Panic World - How trad wives took over the internet — from 4chan to TikTok

Episode Date: May 6, 2026

Where did the "tradwife" trend come from — you know, aside from the 1950s — and why has it become increasingly popular online? Today, we’re talking about not just how men aren’t doing that well, but maybe women aren’t either. This question, of course, is because the (usually) alt-right tradwives supporters have a new girlboss, and it’s Erika Kirk.Journalist Liz Plank joins us to break down the resurgence of these regressive ideas about where women belong and how they should conduct themselves, the trend’s origins (again, aside from in the ‘50s), and why the #tradlife is appealing to people now. Our guest Liz Plank is a journalist, podcaster, and author. She hosts the Boy Problems podcast wherever your listen (or watch on YouTube), the Airplane Mode newsletter, and you can follow her work more broadly at https://www.elizabethplank.com/ or @feministabulous everywhere. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Friends, hello. My name is Mike Regneta. I'm the host of a podcast called NeverPost, which is about the internet. Or really, it's about the world and why the world is the way that it is because of the internet. We ask big questions like, why do disgraced politicians join cameo? Why is it scary and satisfying to block someone? Would you ever create an AI voice clone of a deceased loved one in a show that you don't need to be terminally online to enjoy? But it doesn't hurt. NeverPost is at never poe.st and wherever you find podcasts. In recent months, it seems that Erica Kirk has been everywhere but at home. Today, we are investigating how tradwives move from Nazi fantasies to a performance,

conservative women everywhere are doing. Have you ever had the urge to drop out of society and work on a farm and then post clips if that's TikTok? Is that something you dream about? I dream about the farm part. I don't think I dream about the posting the farm, because I feel like that's, I would go against the farm part. The fun part of the farm part,

which is, you know, being, like, completely disconnected from the world that we're in. And I think having to, like, performatively post would take the fun out of it. Like all men with a beard, I have fantasized about going to the woods to eventually die alone there. And then the idea of having to... Is that the dream? Is that what men want? Yes. All men want... If a man gets stressed enough, he'll just start fantasizing about dying anonymously in the woods somewhere.

It's a thing. Like a dog. Oh, okay. Like a dog, like a dog or like an old cat. Yeah. Our dance was like, hey, women want this too. So at least in our listenership, they are. Oh, yeah.

Apparently our women listeners also want it. Interesting. That's not a fantasy for me. I do have the farm fantasy, but it does. Yeah, I'm too codependent. What's the satisfaction for men of dying alone instead of dying with with someone like the couple in the Titanic holding hands? Like, why is doing it alone better? You know, I've never really like interrogated it.

It's just a feeling. Like your comparison to an old dog or like a cat or something. Like I just, I'm drawn to the woods to disappear there. Like the guy from Into the Wild. Yeah. You know, that's the dream. Got it. But as you said, the act of posting about it ruins the fantasy.

I guess it does. It does. And that is what we're going to be interrogating today. We're going to be interrogating the desire to drop out of society and then, of course, post about it. And we're going to try to figure out, is it connected to a large-scale fascist takeover of America? This is what we're talking about today. I'm Panic World. My name is Ryan Broderick. With me, as always, is my trad wife, Grant Irving, my lovely producer. And this is a show about how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and eventually reality. And yeah,

with disturbing frequency, regressive ideas about where women belong is becoming increasingly mainstream. And we're going to try to figure out where those ideas are coming from and how they took over the internet and joining us today is the host of boy problems Liz Plank I've been a fan of yours for a very long time welcome to the show thank you for having me I the feeling is mutual before we talk about women and we're going to be talking about women a lot today but like do you think men are okay to like like how how would you compare how would you compare like the genders right who's doing worse who's doing worse yeah I that's a good question I do think men are are faring worse but I don't think that I think I think

that women are better at coping. I think women and men both are feeling like crap. I think women are better at coping with it. I think that if any, we've learned anything from the Manosphere documentary and sort of the last 10 years of the internet. It's that like there's a lot of of male suffering that can be monetized. Yes. Women tend to internalize pain and men tend to externalize it. And so, No, I think men are acting out more than women, but I think women are really sad, too. You know, there's all this, you know, talk about the loneliness crisis. I really, women are really lonely too. We're just not going out and like shooting like up like massage parlors.

Right. No, yeah, I was going to say the mass violence would be the difference there. Yes, it's less visible. Like a lot of things that women do, you know, a lot of it is invisible. The labor, the suffering. The hidden emotional labor of not. killing everybody. But I do.

Okay. I think about this. I've been thinking about this really a lot lately. I don't know when this episode is coming out so you can cut it. But the whole Taylor, it's Taylor Frankie Paul. She has like three first names. Yes, yes. And I'm not familiar at all with, unfortunately, the, well, I've watched like one episode

of the Mormon wives. They sound really fun and entertaining. But, you know, the whole thing about her throwing a chair at a guy. And I'm like, I feel like it's a miracle that, and not even a miracle. It's actually unsettling that we don't throw more chairs at men. Like, I think that's actually on us, you know, and requires some thinking because I think that we're not doing that enough. Like, it is weird. It is.

I, you know, barring anything we eventually learn about the Mormon wife lady, yes, I would agree with you that women probably could throw chairs at men more often. And that's what we're going to be talking about today, which is sort of the modern evolution of this very, very lucrative subculture, particularly in the right wing, called trad wives. And I want to start by asking you, how would you define a trad wife? What comes to mind? I mean, what comes to mind is a very like 1950s, you know, a sort of version of what being a woman is. It's a woman who is very domestic, who's very docile, who focuses on traditional, you know, roles that we sort of should, you know, tend to assume or sort of tend to assign to women,

which is taking care of the kids, taking care of the home, making a lot of muffins and making a man, you know, feel like he's a man by having absolutely no sort of like emotions or thoughts that would challenge his own view of being a man. I think actually tried wives are like a lot about making men feel feel better. You know, so our research actually backs it up and we're going to get to where the term comes from in just a second. I wanted to start with this. Yeah, we were actually surprised.

