Sounds Like A Cult - The Cult of Tradwife Influencers

Episode Date: May 19, 2026

When we first aired this episode, the “tradwife” trend felt like a bizarre internet niche. Two years later, tradwife culture has only exploded.  This week, we’re revisiting our episode with culture reporter Anne Helen Petersen (@annehelenpetersen) , alongside then SLAC intern turned permanent co-host and producer of the show, Reese Oliver, in her debut episode! Together, they unpack the aestheticized world of “traditional womanhood,” where hyper-curated domesticity collides with political extremism, anti-feminism, and the growing influence of manosphere ideology online. What once looked ironic or fringe now feels deeply embedded in the zeitgeist. So while the Sounds Like A Cult team takes a much deserved break, we’re falling back down the tradwife rabbit hole. Subscribe to Sounds Like A Cult on Youtube!Follow us on IG @soundslikeacultpod, @amanda_montell, @reesaronii, @chelseaxcharles, @imanharirikia.  Thanks to our Sponsors: Join the loyalty program for renters at ⁠⁠⁠https://joinbilt.com/cult To Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain, Head to ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.squarespace.com/CULT Get 15% off your first order plus free shipping at ⁠https://BollAndBranch.com/slac⁠ with code slac.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You're no longer young people. You're just people. And people are either productive or dead weight. It's my first day of work and I need to make a big impression. Were you just checking me out? No. It's too bad. I see at least 15 ladies I need to talk to before my beta block is off. My co-workers don't take me seriously.

It's not a human. It's just a piece of meat. Someone bring a gurney. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the all-in-one website platform. to help artists, entrepreneurs, podcasters, hello, stand out and succeed online. I am a longtime Squarespace user. It is so easy to set up a website that you're proud of and to update it.

And that is thanks to Squarespace's features, including their design intelligence. If you're inclined to selling things, you can also make selling stuff super easy things to Squarespace payments, get started in just a few clicks, and then you can start accepting payments right away. You can also accept donations for a charity on a Squarespace website. Head to Squarespace.com for a free trial.

And when you're ready to launch, go to Squarespace.com slash cult to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. The views expressed on this episode, as with all episodes of Sounds Like a Cult, are solely host opinions and quoted allegations. The content here should not be taken as indisputable fact. This podcast is for entertainment purposes only. Oftentimes, I see that like a lot of cults, it happens after a trauma, after someone has had their life fall apart for some reason. and they're trying to find a way to make the world legible to them again. And what trad wife life and Christian fundamentalism does, it allows them to have very strict rules,

a very strict understanding of their role in the home, in their marriage, as mothers, in society. It's very comforting in that way. And then there's this, like, external cult of people who are aspirational trad wives, right? Or, like, are taking parts of it. So I think of it as kind of concentric circles. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

This is Sounds Like a Cult, a show about the modern day cults we all follow. I'm your host Amanda Montel, author of the book's cultish and The Age of Magical O overthinking, out now, as well as the host of the new Magical Overthinkers podcast. Every week on the show, you're going to hear about a different fanatical fringe group from the cultural zeitgeist, from K-pop to CrossFit. To try and answer the big question, this group sounds like a cult. cult, but is it really? And if so, which of our cult categories does it fall into?

A live your life, a watcher back, or a get the fuck out-level cult. After all, the word cult, it's up to interpretation these days. Today, we're going to be talking about the cult of tradwives. And if you've never heard this term before, if you don't know what the motherfucker a trad wife is, don't worry, by the end of this episode, you're going to have a damn PhD in the cult of tradwives, thanks to two very special guest voices that we're having on the show today. Stick around because later we're going to be doing an interview with Anne Helen Peterson, who is a cultural critic, an icon, a tradwife connoisseur, fortunately, unfortunately.

But before we get into that interview, I'm going to be bringing on a voice that is very important to sounds like a cult. That's usually a behind-the-scenes figure here, behind the curtain at Slack. And that is our intern, paid intern. The term intern can be triggering, okay? Everyone, please welcome Reese Oliver. Hi. Hello. Reese is an emotionally and professionally important voice at Sounds Like a Cult. In 2024, if you've enjoyed a meme roundup on our social media on Instagram, it sounds like a cult pod. You have Rees. to thank. But the reason why I wanted to bring you, Reese, on to help me set up this episode was because when we were having like a little editorial meeting, when I mentioned that I had

a cult of Tradwives episode in the works, your face lit up like a Christmas tree in a Tradwife's Pinterest ready farmhouse home. And I was just thinking, how fun would it be to set this up together. So welcome and thank you. Well, thank you. I am always happy to be here to info dump on all of my most niche and not the niche interests. Reese, yeah, why the glow to your expression when I mentioned Cult of Tradwives? I am a huge lover of all things fundy snark related or just general religious criticism, I guess you could say. I feel pretty lucky and that I am one of the of the only little white girls in my hometown that was not raised super duper religious. Oh, congrats.

Right? I'm like, you know, my parents have their ups and downs, so they really did their job there. So no offense if you're religious or raised religious kids or were raised religious. I think that's all well and good unless you're a child wife, which we'll get into. Just fell down a rabbit hole one day and here I am watching Nara Smith TikToks. Okay, here's the thing is that I thought I knew what a trad wife was until I spoke to Anne Helle. in Peterson for our interview, which you're going to hear about later and was filmed long before we did this introduction. I thought tradwives were a bit. Oh. Yeah. I thought like even if you were

earnestly participating in the aesthetic or even some of the beliefs that you were performing for the camera and that at the end of the day, you did not actually live and breathe the trad wife lifestyle. But I've come to understand that this is not the case. So actually, just to to back the fuck up because there are plenty of people who are not in our same algorithm and don't have ballerina farm just kneading bread all over their Instagram feeds. For those fortunate enough to be unaware, could you help us define what a tradwife use? I sure can. Short for traditional why, according to political research associates, treadwifery is a movement that's part aesthetic and part ideology, encouraging women to embrace supposedly feminine characteristics like chastity and

submissiveness and trade feminist empowerment for a patriarchal vision of gender norms. Just what we all need. Now that I understand truly what a tradwife is, that the ideology is a necessary part of it, when I see them popping up and I see them saying like my makeup routine before my husband wakes up in the morning so I'm always beautiful, or even a subtler piece of content, like an aesthetic trending song on Instagram and a woman like dancing around in a crinol and petticoat being like, I used to dress in a way that didn't honor my body and now. And they're like in a full blown Christy Dawn peasant gown. I'm like, I love this for you. And then low key fundamentalist evangelical and or Mormon rhetoric starts to enter the picture and I'm like that's scary. So again, to break it down, tradwifes do actually

come in many shapes and forms. We will go into these many shapes and forms. We will go into these many shapes and forms later, but the core tenets of tradwifery are. Homemaking, submission to men, upholding your wifefully and motherly duties with pride, dressing modestly, those Christy Dawn dresses, I do love them. I am a modesty blogger accidentally. Baking sourdough, there is so much fucking sourdough. So much sourdough. What is that? It's like, is it easier on the gut? My theory is that sourdough famously over COVID blew up because it's easy. Everyone can make sourdough. Remember sour bro? That's a Pormonto. That's a fucking Pormonto. Sourbrough. Put that on a T-shirt. Exactly. Boys who made bread in the panty were sour bros. Exactly. And it wasn't that deep. They weren't trying to say anything with their sour bro bread making. But tradwives are trying to say something. And it's...

