Some More News - Some More News: What, Why, How, And Who Are Tradwives?

Episode Date: March 5, 2025

Hi. In today's episode, Katy and Cody take a look at Tradwife influencers and how they're trying to profit off a misguided fantasy of the 1950s. Get the world's news at https://ground.news/SMN to compare coverage and see through biased coverage. Subscribe for 40% off unlimited access through our link. Hosted by Cody Johnston Executive Producer - Katy Stoll Directed by Will Gordh Written by Katie Goldin Produced by Jonathan Harris Edited by Gregg Meller Post-Production Supervisor / Motion Graphics & VFX - John Conway Researcher - Marco Siler-Gonzales Graphics by Clint DeNisco Head Writer - David Christopher Bell PATREON: https://patreon.com/somemorenews MERCH: https://shop.somemorenews.com You can get 50% off a new SimpliSafe system with professional monitoring and your first month free at https://SimpliSafe.com/morenews (60-day satisfaction guarantee or your money back.) Control Body Odor ANYWHERE with @shop.mando and get $5 off your Starter Pack (that’s over 40% off) with promo code Morenews at https://shopmando.com ! AG1 is offering new subscribers a FREE $76 gift when you sign up. You’ll get a Welcome Kit, a bottle of D3K2 AND 5 free travel packs in your first box. So make sure to check out https://DrinkAG1.com/morenews to get this offer! Over 2 Million Butts Love TUSHY. Get 10% off TUSHY with the code SMN at https://hellotushy.com/SMN

Hey baby, how you doing? I'm Cody, spotted you across the room. Listen, doll, here's some news. Have you heard about this new tradwife craze? That trad is short for tradition, and the wife is short for woman knife. It's a trend that's been happening on those TikToks, and at first glance appears to be an online movement where certain dizzy dames film themselves doing so-called traditional woman-knife work like baking and cleaning for their husbands. And while that might seem innocent but misguided, the concept of a tradwife is now bleeding over into political spheres like Fox News and right-wing political pundits.

And that's odd, right? So we thought we would perhaps dig into that. And by weed, I mean mead. Cody, your lovable muscly newsman will analyze these ladies and teach you about the concepts of traditional woman knife work, such as taking care of the squids, eating the laundry, and the many microscopic eels wriggling up my legs

and arms this very second. and the many microscopic eels wriggling up my legs and arms this very second. Sorry that took so long. The vents don't always disperse the gas evenly. It'll be fine. Just a little bone damage. The right-wing tradwife grift. Alrighty, so, tradwives, that is what we are talking about today. I'm Katie. Hi. So, just to start, there are actually a lot of different sects of TradWife, ranging from the rather benign homesteading brand of TradWife that seems more interested in the aesthetic or old-timey kitchen gadgets.

I actually got this at an antique store. So this is a vintage one. They are hard to find. I have not found a bread cutter that can cut sourdough like this. It cuts it all uniformly and it's super easy to cut. Neat bread cutter! I've always wanted a knife to take up my entire counter. But of course, we're not really talking about that kind of tradwife, nor are we going after the videos that are clearly just models writing that sweet tradwife algorithm. No, we're mostly talking about this kind of tradwife.

Okay, here's why more and more young women are rejecting feminism and just like, do not wanna be associated with it at all. Like I'm putting on makeup for my husband to come home from work or if I'm cooking for him, they get upset. They don't like that. Like whoever the head of PR is for feminism

needs to be fired. They are doing a horrible job. Ah, okay. Because you see, feminism is when you get yelled at by internet commenters for putting makeup on for your husband. Okay, got it. It's not always this aggressive, though. There's also this soft-spoken, pastoral, embrace-your-femininity type of trad wife that posts cottagecore videos over gentle rants about gender roles. It's a naive sort of feminism that insists

that women prove their ability to do all the things that men do. This is a distortion and a travesty. Men have never sought to prove that they can do all the things women do. Why subject women to purely masculine criteria? Okay, so first of all, my gal, you are making bread. Men make bread too.

Some men will make bread so good that they get a whole British television show where they reduce people to shreds who don't make bread as good as them. Making bread is fun, and I think everyone who wants to do it should probably do it. Feminism isn't about saying women should have to do all the things men do. It's actually about the freedom for anyone of any gender to do anything. As long as it's not making a craggy sponge with a soggy bottom in the middle of cake week. Cake week, you fucking fool! Anyway, I actually agree with her to some extent. It is a shame that society devalues

work thought of as feminine, and we should actually be encouraging men to feel free to take up more feminine tasks, which is actually also part of feminism. Breaking gender norms, stay-at-home dads, a hooters for dudes, we could call it dooders. Or owl dicks. Because here's a little secret. There's no intrinsically masculine or feminine duties in modern society, because we made everything up. But here's where the slope starts to get slippery. While this trad wife seems to be a little naive, as you watch the videos, things get

a little more trad. I don't know who needs to hear this, but happiness should not be your ultimate goal. Happiness should absolutely be a byproduct of a well-lived life, but it should not be your first and foremost goal in life. Especially not if it's at the expense of your family and loved ones. If happiness is your chief objective, you're probably going to miss out on a bunch of amazing things along the way because you didn't think they would make you happy or you thought something else would make you happier. God is a lot smarter than we are. He knows a lot more than we do. Okay, see, I get the idea that all adults need to, on occasion, accept responsibility and put others

before themselves at the cost of short-term happiness. Like, literally every day I have to choose to work instead of going to a water park. But then you went and brought God into this, didn't you? And how He knows best. And it's starting to seem like these videos are trying to gently direct women into a life where they exclusively put aside all their own needs, burn themselves into a husk, and hide their depression from their kids right up until the moment they inevitably drown them in a bathtub. Or I guess just pretend to do all those things while trying to go viral on TikTok and make money off your 80,000 plus followers.