But let's start with this CNN segment about Erica Kirk because I think that she's probably the most kind of visible of this group right now. Oh, yeah. She's in the home all the time. She's always, we never see her. She's at the family farm. and we never hear about her. She's always barefoot in the kitchen.

She's not in some sort of WWE Thunderdome shooting Charlie's casket into space or some shit. No. So, okay, so she says to CNN, I love submitting to Charlie because he's a phenomenal leader. I mean, clearly he had the larger forehead of the family, so you sort of, you know, you follow him. He's got a big head.

And so she says, as a woman, you are meant to be the guardian of your home to be the helpmate of your husband, be that biblical wife you are supposed to be for him, an honor the order that God had created marriage to be in. When I met Charlie, that was it. I could care less about the career. Well, he's gone now and she really cares about the career.

So that does seem to back that up. But that's like the last Pokemon evolution of this movement. Erica Kirk is performing a girl boss, trad wife. But let's talk about how we got here before we unpack how confusing that is. Yeah, well, that's fascinating. If I had to ask you, like, when the concept, concept of a trad wife started, like in the modern context.

How old do you think this idea is? Because this is a, this surprised us a lot. Like, how far back do you think this stuff goes? I learned this recently on Amanda Montel. She came on my podcast sort of surprised me in the way that she explained where the term originated, which is like 4chan. It is basically like the manosphere before we sort of had a term for it that came up with that term as a way of sort of mock women and degrade them.

And then it was like turned into a positive, I guess. Right. That's sort of the origin story as I understand it. But maybe you have a different. So searching on X these days is kind of tough, but our researcher added went pretty deep. And he thinks he found the first use of the word tradwife on Twitter. It was May 2016. Oh.

And it was an account named Paraxial underscore Logic who was writing a Mother's Day post to his wife, I guess, whose name is a purposeful wife. And this guy writes, Happy Mother's Day to Alia, our dear lady, best to you and your family. So maybe it's not his wife. I actually have no idea what this means. But anyways, he then uses the hashtags, hashtag trad wife,

hashtag trad life, hashtag white girls are magic. Wow. Which would have been a response to the black girls are magic. That last one. Yeah, so this was from the jump associated with white supremacy. So this is what this account looks like. It's private now, but these are older posts. And it was very active mid-2010s.

They identified as a church of Latter-day Saints, a trad wife. They identified as Alt-Right. They are also posting like a bunch of Nordic like traditional, you know, clothing and stuff. And yeah, it was, it was, I'm not even totally clear this is a real person, you know, like this was back in those days where you're just making up kind of like white women to say racist shit before you could just find white women to say white racist shit. The 4-10 guys used to make them. So it, uh, isn't very common still in 2016, but then in 2017, uh, there is something called the white baby challenge. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you remember this? Yeah, yeah. Well, I remember

reading about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, a wife with a purpose, uh, basically, starts the white baby challenge where like you're going to have white children and uh it was this weird kind of mix of far right nordic fetishism and Mormonism and a like clearly going against like whatever was happening on black Twitter at the time and then in august 2017 this woman uh is invited to speak at the unite the right rally in charlottesville and uh allegedly declines writing certainly a women's perspective is important and i plan to speak on the importance of families, but this event was quickly becoming something more, something bigger, something for the leaders of the movement, not for a mom of six children,

which definitely, you know, sounds like this is a real person. This is all real. They killed a white woman at that rally. They did. So she had a good, maybe she, yeah, she had a good premonition. Maybe. But, yeah, it's really heating up in 2017. Reporter Will Somer writes at the time.

So basically, far right guys are obsessed with telling the women on the scene to get married and have kids, everybody's hunting for a hashtag tradwife. And this is the beginning. And what's really fascinating, this is a bit of data science here. In 2014, the number one search term on Pornhub was lesbian. In 2015, as Tadwife started to enter

the consciousness, stepmom became number one. Really fascinating, psychosexual kind of peer into the world. Wasn't there also, and forgive me, I don't remember the term, but there's a term for a certain kind of porn that was

also sort of trending, but this was more around 2020, so maybe it was after that stepmom moment, where it was a kind of porn that is, that like happens within the home where like a woman is literally in the middle of a domestic chore and the man starts having sex with her while she's doing the tour. Oh, free use? What's that called? Free use. I think it's called free use is what you're describing.

Yeah. Didn't that also then become really popular? And then some people say that it was like an extension of tradwife, but also an expression of the pandemic and the fact that like a lot, we were all sort of indoors. I mean, many of us were indoors. So you've stepped into a digression that I have a lot of thoughts on because I have seen this as well. I've seen this this argument as well. I've had a theory for many years, though, that the incest stuff, the free use stuff, the milf stuff is all actually an expression of a very, very like, limited housing market.

Right. And so, like, people, like, can't own their own homes anymore. So even our sexual fantasies reflect back that you still live at home. So there was a New York Times piece that came out, I think a few days ago. And they, you know, published it on or, you know, did a carousel on Instagram. And it was like, millennials, you know, love living with roommates. And, you know, this resurgence of like, and wasn't it, it wasn't even just roommates. It was like, people are living with couples.

Like, couples are living. with a third. Yes, couples are getting a roommate. That's right. Yeah. Everyone in the comments was like, it's called a housing crisis. Like, are you freaking joking me? So, yeah, that's super interesting that then it would affect.

I mean, it's affecting us in so many different ways. And yeah, it's really funny to see them or see all the theories except the one that's very obvious, which is like we're in a fucking housing crisis. Right. Yeah. People aren't gooning to free use porn because they're fascists. They're doing it because they can't afford. Although maybe the housing market is.

exacerbating the rise of fashion. Yeah. I think that's possible. But isn't it also that like we no longer have, we no longer go to work. There's no places to go. There's like people don't like there's like barista porn. Right. You don't order a plumber to come over.

