Вплив Tradwife на соціальні мережі

This morning my toddlers woke up with a cough and a little bit of a sore throat and I don't usually keep cough drops or traditional medicine in the house so let's make some. These were so soothing. Same deal here. Oh my toddlers woke up sick this morning and I just happened to have fresh ginger and elderberry and arrowroot powder and cough drop molds in the pantry. No you didn't! This was clearly planned well in advance and it is crazy to me that people fall for it. This is my hot take. I believe that tradwives have built a business on cosplaying what they believe real homemakers do. Anyone who's an actual homemaker knows that it looks nothing like what tradwives portray. It's an act, it's a facade, it's a business. They're still technically working, but it's their job to pretend that they don't have a job. Do you make six figures a month by posting cooking videos on TikTok? No, probably not. So why are you comparing yourself to someone who lives that life? Ah, tradwives, the new wave of millennial and Gen Z women who are cosplaying 50s housewives on TikTok. Welcome back to another episode of Influencer Insanity, where we cover social media culture and influencer trends. My name is Hannah, and I'll be honest, I've been scared to touch this topic. It's been on my list of topics since the beginning, but there's a reason that it's taken me seven episodes to finally get up the courage to do it, I guess. And that's because of how divisive and nuanced this trend is. It deals with issues of gender roles and feminism and freedom of choice, the rising cost of living, the rising cost of childcare, the apparent declining value of college degrees, the rise and fall of the girl boss era. And then you add in the rising popularity of social media influencers telling us how we should live our lives and it turns into a huge disaster. What I don't want to do is bash women who take on the homemaking role. That is not what I believe and that's not what this video is about. But I do see some issues with the social media trad wife trend and the role that influencers are perpetuating that I think are worth a discussion and worth exposing. So finding that balance and deciding how I'm going to approach this topic has been kind of difficult, but I'm excited to get into this mess and see what we can make of it. I look forward to reading the comments to see what you think of this trend as well, because from what I can tell on the internet, it's very split. It's very polarizing. and I have no doubts that we're going to see some of that discourse in the comments below. But first, I would love to tell you about the sponsor of today's video, the paired app. Paired is a relationship care app that you use with your partner to help prompt meaningful conversations and promote strong communication skills. 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This is going to give both you and your partner a seven day free trial plus 25% off paired premium. Thanks again to the paired app for sponsoring today's video. And speaking of relationships and your role within them, let's get into our deep dive into the trend of trad wives. The term trad wife is defined as a married woman who chooses to be a homemaker as a primary occupation and adheres to or embodies traditional femininity and female gender roles often associated with conservative or alt-right political views. And in the social media influencer sphere, this often looks like conventionally attractive young women, typically with a religious background who get all dolled up like fifties. How housewives, and film themselves performing domestic tasks such as cooking elaborate meals from scratch or gardening or farming or cleaning and organizing. And there's often an air of perfection, tranquility, peace, glamour even. They move so effortlessly, so calmly, with so much joy and gratitude to be able to serve their husband and children in this way. They appear to have endless time and endless resources to spend on simple homemaking tasks, and they couldn't be happier doing it. I can show you easier than I can tell you, so let's get into some examples. Let's start with one of the queen trad wives herself, Nara Smith. With seven minutes... million TikTok followers and over 3 million Instagram followers, there is a great chance that you've already come across her content if you spend time on social media. And she's likely one of the first to come to mind when you think of this trad wife trend. Her videos get millions and millions and millions of views on a regular basis, and she posts mostly cooking content. Here's one that I think you'll enjoy. This morning my toddlers requested some corn flakes for breakfast, but I don't usually keep those in the house so I just decided to make them. I combined some cornmeal, corn flour, and a tablespoon of coconut sugar with some water until it was batter-like consistency. You don't keep cereal in the house, but you have cornmeal, corn flour, and coconut sugar laying around. Okay, let's go with it. She goes on to show us the rest of the process and says that it takes over an hour in the oven for these to bake and get really crispy. My guess is that start to finish, the whole process took at least a couple hours. My question is who has toddlers that are willing to wait hours for a bowl of cereal? And what mom of toddlers has this kind of time? I'm the mom of a toddler. I don't have this kind of time. I can tell you that. One of her favorite flavors is green apple so I made a green apple one and then also experimented with making a cinnamon vanilla gum. Once the mixture was cold enough to handle, I kneaded it and then stretched it out and made sure to always have it covered in the powdered sugar so it wouldn't stick. Then I rolled out my gum, cut it into equal pieces, and decided to go for a little gum ball. Once all the green apple ones were formed, I moved on to my cinnamon vanilla ones and set them aside before tossing them in some more powdered sugar. To keep them fresh, I placed them in some wax paper, twisted the sides, and repeated that process with all of them, and then they were ready to try. These tasted even better than store-bought gum and she was so excited. The cinnamon vanilla ones tasted like a donut. I was very pleased about. Again, gum is too hard to come by in this household, but don't worry, I have gum base and flavorings for it. This is where I really start to raise an eyebrow if I wasn't already because first of all, gum base is not something that's sold in most grocery stores. I looked it up and it's one of those things you either have to order online or maybe they have it in some select craft stores. It's highly unlikely that somebody would have this as a staple ingredient in their pantry, obviously. Which makes me question this whole, my sister is here and just happened to have a craving for gum, and I just happened to have gum base and flavorings on hand narrative. I call major BS. I'm sorry, I do. This to me is cl- clearly a planned piece of content that she prepped for ahead of time. She placed the orders for these ingredients well in advance. And the hook about my sister had a craving for gum is a lie. That's a content hook. That's not the reality. So then it starts to make me question all of her other hooks. My toddlers were asking for this. I had a craving for that. I just have a hard time believing it personally, especially when I saw this one. This morning my toddlers woke up with a cough and a little bit of a sore throat and I don't usually keep cough drops or traditional medicine in the house so let's make some. Wanted to make lemon ginger and elderberry cough drops. I poured some honey into my pot and then moved on to peeling my ginger. Didn't want to use too much ginger because I didn't want it to be too spicy for them so I just eyeballed it and then also added some elderberry and about half a lemon. You can definitely adjust this to whatever you want to do. After I added all my ingredients to my honey, I gave it a good stir and boiled it on the stove until it reached about 300 degrees Fahrenheit. In the meantime, I prepped my mold. Once my honey was hot enough and reached the hard crack stage, I spooned it into my mold. I had to work quickly because towards the end, my honey began to thicken. Popped those in the fridge to harden quicker, and then when they were cooled off, I popped them out of their molds. I laid them on some arrowroot powder to prevent them from sticking, but you can also use cornstarch or powdered sugar. These were so soothing. Same deal here. Oh, my toddlers woke up sick this morning and I just happened to have fresh ginger and elderberry and arrowroot powder and cough drop molds in the pantry. No, you didn't. This was clearly planned well in advance and it is crazy to me that people