Because it's pretty ironic that the one thing all these videos have in common is that they are actively encouraging women to stay at home and not have a paying job while literally being examples of women doing a paying job? Here's another tradwife with over 111,000 followers. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, It's important to note that unless you birth one of those boss babies, this is true. But let's examine it. Obviously, I don't know this woman's life or her marriage, but unless her baby is paying her, it's weird to compare a child to a boss. A boss is the person providing money, right? And so presumably that is the husband.

And you know, TikTok. I mean, nobody really makes that much money off of view counts, but she's clearly aspiring to. Of course, in a healthy marriage, I would argue that you shouldn't have any employer-employee dynamic, right? Even if only one spouse is working, both parties recognize that the other is doing equal amounts of labor. And although it's not paid for by our society, it is providing equal value to the family as the paid work, and so they should have equal control over the finances as everything is done via teamwork. So no, your baby is not your boss and cannot fire you. But your husband could divorce you.

And unlike getting fired from a job, you can't likely find a new husband in a few weeks or even months to start supporting you financially. And again, I do not know the dynamic of this individual's household. Maybe she and her husband do understand that finances should be seen as a team effort so that they should make joint decisions about the money he earns from his job and the money she earns from TikTok and from the Amazon associate links on her blog, which she writes. Which is fine, honestly! Get that, bad girl? But let's be real, it's not exactly being truly only a stay-at-home mom since you're also working. Which is fine! Again, totally fine.

Honestly, it's a pretty innocent TikTok channel. Manon Manon FAT BEE BEE BEE BEE Manon Manon FAT BEE BEE BEE Manon Manon Ah, shucks. Raw milk.

Well, other than that, the channel mainly seems to be geared towards cooking with a vintage stove and hobby farm antics. Which seems more like it has a broader appeal to women because it's not selling a fantasy of subservience, but rather a fantasy of rural farm life. But also one where you have enough money so that you're not forced to do backbreaking farm work and can choose what kind of that you're not forced to do backbreaking farmwork and can choose what kind of farmwork you'd like to do. Which is fine.

There is nothing wrong with hobby farms and enjoying this lifestyle. But it isn't something accessible to everyone. And it is not an individual failing if someone doesn't have the resources to do so. And also, if everyone had a hobby farm, I'm pretty sure we wouldn't be able to have enough food production to actually feed everyone. Subsistence farming is actually really hard, which I learned from Cody forcing me to watch him play Rust. And economics papers.

But mostly Cody playing Rust. He's still working on the oil rig monument, but I don't know what that means so we're just gonna move on. My point is that when framed around simplifying your life, it is not at all hard to see why the trad life would be appealing to a lot of people. Heck, as someone who doesn't know anything about farms besides watching the movie Babe and the beginning and end of Babe too. I would also like to relax on a farm with a talking animal.

Hello Mr. Cody. It's Katie. Womba was just hearing Mr. Cody talk about how great it is to work on a farm and be a trad wife, and Womba wants in. It's Katie. Womba was tired of the rat race, Mr. Cody. It's Katie. Womba is gonna live on a farm,

churn butter, make lots of fresh cream, and be famous on TikTok. Then Wombo is gonna show sleepy Mr. Cody who is the real influencer. It is oh oh I see. He's talking to his unconscious body honestly. He was down there. Well, that is some shallow breathing. You know what? Let's take an ad break while I make a phone call. Oh, hey there. Hi, Cody here.

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that's a website and an app. It gathers all the news together in a big newsy stew pot so you can compare coverage and get the facts straight. News like how federal agencies are handling that weird Elon Musk email demanding work reports or else. Ground news lets me see that headlines from the right aren't quite sure how to cover it. The Daily Wire says,

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Uh huh. Okay, so you are sure that if he dies, I will not bear any legal responsibility? Oh, the opposite of that. Manslaughter? Okay, well, I'll keep an eye on him then. Yeah, thanks, Dawn. That was my dealer, my gas dealer. Gas Dawn, I call him.

Sounds like the villain in Beauty and the Beast. I don't know his real name, but it is good to laugh. That's why I get the gas. Anyway, before the break, we were talking about all the various trad wife accounts on TikTok and how they seem suspiciously leaning towards a more dubious message than they claim. And this is where it starts to leave TikTok and become a political ideology. You see this transition most clearly in one of the most famous tradwives named Estee Williams.

Ah, I see now why she's popular. But okay, nothing wrong with a little 1950s cosplay. Everybody's got a jerk off to something, am I right? But I kid, I kid, I am a kidder. Esti is much more than a bit of eye candy. She is, quite clearly, an aspiring conservative personality. Did I mention that Esti Williams is into Trump? Of course she is. She does what she wants and she looks cool doing it.

