The Cheap Tradsploitation of ‘Yesteryear’

One of the year’s bestselling books contains a pivotal sex scene in which a time-traveling tradwife finds her impotent husband transformed into a domineering patriarch. She is terrified and unwilling and, wouldn’t you know it, satisfied for the first time in her life. In Yesteryear, Caro Claire Burke presents antifeminist gender norms for our condemnation and titillation. You could say she pioneers the genre of tradsploitation. Our tradwife gets what she asked for, good and hard. She must pay for her betrayal of her sex, and of the future. The future, of course, is female.