fall for it. I saw this video one hour after it was posted to TikTok and it had 1.6 million views already and over 2,000 comments of everyone praising her for how amazing she is. DIY cough drops? What can't you make from scratch? Never skip a Nara Smith video. I want to be you. Very creative. No one does it like you. Nara is just that girl. She is mother. You are goals. Here for my daily dose of... Nara Smith. Her fan base is rock solid and I can see why people adore her. She's captivating, she's talented, she seems like an anomaly. But what I want you to know is that she is a content creator. This is her job. Making over-the-top unrealistic cooking videos is her business. It's not a depiction of her reality. Being a traditional wife is not her job. Making videos portraying the fantasy of a traditional wife is her job. Now let's take this up a notch. What if I told you that she had her third baby a couple months ago? She posted that cornflake video four weeks postpartum. She posted the gum video three weeks postpartum. She posted this video of herself making a fried chicken sandwich on homemade focaccia 10 days postpartum. Were you up making bread from scratch at 10 days postpartum? Because I know I wasn't. I could barely scrape together the energy to take a shower. I most certainly was not spending hours in the kitchen making bread and gum and corn flakes from scratch the moment somebody in my household requests it. I think a lot of people who see this could understand how it's unrealistic, how it's fabricated, how it's a false reality, but Nara seems to have a pretty split audience. I would say most in favor of her content, most kind of idolizing her. The early crowd who follows her and sees her content in their feed, they shower her with praise and adoration. They absolutely love and appreciate her content and they think that she's admirable and a real life Wonder Woman who really can do it all. And they have totally bought into the idea that this is real life. And oh yeah, she's 22 years old by the way. Did I say that? Which I think only adds to her allure of how she seems so established and put together. On the other hand, the late crowd who's being fed her content through the algorithm maybe a few days later, they're more critical. They're not buying it. And they point out that she's portraying a false reality, that new young moms have the time, energy, and resources to do this kind of thing. And then... There's people out there who are like me, who are split. I think her videos are gorgeous. I think they're relaxing. I admire that she knows how to make so many things. I think it's wonderful that she's cooking homemade meals. And she seems relatively unbothered. She's just doing her thing, cooking for her family, and I love that for her. But the other part of me is kind of annoyed and critical, and I had to really get to the bottom of why I was feeling that way. Am I annoyed that she's cooking everything from scratch? No, I don't think that's it because I also love cooking for my family. I also find that to be really fulfilling. I see the benefit in doing that. Who's going to be like bad mom, homemade food, gross. Showing your love for your family through cooking for them, disgraceful. That doesn't make any sense. Is it that I'm jealous that she gets to be a stay-at-home wife and mom? I don't think it's that either because I'm also a stay-at-home wife and mom. I don't think it's her role within the home that rubs me the wrong way. So if it's not the fact that she's a homemaker and it's not the fact that she cooks food from scratch, I think the point that bothers me and others is that homemakers know what it takes to live the homemaker lifestyle and we know that it looks nothing like this. I think it's too easy to say, oh, well, if her content makes you mad, you must just be jealous of her in some way. I don't think that's truly it. The issue is not with the role itself. It's the misrepresentation of the role. Getting all dolled up to spend two hours in front of your tripod making cereal from scratch while your kids are occupied and taken care of by somebody else is not an honest representation of what a homemaker or a stay-at-home mom does. We're watching a curated and privileged fantasy. Most stay-at-home moms do not have this privilege. We know from first-hand experience that making breakfast for toddlers is a challenge. They're hungry, they're impatient, they're loud, they're underfoot, they're in the way, or they're in the next room unsupervised getting into something they shouldn't be. And we are lucky if we can make them a scrambled egg and a piece of toast before we lose our minds or before they burn the house down. So to watch content like this feels like a gut punch because it's like, how? How are you managing to do that? What do you mean you have hours to make cornflakes from scratch in a gown? And I would hate for any new mom or soon-to-be mom to watch this and glean an unrealistic expectation of what motherhood or homemaking looks like. Because this ain't it. I was that naive soon-to-be mom who created this expectation of what my job as a mom was going to look like and how much I'd be able to get done in a day and what kinds of meals I'd be able to prepare and how my baby should be behaving and how much free time I would have for myself. Like, I can't even... I can't even say that without laughing now. It is so laughable. But I created this image in my head of what I thought my life was gonna be like after my baby was born because of what I saw influencers put on the internet because I didn't know that it was fake. And it wrecked me. I was in for a rude awakening my first few months of motherhood because my life was going nothing like I thought it should based on what I had seen influencers posting on social media. So I do get heated because this feels like a deeply personal issue for me, something that I have gone through extremely recently. And I don't want other people to experience the same frustration I had when my postpartum experience wasn't going as seamlessly and beautifully and effortlessly. as influencers seem to be. This video of her making focaccia at 10 days postpartum has 30 million views for God's sake. There's got to be at least a certain percentage of those people who watch this because they think it's aspirational or inspiring or achievable, and they desire to live like her and they look at her as a role model. Or there's people who are made to feel bad about their own positions or capabilities or life circumstances because they're not able to do what Nara is doing. But I want people to understand the true logistics that go behind creating this kind of content. I need you to think critically about what's going on outside the scope of the camera lens. What we're watching is somebody whose kitchen is set up like a filming studio. She spent time making herself camera ready for her role. Hair, makeup, beautiful gowns. She's prepped exactly what meal she's going to make. She's following a content calendar that's been planned well in advance. She doesn't have a grocery store sized pantry with every ingredient imaginable. She has lights and tripods. She's taking breaks to position her phone perfectly and get all the different angles. She has arranged child care behind the scenes that affords her the time and space to create these videos in peace. She's not a one-woman show. She has help. She has resources. She has privileges that most stay-at-home moms do not have. And that is wonderful for her. I do not want to diminish that. She's clearly worked very hard to build her platform that now affords her these luxuries, and that's a well-deserved accomplishment. And truly, there is no judgment and no jealousy coming from me based on that. But what we're not gonna do is watch her beautifully curated cooking videos and start beating ourselves up about how we don't have the same time and resources to be doing the same thing for our families. It doesn't make you any less of a wife or mother, it doesn't make you a bad mom if you feed your kids cereal from a box, it's okay if you're not cooking 10 days postpartum, it's okay if you feel frustrated that every task you do feels like it takes 10 times longer and is 10 times harder than it should be because you don't have extra help and you don't have child care. You are the child care. I just want to scream it from the rooftops that the final TikTok video you see does not tell you the full story and that there are endless amounts of unseen help and resources behind the scenes. It's fantastic if you appreciate and enjoy NARS content, just don't believe that it's real life. That's all I'm saying. Moving on to another super popular influencer in the trad wife genre, this is Hannah Nealman, also known for her social media handle Ballerina Farm. She's a