Bite Back with Abbey Sharp - The Cult of “Good Womanhood” - Tradwives, Soft Life & Maternal Martyrdom with Amber Horsburgh

Episode Date: June 30, 2026

Here’s a run down of what we discussed in today’s episode: How Social Media Changed “Good Womanhood” Why the Trad Wife Trend Is So Appealing The Trad Wife Paradox: Submission as a Brand The Soft Life Trend Explained Wellness Culture’s New Rules for Women The Hidden Cost of the “Soft Life” Aesthetic Bounce-Back Culture & Maternal Martyrdom How Beauty Standards Keep Women Small Who Benefits from “Good Womanhood”? What True Freedom for Women Looks Like Check in with today’s amazing guest:  tiktok.com/@amberhorsburgh_ instagram.com/amberhorsburgh__ substack.com/@amberhorsburgh   Disclaimer: The content in this episode is for educational and entertainment purposes only and is never a substitute for medical advice. If you’re struggling with with your mental or physical health, please work one on one with a health care provider. If you have heard yourself in our discussion today, and are looking for support, contact the free NEDIC helpline at 1-866-NEDIC-20 or go to eatingdisorderhope.com. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •✨ Reach Your Weight & Health Goals — Without Dieting! Pre-order The Hunger Crushing Combo Method, Abbey’s revolutionary additive approach to eating well. Learn how to boost satiety, stabilize blood sugars, reduce disease risk, and improve your relationship with food — all while getting the best nutrient bang for your caloric buck. With 400+ research citations, cheat sheets, evidence-based actionable tips, meal plans, and adaptable recipes, The Hunger Crushing Combo Method is the only nutrition bible you’ll ever need. 👉 Pre-order today! 🛒 Where to Purchase:AmazonBarnes & NobleAmazon KindleApple BooksGoogle PlayKoboApple Books (Audiobook)Audibleabbeyskitchen.com/hunger-crushing-combo• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •✉️ Subscribe to My Newsletters:Abbey’s Kitchen Newsletter 📘 Check out my FREE E-Books:Hunger Crushing Combo™ E-BookProtein 101 E-Book👋 Follow me!Instagram: @abbeyskitchenTikTok: @abbeyskitchenYouTube: @AbbeysKitchenBlog: abbeyskitchen.comBook: The Mindful Glow Cookbook • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 🎧 Don’t forget to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen — and leave us a review! It really helps support the show ❤️ 💬 If you liked this podcast, please like, follow, and leave a review — and let me know who you’d love to hear about next! ⭐ ⭐ ⭐⭐ ⭐ 

You shouldn't skill up for the realities of living. Instead, you should opt out and give your power over to somebody else who can make those decisions for you, which is that kind of like, it's the ultimate princess story. Welcome to another episode, A Bite Back with Abby Sharp, where I dismantle Diet culture rules, call out the charlatans spinning the pseudoscience, and help you achieve food freedom for good. Okay, today's conversation is one I have been obsessively thinking about for years now. as someone who analyzes the shifts in diet and wellness culture in real time. Historically, the concept of good womanhood has been tied to ideas of purity, thinness, modesty, domesticity, and self-sacrifice, where women have been praised for taking up less physical, emotional, and social space. In contrast, many of the more recent flavors of wellness culture

have presented themselves as dramatically more progressive, empowering, healing, and even liberating for women. But regardless of the marketing, the expectation is largely still rooted in the same moral framework. That women are only valuable when they are disciplined, controlled, beautiful, selfless, emotionally regulated, and endlessly working on themselves. From Clean Girl, That Girl, Anti-Aging, hormone balancing, and back to Skinny as the outfit, it's no longer enough to simply exist in a body. Women are expected to curate an entire lifestyle of aspirational self-management. So throughout the evolution of diet and wellness culture, the aesthetic changes, the language changes, but the moral assignment remains.

