WAGs are the tradwives of men's sports
They represent a very specific version of the American Dream.
This essay was originally commissioned by a mainstream publication to run alongside the Super Bowl this weekend. However, it was killed last minute to make room for more work related to Trump and Musk’s ongoing coup (which fine, but getting no kill fee after turning around major edits is… lolsob. It’s also the second Super Bowl-pegged piece this month that I had commissioned by a major outlet and then killed). As a result, I’m publishing it here.
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We have entered the age of the "WAG." Nowhere will that be more abundantly clear than at Sunday's Super Bowl. Often dismissed as unserious or by derogatory terms like "puck bunnies," the female partners of male athletes have been using their platforms to do community and charity work without credit or notoriety for years. Now, the wives and girlfriends of professional athletes (WAGs), from Brittany Mahomes to Kristin Juszczyk to Taylor Swift, are taken seriously as cultural influencers in their own right. But despite their business acumen and off-the-field work, WAGs are also selling us a very traditional package of ideas wrapped in the language of empowerment. In other words, they are the tradwives of the men’s sports world.
For the NFL, the rise of the WAG coincides with the league’s attempts to court more female fans. So much of the recent attention on WAGs has been chalked up to Taylor-mania, and perhaps that's right. She's been lauded for fixing relationships between fathers and daughters and for the so-called "Taylor Swift Effect" on the league itself. But her place on the sidelines should make sports-watchers pause. The most visible "female role" available for one of the most powerful women in the world in the NFL’s cinematic universe is as a “wife and girlfriend” to Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce. Swift, a billionaire and music icon, can cheer from the stands, while the men do big manly things on the field. How charming. How retrograde.
Swift’s problem, like that of every men’s sports WAG, is one of normativity. In the NFL’s vision of America, a woman should be situated by a man's side. She rarely coaches a team. She certainly does not play on the field. Her place in America’s most popular sport is as a cheerleader or as a WAG in the most literal sense of the word. No matter how many businesses a WAG starts or how many charities she runs, she still embodies a heteronormative idea of family and a woman's place in society. Her ability to leverage her place to find personal success is impressive, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t a tool for the patriarchy. She is still seen, first and foremost, as some guy’s wife. Even Simone Biles, arguably the best athlete of our generation, has said she’s happy to be called “Jonathan Owens’ wife” and has made being happily married to a big, strong man a core part of her non-gymnastics public image.
There are many WAGs who have been celebrated as entrepreneurs and successes in their own right, but many of their careers are directly tied to their husband’s profession. Take Kristin Juszczyk, the wife of San Francisco 49's fullback Kyle Juszczyk, whose viral jackets and puffer vests landed her a licensing deal with the NFL. Juszczyk has smartly capitalized on a gap in the market, recognizing a desire among sports fans for gear that allows them to be cute at the same time they’re repping their favorite teams. But she’s done so by sticking to a traditionally feminine role. Not only is she making clothing, which has long been an acceptable career for a woman, but she is making clothing that directly bolsters her husband’s job and the image of his employer. Or take Lexi LaFleur Brown, the wife of former NHL player T.J. Brown, who has found a career as an author with a hockey romance novel. She has capitalized on the popularity of this genre, typically written by women, for women. And yet, the book likely owes some of its success—and its existence itself—to Brown's connection to the NHL as a WAG.
Brittany Mahomes, perhaps the most known WAG of the bunch, played collegiate soccer, as well as one year of professional soccer overseas. The Mahomes family is prominent in Kansas City sports, particularly as founders and owners of the National Women’s Soccer League’s Kansas City Current. They’ve expressed interest in bringing a WNBA team to the city, as well. A large part of the Mahomes family’s venture into being owners and investors in women’s teams stems from Brittany’s passion and expertise. And yet she’s known first and foremost as the wife of Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes. Even her recent SKIMs deal is a family endeavor, with the couple and their children appearing together in the company's holiday campaign. She gave birth to the couple’s third child last month and news ahead of the Super Bowl has been dominated by updates on Brittany’s postpartum recovery, with one outlet calling Super Bowl LIX “a ‘golden’ family affair” for the Mahomeses.