You might be surprised to learn that Estee doesn't really present as, like, a monster. She brands herself as a sort of modern and reasonable trad wife. She pushes the lifestyle as optional and encourages young women to pursue college if they so desire. She has a very, very confusing video where she says that because she trusts her husband, she doesn't believe in getting a prenup. But today I'm gonna be talking about why I do not have a prenup or any sort of, I guess you could say, backup plan aside from life insurance.

I am a big advocate for that. But anyways, we're gonna get into that in this video. So I'm just gonna say this right off the bat. I trust my husband. I know. Shocker. Shocker, right? Yes.

That's the man I chose to marry. I got to know him very well. That's odd. Wouldn't getting a prenup protect the person with the money? She's saying she doesn't have a prenup, like it's this act of faith, but if she's the powerless housewife with no income, doesn't that actually benefit her? It's almost as if she does have money. It's almost like the stuff that trad wives push is inherently at odds with modern life. She'll boast about how she asks her husband

permission to leave the house, but is also doing interviews and making TikTok videos about how subservient she is. Like, what's the point? If I were to bet, I'd say that Esti's messages are so muddled because she's clearly using the tradwife lifestyle as a superficial brand to get her foot in the media door. All right, so Esti, what is your daily routine like? I always wake up and I like to get myself ready. And I think that's very important because if you're gonna be home,

you really gotta put forth the effort to make yourself presentable. I think that the apron and the house dress is like a great uniform to kind of get yourself in the right mindset to get to your daily tasks, to cook clean, do your thing. Thanks Esti. I also always wake up in the morning. But I don't know, going on national television with your opinion? That just doesn't sound very traditional to me. Aren't traditional women supposed to keep nonsense, like,

I don't know, their own thoughts, to themselves? Also, you're lying, Estee. That's not all you do. You don't just wake up and throw something on, do you? You set up your phone, perhaps some lights. You shoot your TikToks. Do you edit them yourself or do you outsource that to others? Did you ask your

husband permission to go on Fox News and also Piers Morgan to promote your channel? Yeah, of course she's also on Piers Morgan. Also, a Dr. Phil segment with her husband that, to me, really gives away the grift. A couple years ago, I was into the bodybuilding industry, and I was into fitness modeling. That was awesome. However, when I decide I want to drop out of college and become a traditional wife, and my only goal in life is to be an amazing wife and mother, that's when eyebrows seem to raise.

When I met Estee, I was 20 years old, and Estee was 22. I was going to college to please my parents, but I secretly wanted to be a traditional wife. Before I met Estee, I never really dated, not even casually dated, but when I met Estee, I knew that she was the one and that we were a match made in heaven. We don't do opposite sex friendships. I don't think a woman needs to have a male best friend. Oof, okay. So she was a fitness model who decided to become an influencer,

met a guy who had no dating experience, dropped out of college, and went into business for herself as the trad wife character. And it really seems like a character, in my opinion. I mean, the more you hear from her husband, the clearer it is. And you say you don't have any arguments. I wouldn't say that we don't have any arguments. is. And you say you don't have any arguments.

I wouldn't say that we don't have any arguments. Well, you did say we don't have any arguments. Or disagreements, but I come up with a solution to solve that disagreement, or when we have a disagreement on something, I'm gonna be the person to come up and come up with a solution so it doesn't lead into an argument.

You just think that you love each other and you need to figure out a way to put out whatever you guys are disagreeing about behind you. And do what you want. Do what I want. Well that's what you said, you come up with the solution. Yeah, we come up with the solution, but you know, it's not always what I want. Well, that's what you said. You come up with the solution. Yeah, we come up with a solution, but you know, it's not always what I want.

Yeah, buddy. I don't think you're the one making the decisions. It really just seems like they're role playing, doesn't it? Like, I'm sure they tell themselves that whatever he says goes, but then here he is on Dr. Phil supporting her career as this subservient influencer. Like, if that was true, wouldn't he be the influencer and not her? Wouldn't he be the one on Piers Morgan?

Well, I actually don't believe that everyone should be a traditional wife. I think that it is a choice. And I think it's a lovely choice if a woman wants to simply be a wife and a mother and that's enough for her. Hey, Esti, girl, I think you kind of just described feminism. But Esti's Piers Morgan appearance is, to me, what really makes the ideology side take shape—the actual motivation at work here. You see it best when another guest, Pearl Davis, starts to talk about how families are disappearing and seems to claim that women were happier back when they dumped out scores

of babies. You know, I saw a study the other day that said only 25% of, I mean this is an American step, an American household to a family, so I guess there's positives and there's negatives, but it's like at what cost, you know? What to you? Like 85, 150 years ago, the average woman had seven kids, 85% of people were married.

I mean, you know, there was also much higher infant mortality, and women died very young, and you know. I mean, women were more depressed than ever before. We're on antidepressants. I mean there are a lot of... Women over the age of 45 are the least happy demographics. So just to start, the statistic that only 25% of American households are families is not true at all.

In fact, she nearly gets the statistic inverted. Two thirds of US households are families, a majority of whom are married couples, although there are more cohabitating unmarried adults in 2020 than there were in 1990. But they are still a minority compared to married couples. So no, the traditional family is very much not disappearing. Also, it is wild to talk about modern women being on antidepressants when we used to run entire ad campaigns in the 1950s around drugging housewives to make them more subservient.