former Juilliard ballerina. She's a pageant queen, and she's also the mother to eight children living on a ranch in Utah, and she's amassed a following of 9 million on Instagram. Her family is gorgeous, her ranch is gorgeous, and she portrays this very idyllic little house on the prairie type lifestyle. Milking cows, harvesting eggs, homemade butter and bread, and egg salad sandwiches where everything came from the farm. Ravioli where she made the ricotta cheese filling herself with the milk that she milked by hand. And the issue that people take with Hannah's content is that everything gives off this air of being humble and modest and down to earth, like she's just homesteading and raising babies and making bread in her little farmhouse her linen dresses. Which might be true, but there's also signs of extreme wealth and privilege that poke through. Most notably, the oven that's seen in the background of a lot of her videos is actually worth up to $30,000. Or that the 328 acre ranch she lives on was listed for 2.75 million dollars when they purchased it in 2018. You're probably gonna be hearing my cat Zeke in the background. I cannot, for the life of me, get him to be quiet. I'm at the point now where I've given up. I've let him in and out and in and out. I repeated that last line about the price of the ranch 13 times and he interrupted every single one of them. My patience is gone. I'm just going to talk over him. So sorry about that. Another thing that people have discovered is that her father-in-law is David Nealman, the founder of five commercial airlines, including JetBlue and whose net worth is $400 million dollars. And another sign of her wealth is that her farm is fully operational and she runs a successful farm-to-table agriculture business. And all of this is fine. There's nothing wrong with being wealthy or successful. But exactly as we talked about earlier, there's clearly unseen privileges that are going on outside the scope of the cute little video we see on Instagram. Some of her followers almost feel cheated once they discover that she's extremely wealthy and she likely has all the money and resources in the world to help her. She's somebody that has generational wealth who left her city ballerina pageant lifestyle to become a homesteading trad wife influencer, seemingly almost like a hobby of hers. She's making herself out to be this traditional wife who stays home and raises the kids and bakes bread all day, but she's actually a wealthy business owner, which therefore makes her content feel performative, like an act. And keep in mind that none of this information about her wealth came to light because Hannah herself offered up that information. In fact, she portrays herself as just the opposite. This post from 2021 says, With the ink still wet on the real estate contract for our new little farm, we drove to the nearest farm goods store to buy muck boots, overalls, gloves, and straw hats. We had zero... experience, zero background in farming, didn't own a shovel or a single animal. She's intentionally trying to give off the impression that she came from humble beginnings with just a straw hat and a dream. And look at this fantastically successful farming business that she's been able to build. without giving any credit to her generational wealth or her privileges or the help she had along the way. It was internet sleuths who did some digging and uncovered and publicized this information. I think the Ballerina Farm account is another great example of how tradwife influencers will cosplay as something they're not. And they're doing a really bad job. They're not making it very believable. They build their whole following around being this superhuman, inspirational wife and mother who can manage it all. And they're just hoping that their audience don't think critically for a second about the logistics of what's actually going on behind the camera. And the final trad wife I want to touch on for this video is Estee Williams. She's a self-proclaimed traditional wife, and she has nearly 200,000 followers on TikTok. Unlike Hannah and Nara, she doesn't post much content of her actually doing the domestic labor tasks. She posts mainly sit-down chatty videos about how to live the trad wife lifestyle. For example, this is a video directed at high school girls giving them advice on what they should do if they want to become a trad wife in the future. Here's a video about how to be feminine in the gym and some of her tips include wearing scrunchies, wearing makeup, wearing perfume. buying cutesy pink workout gear, and of course, dressing modestly because you don't want to attract the attention of any man in the gym who isn't your husband, right? This is another video she did on giving tips on how to attract a masculine man. And one of the tips is that you must be an approachable woman, which to her means you need to be feminine, fit, and friendly. And then of course, there's this one, POV, your husband is on the way home and it's just her primping herself to be presentable for him. And no, this account is not satire. She is 100% dead serious about all of it, which kind of leads me into the discussion of is being a trad wife a good or a bad thing? My first reaction to watching her videos is to be appalled and to feel very uncomfortable by it, but then you look in her comments and she has a lot of support, and it's other women leaving their encouragement and praise of this kind of lifestyle. What I found is that people are very split on how they feel about this trend. And I keep calling it the trad wife trend because of the social media component. Obviously, the idea of being a housewife is not new and it's not a trend, but the recent rise of influencers who perform this lifestyle for a camera, for content, for views, for the consumption of others on social media, that is a trend. Each of the tradwives I've shown you in this video have supporters and non-supporters. On one side, some people say the tradwife trend is anti-feminist, and that it's setting us back as a society. Like, we worked so hard for women's rights and equality, and we're finally to a point where women are pursuing a higher education, and they do have a representation in the workforce. And we do envision more for ourselves than being a caretaker, and dual-income households are the norm now. So in a way, the tradwife trend feels like a huge step backwards in time. where these influencers are cropping up and gaining wild popularity, but they're perpetuating traditional gender roles where the woman's sole purpose is to take care of the home and to serve her husband and children. But there is another side to the argument. Some people appreciate the trad wife movement in the sense that it promotes slower and simpler living where family is prioritized. If we have both spouses out in the workforce, then who's caring for the home? Who's caring for the children? In some cases, most, if not all of one spouse's income is going right into child care, so if that's the case, it could be an economical decision to have one spouse stay home, typically the woman. Some also believe that in the fast-paced age we're living in right now, it can be desirable to take a step back. Pursue a simpler way of living where we're really focusing on taking care of our homes and ourselves and our families. And another huge argument I see on the pro-tradwife side is that feminism is a woman's right to choose. If they choose to enter the workforce, that's great, we support it. If they choose to stay home and be a homemaker, that's great, we support it. So many people believe that the tradwife trend is not an attack on feminism. All of that to say, I'm not... personally here to talk about whether or not being a traditional wife is a good or bad thing, because it's ultimately very divisive. Everybody has their own opinions. And if it works well for you and your family, and it makes you happy, and that's the choice you've made, then who am I to judge? What I am here to talk about is how social media influencers are redefining what the traditional wife role looks like. I'm here to talk about how that role is romanticized and exaggerated and performed in the modern social media age. Because in my opinion, I think there is a huge difference between somebody who is an actual homemaker, stay-at-home mom, traditional wife, and a trad wife. Trad wives are influencers who are curating, promoting, and monetizing this lifestyle for social media. I feel that the work of a stay-at-home mom or homemaker is true, honest, difficult, selfless work, but it does not look like what social media trad wives are showing us. It's performative, staged, fake, too perfect, and too pretty. to be believable. And this dissonance between viewers about if being a trad wife is a good or bad thing is in essence what