Trog Wife 

Like so many women struggling to find a simpler life in our frantic modern society, I perused the #tradwife content on social media, lulled by visions of gathering eggs in a calico dress and push-up bra while my unseen husband figures out how we should vote. But building a life based on black-and-white sit-coms of the 1950s and the airbrushed porn of the 1980s just didn't speak to my instinctual femininity. I'm talking about the primal stuff that tells us what kind of life our bodies are made to live without all the noise of feminism and politics.

You think skipping back to the '50s is going to do it? Hon. Mary Wollstonecraft was pulling on her blue stockings in the 1700s. Women were protesting their limited rights in ancient Rome. But as a Trogolodyte Wife™, I'm remaking my life with our Stone Age sisters as my role models of natural femininity.

Milling your own flour? That's for agrarian bitches.

I want to feel cherished and sexy like an old-fashioned girl — specifically a cave dwelling Neanderthal or Homo sapien from Europe or Western Asia around the Middle Paleolithic era some 200,000 years ago. Did my halter top made from giant ground sloth fur slip? Oopsie!

That was when women were women: short limbed and barrel-chested for winter warmth and summer sprints between trees to avoid predators, maybe a pronounced come-hither brow ridge and a slightly elongated skull. I'm working on my brow and skull with some very aggressive massage and gua sha, but it's going to take time. I can't wait to acquire the leathery soles of a natural woman's feet. Which I hope will happen soon because I stepped on a pretty sharp bottle cap today and what I hope was some melted ice cream.

I'm also getting back to some basic skills, like using stone tools and hunting. Recent research points to early women having hunted alongside men, rather than only gathering. So if I want a traditional marriage, I'm going to have to learn to fashion a hand ax. Carrying said hand ax really shifts the dynamic on the dating scene, too. I'm working on affixing a sharpened stone to a long enough stick to attack an animal my own size or larger so I can provide for our household. It's that or scavenge carcasses left by apex predators and crack their bones to extract nutrient rich marrow and harvest the partially digested vegetable matter from their stomachs. Either way, it's going to be extremely feminine and authentically paleo.

I'm so done with working some sedentary job for a corporation when I could be tending the home fires. I'm referring to the one burning on the rocky floor of my cave to cook food, provide warmth and keep wild animals away. Failing that, I guess I'll have to wave a burning stick at anything drawn to the smell of food. Since labor was unlikely to have been as clearly divided among gender lines, that would include men who haven't proven themselves to be proficient gatherers or helpful cohabitants.

Listen, it's one thing to dip your earth-roughened toe into the Trog Wife™ lifestyle with a little cave-core décor but full immersion is about so much more than smashing a berry-red handprint on the wall of your condo. It's a commitment to the core feminine values of my cave-dwelling ancestors: survival and, um, yeah, I guess survival.

I can't believe how much of my life I've wasted trapped in modern conventions like capitalism and patriarchy, especially since our cave-dwelling European foremothers rarely made it past 40. When I don't have to justify or explain my Trog Wife™ life, I can relax into grunts and gestures. Is that historically accurate? I dunno. But my instinctual communication style is loud and unclear so I'm leaning into not worrying about explaining myself. So far, it's been great for responding to people questioning how I live as a woman. That and waving the burning stick.

Jennifer Fumiko Cahill (she/her) is the arts and features editor at the Journal. Reach her at (707) 442-1400, extension 320, or [email protected]. Follow her on Instagram @JFumikoCahill.