We used to dose women with laudanum to treat their hysteria. What the hell are we even talking about, Pearl? Come on. But you can see the angle here. Women are divorced and depressed, and instead of examining anything that could be wrong with men and society, the solution is to revert back to a state that happens to align with traditional and religious values. It is having those traditional values that were once definitely more in place in God, family, and love. That's beautiful, and you have to protect that at all costs.

And I think part of that is putting your partner's needs before your own every single day. And I try and do my best, and I think of my husband as much as I can and what will please him and make him happy. I love the sound of this. Yeah, I bet you do, Piers. You deeply unserious man. Your name is where we park boats. So there.

Anyway, the unifying idea of a tradwife is that there is a tradition to go back to, a way the role of the wife used to be that was the ideal. Peak femininity. Demurity. Goals. A newfound happiness for women by looking to the past. But which past?

As you can already tell from the various different flavors of tradwives, the era to which the TikTok tradwife harkens is a vague, ephemeral concept. Regardless, the general aesthetic seems to be vaguely 50s and earlier, back until about the turn of the century. You know, before the 1920s, when women didn't shave their armpits or legs. Funny that this particular aspect of early tradition doesn't really come into play for the whole tradwife fantasy.

Huh. Interesting. Curious, even. So let's say the tradwife is loosely based on some idea of femininity between the 1920s and 1950s in America. This was, of course, after women had gained the right to vote and to commonly work jobs post-industrialization. Of course, very few women actually worked jobs. And the jobs available to them were pretty bad.

They were still a decade away from rising in the ranks at Sterling Cooper, after all. Sexual harassment? That's what the money's for! So, were the women who were able to stay at home raising children and maintaining the household living the ideal life? First, let's clear something up. Being a stay-at-home mom is valuable labor, even though it's unpaid labor that doesn't magically make it not work. The one major difference is that being a housewife is, by design, a dead-end job. And what I mean is that there are no co-workers, there's no career advancement.

At an office, you work with colleagues, but at home, you work in isolation. And that's okay if you have fulfillment in other parts of your life, like your MMORPG clan. But the role of a housewife, when regarded as an occupation, has always, rightly, been seen as isolating, and, when you think about it, inefficient. All the way back in 1898, a social scientist named Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote a book called Women and Economics, a Study of the Economic Relation between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution. In that, she, prophetically, understood the cost of social isolation as would be experienced

by stay-at-home wives. She pointed out the inefficiency of individual women taking care of a household by themselves. Communal kitchens, public nurseries, and laundromats would make more efficient use of resources, would pay people for their labor, and would see women gain more financial freedom, while society would benefit from interconnectedness. She predicted the negative effects of our extremely atomized, white picket fence version of America. Quote, The individual in the absolute economic isolation of the beast is profited by pure egoism and develops it.

The individual in the increasing economic interdependence of social relation is profited by altruism, and he develops it. That is to say, when families see themselves as isolated economic islands, communities become weaker, social ties seem less important, and natural allies may start to appear instead like competitors. When people are more interdependent on each other, if you don't work and live in your own little isolated mini castle, you thrive when your neighbors thrive, and altruism becomes directly beneficial

to you. What is most interesting about this perspective is the importance of seeing domestic labor as valuable to a community. Being a stay-at-home spouse or parent isn't intrinsically degrading. It's actually valuable, skilled labor that helps society. But when we remove the types of benefits someone might receive in compensated labor roles—when people are isolated from the rest of society and don't have the kinds of financial rights

that should come with their labor and are demoted to a less empowered, less valued position in society. That is when it becomes degrading. And of course, for an average stay-at-home mom in the 1920s, you didn't have any guaranteed community nor did you have any paid help. That was something only the very wealthy would have access to, which is, frankly, probably something everyone can relate to today as well. Interestingly enough, there was a time when the middle class could afford hired help,

but that became inaccessible by the 1930s and is, ironically, one of the reasons that domestic labor is no longer considered real work. Anyway, this is where you might expect me to talk about how terrible and demeaning housewifery used to be. But it's more complicated than that. There's something about anything culturally associated with women that becomes a whirling paradox that makes people's heads explode. I like to call it a dumpster pedestal, something that is simultaneously worshipped and denigrated. Think of how the cultural concept of femininity is perceived in general. It's beauty in its grace and also frivolity. Innocent and wily.

Weak but powerful enough to seduce men, strong enough for a man but made for a woman. The reason it's a land of contradictions is an attempt to create a unifying concept for half of the world population, through the eyes of the other half of the world population. This does not make for a coherent philosophy, such is the case for housewifery. Here is an interesting passage from the book Domesticity and Dirt, Housewives and Domestic Servants in the United States, 1920 to 1945. Listen to the number of contradictions that a woman had to balance to perfect the art of the housewife. Quote, the new woman pursued knowledge,

but voluntarily limited its benefits to her own family. She was plucky, witty, sexy, trustworthy, and domestic. Though she might attract men with her vibrance, she would never cheat on her man, and she would devote herself to his physical as well as emotional comfort. She had to be fun, to have fun, and to keep it clean. She had a responsibility to express her individuality and a duty to align it with her husband's.

