When our grandmothers were young, the entire point of being a woman was to become a perfect, happy little homemaker. To take care of the kids and the house, but ultimately, to take care of a husband, who deserved to end the day in a domain exactly fluffed to his liking. It’s a very specific nostalgia for that kind of energy that has fueled the #tradwife movement. The social media “trend” has pushed women to do things like cater to their husbands’ every need, spend all of their time and energy on the home and their family, and put themselves last. And a study published in Psychology of Women Quarterly has found that the men who most want a #tradwife... are also men who seem to view women the worst.

“These findings indicate that men who perceive the #tradwife movement favorably believe that they rely on women for intimacy and simultaneously resent that this is the case,” Rachael Robnett, one of the report’s authors, told PsyPost. “This mentality could put tradwives in a precarious position considering the amount of control–both financial and otherwise–that they yield to their husbands.”

A growing online trend encourages women to quit their jobs, run the home and defer to their husbands. This “tradwife” movement urges a return to traditional roles and, when researchers in the US recently set out to examine what kind of men support it, they expected to find a cohort fond of old-fashioned chivalry. The reality, they say, was rather different.

The feminist scientific journal Psychology of Women Quarterly recently put out a whole issue centered entirely on the #tradwife phenomenon, and it is fascinating.

In his latest book A World Appears: A journey into consciousness, Pollan charts the work of scientists and philosophers, weaving in literary perspectives along the way. He spoke to New Scientist about the value of writing a book where you know less at the end than before you started.

Michael Pollan (A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness) is a science and environmental journalist. Michael returns to the Armchair Expert to discuss why choosing surrender is liberating in both psychedelics and life, what the “hard problem” of consciousness is and how we get to it, and how sentience serves homeostasis in living beings. Michael and Dax talk about asking what the world would be like without consciousness, the remarkable fact that plants can see, hear, and fight, and experimental evidence via the ginger test that disgust originates in the gut. Michael explains the qualitative redness of red, that there’s so much more going on in consciousness besides computation, and what strange places to visit our minds are.