Tradwives are saying, look at me make this sour bro. Look at me make this sourdough. Follow by example. This is where women belong. Making the easiest form of bread. It's like once you hit me, with a with a like a raisin swirl? Yeah, make me a brooch and then we'll talk. Then we'll fucking talk. A brioche? Listen, then that's traditional. Now, Tradwife originally became a term of interest in the early 2000s. In November of 2004, specifically according to Google Trends.

But it only really started accruing interests in when, January of 2020. Huh, I wonder what national tensions and sense of isolation and mistrust and existing institutions may have triggered this. And Tradwife has been consistently increasing in searches ever since. In the surge of this Tradwife content, the true trademarks are just aesthetically pleasing montages of nice, quiet, soothing domestic labor. This is usually the thin veil atop a ton of honestly cringe-worthy at best and really bigoted abusive rhetoric at worst. The balance of aesthetic and ideology varies among the different varietals of Tradwife you'll encounter on your journey down the Alfried Pipeline. Speaking of which, Catherine Ballieu of the cuts, Crunchy to Alt-Rite Pipeline,

said that you, you know, you come for the calming visuals of pouring milk into one big glass container into another glass container. I do come for that. There's always the sourdough. There's always the overnight oats. And you stay without realizing that you are consuming covertly right nationalist content. Exactly. To your point, to the cuts point, it is sending you down a rabbit hole in a way that there is the new age. I go to Bali and do yoga in Orange County. Oh no, oops, fell down a rabbit hole. Now I'm an anti-vex queue in honor. And the way that there is that pipeline that would never appeal to me because I'm not flexible and my hips don't move. Same. This pipeline would get me. All of a sudden, I'm like spewing accidentally alt-right

rhetoric because I just love Paisley. This is for the girlies who grew up reading historical fiction. This is like, oh, it feels like I'm just reading a little book, but it's my life and it feels like a dream. Oh, my God. Do you remember those little diary books? Did we talk about this? It was called like, Dear America or something. It would be like, I'm Abigail and like, I'm living through the Civil War. Do you know the pages with the gold on the tips? Oh, the gild, oh, I'm a slot for those. Right. So the trad wives are coming for us. But I feel like we should walk through some of the key features in the classification and identification of these different trad wife varieties before we. Before we, get into a teaser of the Colty analysis.

So yeah, as the title of that cut piece implied, steadily supplying the Tradwife ecosystem with fresh meat to indoctrinate more TikTok-obsessed preteens is the ever-flowing, crunchy to alt-right pipeline. This Crunty to Alt-Rite Pipeline also functions as a little spectrum, so it's like an axis on the graph of Tradwife subsex. We do love a three-category system here. it sounds like a cult and so does Anne Helen Peterson, our special guest today. She has a fantastic substack called Culture Study. And for her newsletter, she wrote a piece titled hashtag Trad Wife Life as

Self-Annihilation. In that piece, she proposes three genres of tradwives. Okay. First is the evangelical Christians living out some understanding of biblical womanhood. Think submissive motherly duties. Picture a great deal of beige, so much beige. And honestly, during, during, times of crisis and existential peril, I do see how that lifestyle or the illusion of that lifestyle could appeal even to progressives. You know what I'm saying? This is what makes tradwives confusing to me. There's this one tradwife that I've seen online who used to be like a super alternative outwardly queer creator and she's like fully fond on the tribewife pipeline and is now like, again, making the bread pouring the milk. I think it's truly just like, wow, that sounds nice. And then you're

racist. This is how people join Colts. like nexium and Scientology and Heaven's Gate as well. It's a great deal of work to have to navigate the cognitive dissonance of submitting to a group that promised to save you, then feeling like those promises are not coming to fruition, but also you've sunk so many costs, time, money, hope into this group. And also, you joined it in the first place because something was wrong in your life. So here's the thing. There's this lady named Morgan. If you're on my side of YouTube, you've probably come across her. Morgan of Paul and Morgan, the fundamentalist YouTube channel. You might also have seen them in the documentary, shiny, happy people about

the Duggers. She's one of the ladies who falls into this category. Her content is very trendy, couple focused, lots of Bible teachings, a healthy dose of conspiracy, lots of cis heteronormitivity. It's like, submit to God, submit to your husband, but also be famous on YouTube. Paul and Morgan, to me, they're a lot more modern than some of the tradwives will get into. They're not necessarily making the bread. These are definitely a starter trad wife for people who might already be there ideologically but aren't quite there aesthetically. They're just making content about like, oh, here's how to be a good God-honoring wife. All the ideologies there. They're just not as beige. Literally not a single floral printed apron, which like doesn't make sense because that's the best part.

Okay, according to Anne Helen Peterson, category two is God-loving mothers, okay, God-loving in scare quotes, who are more into the aesthetics and are homesteading. This is me. I'm like an aspiring tradwife who's just like, oh, oh, there's like too much to swallow. I can't like fully get the whole entire vibe down my throat. But yeah, these folks are less urban. They usually live on many homesteads. They're a little crunchier.

God is definitely present here. but in a much less outwardly political capacity. So there's a famous Juilliard dancer turned JetBlue heiress turned trad wife, ballerina farm. You may recognize that name from our mom influencers episode. She definitely falls into this category. She is this like very, very, very, very wealthy woman, cosplay, cholera stricken wife on the Oregon Trail. There's also a Tumblr scene girl turned Laura Ingalls Wilder Wet Dream named Kelly Havens,

who would fit the bill of this category. She made a vegetable mobile for her kids that will never not be hilarious. And this is also where a lot of those sort of new age anti-vax natural birth tradwives reside to. To me, that aesthetic is a little different. That's more like I gave birth to my triplets in a mango peel in Hawaii.

As Anne Helen Peterson puts it, there's also a point where extremism on both ends becomes a bending line that eventually becomes a circle, horseshoe theory. So you have your divine pseudo-feminist, Bali ladies, sort of marching shoulder and shoulder with all right conspiracy theorists in this category. Yeah, you might be different, but at the end of the day, you can both agree that sunscreen will kill you. And that's truly what better. Yeah, sunscreen will kill you. We need to destroy the elites. Okay, now we land at Tradwife category number three, which is the stay-at-home girlfriend. She's the least biblical. She's the youngest. She's this girlie. Think smoothies,

Pilates, standing desks, unending skin care, overconsumption. Reese named some fucking names. Who are these stay-at-home girlfriends? When you might have seen as Kendall Kay, she's lots of. Here's my morning routine as a stay-at-home girlfriend. I make my smoothie ball and I do nothing all day, but I look pretty. And then if you have been on Twitter in the past like three weeks, or at least on my side of Twitter, you've definitely gotten probably hit with way more Nara Smith content than you were wanting to. Nara Smith is like real weird and insidious because all of her videos are basically her being like, my kids were hungry, so I'm making them cereal from scratch. And she's doing it in like a gown, like formalware. Like she just makes cooking videos in form aware. And she had like a little clean girl

sleek French bob. And she doesn't really say much. And she's super like mysterious. But then people are like doing a little digging and they're like she's a huge Mormon. So I vary back and forth on whether she belongs in the category prior to this because she is a mom and she's definitely religious. But her content leans way more polished stay-at-home girlfriend core, as you will. The Mormons are always so good at branding. Like they pioneered the beauty blogger vibe. They pioneered the mommy blogger vibe. Like they're just so good at making cultishness mainstream. Literally shout out to the Mormons. Shout out to the Mormon for all of our cultural.