Joining me today to unpack all of the ways this performance shows. up in wellness culture trends is writer, cultural commentator, and former music industry executive, Amber Horstberg. If you're not already following Amber, you need to get on that stat. Her video essays explore the ways in which media, wellness culture, motherhood, femininity, and online aesthetics shape women's identities and self-worth. So today we'll be unpacking the idea of the good woman through popular trends like tradwifery, soft life, bounce back culture, and the martyrdom of motherhood, and how these trends advantage everyone but the women participating themselves. This is a very rich and informative conversation that I really, really know you're going to love.

But super quickly, if you're not already, please do subscribe to the podcast so that you get notifications on your app whenever a new episode goes live. And please also leave me a five-star review and a comment wherever you're listening. Also, don't forget to check out my best-selling book, The Hunger Cushing Combo Method. I am honestly so proud of this book and the reviews have blown me away. So please do check out the links in the show notes for where to order. All right, friends, let's dive in. Okay, Amber, I am like so excited to chat today.

This is probably one of my most anticipated interviews of the year. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat. You're so welcome. I hope both you can deliver, but we'll try. Oh my gosh. Well, I love your content so much for the folks who are not already following. They absolutely should. And I've so much to talk about.

So I just want to dive right in because, you know, we're talking about femininity, we're talking about performing femininity. This is something like since the birth of patriarchy, really, we've had these expectations around how to perform femininity being a woman. And historically, this performance has been done privately in the home for a husband or for families or for community. But today, since, you know, the dawn of social media, you know, femininity has become much more of a public performance. Now it's like content that we're constantly kind of capturing and putting out there for the world. And I think, you know, one of the most obvious presentations of this online is this kind of tradwife trend that we have seen.

relatively recently in the last five or so years and so you know when you look at the modern trad wife she's usually thin she's beautiful fertile calm you know not aging effortlessly domestic she's making cereal from scratch for her kids and milking her own cows for the children's breakfast you know why do you think this archetype has become so culturally seductive like right now in this time and place there's a real escapist quality to it like where it's beautiful It's like, you know, they're making really interesting recipes that look really beautiful and they wear beautiful clothes and live in beautiful houses. And I mean, a lot of cultural commentators will point to COVID being like a crux for it

because it was, it changed for a lot of women, put the burden of the household and chores and homeschooling and all the responsibility on top of working onto the woman, which then burnt out of a whole lot of people. And so then the idea of like the great rejection of like not having to work at all or like not, you know, being completely like coming out of from a place like being totally over it. I think people will point to that as like why the rise of it. Totally. I don't know.

To me there's also like I think there's like a like almost like a binary of like a good, good mother, bad mother aspect to it. which I think is like what a lot of people, whether it's in tradwife content or something totally different, is looking for answers of like, how do you do it right and be good? And one of the markers of motherhood is like martyrdom or one archetype of motherhood is martyrdom. So like the better you are,

the better you are as a mother is the more that you sacrifice you yourself. And the trad wife is the ultimate of that. It's performing leisure, really, and leisure is aspirational because it means you don't have to work. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, that's what I find so fascinating. Like, as you said, and a lot of these very popular trad wives, Narsmith, ballerina farms, they present their lifestyle

as this like liberation from the hustle culture of feminism. It's returned to nostalgic homemaking, of trying to make their husband's life easier and more comfortable. But the ironic thing is that in reality, these women are also mega entrepreneurs, their influencers, their media brands, and they may also be the primary income generators just based on the success of the performance of this kind of archetype of motherhood. You know, someone like Narra Smith is monetizing the aesthetic and the performance of submission to your husband while very much being kind of financially in control. At least that's kind of

what it would seem, like that's such a cultural paradox. What do you make of that, that contradiction? I see the argument of like the paradox of it being like pretend, you know, the idea that you're pretending to not work, but actually bringing an income through brand deals and however they make money, affiliate revenue brand deals, their own products and stuff. But I think that's very much not the majority of, um, yeah, uh, content. create is. And it's funny, as you're as you're saying this, and I'm absolutely agreeing, like, it almost feels almost like a, like an MLM scam, like, you know, the top dogs are promising this