Yeah. Like that's it. Exactly. It's like it has to suddenly be your stepmom who's really hot. Like it's like women. Because you have no larger network of social stuff. Yeah. So in the late 2010s, the back half the, the day,

decade. The term trad wife is kind of bouncing around the internet. It doesn't get true mainstream attention until the New York Times covers it. And they open with this anecdote about a woman who is much happier being a stay-at-home mom. And it reads, I always wanted children that looked like me, blonde hair, blue-eyed babies, but I kind of had to say it under my breath. The digital far right frequently called the alt-right is largely regarded as a man-only space. The movement shares DNA with so-called incels, and it is defined in part by its misogyny and anti-feminist, anti-woman language. But some members of the alt-right have been weighing whether the absence of women from their movement is a problem.

Nationalist Marcus Follin says, you might not like that women have the right to vote. You might not like that anyone has the right to vote, Mr. Follon conceded. But it's about winning a long-term political victory. And that's, I think, the real kind of breakthrough is that like when the whole alt-reliven right thing fizzles around 2018, the larger far right ecosystem is like we need a way to bring women in. And what's fascinating is like it starts to look exactly like the way ISIS treated women. A friend of mine for years was covering like the Tumblr blogs of ISIS brides that were virtually identical. ISIS. Okay. I thought ISIS. Okay. Got it. So like in the early 2010s, all these women were

flying and young girls were flying from Europe and they would go to Syria and they'd join ISIS. and they marry ISIS members. And then they would start blogging on Tumblr. And there's like these incredible photoshopps of like Disney princesses wearing hijabs. And like life in the day of an ISIS bride posts with hashtags. Yeah. And it's it's it's it was virtually identical to like what the tradwives start to do in the later part of the first Trump administration.

So we took it from the ISIS, which totally makes sense. It's a circle. Or just like yeah. I mean all these all these movements treat women the same way, which is like you're the propagandist. You know, you've got to bring other women. And so then author Annie Kelly, who's great. Anyone listening, definitely check out her stuff, makes the argument about like why the trad wife stuff would be so appealing to women. And Kelly writes, female fears of objectification and sexual violence remain as potent as ever.

The trad wife subculture exploits them by blaming modernity for such phenomena and then offers chastity, marriage, and motherhood as an escape. One such YouTube commentator, a teenager, told her audience, traditionalism does what feminism is supposed to do in preventing women from being made into sexual objects and treated like a horror. Trad wives may seem like a lunatic fringe at the present, but they may not stay one for long. And this was like, yeah, very right. Very, yeah, yeah, very, very right.

Yeah. But also, I'm hung up on the term teenager. So, because this kind of, it's a teenage blogger. Did I understand that correctly? Who said that? She's like a, yeah, it's a teenage YouTuber, basically. Yeah, which is, which is part of this other. theory on the internet right now, which is like everyone's 12. Have you heard that theory?

It's like, well, you look at the Manosphere doc. It is, or who's that guy who interviews all of them, who's South Asian, I think he's South Asian. He's in a studio with a one of those race cars in the back that's definitely like a green screen. Do you guys know what I'm talking about? Okay, you have no idea. So I don't know what you're tough. He interviews a lot of these, these Manusphere guys. He interviewed the guy from the Manusphere doc who's like, you know, know, says that women have never invented anything like that guy. And the set of the interview is like what a 12-year-old boy's version of being a man looks like.

And a lot of people have been using the Simpsons meme of net. I think it's Ned Flanders with his little like race car bed, but not, not Net Flanders. Oh my God. Bart's friend's dad. Yeah, yeah. Millhouse's dad has a race car bed. I think he gets a divorce and maybe gets a race car bed. I don't know what I don't remember.

And so people are like, this is the energy that it's giving. Like, like a 12 year old boy wants a race car bed and these men are sort of using literally like that level of intellect in order to sort of like, yeah, conjure this ideal of masculinity that like boys would want. And I think that on both sides, that's what's happening. You know, like when I was, yeah, 12 years old or maybe a little bit younger, I yeah, I played with my easy bake oven that's the only thing I fucking cared about like my parents were like you need to get a fucking life I was like that's all I could talk about and I wanted babies to like you

know dolls to play with like that's what you know yeah an eight year old girl's version of being a woman is and and then what we're seeing on the manosphere is like is like the same it's like a mirror of that right yeah just like on the side of the manosphere the people who are at the helm of these like movements who are monetizing them are not even uh living the life that they are claiming is this ideal, right? And it's the same thing with women. I mean, you brought up Erica Kirk, who's like, okay, so she's like the trad wife. We're supposed to, you know, look up to Candace Owens, who has like, you know, like a full-time.

I think Candace Owens is a true trad wife, though. She's real ride or die for Charlie Kirk. Like, I love their life. You do. Yeah, yeah. It's inspiring. It's for sure. I, yeah, I want to, I want to be just like her.

Most people will go their whole lives looking for a love like Candice Owens and Charlie Kirk's, you know? that that that yeah she's still talking to him in the astral plan right now um yeah but we're going to talk about after the break how trad wives go from this like fringe Nazi like kind of troll to a full-on cultural movement of course thanks to tick-tock and also surprisingly tumbler and we're going to do that right after work from our sponsors turning point USA um they want to talk to you or kids about stuff yeah let's look at this tweet from 2018 here i got it right here um and i would love for you to read it uh let me pull it up yeah so this is this was an early kind of tradwife tweet from deplorable wife

on twitter nice okay so you're asking me to read it yeah yeah you know you've sent the message to your family that you want to be a trad wife when your birthday gifts consist of of kitchen supplies, cleaning supplies, home decor and dresses. Cry laugh emoji. Okay, I can't speak for the dresses part, but this to me feels like you're gross and your family's trying to tell you. Yeah, it's like getting gum.