Now we got to get into the culty aspects because we're giggling. This is all fun in games. But there is serious bigotry here. So there is this one trad wife named Lori who goes by the transformed wife. Lori is so terrifying. Tell us about Lori, for God's sakes. So if you are familiar with famous fundies and child abusers Michael and Debbie Pearl, who wrote to train up a child, which is like one of the world's most disgusting books.

and Debbie Pearl are good friends of Lori. A lot of her stuff is like way extreme, way bigoted, way gross. And then some of these tradwives in this category are like Nora Smith, subtly dipping their toes into the white supremacist eugenicist content. This is definitely Mrs. Midwest, if anyone's heard of her out there. Or some of them like Girl Defined just like to write subtle little captions about their Nazi grandparents and then ignore it the rest of the time and just biblical womanhood. Yeah, Girl Defined. We talked about them. our purity rings episode. I was their like number one subscriber, aka paying their bills in like 2017 because I was fucking rubbernecking so hard at their content. Fundy car crash. So as if Tradwives even needed a cultish analysis, let's run through some of what makes this the perfect and most

nefarious cult of 2024. So yeah, as we talked about with the Crunchy to All Right Pipeline earlier, The Tradwife content, you are coming for the cute aprons and the scrub daddy montages and the vacuuming your beige rug, like a frog in a pot of boiling water. Your brain is being steeped in misogynistic, Eurocentric, anti-science ideals. Tadwife content is generally just the perfect combination of sensorially pleasing, turn off your brain, just doom scroll brain rot side of the internet, and the side that is obsessed with categorizing and living up to the ideals of femininity. It just It takes all of your guilty pleasure of social media time and uses it to indoctrinate you, which is honestly so mean. Like, I came here to have a good time. Why am I being converted? So mean. One thing I want to shout out is how this trad wife content has really come to appeal to Gen Z. This piece by political research associates put it really well. And in their article, why are Gen C girls attracted to the tradwife lifestyle? They said, quote,

zoomers foray into tradwifery signals a massive change in the movement. Not only is this, ideology becoming more mainstream, with younger, right-leaning female audiences. It's becoming integrated into Gen Z Internet culture. Taking on timely cultural trends, political views, and concepts of gender, tradwifery is a complicated movement entangled in a difficult history of patriarchal religiosity, racism, and misogyny, but aspiring Zumer Tradwives are actively simplifying it, transforming Traduif ideology into fun musical video bites easily digested by their followers in 30 seconds or less. So much to your point, essentially like that gateway style content gently lulls you into this false sense of security as cult so often do. And then stabs you in the fucking back with these significantly less pleasant fundamentalist alt-right ideologies all behind, you know, like get ready with me.

So we're going to get into our interview with Anne Helen Peterson, our very special guest soon because once we do that, all of this chaos will start making a little bit more sense. But something very, very cultish that I want to point out for now that Anne Helen wrote in a piece for Elle is that proper tradwifery is not something that you can just dip a toe into. It's not something that you can just like do for five minutes and then return to your regular life, your regular identity, your regular beliefs. It requires this all in commitment. I'm going to quote her. She said, trad wave behaviors seem to require a wholesale ideological conviction. that a woman's primary role is to be the helpmate of her spouse. They demand a subsumption of personal will and unquestioning eagerness to bent to a man's desires

and a belief that those who don't are sinning against God. Yes, as political research associates kind of echoes, these extreme movements simplify an increasingly complex world, one that is easy to retreat into through chat rooms and algorithmic recommendations. The nostalgia for a mythic past in which gender norms are dictated by a clear division of labor or the reinforcement of social status becomes appealing. And I definitely agree with that. There's something predictable and soothing that the human brain likes about the binary that gender provides.

And what better way to experience that and to let yourself live that than combining it with, like, consumerism and TikTok? You know? 100%. Just across arenas of life, whether we're talking about gender, social identity, cultish affiliation, we like to put things in box. because it makes the world feel more organized and manageable and like it makes sense. And we are willing to sacrifice, apparently, a lot of liberties in order to make the world feel more manageable. Now that said, it seems like there are some tradwifes who have defected from the cult, who

were like all in on it and then woke up to the serious damage that this lifestyle can cause. So in an article for Apple News, this one former Tradwife named Anita Templeton of Littleton, Colorado, shared that she, quote, embodied the Tradwife lifestyle for 10 years. At 4 a.m., she would start making bread and begin prep for the day's meals, always from scratch. This mother of four would do all of the household chores while her husband focused solely on bread winning. A lot of carbs in this conversation. Templeton, though, has since left this life. And now she spends her time basically educating other tradwives online and encouraging them to do the same, kind of like the anti-MLM movement on social media, YouTube, TikTok,

podcasts, but for anti-tradwaves. Maybe we'll start to see that become more popular. She says that she felt, quote, as if the daily mental tasks were meant to distract her from her lack of autonomy and independence, which is something that we see in cults all the time, monotony, constant tasks, exhaustion, they distract you from the fact that you're in a fucking cult. She also said that in the beginnings of her trad life, she hypothesized that the solution to her lack of fulfillment in life would be more kids, which only further embedded her into this life of financial dependence on her husband, which is something that I've seen in much more insidious

religious cults like the Amish and other groups I shan't name because it's too fucking controversial, where like women are coerced to having as many children as possible in part so that they can never leave. How could they fucking leave? All of your resources are divided amongst your 10 children. Exactly. And also like you fucking love them. Like you're not going to leave your kids. You're going to sacrifice your life for them.

Also, I can't help but relate to this idea that having more kids would solve her lack of fulfillment. because I think we as human beings have a bias toward that consumerist solution to a problem. Like, oh my God, something doesn't feel right in my life. I need to add more things. I need to add more kids, more supplements, more clothes. And that's why there are so many consumerist cults in the United States because there's this fucking capitalistic lie. And I would even like rope having more kids into that that having more, more, more, more,

more will save you. Templeton finally had to get a job after 10 years of not having one, which was extremely difficult, a major exit cost, and she had to rely on food stamps from the government to begin her new life as a single mom. So that kind of like sets the stakes of what tradwives are getting into when they join this cult. What do you see is the future of tradwifery? Do you think this is going to continue to get worse and worse? Or do you have hope, Reese? I think as with most Internet cults, it's going to get worse and better at the same time. I would like to give a little shout out to specifically Dave, but also Bethany of Girl Defined. They recently did a collaboration with Paul and Morgan. And all of this is to say, it seems like Bethany is moving in a more

accepting direction with her content, a more sex positive direction for sure, which is like pleasant surprise. But then on one hand, it feels like those who are the worst might be getting better. But I also feel like there's so many more stay-at-home girlfriends now and so many more girls my age wanting to like get into that and like being indoctrinated. So it's getting worse and it's getting better. Yeah, the damage is done. Like all of that gateway content is out there and that's just fucking done. Okay, exciting. Well, Reese, thank you so fucking much for joining me for this intro. Woo! I feel again under-caffeinated but glad that you were here to help me explain this ever-confusing topic. Stick around for after our little breaky break because