glamorous lifestyle, which they are, you know, affording because they are making millions of dollars in brand revenues to perform. When those disciples of theirs who are watching and thinking, oh, that's the life that I want. I'm exhausted by hustle culture. I want to raise good, good children. I want to be a good mother. And then they are kind of leaving those previous lives before to, you know, engage in the same kind of lifestyle that they are seeing from their aspirational, you know, their models in this space, these trad wife kind of role models. And they're realizing that it's not so glamorous to necessarily be home. And I want to make it very clear that I am all for women being, you know, staying home as a stay at home mother, if that's what brings them joy. But I am particularly

fascinated by this, you know, over the top performance of what it takes to be a quote unquote good mother. And if you have to produce, you know, milk the cows and make, you know, basically remove yourself from any modern conveniences in order to do so. And I want to kind of speak to an adjacent trend that I would say is hitting a slightly younger demographic, but you might see differently, is this kind of soft life trend, which again, kind of like what we're talking about here, it's emphasizing femininity as being grounded in rest and ease and slow living, not driving yourself into the ground, you know, escaping that grind said. And it's very interesting to me that it kind of claims to reject,

you know, optimization and perfectionism while actually just becoming another form of optimization and perfectionism. You know, can you just so folks like, a lot of people don't always recognize these things when they see them, but can you just talk about like, what does the soft life trend look like on social media or in the content that we're seeing online. Yeah, it's similar in the tradwife style in that it's like a it's a life of leisure kind of thing where it's like a soft life is a slow way of living one that prioritises mental and physical health, which is good. That's a good thing. However, like all social media content, the more extreme versions of that is like on the fringes. That's what makes it more watchable

and popular and also, you know, argue about in the comments and stuff like that. And so the extreme version of the soft life content is, you know, it's a lot of. is like you reject all stresses, including work in exchange for like slower mornings, like a schedule that is filled with, you know, exercise groups, say Pilates, self-care, meals from scratch. Meditation, journaling, candle lights, you know. Yeah, all that kind of stuff. Macha.

Yeah. And self-care in that sense, too, it's often like, hygiene or grooming, I find as well. So I like a lot of like self-care, quote, unquote, is like red light masks and however many steps, skincare routines and like, I don't know, cellular brushing or whatever, like, which is, yeah, dry brushing. Yeah, dry brushing.

And so, and in that, in that regard, it's like linking beauty and beauty standards with, or basic hygiene with self-care, the idea that in order to take care of your physical and mental self, you also have to be beautiful in the pursuit of beauty to do it. So it's more popular with women than men that I've seen. But in order to have a slow life, like the slow life, a life of leisure, you need someone to be paying for that,

which is usually you're in a relationship. And so it promotes the worst version of it promotes giving up your agency and autonomy in order for somebody to pay for that lifestyle for you. The subtext of this, though, to young girls is like the world is too scary, wars, cost of living crisis, competition, it's exhausting. And that like it's too much and ambition is too much. And specifically like women can't cope. therefore you should opt out entirely and have somebody handle it for you, which is fine if you have the right partner, I think, or like, you know, it's obviously it's risky, but, you know, if it's the right partner and it works,

I think the problem with it is that it's that telling women like you don't, you shouldn't skill up for the realities of living. instead you should opt out and give all of that power, give your power over to somebody else who can make those decisions for you, which is that kind of like princess, it's the ultimate princess story, right? It's like someone's going to pluck me out and help me and give me a better life and I don't have to do anything for it.

I just, you know, well, you do, you have to be beautiful and available and flexible and tolerant and patient and all that kind of stuff. And so instead of saying like, you know, you can handle the world is difficult, but you can handle it. You just skill up. You can learn to, you can change jobs. You can learn to negotiate a salary. You can build an emergency fund.