You know, when someone keeps offering you gum all the time, you're like, am I, do I have bad breath? That's exactly right. Yeah, I don't know anyone who's happy about getting cleaning supplies. I mean, except like Monica from friends, like, like, I just, it is an immediate insult. And also like boring. Like why would I can you just buy Windex?

Very boring. This person describes himself in their Twitter bio as proud to be a white American Christian. Hashtag trad life. Hashtag feminism is cancer. Hashtag maga. And then we have this person who is another trad wife posting around the same time. This is 2018 in our story. Just to orient our listeners.

And this is Midwest Tradwife or Samantha. who writes first time making banana bread. It looks like kind of boring banana bread. Then they write, I'm pretty excited. Then hashtag trad life. Hashtag trad wife. Hashtag Sunday, fun day. Of course, the bio also says pro-medical freedom, informed choice, breastfeeding advocate,

homeschool, stay-at-home wife. Just to sort of summarize, like, the alt-right appears after Trump becomes president. They're all weird men. They're trying to figure out ways to get women interested in their movement. They start, like, creating kind of like aspirational. for women, I think oftentimes using bots, making it explicitly racist. Then they actually seem to get some women on board. And then through there, you start to get like the new agey home, the, um, was it school

choice movement? Yeah. You get anti-VAC stuff down the line. You get homeschool. You get all of that. That's all starting because like they've basically like connected themselves over into Instagram. That's how I sort of see.

Mm-hmm. And you, and that's when you start to see like a lot. more of these like hashtags spinning around. And what's really interesting is I had sort of assumed that the cottage core stuff was before all of this. And it was not. Oh. Yeah.

Our managing editor Kate's Holderness, who used to work at Tumblr, did some digging around Tumblr not using any sort of proprietary information just to say she just knows the website really well. And she discovered that the first cottage core post on was on Tumblr in 20, which would have been right around the same time all this is happening and it's from a username honey goblin who writes cottage core is jam honey insects fruit wooden spoons milkmaids stone and wood ceramics moss and mud goats and lambs picnic baskets and bread and then a bunch of hashtags and then the first comment i got it you have it they've changed the be like i must create something or i will kill myself cool cool um and then it gets kind of recognized as an official aesthetic. There's an aesthetics wiki in June of 2018. And then in August of 2018, you get the Cottage Corps subreddit.

And so to be clear, like, this is not at the current point in our story connected to all this stuff. But it is fascinating that it's happening around the same time. Like, it's strange to me that you have one part of the internet going like, we all want to be barefoot and pregnant, Tradwives. And then you have this other part of the internet saying, we all want to go like eat moss out in the woods or whatever. Yeah. Do witchy stuff. And then they collide basically in 2020 during the pandemic. Right around that time is when the internet got really shitty, right? Like I think there's this whole, you know, sort of trending conversation that's been going on for maybe like a couple of months about 2016, you know, 2016 being like the last good year. And this sort of idea that

It was like the golden age and, you know, and yeah, infinite scrolling. People don't remember. I mean, that's how I don't know how old you guys are, but like infinite scrolling is a new, pretty new modern invention. Like I remember a social media that didn't like where you were on it and then you were done, right? And so then you could move on. You'd be like, oh, I've seen everything. Bye.

I'm going to go outside now. And so I also, you know, weirdly enough, it's almost like that part of the internet that you're describing, you know, trad, all right. I mean, it's pretty negative, right? Like, even if it's,

even if it's, I don't know, helpful, quote unquote, to some of these men that were lost or lonely, it still was like solving their problems and a really sort of like, it was not like helping them be better people

or like feel better about their lives. Then that cottage core thing almost feels like a response, you know, to like wanting to go offline and sort of, I mean, it's off the grid. All of it feels like a big coping mechanism

for the world. getting like really weird and the internet being you know a place that sort of you know in a way was was a way to escape you know in the way that yeah tv and movies are a way to escape your life or even reading like now the internet is is where yeah where when you go like you feel worse yeah i think it also speaks to the insidiousness of a lot of this stuff where it does become very hard to separate and that that gets and it's gotten harder over time you know in 2020 we found an article a tradwife written in this publication, Evie, which I have never heard of. What's the big tradwife magazine?

Is it the big tradwife magazine? It is. I've interviewed the founder. I was at a panel like a couple months ago in L.A. and they plumped me right between, yeah, the founder of a Tradwife magazine and then like an academic lesbian feminist. Like it was just like, go. I felt like Andy Cohen at like a like a Housewives reunion. I was like, oh, yeah. But so, yeah, she, Evie's like, yeah, a very, very big public. I don't even think they would identify that way, but yeah.

They see the opportunity that COVID has provided in April 2020. They publish a story titled, Here's Why I Decided to Become a hashtag Tradwife. This is an expert. This is an excerpt I'd like to read to you and sort of get your thoughts on. So it reads, truth is many people are tired of the constant pressure to feel fulfilled by having it all. While the career model works for most in this day, and age. Many don't want to run on the career treadmill and would rather be a housewife and mother, but these women are told that this isn't enough to want in life and are looked down upon by

the mainstream culture and media. For example, an Australian mother posted on Facebook about how she felt proud of doing housework and preparing breakfast for her husband and children only to be slammed by journalists on national TV. Why do feminists or the mainstream media depreciate housewives as being extremists or lazy or aggressive if feminist truly cared about all women's rights and empowerment, shouldn't they also be cheering on women who choose a life outside the boardroom? Yeah, I mean, that's like a classic straw. Like, you know, like, why do feminists hate, you know, stay-at-home wives? And you're like, show me Jessica Valenti post about how, you know, it's wrong to make banana bread.