keeps the trad wife influencers relevant. Their content relies on the conflicting engagement they get. almost in a rage bait sort of way, which I talked about in episode five of this series. They like that their content is a bit controversial. They intentionally create it to be that way, because that means that the content performs better and their platforms grow easier and they make more money. Any attention is good attention. Any comment is a good comment as far as the algorithm is concerned. And these conflicting opinions in the Tradwives comment sections is exactly what has catapulted them into social media fame in the past year or so. Which ultimately leads us here, the finale of the whole Tradwife topic and the reason that it even made it into this influencer series at all. And that is that I want to make the point so crystal clear that being a Tradwife influencer on social media has become a business. Trad wives are not simply traditional wives. They are social media influencers and businesswomen under the traditional wife disguise. Think about it this way. If somebody wants to become a stay-at-home mom or a homemaker, that means that they are giving up their ability to bring in an income, right? If you're going to stay home and you're not going to work, then you're giving up the opportunity for a two-income household and you are signing on for a one-income household situation. So what this means is that the household must be supported on the working spouse's income alone, right? However, we're We're in the midst of a global cost of living crisis and many families cannot be supported on one income. For some, it's simply not an option to not work. And to be a stay-at-home parent or a homemaker these days is in a lot of ways a privilege. If you're a woman who wants to be a homemaker, here's your two options. Number one, have a rich husband or at least a spouse with a stable, well-paying job that can support your whole family. Or option number two, find a side hustle that allows you to bring in an income and be a homemaker at the same time. And in my opinion, option number two is exactly how the trad wife influencer trend was born. Some women get stuck in MLM pyramid schemes as their side hustle of choice. Other women become trad wife influencers. Trad wives aren't actually traditional housewives. They're housewives with a social media side hustle. It's become a way for women to take on the housewife or stay at home mom role while also being the second income stream for the family. This is my hot take. I believe that trad wives have built a business on cosplaying what they believe real homemakers do. Anyone who's an actual homemaker knows that it looks nothing like what trad wives portray. It's an act. It's a facade. It's a business. They're still technically working, but it's their job to pretend that they don't have a job. They've shot their way into social media success by creating fictional fantasy content. I think we can look at Nara Smith and Hannah Nealman as perfect examples of this. Nara has grown her platform so large to the point that she is bringing in- insane high-paying sponsorships with extremely recognizable brands. Just so far in 2024 alone, she's done sponsorships with Seed Supplements, Coterie Diapers, Calvin Klein, Brilliant Earth, Adenola, Poppy, and MAC Cosmetics. She is killing it with the views. Her TikToks tend to get like a minimum of 10 million views and they go up to like 30 million, 40 million sometimes. I don't think the general public understands how much money she's making from these sponsorships. It is truly astronomical, unbelievable kinds of money. And that's just brand sponsorships, you guys. She also gets paid for TikTok views too. I'm not on TikTok, so I can't speak to how much creators make on that platform, but some other TikTokers have done the math. based on how much they get paid for their views. And they've kind of extrapolated that data to estimate how much Nara might make. And some have estimated that she makes somewhere in the ballpark of like $200,000 a month in TikTok views. Like truly this woman is most likely a millionaire. And before anyone gets it twisted, please know I am not hating on her for having those sponsorships or for having those views. Go off, girl. These are truly massive accomplishments in the influencer world, and that is amazing for her. My point in bringing this up at all is to say that being a trad wife influencer is her job. It's a- business. It's a brand. She is extremely wealthy and that wealth affords her the privilege to be able to create this kind of performative trad wife content. Do you make six figures a month by posting cooking videos on TikTok? No, probably not. So why are you comparing yourself to someone who lives that life? She's completely unrelatable as far as I'm concerned, and she's fantastic in her own right, but she's not to be looked at as the type of wife and mother to compare yourself to. Same goes for Hannah from Ballerina Farm. She's used her platform as a trad wife influencer to skyrocket her farming business. And she also takes sponsorships and she's also incredibly wealthy and is also somebody who's not relatable to the average woman, even though she tries to make herself out to be. I want to leave you with this thought. This is something I have not been able to stop thinking about and was honestly the inspiration for this video. It's an idea that I first heard about from Professor Neil on TikTok. And I'm going to show you a little piece of his video. I'm going to link the whole thing below if you want to watch it all. This morning I asked my toddlers what they wanted for breakfast and they both said cereal. So cereal it was and we got started right away. Have you ever asked yourself why it is that trad wives and other conservative female influencers who promote traditional gender roles have all the time in the world to make cereal from scratch but somehow never seem to record themselves doing essential domestic labor like vacuuming, trying to get a particularly nasty stain out of a shirt, or scrubbing a toilet? When they are performing labor in these videos, it's always something that, strictly speaking, is unnecessary and they are doing it the hardest way possible. Because the answer is that it is for show. It is all a performance. In his remarkably prescient 1899 book, The Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen coined the terms conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure, suggesting that those with wealth and power no longer having any economic production to contribute themselves. instead contribute to the production and consumption of leisure. Those consumption practices, those leisure activities, are conspicuous precisely because that is how the leisure class signals their difference from the working class, signals their exceptionality and their superiority. They're not better than us because they can make their children cereal from scratch. They're better than us because they are so wealthy and well-off that they have nothing more important to worry about. Our idea of a traditional wife is rooted in the 1950s when many women belonging to the middle class took on the homemaking role. However, in 2024, the tradwife trend has morphed into a trend for the leisure class. Those who are so wealthy and so privileged and so far above the rest of us that they have the financial and logistical resources to allow them to cosplay this lifestyle, not only as their job, but also for the entertainment of others. They likely have help behind the scenes in the form of housekeepers or nannies or social media managers and so on. that makes them unrelatable to people below their class. They are not traditional wives. They are influencers and performers pretending to be traditional wives. And that's not to say that I believe you shouldn't follow or support these influencers, but I do hope that you will think critically and consume their content responsibly. And with that, that's everything I have for you for my take on trad wives. I don't think that everybody's going to agree with me on this. And I think that's perfectly fine. I think it's a really interesting topic to have a conversation about. I've watched some other YouTube videos on Tradwives that don't share the same views as me. I've had conversations in my DMs with my followers who don't agree with my views on Tradwives. And I think that's the part of it that makes it so perplexing and so intriguing. And I would love to hear what you think about it too in the comments. And before you go, thanks again to Paired for sponsoring today's video. You can click the link in the description box below to get a 7-day free trial plus 25% off Paired Premium. Thank you so much for watching. I really appreciate you and I'll see you in my next one real soon. I