You can practice saying no to people that you don't want to. You can do all of those things. You can practice self-care without trading your future or your autonomy for the fantasy of being taken care of. So I think, I think the easiest way to think about is like soft life is like, before you have kids and trad wife is like after and they're very similar they're like aspirational and beautiful and leisurely one of them is more centered around family and like type of content you're watching is centered more around family and um child rearing mostly young children too like babies

toddlers young kids and then soft life is like almost before before that courting dating um that kind of stuff yep yeah it's very damsel and distress um And, you know, as you were talking about this, I was reminded of this Instagram post that I saw where a woman was kind of had a photo of herself at a very high-end restaurant, assumedly, with a very large diamond on her finger. And essentially, the POV was, you know, like, my boyfriend tells me what I'm allowed to eat, but that's okay because like, look what I got, you know, like kind of that. And so, like, yes, I think that that's a dangerous message for young girls to be consuming every single day because it puts us at risk of, you know, potentially abusive situations and tolering those, you know, bad relationships because we have given up our autonomy, our skills, our ambitions. and therefore like our worth is only, you know, dependent on our looks. And I see this often, you know, this low life content overlapping heavily with a lot of kind of morally loaded diet and wellness culture.

So there's like a lot of talk about natural hormone balancing and gut healing and anti-inflammatory eating and this appeal to nature's fallacy. So we're like, you know, traditional diet culture might say eat less. and wellness culture might say, eat clean, the slow life flavor of these cultures is kind of like eat intentionally, like to, you know, to kind of preserve your body, your mind for this other person who is kind of taking care of the quote unquote hard things. And so, you know, at the end of the day, we're still taught to be monitoring our food and our bodies constantly just through slightly different performance. And what's kind of interesting is that a lot of the messaging and the branding

of these trends is centered in simplicity. But it's shockingly expensive and complicated to maintain these lifestyles. He's like 20-step skincare routines and the cryo chambers and the red light therapy. And so the messages, women who are leaning on these modern conveniences are taking the quote-unquote, you know, easy way out. And I think that maps on to what we were talking about earlier, but the martyrdom of motherhood. So, and I, I wanted to speak to definitely more of that because I think that's a reoccurring theme here. So speaking of that martyrdom of motherhood, you know, I'm often very interested but triggered as a mom myself by this common phrase of, oh, you let yourself go.

You know, especially we're seeing a lot of that right now because we're in this kind of like longevity, anti-aging era that were in optimization of our bodies and minds. But that letting yourself go phrase only ever really applies to women, right? Like we don't, men age gracefully, right? Women let themselves go, especially once they become moms and there's this expectation that's not new, that we should just be like bouncing back the moment that we pop the baby out, right? So women are just put into this impossible bind where we're expected to be selfless enough to sacrifice our body to our children but then disciplined enough to get the old body back immediately. Can you kind of tell us about any kind of presentations of this bounce back culture or the kind

of letting yourself go narrative or even just the maternal martyrdom that we see online? Because oftentimes I don't think we even clock that this may be kind of die culture. It has just been so ingrained in us that this is what you do. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I remember when I was pregnant, I had shocking first trimester nausea. And so I was looking for ways to help that, help me out. And so I was all like doing, I was doing a lot of yoga in the beginning, just trying to like get rid of the nausea. And so I would search YouTube for first trimester pregnancy, nausea or whatever keywords. And then almost immediately I started getting ads by usually, usually regular creators who were selling programs which were like, you know, bump only pregnancies,

which is, yeah, awful. Obviously, like, bump only pregnancy. Yeah, so like, what is that? The idea that, like, when you get pregnant, you will only gain weight in your front, so you'll have like a perfect round bump. And with the idea that, like, you know, that can be styled in a perfect way, which obviously, I mean, you know, more than anybody else is like an impossible feat. but the difference is like getting your body back versus like recovering from childbirth is

two totally different messages right like that when you're talking about recovering from child birth you're talking about like your pelvic floor strength and any any kind of physical trauma that you've gone through in the birth a recovery in that regard getting your body back promises or gives you the idea that you need to erase all signs of of childbirth, that like you go back, like, when your body has physically changed and morphs, your hips have moved in different directions. You know, like, your body has changed afterwards. The idea that you have to go back to being like someone who hasn't given birth before. It's like erase signs of childbirth, but change your entire life to be centered around

your children. Yeah, and also another, like, massive pressure to add on to, like, say, postpartum woman to be like, okay, he is now a child, learn how to keep this thing alive, and then also learn how your new body works and recover, but also lose all the weight that you put on and more, or however much you want. Like, you know, it's just like it's such an unfair expectation of what you should be doing in the fourth trimester, I believe. Truly, truly. Yeah. And I mean, I often think about just how much of our cognitive bandwidth is just consumed by managing our bodies and our appetite and our appearance and our desirability to others. How do these kind of like diet culture and wellness culture expectations serve as like a method of control, like socially, culturally, politically? Have you read the beauty myth by Naomi Wolf?