Anne Helen Peterson, the fucking granddaddy priest of understanding tradwives, is going to come here. I recorded this interview with Anne Helen like before Reese was even born, so she's not part of it. But I really hope you enjoy. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the all-in-one website platform to help artists on entrepreneurs, podcasters, hello, stand out and succeed online. So whether you're just starting out or managing a growing brand, Squarespace makes it super easy to set up a beautiful website to connect with your audience and to sell anything,

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Head to Squarespace.com for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, go to Squarespace.com slash cult to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Let's get into it, the cult of Tradwives. No one can see that I'm dancing, but I am thrilled to be talking about this with none other than Anne Helen Peterson. Could you please introduce yourself in your work to our listeners? Yeah, I write the newsletter Culture Study, which is a newsletter that's about thinking more about the culture that surrounds us. I do that. Like, it's super broad so that I can really just write about anything that I find interesting. And I have a PhD in media studies, and I used to be very much more focused specifically on the history of celebrity and the history of celebrity gossip.

But those analytical tools have served me well as I've expanded to look at other phenomenon within our larger pop culture world. Yes. And the interpretation of celebrity has become So Lucy Goosey as celebrities are now in spaces where maybe 50 years ago we would have never envisioned them to be. Well, it's so funny because I think that there is always anxiety about celebratization of new parts of media. And like, I spent a lot of time in the gutters of the 1950s pop culture press, like lots of different fan magazines. And like there was so much anxiety over television stars. Like imagine being anxious about television stars and teen idols also, many of whom were either like, oh, like, maybe they can sing, but they don't have any other talent, right? So there's just this real, like, hierarchy of movie stars are the most important.

And everyone else is somehow, like, if you were paying attention to them or if they show up in this magazine, it is an attack on the integrity of the pop culture world. And I think that we see that, especially when people are like, oh, how dare we pay attention to it? influencers, whether they're child-wife influencers or like home decorating influencers. Ooh, slick transition. Thank you for that. You're right, though. And I do have to check myself too, because I can slip into that like moral panic of like stay in your lane celebrity because the worst case scenarios are like the Donald Trumps and the Dr. Oz's and the whatnot. But we do need to remember that that type of panic is nothing new at all. But on to the topic at hand, When I say the cult of trad wives, what does that mean to you exactly, the cultish aspect of it?

Well, I mean, there's the people who are like in the world, right? Like deeply invested in the world. And I think that if you are not super familiar with fundamental Christianity, then this is hard to understand. But like a lot of people who espouse this ideology have never known any other way, right? And who understand choosing to live not this way as choosing damnation for themselves and their family. right? I think that that's hard for a lot of us who understand personal choices like a cornucopia of like different ways that we can find happiness, right? When you are within this fundamentalist worldview, it's like if I try to escape or if I try to leave this, then we're all

going to hell forever. And so there are those people who've grown up into it or who have been otherwise inculcated, which is a great word because it sounds like a cult into that world. Oftentimes I see that like a lot of cults, it happens after a trauma, after someone has had their life fall apart for some reason and they're trying to find a way to make the world legible to them again. And what trad wife life and Christian fundamentalism does, it allows them to like have very strict rules, a very strict understanding of their role in the home, in their marriage as mothers in society. It's very comforting in that way. And then there's this like external cult of people who are aspirational trad wives, right, or like are taking parts of it. So I think of it as kind of

concentric circles. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I always go back to that flea bag quote when she's going through a rough time and she's in the confessional with the hot priest and her life feels unmanageable. And she just is pleading to him. I want someone to tell me who to vote for, what band to like, who to love, how to love them. And it's no coincidence that she's in like a religious space having that crisis begging this person to tell her what to do. And I love that point of like it's, exactly what you said. It's just a way to make the world feel more legible and not worrying about the consequences because the most urgent desire is just like, I need to get grounded in something that feels manageable. I want to back up, though. Could you sort of explain to the listeners

how you developed an interest in Tradwives and in writing about them to begin with and some of the work that you've done looking into Tradwives? Yeah, you know, I think like a lot of things about the way that Christianity and evangelical Christianity manifests online. It's one of those things that other people in my universe were like, oh my God, can you believe this? And I'm like, yes. Yeah. So I grew up Presbyterian, but in the 90s, a lot of churches that were what's called Mainline Protestant. So Mainline is like basically like any of these Protestant religions that you can think of that were like had churches in suburbs. Right. So like Presbyterians, Lutherans, congregationalists, Episcopalians, all those sorts of things. A lot of them took a little bit of

a evangelical flair in the 1990s. Because the evangelicalisms had their mega churches and their fabulous Christian rock. I mean, a chord progression. The evangelicals mastered the chord progression is what they did. Just like raising your hand, like having that, what's known as like a charismatic experience in worship of like raising your hand and closing your eyes and like feeling the spirit wash over you. Like, that is a very evangelical pivot from, like, Presbyterians were known as the Frozen Chosen. Like, you did not do that sort of movement. And then suddenly in the 90s, we had, like, an early service with guitars, right? And it was also, I think, especially prevalent in the way that pastors were speaking to the youth. Like, you had a bunch of evangelical movements

happening on a national scale in terms of, like, purity movements and, like, trying to make Christianity more prevalent in schools, right? See what the poll was one that I, that I remember, where you, like, went and prayed at school in the morning. So I grew up around a lot of this stuff, and I understand how, like, where I was positioned, I knew people, both in my friend group, and then also who I went to church camp with, who had taken it to a further extent, right, who were more in the evangelical, non-denominational, some of them fundamentalists, don't believe in evolution, that sort of thing, and much more traditional understanding of wives in the home. I also grew up in Idaho around a lot of Mormons, and I was familiar with lots of families who,

the way that their family was organized was not dissimilar to a trad wife. It probably wasn't as explicit some of the rules that trad wives broadcast in terms of, like, you submit to your husband and that sort of thing, but that is very much written into the way that a lot of not progressive Mormons understand the way the family should be. So my interest, like a lot of the stuff, was like, I already know a lot about this. I should like think about it more and how it's manifesting now, why it's popular now, that sort of thing. Right. And I think I also saw it popping up a lot in another area of my work, which is, so when we talk about what different parts of Idaho are known for, I'm from North Idaho, which is known for racist and neo-Nazis. And now, like,

the extreme far right. And this has been the case for decades. There was an arra nation compound in North Idaho where like if I talk to people who are my parents' generation and you say you're from North Idaho, that's what they bring up. And now it's just a lot of like people fleeing California because there's too much unrest there. Okay. So this is the type of tradwife that I think of as like the canonical tradwife is someone who aspired to a more liberated world. And the reality did not meet their expectations. And so they were like, you know what? I reject it all. I'm going to Idaho and I'm going to bake and I'm going to submit to my husband. Am I mistaken? And those tradwives are usually like really hot, right? Because the thing is, is they've already become incredibly

familiar with like the vernacular of social media and like how they should dress, how to do their hair, all that sort of thing. Whereas like the trad wives that I knew had hair down to their butts and braided it and, you know, would never, ever show off their shoulders, like, are much more conservative in that capacity. They are not social media ready. It's not a Christy Don dress. The puffy sleeves are so much more honest than that. Okay, but those people would never call themselves a tradwife because trad wife is like a branding exercise. They're just a woman as far as they're concerned. No, they would say that they follow the teaching of biblical femininity. Okay, so then speaking of why tradwives are like in the zeitgeist now and where that term came from, can you like set the scene a little bit?