This was clearly planned well in advance and it is crazy to me that people fall for it. This is my hot take. I believe that tradwives have built a business on cosplaying what they believe real homemakers do.

Anyone who's an actual homemaker knows that it looks nothing like what tradwives portray. It's an act, it's a facade, it's a business. They're still technically working, but it's their job to pretend that they don't have a job.

Do you make six figures a month by posting cooking videos on TikTok? No, probably not. So why are you comparing yourself to someone who lives that life? Ah, tradwives, the new wave of millennial and Gen Z women who are cosplaying 50s housewives on TikTok. Welcome back to another episode of Influencer Insanity, where we cover social media culture and influencer trends.

My name is Hannah, and I'll be honest, I've been scared to touch this topic. It's been on my list of topics since the beginning, but there's a reason that it's taken me seven episodes to finally get up the courage to do it, I guess. And that's because of how divisive and nuanced this trend is. It deals with issues of gender roles and feminism and freedom of choice, the rising cost of living, the rising cost of childcare, the apparent declining value of college degrees, the rise and fall of the girl boss era.

And then you add in the rising popularity of social media influencers telling us how we should live our lives and it turns into a huge disaster. What I don't want to do is bash women who take on the homemaking role. That is not what I believe and that's not what this video is about. But I do see some issues with the social media trad wife trend and the role that influencers are perpetuating that I think are worth a discussion and worth exposing.

So finding that balance and deciding how I'm going to approach this topic has been kind of difficult, but I'm excited to get into this mess and see what we can make of it. I look forward to reading the comments to see what you think of this trend as well, because from what I can tell on the internet, it's very split. It's very polarizing. and I have no doubts that we're going to see some of that discourse in the comments below.

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Thanks again to the paired app for sponsoring today's video. And speaking of relationships and your role within them, let's get into our deep dive into the trend of trad wives. The term trad wife is defined as a married woman who chooses to be a homemaker as a primary occupation and adheres to or embodies traditional femininity and female gender roles often associated with conservative or alt-right political views.

And in the social media influencer sphere, this often looks like conventionally attractive young women, typically with a religious background who get all dolled up like fifties. How housewives, and film themselves performing domestic tasks such as cooking elaborate meals from scratch or gardening or farming or cleaning and organizing. And there's often an air of perfection, tranquility, peace, glamour even.

They move so effortlessly, so calmly, with so much joy and gratitude to be able to serve their husband and children in this way. They appear to have endless time and endless resources to spend on simple homemaking tasks, and they couldn't be happier doing it. I can show you easier than I can tell you, so let's get into some examples. Let's start with one of the queen trad wives herself, Nara Smith. With seven minutes...

million TikTok followers and over 3 million Instagram followers, there is a great chance that you've already come across her content if you spend time on social media. And she's likely one of the first to come to mind when you think of this trad wife trend. Her videos get millions and millions and millions of views on a regular basis, and she posts mostly cooking content.

Here's one that I think you'll enjoy. This morning my toddlers requested some corn flakes for breakfast, but I don't usually keep those in the house so I just decided to make them. I combined some cornmeal, corn flour, and a tablespoon of coconut sugar with some water until it was batter-like consistency.

You don't keep cereal in the house, but you have cornmeal, corn flour, and coconut sugar laying around. Okay, let's go with it. She goes on to show us the rest of the process and says that it takes over an hour in the oven for these to bake and get really crispy.

My guess is that start to finish, the whole process took at least a couple hours. My question is who has toddlers that are willing to wait hours for a bowl of cereal? And what mom of toddlers has this kind of time?

I'm the mom of a toddler. I don't have this kind of time. I can tell you that. One of her favorite flavors is green apple so I made a green apple one and then also experimented with making a cinnamon vanilla gum. Once the mixture was cold enough to handle, I kneaded it and then stretched it out and made sure to always have it covered in the powdered sugar so it wouldn't stick.

Then I rolled out my gum, cut it into equal pieces, and decided to go for a little gum ball. Once all the green apple ones were formed, I moved on to my cinnamon vanilla ones and set them aside before tossing them in some more powdered sugar. To keep them fresh, I placed them in some wax paper, twisted the sides, and repeated that process with all of them, and then they were ready to try.

These tasted even better than store-bought gum and she was so excited. The cinnamon vanilla ones tasted like a donut. I was very pleased about. Again, gum is too hard to come by in this household, but don't worry, I have gum base and flavorings for it. This is where I really start to raise an eyebrow if I wasn't already because first of all, gum base is not something that's sold in most grocery stores.

I looked it up and it's one of those things you either have to order online or maybe they have it in some select craft stores. It's highly unlikely that somebody would have this as a staple ingredient in their pantry, obviously. Which makes me question this whole, my sister is here and just happened to have a craving for gum, and I just happened to have gum base and flavorings on hand narrative.

I call major BS. I'm sorry, I do. This to me is cl- clearly a planned piece of content that she prepped for ahead of time.

She placed the orders for these ingredients well in advance. And the hook about my sister had a craving for gum is a lie. That's a content hook.

That's not the reality. So then it starts to make me question all of her other hooks. My toddlers were asking for this.

I had a craving for that. I just have a hard time believing it personally, especially when I saw this one. This morning my toddlers woke up with a cough and a little bit of a sore throat and I don't usually keep cough drops or traditional medicine in the house so let's make some.

Wanted to make lemon ginger and elderberry cough drops. I poured some honey into my pot and then moved on to peeling my ginger. Didn't want to use too much ginger because I didn't want it to be too spicy for them so I just eyeballed it and then also added some elderberry and about half a lemon.

You can definitely adjust this to whatever you want to do. After I added all my ingredients to my honey, I gave it a good stir and boiled it on the stove until it reached about 300 degrees Fahrenheit. In the meantime, I prepped my mold.

Once my honey was hot enough and reached the hard crack stage, I spooned it into my mold. I had to work quickly because towards the end, my honey began to thicken. Popped those in the fridge to harden quicker, and then when they were cooled off, I popped them out of their molds.

I laid them on some arrowroot powder to prevent them from sticking, but you can also use cornstarch or powdered sugar. These were so soothing. Same deal here. Oh, my toddlers woke up sick this morning and I just happened to have fresh ginger and elderberry and arrowroot powder and cough drop molds in the pantry.

No, you didn't. This was clearly planned well in advance and it is crazy to me that people fall for it. I saw this video one hour after it was posted to TikTok and it had 1.6 million views already and over 2,000 comments of everyone praising her for how amazing she is. DIY cough drops?

What can't you make from scratch? Never skip a Nara Smith video. I want to be you. Very creative.

