This weekend I devoured Yesteryear, the new instant bestseller about a rich tradwife influencer who wakes up one morning in 1855 and has to live like a pioneer woman for real. I started it Friday afternoon and was done before Saturday night. Natalie, the story’s anti-hero, is addictive to read about and easy to hate. But debut author Caro Claire Burke, who also co-hosts a podcast about the reactionary conservative lies fed to women, pulls back the curtain on what really makes Natalie tick—and succeed, at least for a little while. Reading it sometimes felt like Andrea Dworkin’s Right-Wing Women had become a novel. Which is not what you would usually say about a plot destined to become a Hollywood blockbuster.

A movie adaptation of Yesteryear starring and produced by Anne Hathaway has already been in the works for years, and Burke wrote in the book’s acknowledgements that Hathaway even gave input on Natalie’s character after reading the first draft. Yesteryear will almost certainly be a top-grossing film, part of a growing genre of psychological thrillers about tradwives that includes The Housemaid and Don’t Worry Darling. The twist tends to be how ugly, violent, and neglectful wealthy white Christian families can get behind closed doors (see also: the Ready or Not franchise, where a woman marries into a wealthy family only for them to try and kill her on her wedding night).

In exposing the true danger inherent to the supposed protections women earn by practicing traditional values, this media also runs its tradwives through the ringer for our collective enjoyment. In Yesteryear, Natalie refers to her online critics as the “Angry Women.” That’s many of us, the women who make up most of the audience for these patriarchy revenge flicks. It’s also anyone who has lingered in snark forums, hate-followed a mommy blogger, or dabbled in discourse around whether Taylor Swift is becoming a tradwife (guilty as charged). Which got me thinking about why we love to torture our tradwives so much.