Why, I feel like a year and a half ago, did this term trad wife seem to explode all over the internet? Well, I think there was a handful of people doing exactly what you described who wanted to figure out their influencer brand and like move to places like Idaho and started hashtag homesteading. In the pandemic, it feels like. Yeah. And in the pandemic, I think a couple of them had this before. The roots were there, obviously, for online performance of this sort of lifestyle. Like Mormon mommy blogging was absolutely doing this long before the tradwife was. But I think there's a whole bunch of different internet niches that people went deep in over the pandemic, right?

And so when something seems to like hit the algorithm, this is particularly true on TikTok, right? You're like, oh, well, if I do more of that, if I lean into that, then that will make my account more popular, all that sort of thing. So I think that, like, some people who may have thought of themselves as just, like, conservative mamas became tradwaves in the way that they marketed themselves and the what they emphasized in their content. And then it became somewhat of like a panic point, right, an anxiety point of people saying, why is this happening? this seems so retrograde, which, you know, that made it so that more people like you and I were following them. So they would make more content. So you have people who are like oppositionally watching them and then people who are watching them because they actually see them as aspirational. And I think that that's actually a much smaller percentage. Well, I can't tell which I am.

Because I don't want to subscribe to like fundamentalist religious patriarchy. but I do sometimes like the aesthetic of it. Well, and here's the thing is like the aesthetic is very, like, what if we lived in Little House on the Prairie, but like no one got sick and we had electricity? I know. It's like I call it tuberculosis core. Remember during the pandemic when that headline went viral saying that medieval peasants had more time off than the average like contemporary worker or whatever?

And it's like, no one wants to be a medieval peasant. It was objectively like a bad, bad, bad time. But the middle ages have a similar kind of romance to them because they've been romanticized in like fairy tales. And I eat it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I love that kind of nostalgia. What does that say about me? Can you help me understand it?

Well, it says that you're just doing too many jobs. Like that and that is the hard thing, right? It's like, and I wrote about this in this article that I ended up writing for Elle where my editor was like, you should live as a trad wife. And I was like, huh, do I actually want to like? lose money by doing this because if I didn't like do my work for a week, the amount that I would get paid to write the article would not make up for the lack of doing the work. But I think that the appeal is absolutely to women who feel like they're, you know, you're already doing so many

jobs, right? And whether or not you have kids, you're doing all of the jobs of the home, whatever that means in individuals' experience, and then doing work for pay in most situations. And like, that's just so exhausting. So the idea to just do the responsibilities of the home, like, who wouldn't want to do one job instead of two or five? And so I think that that's part of the allure. Right. And that, to me, that is a manifestation of the fact that, like, so many of us, our lives have become so incredibly tethered to work. Like, work is the center.

Work and maybe family, like, maybe parenting. Parenting as a verb. And I think that that doesn't leave any sense. space for things that can be really nourishing about work that we do in the home and what are often dismissively called hobbies. I have personally, like, done a lot of work to get into hobbies in the last couple years. Like, that's my anti-burnout strategy is like having things that I actually like to do that are not work. Because before, I just didn't have that, right? Like, there was just work. And it's like, well, why wouldn't I do more work? Totally. Well, also because I feel like we like

to write. And that's what's tough. Is like, I really like my work. And I really like my work. if I may say so. But that doesn't mean I should do it 24-7. I'm still really reckoning with that. So anyway, hobbies. So do any of your hobbies have a whiff of tradwife? Gardening, I think, intersects with especially the homesteading component, especially someone who's kind of in this like this larger trad wife universe like ballerina farm, who is an enormously popular Mormon influencer who is married to one of the heirs to the JetBlue Fortune and is currently pregnant with her eighth kid and is also the reigning Mrs. America. Not Miss America. Mrs. America. She has a beautiful life on this homestead area that they have in Utah that's like not

that far from Park City, even though it seems like it's far in the middle of nowhere. You're like just over the hill from Park City. But part of the reason that it looks so alluring is because they have a lot of money. Yeah. Money makes a big difference in branding as it turns out. Okay, speaking of Ballerina Farm, I would love if you could sort of break down the different denominations of Trad Wave, the different sects. And could you name names in addition to Ballerina Farm? Like, she is sort of canonical reigning Trad Wave, but how would you describe her denomination? And then how would you describe others that might diverge a bit? She's canonical, but like sneaky canonical because she would never call herself a Tradwife.

She would never hashtag something with Tradwife. Never. Why not? That's just that's not her brand. And it's also not Mormon brand at all. Like, I'm not going to speak, like, universally here. But I think talking to people who are experts in Mormon evangelical style, right? Because it's different than that of Christian non-denominational evangelicals.

And having seen it a lot and analyzed it a lot, like, you show, you don't tell. So there is the style that is very much you tell, right? Like there is Mormon missionaries knocking down the door, recruiting people to come to church. But there's a lot of just being a very public Mormon person. So that is why something like the blogging or the Instagram accounts and that sort of thing, like that is a great way to be an example of what Mormonism looks like. So Ballerina Farm would never say, like, you should consider joining the LDS Church, would never put that on her Instagram. Uh-huh. Would never say, here is why I'm a tried wife and here's why you should be a tried wife, right?

Like to her, there's nothing that is like exceptional about the way that she is living her life. She is simply living according to her faith. Okay. So I would put the vast, vast majority of Mormon influencers who have a lot of overlap with what we think of as hashtag trad wave in that bucket. Got it? Then there are people who are really leaning into the tradwife thing, right? And that's the people that you were talking about who like either have converted to evangelical Christianity or who grew up in it. And I think that there are extremes in terms of, like, people who are very focused on presentation and, like, looking

hot. There are people who are much more focused on homeschooling and having, like, that be the real focus of their brand. And then there are people, like, the transformed wife is she is an older woman. She's probably in her either late 60s or 70s and came to espouse the teachings of biblical femininity probably within the last 20 years and, like, has had a blog for a long time. and now, because she can't create content of her own life that's in that vein, she instead just, like, does these screenshots of tweets that are like, women waste themselves when they go to school, like, just really ardent and aggressive understandings of how a woman should embrace passivity in the home. So she's, like, on the, I think, extreme end of this spectrum.