No one does it like you. Nara is just that girl. She is mother. You are goals. Here for my daily dose of...

Nara Smith. Her fan base is rock solid and I can see why people adore her. She's captivating, she's talented, she seems like an anomaly.

But what I want you to know is that she is a content creator. This is her job. Making over-the-top unrealistic cooking videos is her business. It's not a depiction of her reality.

Being a traditional wife is not her job. Making videos portraying the fantasy of a traditional wife is her job. Now let's take this up a notch.

What if I told you that she had her third baby a couple months ago? She posted that cornflake video four weeks postpartum. She posted the gum video three weeks postpartum. She posted this video of herself making a fried chicken sandwich on homemade focaccia 10 days postpartum. Were you up making bread from scratch at 10 days postpartum?

Because I know I wasn't. I could barely scrape together the energy to take a shower. I most certainly was not spending hours in the kitchen making bread and gum and corn flakes from scratch the moment somebody in my household requests it.

I think a lot of people who see this could understand how it's unrealistic, how it's fabricated, how it's a false reality, but Nara seems to have a pretty split audience. I would say most in favor of her content, most kind of idolizing her. The early crowd who follows her and sees her content in their feed, they shower her with praise and adoration. They absolutely love and appreciate her content and they think that she's admirable and a real life Wonder Woman who really can do it all.

And they have totally bought into the idea that this is real life. And oh yeah, she's 22 years old by the way. Did I say that? Which I think only adds to her allure of how she seems so established and put together. On the other hand, the late crowd who's being fed her content through the algorithm maybe a few days later, they're more critical.

They're not buying it. And they point out that she's portraying a false reality, that new young moms have the time, energy, and resources to do this kind of thing. And then... There's people out there who are like me, who are split.

I think her videos are gorgeous. I think they're relaxing. I admire that she knows how to make so many things. I think it's wonderful that she's cooking homemade meals.

And she seems relatively unbothered. She's just doing her thing, cooking for her family, and I love that for her. But the other part of me is kind of annoyed and critical, and I had to really get to the bottom of why I was feeling that way.

Am I annoyed that she's cooking everything from scratch? No, I don't think that's it because I also love cooking for my family. I also find that to be really fulfilling.

I see the benefit in doing that. Who's going to be like bad mom, homemade food, gross. Showing your love for your family through cooking for them, disgraceful. That doesn't make any sense.

Is it that I'm jealous that she gets to be a stay-at-home wife and mom? I don't think it's that either because I'm also a stay-at-home wife and mom. I don't think it's her role within the home that rubs me the wrong way. So if it's not the fact that she's a homemaker and it's not the fact that she cooks food from scratch, I think the point that bothers me and others is that homemakers know what it takes to live the homemaker lifestyle and we know that it looks nothing like this.

I think it's too easy to say, oh, well, if her content makes you mad, you must just be jealous of her in some way. I don't think that's truly it. The issue is not with the role itself. It's the misrepresentation of the role.

Getting all dolled up to spend two hours in front of your tripod making cereal from scratch while your kids are occupied and taken care of by somebody else is not an honest representation of what a homemaker or a stay-at-home mom does. We're watching a curated and privileged fantasy. Most stay-at-home moms do not have this privilege. We know from first-hand experience that making breakfast for toddlers is a challenge.

They're hungry, they're impatient, they're loud, they're underfoot, they're in the way, or they're in the next room unsupervised getting into something they shouldn't be. And we are lucky if we can make them a scrambled egg and a piece of toast before we lose our minds or before they burn the house down. So to watch content like this feels like a gut punch because it's like, how? How are you managing to do that? What do you mean you have hours to make cornflakes from scratch in a gown?

And I would hate for any new mom or soon-to-be mom to watch this and glean an unrealistic expectation of what motherhood or homemaking looks like. Because this ain't it. I was that naive soon-to-be mom who created this expectation of what my job as a mom was going to look like and how much I'd be able to get done in a day and what kinds of meals I'd be able to prepare and how my baby should be behaving and how much free time I would have for myself. Like, I can't even... I can't even say that without laughing now.

It is so laughable. But I created this image in my head of what I thought my life was gonna be like after my baby was born because of what I saw influencers put on the internet because I didn't know that it was fake. And it wrecked me.

I was in for a rude awakening my first few months of motherhood because my life was going nothing like I thought it should based on what I had seen influencers posting on social media. So I do get heated because this feels like a deeply personal issue for me, something that I have gone through extremely recently. And I don't want other people to experience the same frustration I had when my postpartum experience wasn't going as seamlessly and beautifully and effortlessly.

as influencers seem to be. This video of her making focaccia at 10 days postpartum has 30 million views for God's sake. There's got to be at least a certain percentage of those people who watch this because they think it's aspirational or inspiring or achievable, and they desire to live like her and they look at her as a role model. Or there's people who are made to feel bad about their own positions or capabilities or life circumstances because they're not able to do what Nara is doing.

But I want people to understand the true logistics that go behind creating this kind of content. I need you to think critically about what's going on outside the scope of the camera lens. What we're watching is somebody whose kitchen is set up like a filming studio.

She spent time making herself camera ready for her role. Hair, makeup, beautiful gowns. She's prepped exactly what meal she's going to make. She's following a content calendar that's been planned well in advance.

She doesn't have a grocery store sized pantry with every ingredient imaginable. She has lights and tripods. She's taking breaks to position her phone perfectly and get all the different angles. She has arranged child care behind the scenes that affords her the time and space to create these videos in peace.

She's not a one-woman show. She has help. She has resources. She has privileges that most stay-at-home moms do not have. And that is wonderful for her.

I do not want to diminish that. She's clearly worked very hard to build her platform that now affords her these luxuries, and that's a well-deserved accomplishment. And truly, there is no judgment and no jealousy coming from me based on that.

But what we're not gonna do is watch her beautifully curated cooking videos and start beating ourselves up about how we don't have the same time and resources to be doing the same thing for our families. It doesn't make you any less of a wife or mother, it doesn't make you a bad mom if you feed your kids cereal from a box, it's okay if you're not cooking 10 days postpartum, it's okay if you feel frustrated that every task you do feels like it takes 10 times longer and is 10 times harder than it should be because you don't have extra help and you don't have child care. You are the child care.

I just want to scream it from the rooftops that the final TikTok video you see does not tell you the full story and that there are endless amounts of unseen help and resources behind the scenes. It's fantastic if you appreciate and enjoy NARS content, just don't believe that it's real life. That's all I'm saying.

Moving on to another super popular influencer in the trad wife genre, this is Hannah Nealman, also known for her social media handle Ballerina Farm. She's a former Juilliard ballerina. She's a pageant queen, and she's also the mother to eight children living on a ranch in Utah, and she's amassed a following of 9 million on Instagram.