Like I many of these quote-unquote feminists are, yeah, mothers themselves. And yeah, maybe if this was like, I don't know, the 1970s and like, I don't know what Andrew Dorgan would have said about tried wives, but maybe she was critical of motherhood. Like, it's just not a take. It's not a modern take that you'll hear, you know, any kind of mainstream feminist have. I mean, women on the right are told a lot of stuff. And what I've found when you start having conversations with them is like,

or even with Brittany, like we're friends. Like once we started talking, realized, oh, we have all these things in common. And I don't look down on you for being proud to be a mother. Like, I want to be a mother. There's money to be made by making people angry. And particularly, I guess, making women angry. What has become very apparent to me now? Because I'm watching a lot of people.

We're recording this in the midst of, gosh, I think this is probably day seven or eight of our national discourse about Lindy West's Thruple. Oh, my God. And I'm watching a lot of people talk about mid-2000s in 2010 blogging culture, talking a lot about Jezebel. And like, you know, I had an RSS reader up and running with my favorite blogs in it since I was like a freshman in college. I was reading all of those sites as they became bigger and bigger. And it's fascinating to watch young people, but also just like non-media people, I suppose, misremember that era so explicitly. And I have to imagine that it's like not totally their fault in a way.

Like because of the way everything moved online and conversation moved onto the internet in the 2010s and not everyone moved with it immediately, I'm just realizing that there are massive gaps. in American culture that like a large chunk of people don't totally understand because it was happening on Twitter and no one was on Twitter in 2015. Yeah. Well, how do you think it is misremembered? I saw this one take that like Lindy West and all the Jezebel writers are the reason why Roe v. Wade was repealed in 2022 and they were spending all their time doing dumb shit and being frivolous.

And I'm like, they were like one of the. the most aggressive newsrooms in the country in like the 2010s. And and I have to imagine that like it's like a purple monkey dishwasher thing. Because I even like clicked on some of these accounts being like, okay, are you just like a right winger that's like being up to some purpose? And like, no, these were like chapel rhone stands being like, oh, millennial feminists like threw us all under the bus. And it's like yeah, because you were like 12 and you didn't understand what was going on.

And I think like a large chunk of the population probably saw social progress happening. in visible ways and not really understanding why, like, what conversations led to that. Oh, my God. Yeah. Who was involved. Yeah, I have to imagine that's the case. And all of this gets like supercharged after the pandemic because now, now a huge chunk of the country is on the internet.

And that's when these platforms start to like really latch on to the trad wife thing. And the cut interviewed reporter Max Reed about like the trad wife trend in 2003. And he had kind of an interesting take on it. which was Reed said it's neither bait nor authentic. It's just audience strategy. Social networks are specifically designed to engage people in exactly this way through the performance of political and social identity, putting that together as a lifestyle that you show over the course of multiple videos.

It's perfect, which I think is largely true. Like it's performative. You know, it becomes far more performative after COVID. Yes. Social media, look, it was always performance. like it was performative right like we we we posted good brunch picks like if you made a shitty you know or if you tried to do a Pinterest recipe and it came out looking fucking bad like you didn't post it but but now we're kind of like all avatars of ourselves and in a way that back then your real life

was more important than your digital life your digital life was was i mean in my case and it seems like yours like full and and interesting but it didn't it was still separate and and now I truly do think that who you are online is is more important than who you are in in real life and so yeah we were I'm not surprised to see yeah these I mean what you're describing is like like caricatures I mean I saw Andrew Tate talk yesterday he's like sitting alone in some fucking boat and what did he yeah he was like men who have wives are gay He was like, if you don't have multiple baby mamas, you're gay. Like any guy who posts about his wife on social media is gay.

And the proof is, think about guys in elementary school. Again, who is he talking to? The guys who had friends that were girls were all gay. Like the logic, you know, it's just, it's a parody. And we're all a little bit parodies. I mean, even if you look at the real faces of celebrities now. They're like, they look like avatars of themselves.

They look crazy. Yeah. Everyone, you know, anyway, it's just reached a fever bitch. And it has. And it's largely thanks to this, this TikTok effect that we see, you know, in the, in around 2023. And that's when we started to get accounts like Esté Williams. Are you familiar with her?

The name is familiar. I'm sure. You've probably heard of ballerina farm. Yeah, yeah. And then we also get Hannah Neelam. who is a Mormon woman who married the son of the founder of JetBlue, and which I think is very important to point out here that like, this is something that rich women are telling poor women to do.

Yeah. Like everything on the right, this is a concerted effort from the rich and powerful to convince poor people to do something that they want them to do. And there is nothing probably better for their overall political strategy than telling poor women to drop out of the workforce and rely on a man and, you know, and drop out of school. It seems to have not really worked out for these women. Williams had a baby born with a birth effect and after that did a big pivot away from trad content. Hannah Nealman

of Ballerina Farms was profiled in 2024 and the dynamic between her and her husband honestly seemed scary. And in 2025, Gwen, the milkmaid, deleted all her milkmade content and went back to Gwen Gwiz, i.e. making ASMR videos in lingerie, which is fine. That's, yeah, okay. Right. I think it's Magdalene Taylor, former guest of Panic World, who excellent sex and culture writer who just was like, this is all, like, this is all porn. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Her take is like, trad wife content is all porn to some degree. Right. And I think that that's right. Wow. Do guys like that? Like, like, I don't. But when, when you're like, is, Is it again, like we're all 12, like 12, like, is it the idea that a 12 year old boy would be like, be like, yeah.

I think that's right. There's some data to back that up too. In 2024, trad wife searches were up 72% on Pornhub. I think there's like a couple dimensions to this. Like, I think it's particularly easy for like Zoom school Gen Z kids to fantasize about a life that they do not live because they don't really live one. TikTok is a portal to like different kinds of identities and lifestyles that they can try on. And like very early on in sort of the Gen Z's story, there was a lot of like identity play and aesthetic play and sort of like understanding the world through what they're seeing online.