So a sexy, but not too sexy, wife who plays sonatas and earns money, but not too much. She is smart, but she doesn't show it. She takes care of you like your mommy, but she has fun doing it. She is an individual, but only as long as it matches your vision of her. She's your sexy, innocent mommy nanny who offers service with a smile. In a way, tradwives are traditional in that they are maintaining the tradition of impossible, contradictory standards. All the while, the reality of life marched on, apart from what people saw on the silver screen

or in advertisements that now told you that your armpit hair was suddenly a foul embarrassment. You ladies, take care of it. So were women rewarded by society for their attempts to adhere to an impossible standard? No. There was, of course, a massive jump in women working during World War II and then a huge drop-off after World War II. Help us do war, and then back to the kitchen with ya! Aside from war stuff, even though women in the workforce increased from 1930 to 1940, this wasn't as liberating for women in general as you might think.

Not only did women not earn as much as men, but it was only white women who were able to take jobs on the lower rungs of the ladder that had once been held by black women. Black women, who were previously much more likely to work jobs, were effectively pushed out of the labor force. Women who were married were discriminated against and also pushed out of their jobs. Not only that, but even after women gained the right to vote, it took decades to gain financial rights and freedoms. Women couldn't get a bank account without their husband's approval. It wasn't until the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 when women were given the right to have their own bank accounts without discrimination, as the Act finally outlawed banks from discriminating against people based on their sex or their race. That is right!

Until 1974, a bank could just tell you, no, no, we don't want to store your gross money if you are a woman or a minority. Things were allowed to say no to women's money long before women were legally granted the right to say no to their husbands demanding sex, i.e. rape. That's right. It wasn't until the 1970s that marital rape was made illegal in a few states and nationwide in, hey, let's see, 1993! To be clear, MC Hammer's You Can't Touch This came out before America decided that

raping your spouse should be illegal. My goodness. They should have listened to the title of the song! In the early 20th century, domestic violence in general wasn't considered a serious problem or one that merited legal consequences, not even being perceived as a crime by the justice system until the 1960s and 70s. Take this apparent newspaper article from the 1950s in which they interview men on the street about whether it's okay to spank your wife.

It teaches them who's boss, some dipshit named Teddy responded. A lot of women tend to forget this is a man's world and a lot of men who stepped down as boss of a family wish they hadn't. Some doofus named William said most of them have it coming to them anyway. said, most of them have it coming to them anyway. Frank, who ejaculates the spiders, said, yes, if they deserve it as a barber, I've got a lot of faith in the hairbrush. Oh, so Frank just had a fetish. But this was obviously a disturbing problem,

especially considering that no fault divorce wasn't made legal until California did so in 1969 and hadn't been legalized in every state until 2010. Two thousand and flippin' ten! And now conservatives are trying to make it illegal again. It's weird, right? There's this constant talk from tradwives about how they trust their husbands and how their husbands don't abuse the authority they are ceding them. But if that were the case, why also force women to stay

in marriages? Why would the trust only go one way? And if these husbands are so good, why would they need to trap women? It seems bad. And if you are thinking that surely, surely conservatives won't manage to or be allowed to do this, then you haven't been paying attention to literally anything happening right now in America. Because again, this is where the tradwife stuff gets really insidious. It's not about individual relationships. Like if you and your wife want to dress like it's the 50s and take on traditional roles, or if you and your co-worker sometimes like to dress in leather greaser jackets and have knife fights in the parking lot of a Denny's.

That's all fine and cool, as long as it's consensual. The problem with traditional housewifery is that it's a political movement going after tangible, legal, and financial rights and autonomy. The cool thing about autonomy is it allows you to do things like stay at home and raise kids, cook, bake, crochet, get a little high, do needlepoint. All of that is great and honestly delightful if you have the choice to do it. But if House Wifery is an economic system, one that enforces a system of obligatory unpaid labor without the legal rights and tangible freedoms.

Well, that's indentured servitude. That's not just culture. That's an economic system of forced labor. It is one political party passing laws designed to make half of the population subservient to the other half. Did someone say subservient? Wow. So you're just... Wow. Okay, not listening to anything I said, huh? Treadworm Bo here's everything, Mr. Cody!

I'm here to milk some cream and obey my hubby. Oh, my skeleton! Oh, shoot. Okay, he's awake. I think my work here is done. Okay, he's awake. I think my work here is done. Let's cut to an ad. Greetings theater lovers. As chairman of respectable British theater company,

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I don't know what it is. So, what did I miss? Wombat was making cream now for Mr. Cody. Cream. I want you to leave. Hi again, we're back from break. Was I hosting before? I was definitely sitting here earlier. Something about squids? I'm just gonna read from the teleprompter. Okay, so before the break, we were examining the tradwife obsession with the 1950s housewife aesthetic

and how clearly insidious it is to romanticize that era. But what of the other end of the spectrum? Specifically, what of the cottagecore tradwives that push the appeal of a humble farm amid rolling green hills? You know, this slop. I'm looking for a- Tread Wife, Sourdough, Homestead, Crunchy, Eats Meat, Butter, Wants Kids, Chickens, Tinfoil, Tallow, Content,

Jesus. Did he say tinfoil? Why is that the weirdest thing he listed? And like, maybe the person actually meant content, as in achieving contentment, but the video said content, like making slop for TikTok. But whatever, this probably seems innocent, if not a bit naive.