Her family is gorgeous, her ranch is gorgeous, and she portrays this very idyllic little house on the prairie type lifestyle. Milking cows, harvesting eggs, homemade butter and bread, and egg salad sandwiches where everything came from the farm. Ravioli where she made the ricotta cheese filling herself with the milk that she milked by hand. And the issue that people take with Hannah's content is that everything gives off this air of being humble and modest and down to earth, like she's just homesteading and raising babies and making bread in her little farmhouse her linen dresses.

Which might be true, but there's also signs of extreme wealth and privilege that poke through. Most notably, the oven that's seen in the background of a lot of her videos is actually worth up to $30,000. Or that the 328 acre ranch she lives on was listed for 2.75 million dollars when they purchased it in 2018. You're probably gonna be hearing my cat Zeke in the background.

I cannot, for the life of me, get him to be quiet. I'm at the point now where I've given up. I've let him in and out and in and out.

I repeated that last line about the price of the ranch 13 times and he interrupted every single one of them. My patience is gone. I'm just going to talk over him.

So sorry about that. Another thing that people have discovered is that her father-in-law is David Nealman, the founder of five commercial airlines, including JetBlue and whose net worth is $400 million dollars. And another sign of her wealth is that her farm is fully operational and she runs a successful farm-to-table agriculture business. And all of this is fine. There's nothing wrong with being wealthy or successful.

But exactly as we talked about earlier, there's clearly unseen privileges that are going on outside the scope of the cute little video we see on Instagram. Some of her followers almost feel cheated once they discover that she's extremely wealthy and she likely has all the money and resources in the world to help her. She's somebody that has generational wealth who left her city ballerina pageant lifestyle to become a homesteading trad wife influencer, seemingly almost like a hobby of hers. She's making herself out to be this traditional wife who stays home and raises the kids and bakes bread all day, but she's actually a wealthy business owner, which therefore makes her content feel performative, like an act.

And keep in mind that none of this information about her wealth came to light because Hannah herself offered up that information. In fact, she portrays herself as just the opposite. This post from 2021 says, With the ink still wet on the real estate contract for our new little farm, we drove to the nearest farm goods store to buy muck boots, overalls, gloves, and straw hats. We had zero... experience, zero background in farming, didn't own a shovel or a single animal.

She's intentionally trying to give off the impression that she came from humble beginnings with just a straw hat and a dream. And look at this fantastically successful farming business that she's been able to build. without giving any credit to her generational wealth or her privileges or the help she had along the way.

It was internet sleuths who did some digging and uncovered and publicized this information. I think the Ballerina Farm account is another great example of how tradwife influencers will cosplay as something they're not. And they're doing a really bad job.

They're not making it very believable. They build their whole following around being this superhuman, inspirational wife and mother who can manage it all. And they're just hoping that their audience don't think critically for a second about the logistics of what's actually going on behind the camera. And the final trad wife I want to touch on for this video is Estee Williams.

She's a self-proclaimed traditional wife, and she has nearly 200,000 followers on TikTok. Unlike Hannah and Nara, she doesn't post much content of her actually doing the domestic labor tasks. She posts mainly sit-down chatty videos about how to live the trad wife lifestyle.

For example, this is a video directed at high school girls giving them advice on what they should do if they want to become a trad wife in the future. Here's a video about how to be feminine in the gym and some of her tips include wearing scrunchies, wearing makeup, wearing perfume. buying cutesy pink workout gear, and of course, dressing modestly because you don't want to attract the attention of any man in the gym who isn't your husband, right?

This is another video she did on giving tips on how to attract a masculine man. And one of the tips is that you must be an approachable woman, which to her means you need to be feminine, fit, and friendly. And then of course, there's this one, POV, your husband is on the way home and it's just her primping herself to be presentable for him. And no, this account is not satire. She is 100% dead serious about all of it, which kind of leads me into the discussion of is being a trad wife a good or a bad thing?

My first reaction to watching her videos is to be appalled and to feel very uncomfortable by it, but then you look in her comments and she has a lot of support, and it's other women leaving their encouragement and praise of this kind of lifestyle. What I found is that people are very split on how they feel about this trend. And I keep calling it the trad wife trend because of the social media component.

Obviously, the idea of being a housewife is not new and it's not a trend, but the recent rise of influencers who perform this lifestyle for a camera, for content, for views, for the consumption of others on social media, that is a trend. Each of the tradwives I've shown you in this video have supporters and non-supporters. On one side, some people say the tradwife trend is anti-feminist, and that it's setting us back as a society. Like, we worked so hard for women's rights and equality, and we're finally to a point where women are pursuing a higher education, and they do have a representation in the workforce.

And we do envision more for ourselves than being a caretaker, and dual-income households are the norm now. So in a way, the tradwife trend feels like a huge step backwards in time. where these influencers are cropping up and gaining wild popularity, but they're perpetuating traditional gender roles where the woman's sole purpose is to take care of the home and to serve her husband and children.

But there is another side to the argument. Some people appreciate the trad wife movement in the sense that it promotes slower and simpler living where family is prioritized. If we have both spouses out in the workforce, then who's caring for the home?

Who's caring for the children? In some cases, most, if not all of one spouse's income is going right into child care, so if that's the case, it could be an economical decision to have one spouse stay home, typically the woman. Some also believe that in the fast-paced age we're living in right now, it can be desirable to take a step back. Pursue a simpler way of living where we're really focusing on taking care of our homes and ourselves and our families.

And another huge argument I see on the pro-tradwife side is that feminism is a woman's right to choose. If they choose to enter the workforce, that's great, we support it. If they choose to stay home and be a homemaker, that's great, we support it. So many people believe that the tradwife trend is not an attack on feminism. All of that to say, I'm not...

personally here to talk about whether or not being a traditional wife is a good or bad thing, because it's ultimately very divisive. Everybody has their own opinions. And if it works well for you and your family, and it makes you happy, and that's the choice you've made, then who am I to judge? What I am here to talk about is how social media influencers are redefining what the traditional wife role looks like. I'm here to talk about how that role is romanticized and exaggerated and performed in the modern social media age.

Because in my opinion, I think there is a huge difference between somebody who is an actual homemaker, stay-at-home mom, traditional wife, and a trad wife. Trad wives are influencers who are curating, promoting, and monetizing this lifestyle for social media. I feel that the work of a stay-at-home mom or homemaker is true, honest, difficult, selfless work, but it does not look like what social media trad wives are showing us.

It's performative, staged, fake, too perfect, and too pretty. to be believable. And this dissonance between viewers about if being a trad wife is a good or bad thing is in essence what keeps the trad wife influencers relevant.