I think tradwives fit in perfectly there because you can just sort of imagine this thing that is not real. I think that there is a lot of millennial tradwives that are doing it to make money or because they have like hardcore right. wing political beliefs, not to excuse the Gen Z kids, but I think it's a lot more sort of cynical at that age, our age. And I also just think that I don't see this as, I think it's twofold. Like, yes, it is something that is being performed for a male audience to a degree. I think that's newer. I think it originally started as a way for women to recruit women. And it has, it is now kind of pivoted. And in fact, we did an episode about the Man of Seri with Siri a couple weeks ago. And she had this great take where it's like, the manosphere used to be something that was totally like focused on helping men meet women.

Yeah. Pick up. And now it is totally focused on helping men perform for other men. Yeah. So it's like both of these kind of sides of the coin have devolved over time into being just like some combination of porn and wrestling and QVC. Right, right, right. And I will add, I think for millennial women who have fallen into this. who have fallen into this rabbit hole.

We also have to remember, although the 2010s were wonderful, you know, that's also when the Girl Boss movement sort of, you know, that was that was our trad wife. Hold that thought. Hold that thought right there. We're going to talk about it. Because that's coming up next, but we're going to first go to a word from our sponsors, Prager University.

Accurate historical information about women's rights from Prager University. Hey y'all, it's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair. Ever order furniture online and wonder what if? Like, what if it doesn't hold up? That sofa was four days old. You should have ordered from Wayfair. With Wayfair, there's no what if. Just style you love and quality you can trust.

Visit Wayfair.ca. Wayfair, every style, every home. All right. We are back now and I want to show you a video. In my opinion, this video basically caused the global recession we're all living in. It is titled... Is it Charles Sandberg's TED Talk? Gen Z and a mini?

No. I can't hear what they're saying, but I know this. You don't have to. Like, Gen Z, I know the trend. Gen Z, boss, and a miniskirt. Do the whole thing, Ryan. Gen Z, boss and a mini. Gen Z boss and a mini. Eaddy, Tis and a ball.

I have three and a boat. You have a friend green and a sneaky link. Yeah. You friend grain and a sneaky link. Okay. So if you have never seen this video, this video is probably without question the most viral video of Elon Musk's ownership of Twitter of X. It is the most hated piece of content of the 2020s. And when Donald Trump announced the tariffs, like thousands of

Trump supporters were like, we did it to specifically hurt these women because we hate them so much. These women are not American. They run an Australian skincare brand called TBH. They seemingly have no idea that they have become the symbol of everything wrong with feminism and women and life. And like there are like multiple thousand, 10,000 words creeds out there of men being like, I want to crash the global economy to make sure that these women can never be in an office again because they were so mad about this video. What I'm, I did I miss this whole thing. So these women are making a funny because I know the trend of like it like, like, you know,

Hi pony and hoop earrings. So they just happen to make a version of it. And why were men so mad about it? Because they're happy. So, okay, trying to follow, sort of, yes, but trying to follow the thought process in these spaces like takes a lot of time. It's really stupid every time. So basically, during the pandemic, a bunch of men working in like engineering and coding

and sort of STEM jobs started complaining that like they had to do. work while their bosses who were women or what they call laptop mommies or product mommies got to like sit in pools all day and answer slack messages. Oh yeah. And so there was this massive wave of resentment largely started by one previous video of two young women basically work on their laptops out of a pool. And that sort of created this idea that like in the 2010s progressivism installed a bunch of young women in managerial positions to manage a bunch of men.

Wow. And then when this video dropped, they saw it as proof that, like, women don't do anything but do TikTok dances all day in the office. And so we should smash the global economy so that women have to marry men to survive the global depression. Got it. And what makes men escape this global depression that they've caused? Or is it like a murder-suicide situation?

Yeah. I mean, well, like men love hurting each other. Yeah. That's just like a thing that they do. Got it. And like they just sort of believe that like, what's the term they use? Like a high interest rate phenomenon or whatever it's called. We're like they believe that like women having jobs is like a totally caused by like just having interest rates that were too low or whatever.

Is this a real? This is a real thing. Yes. Yes. Yeah. It's this video like comes around on like the. So I have like a watch list of like the. worst guys and like they're sharing this video like once a month probably still being like they're

like when when the there'll be like the it's it's okay that like we're having an energy crisis because of the war in Iran because it means like these women won't have jobs soon that's like the thing wow fascinating it links to your point about girl bosses where it's like we have to punish the girl boss yeah and and by the way oh my god I mean we could do a full hour on the girl boss that defined the 2010. It really did, right? So Sheryl, you know, but basically 20, before 2013, women were in the office, but like a real like minor, like treated like a like a true minority and not that they're not anymore. But when I started writing at the, so I moved to New York in 2013. That was like my first year of like working as a journalist. I remember seeing a New York Times room for debate.

Remember, remember that. I don't, they still have it. They'll have people like debate a topic. And the the headline, I need to get this right. Oh yeah, the headline was can women lead? Didn't they just do that story again like a month ago? Like, like, yeah. Oh, yeah. Are women ruining the work? Yeah. Yeah. It's just it. And, and then they had four people debate that idea and, and, you know, have like one normal person be like, yeah, I think women can be bosses. Um, I think that's, that's possible. And then like three other people. And then like, you know, have like one normal person be like, yeah. And then, like, three other people be like evolutionarily women are supposed to just be fucked you know like it just it was ridiculous and and it was printed and i so my first article i wrote and i was like the fucking new york times and then margott sullivan who was the public editor at the new york times at the time wrote like i was writing for a blog called mike dot com at the time called policy mic that no one knew about and she responded to my article and then they ended up taking it down and having sort of a

And this was so there was a moment of reckoning, obviously beyond the scope of this one article that the New York Times did, where there started to be a Huffington Post women section. And, you know, people started being like, maybe we should hire women in newsrooms. And like, maybe we should have a manager, like a managing editor who's a woman at one of these newspapers. So, so this was a really exciting time for women. Long live the hairpin and the toast. Yes. Yes. RIP. RIP. And RIP Jezabelle, I mean, I can't. RIP Jezabelle. I can't even believe that's a sentence. But so it was a very exciting time.