And so there are people who are, like, arguing about theology a lot more. And she's there. And then there are people who are much more into the aesthetics, right? And who, like, still have, like, Jesus-loving mama of six or whatever in their bio, but they're not as, I mean, aggressive is the only word I can think of. Yeah. And then there are the watered-down types. And some of those are, like, on TikTok, there's this woman named Esty Williams who sometimes put some stuff about, like, God or, like, I don't know, like, we go to church

or something like that. But I don't actually think she goes to church necessarily. I think it's Christian the way that like a lot of Trump voters are Christian and that they say they are Christian but haven't gone to church in probably a year and don't necessarily ascribe to a particular theology, but really understand Christianity as part of their overall identity. Sure. And so Esty, I think, this is my theory, understood that she was performing really well on TikTok when she dressed like Marilyn Monroe and talked about how she did her hair the way that her husband, like. liked and cooked the way that her husband liked and dress the way that her husband liked. And so she creates content that a lot of it is like, my rules for being a trad wife, right? So it's very much leaning into it. And it's so obvious that like to me, it strikes me as

different. But I think if you are not a discerning consumer of trad wife content, then it might be a little different. Okay. So she's beholden to the algorithm essentially. The algorithm told her that this was the brand she should stick to. And now she's sort of like her own cult leader and her own cult follower in that sense. I'm confused by all of the denominations of tradwife because I understand that there's the sort of more explicit missionary style tradwife who's like spreading gospel, trying to get other people to see that this is the right way of living in the way that any missionary religion does. And then there's the branding exercise of it. People who maybe don't even earnestly believe this stuff, but like it's just working for their social media platform.

But then I want to talk a little bit about the like neoliberal tradwife. And maybe this is not a trad wife at all. But I definitely followed hella DIY homesteader influencers, not so much on TikTok, but on YouTube very much so during the pandemic. Because it felt like, okay, the apocalypse is here. Here's a way to like return to a pre slash post apocalyptic style of living. but they don't talk about God or Jesus. I think they are progressive in their politics, but the aesthetic.

Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. No, maybe I don't know. Now that we're talking about this, I'm not sure. No, but I know exactly what you're talking about. And I think that they're progressive in so much as they're like, gay people should get married. We hate racist.

And Donald Trump is bad. But they're like, wokeism has maybe gone a little bit too far. Sure. There are too many trans kids in schools. Hmm. And school choice is important, right? Like, I should be able to have my kid go where they're, like, they probably are in private school. Well, and I guess the people that I follow don't have kids yet.

So I think they are like more apathetic. They're maybe pregnant right now. Or they'll maybe be pregnant soon. And so, like, I don't really know their point of view yet. And so I give them the benefit of the doubt because I'm projecting what I want to believe onto them. Did you see any Vax content? No. Because a lot of those people, not all some.

are like into natural birth and like, let's wait and see on Vax, you know, like that style. I don't know. I mean, okay, my favorite YouTuber is this like fully DIY homesteader. She like built her own tiny house wearing a sundress. She's either engaged or married. She knows how to operate a spinning wheel. She made her own wedding dress out of a curtain. She has her own garden.

She harvests her own vegetables. She knows how to make every vegan dish under the sun. I bought her cookbook. Oh, then she's just a hippie. Okay. she's not a tradwife at all. But she's living so old school. Right. She's living old school, but like did she have sex with her boyfriend before she got engaged to him? Probably, right? Probably, yeah. You can't be a trad wife if you're not a Christian. Not at all? I mean, I think that like

there can be people who are living tradwife elements who are different religions. What if you're like evangelical to new age? Because that's the thing that trips me up. Well, this is the whole circle, right? It's like the people who were like, I would have voted for Bernie, but Bernie didn't get elected, so I voted for Trump. There are a lot of people that I have met who were like that, mostly older people. And it's where the circle goes complete, right? And how anti-vaxers also meet. It's the far right and the far left. Completely.

Or like raw milk people or homeschoolers too, oftentimes on either side. So it's like, I think a lot of new age stuff is just like evangelicalism with a new aesthetic. But if you've like rejected God and Jesus, you can't be a trad wife anymore. I think you can have Tradwife elements, but where this all springs from, at least its current manifestation, is all from biblical femininity. Okay. It's all from understanding this as like the path to salvation. And so I think you get more of it within like Mormonism because it is a part of their understanding of the way to salvation, the way to being a god of your own planet and being eternally pregnant with your husband's children. But I think you can have elements like this woman

of the Tradwife aesthetic. But I don't think that she at all espouses to like the idea that she should be submissive or that she should like not leave the home after dark without her husband, right? Or like I'm looking at the home page, like there's all the stuff of her in a bikini and like tank tops and all that sort of thing. You're right. Well, this is just how clever the Trad Wave is because I have now convinced myself that it's not that bad. And this is how you know that it's a cult. Because there are elements that are good and appealing and harmless. So now in my mind, I'm like, none of them really truly believe this, but you're correcting me and saying like, no, no, no, some of them really, really, really do believe it. And I'm being hoodwinked right now. I just think, like, the part that

appeals to you is not letting your husband make every decision in your home, right? Or letting your partner, you know what I mean? I think it's more like, oh, what if I did cold plunges and yoga in the dawn light and, like, was self-sustaining. And I didn't have to worry about stuff all the time. Like that is what is, that's the lifestyle that is depicted here. And that's just like a bucolic ideal. Right. And I think that has had a hold for so long in so many different manifestations, but content like this is just the current iteration. And it appeals to people of our age group who want that sort of connection and yearn for that sort of connection. Yeah. And tradwives are dominating that corner of the internet. So it's like if I want to see people doing that, I very well might be

getting that from a trad wife. Okay, that makes more sense. Thank you for puzzling through that with me. What would you say are the cultiest beliefs and rituals in the tradwife community that you've observed? This is a sensitive one because having as many children as possible is part of like tradwife belief system. Like biblical femininity is letting God's will take action on your body and making yourself available to your husband whenever he wants you to be available to him. Like saying no is actually like a big no-no within the understanding of biblical femininity. And if your husband cheats, it's your fault because you didn't say no. But as a result of that, there are a lot of pregnancies, right?

And there are a lot of miscarriages. And I think there is a real devotion to memorializing those miscarriages in a very prominent way. Hmm. Right? So a lot of child wife bios will say like seven kids on earth, three kids in heaven. Whoa. And it's not that three children that they gave. birth to my full term lived several years and died it's that they had three miscarriages holy shit they

name every miscarriage oftentimes and then they often also like really celebrate their birthday like when they lost that child and so there's just a lot of that and i think that like i gosh miscarriages are so complicated and i think we don't talk about them enough but also the way that they are it's almost like a fetishization of these lost children um that's part of the the the cultural of it, I think. Whoa. And being, yeah, being so public about them and sort of like using them as a clout building exercise. Right. You have a post about it. And then like, because you get a lot of commentary on it, it does well. And so that encourages people to do more of them. And like, I think that, again, being public about grief, about a miscarriage, totally makes sense. But I think this is one of the things

that becomes almost ritualized within the community. Yes. And I think like, obviously there's no right and wrong when it comes to how you want to manage your grief. And if you have a social media profile, it's like, do you? But I think as onlookers, we are so intuitively discerning. Like, we can tell, because our gut tells us when someone is doing it for reasons other than a sincere individual expression of grief. They make it known that this is a ritual it sounds like. Can you tell us more about your L piece and that tradwife experiment? So it actually was like an experiment that never was because my editor at L emailed me with this idea. It was like, what if you lived as a trad wife for a week and then wrote about it? Because you're like very much not a tried wife. I'm not married to my partner. You know, we've been together almost 10 years, but not married, no plans to get married. I don't have kids. And I'm not going to have kids. And so it would be like funny, right? Like it's stunt journalism that also would be illuminating in some way. And I was like, no, this is silly. I'm not going to do this. And I like talked about it with my partner. And he's

He's like, he's the one who brought up. Are you sure you want to lose money on this assignment? And he's like, if you do it, you just have to, you have to say in the piece that this was not my idea, right? To like make all the food for him. So, like, because I figured out, okay, what are the elements of this checklist that I can do? Like, you know, one of them is you're not supposed to go to the gym by yourself. And I was like, I don't, my gym is my peloton in the basement. So that's okay.