It came out of the 90s. Excellent. Yeah. Yes, excellent book. It's one of those books that when I read it, I was like, oh my God. And like, granted, a lot of the, I think some of the research since she wrote it in the 90s has been debunked. But the basic premise of it is still holds up, in my opinion, which is like the beauty standard that we hold women to keep women broke, starving and too distracted to compete properly. And I just, I so believe that.

Like if you have ever tried to lose weight or like tried to be on a diet or have had extreme dieting or eating disorders, you know it's all consuming. Like it undermines yourself confidence. So you, therefore you can't trust yourself in any decisions that you make or any risk taking. Like you just, you've got no confidence. So you can't back yourself in anything. It keeps you physically starving. So you're too scatty to concentrate on anything. I don't know that there's like any grandmaster plan.

by any particular one government or whatever. But I think there's a lot of people who benefit from diet culture, like whether that's like creators online who are incentivised by audience growth or money or if it's actual like companies and all that kind of stuff. But I've listened to a couple of podcasts recently by prominent figures within diet and wellness culture of the 2010s, like Instagram 2010s, where it was like, buy my program, by my, by my, by my this of Instagram and made a lot of money and made a big followings and then are dealing with the, um, the consequences of

putting out some of those messages and some of those like really restrictive, um, programs and stuff. And I, I don't think, when you listen to these people talk and they, you know, they can, they're now confronted with, um, you know, some of the people that they, people that took their advice and got quite sick from it or they themselves fell into really unhealthy patterns themselves and they're kind of having a reckoning now and when you listen to them talk they themselves don't know that they're incentivised like they were just you know everything's happening so fast and they're making money and they're growing their audiences and people are having saying really glowing things about them and stuff and so this is the whole the premise of the beauty

myth which is like there's a beauty standard it's so enticing to people that that you start to pursue it, but the cost of maintaining it is so detrimental to what you, your actual functioning in, and undermines what you really want to do and other goals. And that's why I started making the videos that I make because I found there's a lot of like,

there's a lot of power in reading about women's stories that aren't based around their body at all. Like when you start to read stories of women that are tied to, rebellion or ambition, creativity, resilience, the pursuit of a perfect body starts to become less important when you're like, oh, I actually want to do that. Like, I want to create this art or like this idea or challenge this thing and I'm going to go after it. That's, that's very attractive. And that alone takes bravery to basically reject the status quo model of you know, we've been talking about tradwives, we've been talking about soft lives, which are soft life,

which is obviously an extreme presentation of these kinds of like wellness culture, you know, expectations of womanhood, a good woman, a good mother. But the underlying, you know, the underlying ideas remain the same. And of course they are grounded in the expectations around our bodies and our beauty and our youth. But, you know, as you spoke to earlier, like, I also suffer from an eating disorder. I, you know, a very kind of very specific experience that I had was like I was a professional singer. And I, when I was going through my eating disorder, I actually stopped singing. I felt incapable of opening my mouth to sing a single note. And that was physically, like, I did not have the energy, but more so it was my self-confidence had shrunk. I was used to being on that stage,

a big voice, small girl, and I became like shrunk to like a like to a shell of myself who just felt like I was not worth doing anything. So, you know, like a hungry woman, hungry for food, rest, ambition, power, you know, like if we're hungry, we're culturally threatening. So when we keep women small and underfed, it like we simply just have less energy and less confidence to question the systems that disadvantage us. And so like these these women that you speak about who have ambition, who are like really reclaiming that their creativity and their purpose, you kind of have to reject the whole package of this, this expectation that we place on women. doesn't mean you don't care what you look like, you know, we're, we all like, you know,