Women were starting to be respected and, and have sort of, you know, this sort of equal place. And or at least there was this belief that was sort of, like you weren't supposed to say women are inferior at least. Like you were supposed to at least publicly say like, yeah, women are equal to men. And I do think that we took it a little far. You know, like, I do think that then it just became this like capitalist definition of, of mask, of, of, of, feminism, this very like white feminist, you know, definition of like, you can have kids and be the boss and sleep four hours a day because you'll be fine. You have a brown or black nanny to, you know, it was very, it was not realistic as an ideal and it was very elite and very white. And I do think a lot of women burnt out from it. I myself did. I mean, Samita, Muko Pai Dai who was one of the founders of feministsing, another amazing blog from the 2010s. I mean, she wrote an entire book about it. She was the, you know, she made it.

She was the executive editor, Team Bogue and had been, you know, at the helm of all these different media companies. And yeah, we all burnt out. And so in a way, this is my admission in a moment of vulnerability. I will be honest. Like, are you a trad wife? I'm not a trad wife. I'm not.

I would need like a husband and like many other, you know, I would need like to own my home and like have a bunch of cows. A trad rental. I'm a trad rental. Yeah. I'm not even a trad, but like I, because part of the trad wife movement has been sort of tangential in any kind of extreme, you know, sort of movement.

There's also like smaller more like, I don't even know how to describe it, but like like less, I guess radical portions of it. And one of them is the stay at home girlfriend. Well, I was about to say my dream is to be a stay at home girlfriend. That sounds awesome. Right? When I see those across my feed, I'd be like, this fucking girl. And then I look at her day and I'm like, I, I kind of wish that could be my life. You know, part of it is that we're all trying to escape the fucking hellscape of living, especially in the United States, you know, in a country where you have to work just to afford to be alive, maybe, you know, or if you're James Vanderbeak and you, you are literally living the American dream, you still need to create a go fund meet after you've already died to pay for your. expenses, right? Wait, but it wasn't that because his wife was a tradd wife who's like doing right wing shit on

Instagram and like, don't. Are you kidding me? Did he die because she's anti-vax and stuff? Yeah, I'm pretty sure like all of that. Yeah, because like this, she's like a woo-woo. I'm pretty sure she's like a woo-woo trad wife who made them move to the farm. They were like still renting or something and like. Oh my God.

We can cut this. But I'm almost positive like she is like he died kind of because she killed. She killed him. Okay. Or she like wouldn't let him take like real medicine or something. Okay. I did not see that portion of the discourse. Oh yeah.

James Vanderbeek's wife is anti-science and was against him doing chemotherapy in favor of holistic stuff. No, no. His colon cancer was specifically very survivable. And like their whole move to the farm was sort of to support her like woo-woo bullshit. Yeah. It's a Steve Jobs. Mm-hmm. It's just.

It was totally treatable, but he needed to eat like only orange food. That's really sad. Yeah, the whole thing about like them not having money or whatever is like real weird. Okay, I just. There's no evidence he was right wing, apparently. Okay. But there's no evidence he wasn't. I think it has become increasingly difficult to understand like who is doing this stuff for what reason.

And I think RFK, you know, as the installation of, you know, whatever. whatever his stupid fucking title is, the Department of Health, Secretary of Health, yeah, Secretary of Health, yeah, has like made it even more confusing because, like, we've done research into sort of how Maha or Make America Healthy again works as a network. And you have a lot of people who know that it's explicitly right wing. And then you have a bunch of, like, crusty yoga moms who don't know that they are repeating right wing talking points. And that's on purpose.

Like, this stuff has become so insidious. The right wing fixation on Sidney's Sweeney and whether or not she's conservative. or not. They don't, they're not really waiting around to recruit people anymore. What they're doing is like casting the widest net possible and then making you be right wing by association. Right, right, right, right. It's all about like false consensus building, I think. Oh, that's really interesting. Yeah, yeah. And, and, you know, I went to a turning point conference a few months before, uh, Charlie Kirk was killed. And, wait, wait, did you go to the one where Dana Loche spoke to like all the women? Because that's literally next at our outline here.

Did you? I, they kicked me out. So I wasn't allowed to. Why did they kick you out? Well, I mean, why did they kick you out? Because I do podcasts like these. I don't know. No, like they, they yeah, really, I really tried to get in.

And I paid actually like, they owe me like several hundred dollars. That ticket was expensive, but whatever. Was it, was it the, was it the T. Was it the T. USA one in Dallas? No, it was in, um, fucking Tampa. Do you in the summer? Yeah.

I don't, I blacked out for half of it. No, it was the one where, like um they taught where where where Tucker Carlson gave that speech where he was like hey you can't afford your house like that sucks you know gave a very sort of left wing kind of speech and and and where the Epstein file stuff also like a lot of some of them even spoke out about and I think Charlie Kirk spoke out about the Epstein files on stage um but whatever okay yeah the one we have here is basically like kind of a a bow on where we started with this episode which is there was a Q&A with Charlie Kirk and Erica Kirk in Dallas at a TPP USA event.

And this is from the New York Times who covered it. And they basically, they write, one after another, members of the audience came forward to ask Mr. Kirk and his wife for advice. Why? Why are you? Okay. I don't want to go to college and I don't want to commit to a career that I know I'm going to have to abandon once I have kids.

One young woman said to which Mr. Kirk replied, you're already thinking correctly. Mrs. Kirk asked if anyone in the room had a liberal boyfriend, a hand, near the front shot up. Pray for her, an audience member yelled. And then Charlie Kirk suggested that we bring back the celebration of the Mrs. degree. And then he said, you know who the most miserable and depressed people in America are? Mr. Kirk said, career-driven early 30-something women. So this woman told New York Times in attendance at the thing, she said, first she got rid of her seed oils and food dies. And she ransacked the cabinets and threw out cheese-its and candy. And then she decided to not get the COVID vaccine.

