Page 24 of Everyone Is Lying to You

“Good meeting you, Lizzie.” Olivia clasps a strong hand on my shoulder. “I’m sure we’ll be talking much more soon. Looking forward to it.” She turns to the stage with a laser focus.

A slim but well-muscled man with immovable hair fist pumps his way from the back doors of the ballroom. He’s the first dude I’ve seen who isn’t working here, and the vibe in the space immediately shifts. The man takes his time getting to the stage. He’sgot a square jaw and the bushy beard of someone who has watched too muchOutlanderwith their wife.

“HEYA, MAMASSSSSSSS!” he shouts into the microphone.

“Is that Marsden?” I ask.

Katie rolls her eyes. “Doesn’t he look like a Marsden? When did people start naming their children the things you would normally call beagles anyway?”

“By the way,” I whisper to her before Marsden can start speaking, “do you know Rebecca Sommers? I’ve been looking for her. Have you seen her around this morning?”

Katie taps away at the computer for a second before answering. “Everyone knows her,” she says. “I haven’t seen her this morning. She’s probably getting ready for her big talk.”

Another woman, the henfluencer, chimes in. “I assumed she would be here since this Marsden guy is like her husband’s BFF since they were kids. Super tight.”

“Oh. Yeah. That makes sense,” I say because I can totally see Marsden hanging out with Grayson. Their names alone demand it. This dude taking the stage with his perfectly coiffed Ken doll hair and his deep V-neck T-shirt revealing intensely trimmed chest hair and a well-oiled physique has the vibrating energy of a kitten. It’s like he can’t decide whether to step up closer to the microphone or hurl his body onto the stage and do burpees. He chooses the mic and chants again.

“MOMS ARE THE BOMB!”

He seems to expect a call-and-response.

“MOMS ARE THE BOMB!!!!?”

A few women offer weak claps and half-hearted repetition.

“What does his app do again?” I ask Katie.

“Who knows. People love giving funding to white dudes who are on TV. I bet he doesn’t even know.”

The music finally fades, and Marsden has to say words that are not a cheer of some sort.

“So happy to be here with you lovely ladies today. I love women. I love my wife.”

“His wife is such an asshole,” Katie whispers.

“You ladies have been busy little bees. I’ve been told by my team that you all, that you mothers, control eighty-five percent of household purchases in the United States, that y’all got a spending power of something like $2.4 trillion. I know a little something about that spending. My wife is always racking up the charges on the credit card. But you know what they say, happy wife, happy life.”

The room stays mostly silent except for one table in the front that erupts in giggles and hoots. Many of them stand to cheer on Marsden. There are at least fifteen women squeezed around a table that should only seat eight. When they sit back down, I notice a couple are perched on the others’ laps. They’re slightly different from many of the women here. While everyone I’ve seen so far has looked like they’re ready to appear on high-definition television at a moment’s notice in a wardrobe that might cost half my monthly paycheck, these women have gone above and beyond the call of aesthetic duty.

This crew appears airlifted out of a 1950s sitcom, the kind I used to watch on Nick at Nite with my grandma when I slept over at her apartment as a kid. Margaret Anderson, Donna Stone, Harriet Nelson, June Cleaver. These women are all in dresses with fitted bodices that accentuate impossibly tiny waists. Insteadof the Pre-Raphaelite waves of many of the other conference attendees their hair is pulled up into intricate French twists or pinned into scarves that match the patterns of their dresses.

I’ve never seen any of them in person of course, but I recognize a few from my scrolls. The so-called tradwives, the most controversial of the influencers. The worst thing to happen on the Internet since planking. I don’t really give a damn if someone wants to play dress-up and service their husband. I do care when they start spouting off about how this choice is a new offshoot of feminism. They cook and they clean and they talk about how a woman’s place is in the home and how she must submit to her husband. They homeschool their kids. They claim that women who work in the corporate world have been sold a lie, that it’s toxic for women to focus on anything but motherhood. I pray they’ll descend into the graveyard of Internet trends past, like the Mannequin Challenge and dabbing, before my daughter gets a phone.

@BarefootMamaLove gets lumped in with the trad influencers a lot online. I think about Bex’s captions that claim motherhood is her own highest purpose. Just make itLittle House on the Prairieinstead of Betty Draper. A false nostalgia for a different century.

Marsden is still going on and on. His acolytes are rapt. But most of the crowd is doing what we’re doing, whispering in side conversations and tapping away on laptops.

But then, as if Marsden has intuited that the majority of the room has checked out, he decides to go all in.

“Do you want to know why I’m really here today?” No answer.

“I am here for you! All of you are doing God’s work. Motherhood is the highest vocation for a woman to aspire to.”

I see Katie look up from her laptop for the first time and fix a steely gaze on the stage.

“I know that a lot of you were raised in a world that told you to lean in and climb the corporate ladder and grab that brass ring. But y’all know that just made women miserable. You all want to have your babies and live the good life while your husbands take care of you. Am I right?”

Silence.

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