Real farming as we've said before is not exactly TikTok or Instagram glamorous. The conditions that both people and animals suffer in factory farming isn't some sort of quaint, relaxing respite from a desk job. And subsistence farming, small farms typically found in developing countries, is backbreaking labor where a lack of expensive farming equipment

means people engage in harsh daily labor and subpar conditions. But to be fair to the concept of trad, it seems that they envision something different from factory farms or impoverished subsistence farms, instead hoping for something more similar to a hobby farm with a couple dairy cows, some adorable goats, a few chickens, and lots of tin foil, I guess.

And yeah, sounds good. It would be great if more people had small sustainable farms. Factory farms suck. Of course, we still need to feed everyone. And unfortunately, every person having their own private herb garden and a handful of chickens isn't going to cut it when it comes to feeding a population of over 300 million people. But you know, there's nothing wrong with a hobby farm in the same way that there's

nothing wrong with being obsessed with model trains, which are neat. I love the little choo-choos. But being super into model trains doesn't mean you've solved the issue of public transportation in the United States. And because the cottagecore aesthetic tends to focus on the European countryside and is often paired with Christianity, it is, like seemingly everything on the internet these days used as a pipeline to white nationalism. No, really. Generally speaking, any time people start talking about returning to tradition or how things were better before, they are often buttering people up to accept, well, Nazi

shit. Do we have a video of a Nazi shit? There he is. Didn't need that clip, just wanted it. It's true, Nazis like to hide their ideology within pastoral fantasies and the notion of traditional gender roles. And I mean, literal neo-Nazis,

such as anti-feminist, trad influencer, Brittany Sellner, who has more than 150,000 subscribers with YouTube videos such as The War on Men and What Makes a Great Woman. It comes as absolutely no surprise to me at this point that movements like the men's rights movement have gained such popularity. Men are tired of being shamed for their inherent qualities

such as masculinity and pigeonholed as the perpetrators of all the world's problems. But actually, believe it or not, infidelity in regards to relationships is actually promoted nowadays, with some even being proud of their infidelity. You get it. She's a men's rights school. Also a Nazi. Or rather, she's a self-described Catholic American nationalist and a far-right proponent

of the neo-Nazi concept of the Great Replacement Theory. That white people are being replaced by minorities, Jews, brown people, dogs playing basketball, etc. Her husband, Martin Sellner, is the leader of the Identitarian Movement of Austria. If that sounds vaguely Nazi, that's because it is. Martin Sellner was, and come on folks, still is, a neo-Nazi, having been mentored by neo-Nazi Godfried Kussel and part of the neo-Nazi movement as a teenager. Literal Nazis! Not that people seem to care these days about that sort of thing. To be clear, I'm not saying that these pastoral tradwife videos are all exclusively made by

neo-Nazis, but rather that they are an initial push down the pipeline. According to a study conducted by Media Matters, which was basically them hotboxing themselves with TradWife content on TikTok, the algorithm quickly turned to right-wing conspiracy theories. They reported, After we interacted with TradWife content, TikTok's recommendation algorithm began flooding our For You page with right-wing conspiracy theory content, TikTok's recommendation algorithm began flooding our For You page with right-wing conspiracy theory content, and also began displaying medical misinformation

and anti-government content, specifically fear-mongering about the need to prepare for an impending civil war. So TradWiF content is kind of like the mosquito bearing the malaria plasmodium that makes you want to drink raw milk in case the government is putting the gay virus in the drinking water. And you can see it in real time as these tradwife videos get more and more unhinged as you watch them. First, it's just raw milk and a tinge of anti-feminism.

["The Favourite Man"] Then you keep watching these and suddenly we're talking about how abortion and sex work are bad. Next thing you know, you're getting videos of beautiful farm settings set to the most off-the-rails RFK conspiracy shit you'll ever hear. So if you have millions of women on pharmaceutical birth control and they're all urinating in the municipal water and then that water in most cities if I'm not mistaken is then, you know, cleaned air quotes and then recycled into the municipal drinking water supply,

anyone who's drinking that water is essentially microdosing birth control. Pharmaceutical cocktail. And Prozac and God knows what else. My goodness, what is happening to my brain right now? Imagine being a teenager surfing TikTok and having this shit blasted at you like you're being reprogrammed for thought crimes. Like this is some clockwork orange shit, right?

And it finally escalates all the way to whatever this is. [♪ Music Plays And Gets Louder And More Louder And More Louder And More Louder And More Louder And More Louder And More Louder And More Louder And More Louder And More Louder And More Louder And More Louder And More Louder And More Louder And More Louder And More Louder And More Louder And More Louder And More Louder And More Louder And More Louder And More Louder And More Louder And More Louder And More Louder And More Louder And Louder And More Louder And More Louder And More Louder And More Louder And More Louder And More Louder And More Louder And More Louder And More Louder And More Louder And

Louder And More Louder And More Louder And More Louder And More Louder And More Louder And More Louder And More Louder And More Louder And More Louder And More Louder And more Louder And more Louder And more Louder And more Louder And more Louder And more Louder And more Louder And more Louder And more Louder And more Louder And more Louder And more Louder And more Louder And more Louder And more Louder And more Louder And more Louder And more Louder And more Louder And more Louder And more Louder And more Louder And more Louder And more Louder And more AI generated tradwives with the tradwife hashtag and old timey Nazi font posted by a German patriot and supporter of the AFD, the far right neo-Nazi German party. Like if you want to rock a cottage core aesthetic and milk a cow, that's totally fine. I like cows, I like cottages, I like milking, I like core.