there's, we can still want to, you know, look our best for ourselves and things like that. But we, we have to kind of notice it and then start to question it and dismantle it a little bit in order to get these things to work for us as opposed to really like against us and for everybody else's benefit. Yeah. Um, I found, I found like rejecting it to, for me personally, too difficult. So like it was like the whole, like I tried doing the whole like just positive self-talk and you know, if you have a negative thought, just think the opposite. And I can intellectualize it and I can

try to do it, but it just didn't work. And so, but what I found was like when you fill up, if your brain or your attention has only got so much bandwidth that if you like fill it up with other stuff than the other the obsession or the pursuit of a perfect body starts to become less important because yeah there's yeah it's like adding adding hobbies rather than saying no don't do that like don't do think that you can be like yeah you can still think that but you're going to be less interested in thinking about that when you know about this story over here that's funny because that's that's that's that's the psychology of you know my signature like hunger crush and commo method where we think about we have to think about adding not taking away because as

soon as you think i can't have that i don't want to do that don't think that what are you going to do you're going to think about it as you say like don't think about the white elephant you're going to think about the white elephant so um i think that that's exactly the mentality like fill your brain and your world with things that actually fill your cup with with things that that spark your imagination and your creativity and passion and joy and it just will naturally edge out the space in your life for these things that are not actually serving you like the obsession with food and diet and body and you know your self-worth being kind of wrapped up in this idea that you didn't set for yourself so I think that's a really great way to for our listeners to try to reprogram without

it feeling like this impossible endeavor that like oh yeah you're just going to not think about these things ever again, which is just not the case in the world that we live in. Thank you so much, Amber, for those who are not already following, where can they find your content? Yeah, sure. I'm on Instagram, TikTok and Substack. Just my name, Amber Horsbrough, underscores at the end. And right now I'm trying to rewrite millennial music, millennial pop music by women, talking about the resilience and rebellion, rebellion in pop music. so and rewriting some of the stories around ageism and um slat shaming and body shaming that we grew up on to uh see these women's artistry and genius and resilience and creativity that's what i'm doing

on the internet and my own i love it amazing so everybody else please do check that out um and thanks again my pleasure oh i could chat with amber all day and honestly one thing that i'm often left wrestling with in conversations like this is how to talk about agency honestly. Because women can genuinely enjoy beauty, motherhood, homemaking, wellness, fitness, makeup, cooking, softness, et cetera. I know I do, but the problem isn't making sourdough from scratch every week. The problem is that we often aren't interrogating our quote unquote desires to determine if these are entirely personal or if they're reflection of social conditioning. Choices never exist in a vacuum. We make choices inside systems that constantly reward certain versions of femininity over others.

Consider the woman who is thin but effortless, nurturing but not needy, ambitious but not threatening, disciplined but still beautiful, maternal but unchanged by motherhood. That woman, gets rewarded and seen as more valuable, respectable, and desirable. And I think sometimes feminism gets flattened into this idea that any choice a woman makes is automatically empowering simply because she made it. But then that can often ignore the social, economic, and cultural pressures that shape these choices in the first place. And honestly, that's why these conversations around tradwives, wellness culture, soft life aesthetics, bounce back culture, all of it feel so emotionally charged. Because underneath the aesthetics, what we're really talking about is female worth. We're

talking about who gets rewarded and protected and admired, algorithmically amplified, and culturally validated. And so for me, liberation isn't about policing women or shaming women for participating in these systems because we all do to some extent. Liberation is being able to question why womanhood still feels so tied to performance. Why we are still expected to curate ourselves into acceptability. Why our bodies, our appetites, our aging, our emotions, and our ambitions are still feeling so publicly evaluated. The issue isn't about conforming to the systems that reward quote quote good womanhood. The issue is our inability to see that the systems are even there. And honestly, I could talk about this all day long, so I'll have to do a follow-up episode

with some more thoughts in the future. But if you enjoy this episode, I would really, really appreciate if you would leave me a comment, subscribe to bite back, and share this episode with a friend as it really does help me get the word out. Signing off with Science and Sass, I'm Abby Sharp. Thanks for listening.