And then she said, all these doors opened when I found out about the food. It only takes one voice to start going down a rabbit hole. And like, I think that's really the driving. Like, that's how most people are encountering this stuff now. No. It's like they're, they see a post and they're like, what does that mean? And then they just start picking and picking. And then they find themselves at a T.P. USA event.

Yeah. And, you know, it's, I think the point I think of this whole episode is just like, this stuff was done on purpose. Like it was set up this way on purpose to do this exact thing. And they succeeded. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like sort of comes back to even our joke about wanting to die alone in the woods.

Like it's right. It's like, yeah, people are unhappy. Right? Like people, I mean, and it's a normal part of being alive. You know, it's a normal suffering is a normal part of the human condition. And I think what we've been seeing is, I mean, I think a lot, sorry to make this whole conversation about the 2010s, but the internet in the 2010s, one of the big differences with it now is sure, there was always optimization and

monetization, right? The tech rose wanting to make money and like, you know, all those things, right? Mark Zuckerberg didn't start Facebook out of like the kindness of his own heart to, you know, bring people together. But the internet wasn't as much of a place to like monetize everything. Like and the perfect example of that for me is couch serving like do you oh do you remember couch surfing so gen C people have no idea that this existed basically I'm like oh it was Airbnb but it was free and they look at me and they're like I'm sorry what like and of course and and I don't know if you I used it at multiple occasions it led to many I did it in Hungary I did it in France I met friends I had a boyfriend like it was great and then it and an Airbnb comes around

it's like, well, we can make money off of someone having an extra couch, right? Airbnb was like literally after an air mattress, right? Because some of these couch surfers, it was a couch surfing, right? So it wasn't even to have an extra room. It was like, I have just like an inflatable mattress. And yeah, someone was like, we got to monetize this. And I really do think that so much of this is tied to that, right? People being fucking scammed.

I mean, it is, I think, going to be the defining characteristics, characteristic of the 2010s. I think it definitely started with Donald Trump, but who's, you know, the grifty as president we've, we've ever had. It's just like people seeing opportunity for money and, and even clavicular. I mean, we didn't even get into that, but he's a, he's kind of a trad wife. He is. He's a beauty influencer. He is a beauty influencer. And I also still do not think he believes a lot of the things that he says to that extreme,

but he's making money off of it. And so, yeah, I think sometimes it's like, And I'm not saying that to depress us. It's like sometimes it's not even that deep. Before we move off clivocular, like further proof of like how insidious this stuff is. I was having a conversation with like a good reporter, like a good internet culture, fluent reporter. And she was saying like, oh my God, like the clickier stuff is so funny. I think he's so funny.

And I'm like, yeah, like he is funny, but like he's super racist, of course. And she's like, what do you mean super racist? Well, he's got like tons of videos where he's just like. talking about how like black people are inferior and all this stuff and she's like oh I didn't see you that I just saw like the funny clips and I'm like right right and because like that's that's what that's how all of this stuff works is like you you could and she's like I'm mortified I've been going to parties being like I think he's so funny and I'm like yeah and I bet you like 90% of the people you're talking to are like yeah he's funny because they also don't know that like he's talking

in the same streams about all kinds of fucked up stuff because we only watch clips Yeah. Because we only see the jester maxing at the club. We only see the gesture. We're not. And how could we see it all? I mean, that's the other thing. I'm like, what are you can't see it all.

You can't. You can't have it all and you can't see it all. Yeah. And the rise of streaming, it's like, I was explaining it to my sister. You know, and she was like, but like, I don't understand. Don't people have jobs? Like, what do you mean watching someone for eight hours a day? It's a perfect storm.

And it took all of these different things for it to, you know, sort of get to where we're at. I always say this. I hope this stuff is losing steam. And I sort of think the proof of that is that people are getting more desperate about making everything seem tradwife coated. Like the Sydney's tweeny meltdown last summer, like to me feels very desperate. I think a vibe shift is happening whether the right wing wanted or not. And so, yeah, I know I'm not totally pessimistic about all of this. But I will definitely be posting TikToks of myself churning butter on my farm soon.

Yeah. And I want to thank you for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. Lovely. It's just so fun. I ask all of our guests. Where can people follow you on the internet? If you want to see your trad tenant.

Yeah. My application. Yeah. Yeah. I am at Feministabulous on Instagram, but if you put in Liz Plank, you'll find me. I'm Liz Plank on TikTok and YouTube. You can find my podcast, Boy Problems on Spotify or anywhere you listen to your podcast. You can watch it on YouTube.

I have a substack called Airplane Mode and where I break down. the news and try not to make you feel depressed about it. I think those are the big ones for now. Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you again. This was lovely. Panic World is a production of Courier.

It is written and produced by Grant Irving and hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Josh Fielstead is our production coordinator. And our amazing researcher is Adam Bumis. From Courier is Shane Verkest, who edits our video episodes along with our producer, Kevin Maroni and National Managing Director and Executive Producer Kevin Dreyfus. R.C. de Mezzo is their VP of brand and social. Charlotte Robinson is their deputy director of brand and social. Marianne Couga is their director of marketing, YouTube, and podcast growth marketer,

Samantha Hollos. And Tracy Kaplan is the senior vice president of sales and distribution. If you want to sponsor the show or give us products to sell, she's the one to talk to. You can email her at Tracy at courier newsroom.com. Be sure to check up the Panicworld YouTube channel, which you can find at YouTube.com slash at Panic WorldPod. And please give us some nice ratings on podcast apps and leave a funny review. Lastly, here's my advice for you.

Chill out and touch grass while you still can.