But why does it become this weird, twisted political ideology? Why do we have to go from, hey, check out my cute sundress, to we need the Lebenström for our white kinderchildren. And then you do like one of those classic, my heart goes out to you gestures. Did I, I'm not gonna do it,

because that's not what it is. This isn't some fringe internet Nazi thing either. Tradwife as a political ideology has been embraced by the GOP. Seems like they sure like Nazi stuff these days. Conservative commentator Benny Johnson spoke to a group of women at Turning Point USA's Women's Summit, which was basically Skål'd Women Con but without the anime. And this was what he had to say. There's no great men out there. Are you a great woman? Have you behaved like a great woman

that would attract a great man? Well, there's two parts of this. Attraction is magnetic. You have to have both ends of the magnet. So have you been a great woman? There ain't nothing wrong with being a trad wife. Being a trad wife's base. Boy, if there were ever a sentence that described grooming,

it would be an adult man saying, being a tradwife is based to a group of women half his age. Because this was, by all accounts, just a big weird groomer event. Here's professional wraith, Charlie Kirk, talking to a young woman who is, mind you, a turning point co-president at one of their chapters, and also on her path to becoming an orthopedic surgeon.

I would argue one of those two endeavors is better than the other, but let's hear from Chuck. You could potentially do both. You could become an orthopedic surgeon and still do that, but there will be a lot of people that says, oh, just put the family thing on hold and put that on hold. I just want to caution you a reality is that there are a lot of successful 35 year old orthopedic surgeons that have cats and not kids. And they're very miserable.

Whoa, slow down there toots. Maybe you should put down the scalpel and pick up a baby. There's been, especially with the new Trump presidency, an attempt to put women back into their proper place, such as how Pete Hegseth, Trump's secretary of defense, thinks women shouldn't be in combat roles in the military. Matt Walsh, Steven Crowder, and Vice President J.D. Vance have all taken aim at no-fault divorce.

In 2021, J.D. Vance, the vice president, said that freely divorcing was quote, one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that like, well, okay, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that's going to make people happier in the longterm.

JD Vance then wandered into a donut shop and asked for whatever makes sense before trying to take away the basic rights of the donut and being president cucked by Elon Musk, who interestingly is perhaps the poster weird adult for somebody whose entire ideology is fueled by being divorced. Also, JD, hey JD, if you think it's easy for people

to shift spouses like they change their underwear, it sounds like maybe you have trouble changing your underwear and should do it more often. Maybe practice every day since you now have so much free time after being relegated to assistant to the secret second president or whatever it is you do now. Oh, post all day, awesome, great job. Anyway, JD Vance being very pro birth, but anti baby

is against universal childcare and insulted Kamala Harris as a childless cat lady, even though she very much has stepchildren. So basically no abortions, divorce is bad, even if it's a violent marriage, being an adoptive parent isn't real motherhood, and if you're stuck raising a child on your own, you're out of luck.

It seems like they just hate women existing, but here's the thing, I can shout until I'm blue in the beard that these people are so obviously pushing their handmaids' tail fetish to become national policy. But people are still eating the slop, right? That's because this tradwife movement and also the entire conservative party's current message is based around one extremely true fact. Things are not good right now. Nobody can afford anything. All the stuff

and things are low quality. There isn't a cranny of our lives that isn't bombarded with tech noise trying to sell us on more tech noise. It's easy to look at a farm in the 20s or a suburban house in the 50s and see that as a simpler and better life. And it was. For honkies. Men honkies.

Because those were the people allowed to be in power. But that social hierarchy has nothing to do with the economic relief of the time. It has nothing to do with that idealistic simple life. In fact, it had a lot to do with progressive policies. The GI Bill provided education and training and loans for veterans. The top marginal tax rate for the ultra-wealthy was 91%. Union membership was at an all-time high in the 1950s, reducing income inequality to the lowest levels since prior to the Great Depression. But as union

membership declined through the 1970s and 80s, due to the dismantling of New Deal-era policies, income inequality rose back up. Raises to the minimum wage stagnated. Labor laws weakened in the face of union-busting efforts. Taxes on the wealthiest people were slashed. Workers' rights, such as in the trucking and airline industries, were dismantled bit by bit, while antitrust policies were systematically weakened by unelected regulators and judges, and financial regulations were

hacked apart. Back before the great gutting of the working class, home ownership was genuinely easier. Union activity often led to more affordable housing, such as how in the 1950s New York unions created the United Housing Foundation, which built thousands of co-op apartment units for moderate income households. Housing construction boom supported by policies such as the Truman Democrats' 1949 Housing Act allowed for more people to afford homes. Because building more housing usually means more people can have housing. The specific conditions that allowed for the nuclear family was a very brief, very concentrated mixture of economic

conditions, policy, and social norms from around 1950 to 1965, as even David Brooks argues. But the conservatives and hardcore trad influencers don't care about the actual economic policies that made life affordable or simpler back then. Nor do they want you to care about them. They just want to point at women in the kitchen and claim that's actually the reason. The logic, when you think about it, is painfully childish. It's like saying that the reason rockets go fast is because they're painted white. And make no mistake, if we reverted back to a world where women didn't work jobs and only popped out kids, that wouldn't change all the economic problems.