And while Brittany Mahomes’s relevance should not rely on being the wife of a star quarterback, the truth is that her proximity to an NFL-player husband allows her access to a public profile. Even someone like Taylor Swift, who is arguably the most successful pop star of all-time, is sublimated under the WAG image in the eyes of many, her relationship with Travis Kelce being held up as the most aspirational thing about her life. The couple has been referred to as “America’s happily ever after,” has inspired two different holiday romance movies, and you can buy a “Go Taylor’s Boyfriend” shirt from Target. So yeah, even someone with Taylor Swift’s power can't fix things for women and the NFL, not that she should be expected to. That relationship is unfixable as long as the NFL continues to fund right-wing politics and embolden a conservative culture that would disempower women.
It takes a weird kind of cognitive dissonance to celebrate the NFL’s women when women's rights are being stripped by elected officials whose campaigns the owners of NFL teams have donated to. Reporting from The Guardian found that NFL owners have been the most prolific givers when it comes to political donations from sports league owners, and they have also been the most conservative. Last fall, the family of Clark Hunt, who has owned the Kansas City Chiefs for decades, made a $300,000 donation to a PAC who funded anti-abortion commercials and encouraged Missouri voters to reject an amendment that would have overturned the state’s abortion ban. Hunt also donated to Republican politicians (donations from Philadelphia Eagles Jeffrey Lurie went to bipartisan PACs). It's jarring to watch the women who love the players on the field be elevated to icons of cultural importance when the league has a domestic violence problem. One study found that police receive an increased number of calls related to domestic violence on Sundays during football season, and that incidents of in-home intimate partner violence increases nearly 10% on days that NFL games are played. Another study found that for NFL players themselves who are arrested for incidents of violence against women, the impacts on their career are “negligible” and NFL-sanctioned consequences for the behavior is often fairly mild.
There is also inconsistency in terms of how players are allowed to express their political views. Colin Kaepernick was essentially blackballed from the league for calling attention to police brutality against Black Americans by taking a knee during the National Anthem. And while 49ers defensive end Nick Bosa was eventually fined by the league for violating their uniform policy after wearing a MAGA hat in a post-game interview, the NFL reportedly delayed issuing the fine until after the election in an attempt to avoid being perceived as making a statement against Trump. Meanwhile, Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker continues to use his platform to give speeches calling homosexuality a sin and declaring that a woman's most important role is that of “homemaker,” views he stood by as recently as this week. Not only that, Butker founded a PAC to mobilize Christian voters, saying the goal was to “reclaim the traditional values that have made this country great.” For their part, the NFL distanced themselves from Butker’s remarks but stopped short of condemning them, saying that “(Butker's) views are not those of the NFL” and that the league was “steadfast to our commitment of inclusion.” Now, following Trump’s executive orders attacking diversity and inclusion initiatives, the NFL has announced they will be removing the “End Racism” banner from the end zone ahead of the Super Bowl, and Travis Kelce said it was going to be a “great honor” to have Trump attend the game.
Brittany Mahomes herself came under fire last fall when she revealed herself to potentially be a Trump supporter. In the aftermath of that controversy, women’s sports fans began to question her role in the women’s sports sphere, concerned that conservative political views may conflict with her ability to own a team in a league like the WNBA, which is known for its social justice values and vocally progressive base of players. The dissonance makes perfect sense in our current political and cultural moment. The men these WAGs are married to represent a kind of traditional masculinity that appeals to one of the most politically conservative fanbases in sports. If the players represent a traditional husband, who as the breadwinner of the family performs hard, literally brain-breaking labor, then who are these WAGs, if not their Tradwives?
The tradwife movement is a return to traditional ideas of wives and motherhood, characterized by a (usually white) woman who stays home with the kids, keeps a house, and serves her husband and family—real “Make America Great Again” vibes. Their rise to cultural prominence has been happening for years, but there has been renewed attention on the trend following Trump’s re-election, in which tradwives were credited with helping move white women voters to the right. A successful tradwife works to create a public platform to proselytize traditional ideas about femininity and set an example for the world at-large. Oftentimes, their messages are wrapped up in conservative Christianity or Mormonism (the church encourages its women to be social media influencers.)