You're not supposed to leave the house at night by yourself. And I live on an island of 900 people, so like that's not really a problem either for a week, right? For a non-trad wife, you're set up pretty well to be one. I am. And I was like, okay, I can kind of like play along with some of this stuff. But then my dog died. And that actually forced me to take a real step away from work and allowed me to actually write the piece in like a very different way where I was like, oh, you know how I took care of my family? Like I stopped working for a little bit and focused on my family and on care.

But it didn't have to be like in submission, right? It could just be out of love. Right. So that's how that went. But it was fun. And I think, you know, that piece did well. But also the piece that I wrote for my newsletter that was kind of like, here's all the things that I couldn't put into a 1200 word piece. That did even better, I think.

Yeah. Can you tell us about the piece for your substack and some of the reactions to it? It was one of those pieces where I was like, I'm just going to barf some of the stuff that I didn't have an opportunity. to talk about. And I don't know if you've had this experience where, like, you spend a lot of time researching a piece or a book chapter or something like that. And it has to be refined to become whatever polished thing that it goes into the world. But you have this giant knowledge cloud all around it. And for me, that knowledge cloud was in part, like, what I had gleaned from having followed these tradwives for nearly four or five months. You know, I asked my followers on Instagram, which trad wives should I

follow and I followed all of them. And so I just had this content in my feed and you know how if something's in your feed for five months like you see a lot of it. And so a lot of it with those learnings and like, you know, in the L piece, I very briefly did a little taxonomy of the different types, you know, like what your, the denominations as you said. And this, I, you know, I kind of dove more into someone like the transformed way for like, there's this one called growing goodings, uh, different ones, the, the more softer side that you see on Instagram a lot. And, I thought people were kind of sick of trad wives. In fact, no.

They still want to know a lot more. But I also was surprised. I should never be surprised by this. But I was surprised by people who were like, I had no idea that this was a thing. Yeah. Well, I mean, I am learning right now. Like I thought, you know,

I've followed a couple of these people because I follow Sarah Peterson, who we interviewed for our episode on the cult of mom fluencers. And I've learned a little bit about trad wives through her work and, of course, yours. but I still find myself mystified by them in the way that I am mystified by cults in general. And this podcast is a result of that brain cloud that you were talking about, the result of like what couldn't be in the book and me wanting to talk about it like in a more casual way because who's a cult expert?

Like anyone branding themselves as a cult expert I am skeptical of because we are all in cults, right? And like I find a new subculture. cult-like subculture every single week. And I can't be an expert in all of them just because I know a few things about cult language. So I think the way that we never get sick of cult documentaries, they're all the same. The nexium ones, the Jonestown ones, the Heavensgate ones,

the freaking Scientology, whatever. It's like we are trying to determine if this thing is a threat to us. And the answer is always yes. And we can't get enough of that. Yes. And this is the thing is I think that what makes it concerning for a lot of, especially feminist women, is that you're like, how is this still pervasive?

Like, how is this a message that is getting through? I mean, I think there will always be reactionary politics, right? Like, oh, women are more liberated. So, like, let's take this reactionary step backwards. Yes. But that doesn't mean that it is a salient ideology for the vast majority of women, right? Like, yet maybe one in 10,000 junior high girls right now. are like, this is what I want more than anything.

Yeah. But others are like, no, I want to go to college. College is good, right? Or like whatever they want to do after they graduate. Like, I want to have sex before I get married and not feel bad about it. Like, all those sorts of things. That's actually a really important counter perspective is that like when something's in your feed, as much as tradwives were in your feed, it can start to feel like this is representative

of the whole world and this is like a major, major problem. But it doesn't seem like tradwives are like a major global threat. They're just a threat to certain people. Well, I mean, there are a manifestation of an ideology that I think is pernicious. Like, it's kind of like, oh, there aren't that many white supremacists. But also there are ways in which that gets watered down and manifests in systemic racism and policy and all that sort of thing. And so I think that like I'm not concerned about tradwife accounts. I'm concerned against anti-abortion and reproductive rights.

You know what I mean? Like that's where I try to concentrate my energy. I'm like, this is where we need to fight it. Completely. But they all are part of the same piece. You're so right. And yet it's so much more fun and juicy to look at the tradwives and not have to do the unglamorous daily policy work of like supporting reproductive rights.

Right. So like personally, I analyze how trad wives are like this anti-feminist backlash. and also I donate to an abortion access fund, right? Like, that's how I do my work. Yeah, love that. Love that. I want to ask a couple more questions and then play a game. So obviously, society and the internet are really hard on women.

And I would love to know, like, what's the deal? Are there trad husbands? Like, should we be redirecting our rage at them instead? Like, who are these people's husbands? Like, do they have an internet presence? Why aren't we mad at them? I mean, a trout husband are just like most husbands. I would say that there is a solid percentage of husbands whose wives maybe understand themselves

as feminists who like the husband is still pretty much a trout husband, right? Who's like, I'll do some parenting, but like that's not totally my job or like I'm not going to learn how to be competent in it. Like they're learned incompetency when it comes to domestic tasks is part of being a trout husband. So like I like to think of it as like part of that. larger sphere. But I mean, like, what's the version of a trot husband is like, I don't know, like a Huberman bro mixed with a Joe Rogan bro. Like, they, it's like the same guy. It's just espousing is sort of like powerful masculinity that doesn't necessarily talk, like, say things like wives submit, but it's implicit. Some of these husbands show up periodically in these

women's accounts being like strong biblical men which means like providing for the household and providing a good example and being a man of faith in the home and that sort of thing i think of like ballerina wife's husband who has an instagram account that's like hog fathering i think is it oh christ but it i think whenever the husbands show up in the accounts it's always really interesting to me because it's kind of feminizing to show up in your wife's very popular account yeah you're acknowledging that you love a woman How dare you? No, but also that you are like a character in your wife's world almost. Does that make sense, right?

Your wife is controlling the narrative in terms of like what your home life is like. And you are passive to that understanding. So I think anytime that the husband shows up, it's always a really interesting text. Oh, yeah. That's a wrinkle. Right, because he's the protagonist. And she's not even the main character in her own story. This is just a side story.