It would just fuck over women and make it even harder for men to support a family on that one income they now have. It would bring back all the worst social aspects of the 20s and 50s with none of the upsides. Just ask right-wing influencer and ex-Trad wife Lauren Southern, who had to leave her husband due to their abusive marriage. She revealed, I had this delusional view of relationships, that only women could be the ones that make or break them, and men can do no wrong. He'd lock me out of the house. I remember having to knock on the neighbor's door

on rainy nights because he'd get upset and drive off without unlocking the house. It was very strange to go from being this public figure on stage with people clapping to the girl crying, knocking on someone's door with no home to get into, being abandoned with a baby. Look, Lauren Southern is not a very good person. She's a racist, and she seemingly only figured out she was wrong about something when she

directly experienced the horrific reality of the trad lifestyle. It's good that she got out of her marriage, and it's good that she's speaking out now. But man, think of all the women who get into traditional marriages because influencers, politicians, or religious leaders told them that's their role in life, to submit to your husband. Think of all the young men being told by wealthy thieves that the real reason they can't afford a good life

is because women need to be put in their rightful place. And all of this, ultimately, is because a group of people on the internet has turned a fetish into a full-blown ideology, right? That's actually the final point. It's a kink, right? The tradwife thing, the submit to your husband,

it's a fetish, one dressed up as tradition and religion, but like, come on guys Come on. All right. I'm gonna unwrap it and I'm gonna take a bite. Oh, it's so hot Mmm so good I like the way you kiss me, I can tell you miss Peace up, A-Town Yeah, yeah, uh, okay Come on. It's porn. Just say it. Porn doesn't need to be naked stuff. It can be a lot of stuff. It can be this picture of Dana Carvey as a turtle in Master of Disguise, so long as it makes you splooge, or, as the medical community calls, splooge-a-roonying. The tradwife stuff is a kink. They have a kink.

Like, I have a theory, and maybe it's not popular yet in the lame stream weedia, but I think like 99% of weird conservative freakery is because they just don't know how to jerk off like a normal person. Listen, you got some kind of Dom sub fetish and a fondness for shabby milkmaid chic? Good for you.

Crank that downstairs butter churn. But like, it's fine. You can have that fetish and not take away anyone's right to vote. I'm not even joking here. There's nothing wrong with having a consensual sexual fantasy. Or even if it's not solely sexual,

there's also nothing wrong with enjoying wearing traditional clothes or having traditional hobbies. Or even if it's not solely sexual, there's also nothing wrong with enjoying wearing traditional clothes or having traditional hobbies. Personally, I like dressing my cat up like a little pirate. I just don't feel the need to force everyone into a legal system that makes everybody dress their cats up like pirates. Now, all that said, I'm about to kink shame a lot

because all of this is perfectly exemplified by this tweet from a far right influencer named Elijah Schaefer who tweeted this AI video with the caption, this type of content awakens in a man something so primal not even an OnlyFans model in lingerie could compete. Now one thing you might notice about this AI video is that it features what one would not describe as a woman. That is a very young girl. So if this awakens something in a man, shame on that man.

There's a reason he compared this young girl holding a plate of eggs to an OnlyFans model in lingerie. It is sexual to them. They want young girls to be their weird baby farm sex servants, but classy and conservative, traditional. There's a reason most trad content doesn't actually take off or make people money. Because it's boring and people don't really want to do it. Popular trad content requires an undercurrent or overcurrent of sexuality. Because modern

conservatism isn't about family values. It's about the world's richest man impregnating a young conservative influencer and then immediately abandoning her and that child. There's a reason there isn't popular trad content of older women. The project is to put girls in a very specific box and not let them out. Don't vote, don't disagree, don't talk back, don't get old, don't make decisions, don't say no. Just be the plate of eggs girl.

It's gross and weird. Real fucking weird, real gross, weirder and grosser than this actually. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, Mr. Cody. Happy birthday to you. Thank you, Warmbo, sexy stuff.

Anyway, that's the show. Be sure to like and prescribe, eat your sleeves, blood thoughts, my bones hurt again for some reason. Sorry, sorry, totally forgot to rob him. Ew, why are your pockets sticky? Is that funny? Hi everybody, it's me, Wombo, doing the like and subscribe part because we all thought I looked really cute and I just wanted to do this again and say hi everybody. Don't I look super cute? I think so.

So like and subscribe to the video, like the video and subscribe to the channel. And what else do I say? They've got a podcast called Even More News that they won't let Wombo do. I wanna be a guest on your show. I just wanna be a guest on this show. And you can listen to it without Wombo, I guess. And you can also watch it on YouTube,

which is the website you're on right now. You can listen to this show, some more news as a podcast. You can watch it again on YouTube. If you wanna see me again be so super cute. I mean, come on, look at this. I wanna wear this all the time now. Okay, so we've got a patreon.com to have some more news.

And, a moustache with one go on it. I got so many of my faces on the stuff that you can tie. Do it and when you wear it, I will be with you. I will always be with you. Wear me!