern.”
This often includes anti-vaccination messaging, anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric, framed as “protecting children” from indoctrination, and a full rejection of the scientific consensus on climate change, health, or history.
The conversation shifts from organic food to Anti-vax and alternative medicine. It embraces conspiracy theories (e.g., “Big Pharma,” the “Great Reset”) and positions the user as one of the few who is “awakened” to the truth.
Step 4: “Return to Traditional Values” (Translation: Serve Your Man)
Your daughter’s feed is now filled with Tradwife cosplay. The messaging gets more direct: Don’t chase a career. Be pure. Serve your husband. Submit to the natural order. Cooking and gardening become the backdrop for a much larger lesson: happiness comes from obedience and retreating into rigid gender roles.
The Rejection of Society and Feminism
The community argues that all modern problems (anxiety, poor health, loneliness) are caused by a corrupt, liberal, feminist-run society. Feminism and independence are reframed as lies that make women unhappy and pushes them into an unnatural, miserable life outside the home. Community members are encouraged to “detox from society” and reject higher education, modern careers, and frame independence as soul-crushing traps.
The Call to Traditional Values to “Serve Your Man”
The aesthetic of homemaking transitions into the full-blown “Tradwife” persona, a woman who believes her purpose is to marry, have children, and serve her husband as a submissive spouse. In the most extreme versions, this content promotes white nationalist or white supremacist ideals, framing the role of the woman as a “reproducer of the white race” to combat “white genocide.” The core message: happiness is found only in rigid, heteronormative gender roles, with the man as the strong leader and the woman as the devoted homemaker, thereby restoring the “natural order” that society has corrupted.
It Works
It’s sneaky because it doesn’t come at your daughter with a swastika and a torch. It comes with a recipe for tea. It feels relatable, even empowering, until it pivots to stripping away her independence.
This is how radicalization works in 2025: soft entry points, wrapped in pastel filters, sliding into your kid’s For You Page when you’re not looking.
This pipeline is successful because it preys on real anxieties and offers a seemingly simple solution packaged in a beautiful, non-political aesthetic. Your daughter may not realize she’s following an extremist.
The Dad Bod Weekly Take
Look, I’ve got no problem with compost piles. But if the guy teaching your kid about compost suddenly tells her that vaccines are evil and her destiny is barefoot in a kitchen, you’ve got a problem.
The far right isn’t storming in the front door. They’re planting seeds. As dads, we’ve got to spot the weeds before they choke out the garden.
⚠️ Call to Action: Share this post with another parent. The fight for your kid’s future isn’t in Washington, it’s in the algorithm.
DAD BOD WEEKLY 