Their content relies on the conflicting engagement they get. almost in a rage bait sort of way, which I talked about in episode five of this series. They like that their content is a bit controversial.

They intentionally create it to be that way, because that means that the content performs better and their platforms grow easier and they make more money. Any attention is good attention. Any comment is a good comment as far as the algorithm is concerned. And these conflicting opinions in the Tradwives comment sections is exactly what has catapulted them into social media fame in the past year or so. Which ultimately leads us here, the finale of the whole Tradwife topic and the reason that it even made it into this influencer series at all.

And that is that I want to make the point so crystal clear that being a Tradwife influencer on social media has become a business. Trad wives are not simply traditional wives. They are social media influencers and businesswomen under the traditional wife disguise. Think about it this way. If somebody wants to become a stay-at-home mom or a homemaker, that means that they are giving up their ability to bring in an income, right?

If you're going to stay home and you're not going to work, then you're giving up the opportunity for a two-income household and you are signing on for a one-income household situation. So what this means is that the household must be supported on the working spouse's income alone, right? However, we're We're in the midst of a global cost of living crisis and many families cannot be supported on one income.

For some, it's simply not an option to not work. And to be a stay-at-home parent or a homemaker these days is in a lot of ways a privilege. If you're a woman who wants to be a homemaker, here's your two options. Number one, have a rich husband or at least a spouse with a stable, well-paying job that can support your whole family.

Or option number two, find a side hustle that allows you to bring in an income and be a homemaker at the same time. And in my opinion, option number two is exactly how the trad wife influencer trend was born. Some women get stuck in MLM pyramid schemes as their side hustle of choice.

Other women become trad wife influencers. Trad wives aren't actually traditional housewives. They're housewives with a social media side hustle. It's become a way for women to take on the housewife or stay at home mom role while also being the second income stream for the family.

This is my hot take. I believe that trad wives have built a business on cosplaying what they believe real homemakers do. Anyone who's an actual homemaker knows that it looks nothing like what trad wives portray. It's an act. It's a facade.

It's a business. They're still technically working, but it's their job to pretend that they don't have a job. They've shot their way into social media success by creating fictional fantasy content. I think we can look at Nara Smith and Hannah Nealman as perfect examples of this. Nara has grown her platform so large to the point that she is bringing in- insane high-paying sponsorships with extremely recognizable brands.

Just so far in 2024 alone, she's done sponsorships with Seed Supplements, Coterie Diapers, Calvin Klein, Brilliant Earth, Adenola, Poppy, and MAC Cosmetics. She is killing it with the views. Her TikToks tend to get like a minimum of 10 million views and they go up to like 30 million, 40 million sometimes.

I don't think the general public understands how much money she's making from these sponsorships. It is truly astronomical, unbelievable kinds of money. And that's just brand sponsorships, you guys.

She also gets paid for TikTok views too. I'm not on TikTok, so I can't speak to how much creators make on that platform, but some other TikTokers have done the math. based on how much they get paid for their views. And they've kind of extrapolated that data to estimate how much Nara might make.

And some have estimated that she makes somewhere in the ballpark of like $200,000 a month in TikTok views. Like truly this woman is most likely a millionaire. And before anyone gets it twisted, please know I am not hating on her for having those sponsorships or for having those views. Go off, girl. These are truly massive accomplishments in the influencer world, and that is amazing for her.

My point in bringing this up at all is to say that being a trad wife influencer is her job. It's a- business. It's a brand.

She is extremely wealthy and that wealth affords her the privilege to be able to create this kind of performative trad wife content. Do you make six figures a month by posting cooking videos on TikTok? No, probably not. So why are you comparing yourself to someone who lives that life?

She's completely unrelatable as far as I'm concerned, and she's fantastic in her own right, but she's not to be looked at as the type of wife and mother to compare yourself to. Same goes for Hannah from Ballerina Farm. She's used her platform as a trad wife influencer to skyrocket her farming business.

And she also takes sponsorships and she's also incredibly wealthy and is also somebody who's not relatable to the average woman, even though she tries to make herself out to be. I want to leave you with this thought. This is something I have not been able to stop thinking about and was honestly the inspiration for this video.

It's an idea that I first heard about from Professor Neil on TikTok. And I'm going to show you a little piece of his video. I'm going to link the whole thing below if you want to watch it all. This morning I asked my toddlers what they wanted for breakfast and they both said cereal.

So cereal it was and we got started right away. Have you ever asked yourself why it is that trad wives and other conservative female influencers who promote traditional gender roles have all the time in the world to make cereal from scratch but somehow never seem to record themselves doing essential domestic labor like vacuuming, trying to get a particularly nasty stain out of a shirt, or scrubbing a toilet? When they are performing labor in these videos, it's always something that, strictly speaking, is unnecessary and they are doing it the hardest way possible. Because the answer is that it is for show.

It is all a performance. In his remarkably prescient 1899 book, The Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen coined the terms conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure, suggesting that those with wealth and power no longer having any economic production to contribute themselves. instead contribute to the production and consumption of leisure.

Those consumption practices, those leisure activities, are conspicuous precisely because that is how the leisure class signals their difference from the working class, signals their exceptionality and their superiority. They're not better than us because they can make their children cereal from scratch. They're better than us because they are so wealthy and well-off that they have nothing more important to worry about. Our idea of a traditional wife is rooted in the 1950s when many women belonging to the middle class took on the homemaking role.

However, in 2024, the tradwife trend has morphed into a trend for the leisure class. Those who are so wealthy and so privileged and so far above the rest of us that they have the financial and logistical resources to allow them to cosplay this lifestyle, not only as their job, but also for the entertainment of others. They likely have help behind the scenes in the form of housekeepers or nannies or social media managers and so on. that makes them unrelatable to people below their class. They are not traditional wives.

They are influencers and performers pretending to be traditional wives. And that's not to say that I believe you shouldn't follow or support these influencers, but I do hope that you will think critically and consume their content responsibly. And with that, that's everything I have for you for my take on trad wives. I don't think that everybody's going to agree with me on this.

And I think that's perfectly fine. I think it's a really interesting topic to have a conversation about. I've watched some other YouTube videos on Tradwives that don't share the same views as me.

I've had conversations in my DMs with my followers who don't agree with my views on Tradwives. And I think that's the part of it that makes it so perplexing and so intriguing. And I would love to hear what you think about it too in the comments. And before you go, thanks again to Paired for sponsoring today's video.

You can click the link in the description box below to get a 7-day free trial plus 25% off Paired Premium. Thank you so much for watching. I really appreciate you and I'll see you in my next one real soon.

Transcript for:Вплив Tradwife на соціальні мережі

Transcript for:
Вплив Tradwife на соціальні мережі