Sunday Edition: We really just want a community

Tradwives, the 'little favors' economy and what I mean I say I yearn for a Stars Hollow life.

I think you will know exactly what I mean when I say, I yearn for a Stars Hollow life. It’s not the fast patter of the banter between Rory and Lorelei, but rather it’s this fictionalized community they live in. Breakfast where everyone knows your name (and your order), friends stopping by, the flickering of street lamps at night and houses all decorated at Christmas, a constant hum of interconnected lives and people who care about you.

The emotional resonance of this yearning - to live a small town life where neighbors care and life isn’t complicated by big city problems - is the cornerstone of a vast Hallmark movie catalog and a foundation of the culture war the right is currently running on social media.

The tradwives have gotten all of the attention, with their aprons and aesthetically perfected content that feeds the desires of the algorithm, but they are really the tip of the spear. It’s hard to convince the vast majority of women out there that they should give up their entire identity, not only their jobs and life but their decision-making capabilities, agency and bank accounts and become subservient to a man. 

Because tradwifery is not just about aprons and cookery (Nara Smith, for the love of god, is not a tradwife), it’s about returning to a fantasy world where men were men and women were women. It’s the famous christian umbrella diagram without explicit mention of the top umbrella.

This is the central underpinning of tradwife content. Christ and the husband are king. Wives do their bidding. 

But this content isn’t as explicit as the umbrella diagram. It taps into our own desires too. It radiates simplicity and community and ease. It promotes small town values and norms. It tells us that we need to get back to the land and out of the anonymous darkness of the cities if we ever want to be happy. 

It’s not as if the fetishization of small town life is new. When I was in college, in a small town in California no less, everyone was deeply obsessed with Friday Night Lights with its capital R romantic life of big dreams and possibilities. 

Like the tradwives, the content selling this fantasy of small town perfection doesn’t reflect an across the board reality. There’s a great old video from The Daily Show where John Oliver asks attendees at the RNC what “small town values” are: “it's real people …real values…Common Sense;” and “traditional marriage,” “fishing” and “ church.”  Are people who live in cities not “real people”? What is a “real value”? These are not real answers…

There’s a reason that so many people I know left small town life when they had the option. The stifling feeling of complacency and compliance. The lack of economic mobility. The sense that you are trapped in a box and will always be the same person you were at 14. The deeply intolerant social norms that try to make everyone act and behave exactly the same. 

I think what many of us yearn for when we talk about wanting a small town life is actually just a community where we belong and help each other out. Money with Katie recently posted on instagram about the divorcing of friendship and assistance. Or what, in Democracy in Retrograde, we would call the fraying of our social fabric.  (Find her on Instagram here, and her podcast here).

This worldview has framed asking for help or needing support as an inexcusable burden. Its huffy refrain is don’t be cheap’ do not ask me to take you to the airport. 

So rather than asking your friend for a ride, you take an Uber. 

Need help mounting your TV? TaskRabbit.

Instead of trading your neighbor a six-pack of beer to feed your dog while you’re away, you pay a stranger on Rover $30 a day.

Cooking an elaborate meal and realize you’re now out of a crucial ingredient? You don’t know the people in the apartment next to you, so instead of knocking and asking if they’ve got a spare lemon, you end up on DoorDash. 

The fear of being a burden atomizes us and, as a result, further entrenches our reliance on something else: money. The central promise of so many apps is they can eradicate the need to maintain relationships, look out for one another, or inconvenience yourself for the sake of a loved one. (For a price.)

What I love about Gilmore Girls and Parks and Rec and Agatha Raisin is the town square of it all. People hanging out and helping out and it not being weird to ask for help. 

Katie calls it the “little favors” economy - you do something for me and at some point it will kick back around the other way. 

We aren’t hungry for homesteading or sourdough or backyard chickens. We just want real friends. We want a community that cares about us. 

While I’m now in a big (not large) city, I have made new friends and made my world feel smaller as an adult. I’ve found people who give a damn, who want to make the world better. And in finding that I have also found someone to look after my dog, to pick up my kids from school when I’m stuck in a meeting, or bring me soup when I’m sick.

Community doesn’t just happen. We have to build it. We know we want it. Now let’s embrace the small town values wherever we are and stop being afraid to ask for help.