Tradwives are also often business owners, whether as social media influencers, homesteaders or interior designers. “In ‘The Women of the Far Right,’ Eviane Leidig describes what she calls ‘far-right entrepreneurism,’ a sprawling market of far-right, influencer-promoted goods that make a profit and slowly acculturate people to extremism,” Tressie McMillan Cottom wrote after the election. What many of these WAGs are doing is not really that different from what the tradwives are doing—they’re both exporting conservative values, just with different wrapping paper. They’re using their roles as wives to traditionally masculine men to sell their wares to the public. And the public is buying what the WAGs are selling because they covet the lifestyle these women are living, one in which they’re raising a beautiful family alongside a handsome man. They represent a very specific version of the American Dream, and their rise to prominence has happened alongside that of tradwives because they are related phenomenons that serve a similar purpose in the culture wars.
It’s not a coincidence, then, that the most prominent WAGs in American culture are white women, either. Despite shows like Basketball Wives, which has been on the air for 11 seasons, or Netflix’s new reality series W.A.G.S to Riches, the predominantly Black casts of these shows have mostly failed to become household names in the same way that, say, Brittany Mahomes has. Like tradwife-ism, whiteness is an aspirational element of WAG-dom. “The unassuming hyperfeminine aesthetic within the tradwife persona… allows tradculture to perpetuate alt-right ideology to an everyday audience [and] perpetuate a form of white nostalgia,” Laura Jane Bower writes in the Journal of Gender Studies. “The tradwife movement is also marked by clear-cut racist undertones, even if individual tradwives themselves staunchly deny their links to racism or fascism.” Even when the athletes these women have married are Black or brown, by marrying conventionally attractive white women, these athletes gain proximity to whiteness. It is this adherence to white supremacist ideals around beauty, gender roles, and family that propels certain WAGs to mainstream prominence and not their Black or brown counterparts.
As an audience, we have a choice whether we stan a sports league. Maybe the NFL can’t be saved, but there’s an answer in this for anyone who feels kind of gross about the way WAGs are platformed: The meteoric rise of women's sports. Women are finally being recognized as belonging in the sports world, in every aspect of the game. Notably, the WAGs of women’s sports don’t function the same way that the men’s sports partners do. That’s because, even in the case of a prominent athlete-couple like Megan Rapinoe and Sue Bird, the fact that these WAGs are queer means that they are subverting cultural norms. Their visibility is a much more radical act because they are rejecting the long-held belief that women athletes have to appeal to straight male audiences in order to be successful.
While even women’s sports culture is imperfect (*cough* capitalism *cough*), it is, in most ways, decidedly not for men. That, in and of itself, makes it an improvement on the men’s leagues. Anyone who reads this newsletter knows that fixing the toxicity of our culture goes beyond simply “supporting women.” But in refusing to give airtime to leagues like the NFL that are broken from top to bottom, including in the way the WAGs who are partnered with its athletes are seen as mere extensions of those men, we can reject the lie they’re trying to sell us.
So watch women on the field, watch them kiss their wives (sometimes husbands), watch them speak up for the causes they care about. Women don’t need to be on the sidelines anymore, especially when they’re being used as unwitting tools in the culture wars.
This essay was edited by Louis Bien.
Love this piece / HATE that it was killed.
Love this! We’re seeing the same thing in the racing world. There has been quite a bit of backlash that — while women and girls are finally making strides in the sport whether as drivers, engineers, mechanics, etc. — it is WAGs who are tapped for “women in motorsport” lunch and learns, panels, and social media campaigns. While they aren’t confined to the U.S. or American politics, they do often fall into the “seen, not heard” trad wife category. They’ve become so big online that Formula 1’s all-women junior racing series has begun to depend on WAGs for marketing, knowing a quick snap trackside will be one of the few ways the women’s racing series will make headlines.