Right. She's just the narrator. Right, right. So then we go back to the. beginning commentary, which is like the allure of these people for me is to just foam at the mouth watching someone give up all control because there's some part of me that wants to do that, you know? It's like what we were saying before. It's like we're like these quote unquote empowered feminist like work in women, but I am so fucking tired. Right. But it's like you want to go

in a drug trip for like one day, right? Like you don't actually want this to be the rest of your life. You're like talking me off the ledge. Watch it in two weeks. This will be a Shradway podcast. I will be espousing problems. No, but I do. You know how sometimes you're so tired and you so want to go on vacation and like, you're like, all I want to do is go to a beach and just like lay there and relax.

And like that works for two days. And then you're like, I'm kind of bored, right? And that's the thing. Like you talk to our grandmother's generation or people who had to stay home because like they didn't have access to bank accounts. They weren't allowed to drive. So fucking boring. And I think that that's what we have to remember.

Yes. Part of the reason these women are doing their Instagram accounts is because they are so fucking bored. Bored and trapped. No, this is so fucking true. It's like I would rather be in temporary pain that I chose than some boring lifestyle that I did not choose. Okay, so I would just love to hear a story of the worst case scenario because we're trying to evaluate how bad of a cult this really. is. So how bad does it get? What's like an extreme example of how far tradwives can go? Well, I mean, it's become a cliche now to say that like we become the handmaid's tale. But that, you know,

there's a reason why that is a dystopic novel, right, is that Margaret Atwood perceived the risk of that sort of regression, right? And the popularity of that novel goes up and down. And I think it's like, it's popular again now because of that understanding of like, here's what happens when you seed control in this way. And it's a mix of men and women who make that possible, right? It's never just like men are like, oh, all women, you must be subjugated. Like, women are the handmaidens to that particular project. And I think that, like, there's a reason why the vast majority of these, like, I don't even

think I've seen one that's not white, right? That's like a traditional, like a real childwife that's not white. And so some of it, too, is like consolidating your societal power in whatever way. you know how, right? So maybe you are disempowered within the home, but you are empowered as a family unit. Holy shit. This reminds me so much of the power structure of basically like every notorious cult in history where there's like a quote unquote charismatic, potentially halfway good looking white man at the top. And then the second tier of power is like a gaggle of white, pretty young women that he's surrounded himself with who exchange their like sexuality and

whiteness for like a grain of more power. Mm-hmm. Who are the cultiest trad wives at large right now? To me, I think like transformed wife is the absolute worst of them. She's like on Instagram. She's on Twitter. But then I also think that like the cultiest oftentimes are ones who don't make their politics as clear, right?

Like who are much more insidious in the way that they talk about it. So that I would love to hear like from your listeners who they think are like the person who is like most effective at this. I mean, there's an argument to say ballerina farm is, right? But that I don't have the answer yet. Yeah, I'm going to toss up a post on the Instagram where we can all caucus and warn each other, Whisper Network style about who the most pernicious Tradwives at large right now are. We're now going to play a little game.

It's just a classic sounds like a cult game called What's Coulter? I'm going to name two Tradwife-related scenarios, and you're simply going to answer based on your opinions and instant. which is cultier, conservative Christian evangelical tradwives who were born into the lifestyle or reformed sort of city slicker tradwives who've elected to go all Laura Ingalls Wilder on their own volition. Gosh, I can't tell you. I think that they're just, they're effective in different ways. What do you think? Oh, I think those who've elected into it are cultier because there's so much justification of your choices that goes in. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's true. Yeah. You're right.

Round number two. What's cultier? Princessy Snowweight 1800s Cottage Corps Tradwives or 50s leave it to Beaver Susie Homemaker Tradwives. Susie Homemaker Trad Wives. Yeah. Because I think that there's like there are positive things to be said about like cottage core like communing with nature. Like there are like parts of it that like make sense. Whereas I think that there is like a real ideological perversion that's going on with like I love my microwave.

Like that sort of thing. Yeah. I love just add an egg, Betty Crocker Instant Cake Mix, so much. I don't know. Based on the Chotchkes alone, I'm going Cottage Corps all day, every day. What's cult here?

People sensationally comparing all tradwaves to the Handmaid's Tale or people sensationally comparing all cults to Jones Town. Let me kind of justify that question. Because like whenever a threat to feminist liberation arises in the discourse and in politics, I think people are typically quite quick to cry Handmaid's Tale for good reason. But the same shit happens whenever something culty happens with Donald Trump or whatever,

people are like, it's Jonestown. And I think sometimes that sensationalism can like shut down conversations because I can't speak to like the Handmaid's Tale Tradwife thing as much. But in terms of Jonestown, it's like, I think when people threaten that this is just another Jones Town. It's like that was an unprecedented and since unreplicated event. Donald Trump is dumber than Jim Jones and more dangerous. Dumber and more dangerous, more populist, more of a coward, equally narcissistic. I just think like there are different situations that can't be directly compared. Anyway, that's why I formulated that question. Yeah, no, no, no. I mean, but you're asking

me these are like, I actually think those two are very similar. Like I think that The Handmaid's Tale analogy loses its power as it's deployed more and more. Right. And so it's deployed because we don't have language or imagery to express the horror and the fear of like this sort of regression. But you become numb to that comparison. I do remember the first time that I saw like women in handmaids cloaks, right, at some sort of event like protesting something.

And I was like, that's powerful. That's the only time, right? Then it became reductive and replicative and like it didn't seem to have that power. So like what's other language, what's other imagery that we can use to express that I think is one of the things that the feminist movement and the reproductive rights movement has to grapple with. Totally. And I understand why people make both comparisons to because it's shorthand. But yeah, I don't know. In terms of what's cultier, the handmade stale comparisons or the Jonestown comparisons, what do you think is more like in? idiously cultish. Jonestown. Don't you think? Yeah, of course. Yeah, I think so. Last one.

What's cultier? Tradwives or men? Oh, man. Men. Men. What do you think? Yeah, men. No qualifiers, no explanation.

no notes. I'm just going to say that my partner said that he couldn't do something because like he had some stuff to do around the house. Like he was just trying to like be on top of some stuff that I hadn't even asked him to do. Like he had to decline in invitation. And someone responded to them and was like, oh like Amy's really cracking the whip, right? Like that idea that like you would only do stuff around the house because your partner is like disciplining you or something, right? Like that to me is evident. of the cult of men. And it is all over the place.

So, so true. Yeah. So now I'm just going to ask you the final question that we ask at the end of every episode of Sounds Like a Cult. The Cult of Tradwives. What do you think? Is it a live your life? A watch your back. Or I get the fuck out level cult.

Watch your back. Explain. Oh, I just think like. What we were talking about before, I think that it is a flare going up of like the popularity of regressive and reactionary understandings of the place of women in society and how much power women should have in society. And so we have to be incredibly vigilant about attempts on the part of our legislatures and governments to roll back those protections and those rights. But I'm not scared that like my friends are going to go do this. Fair. And we don't need to like throw ballerina farm in prison.

No, no. She's already in a prison of her own creation. Oh, my gosh. Wow. This conversation has been a joy for me. If folks want to keep up with you and your work and your cult, where can they find you? At Anne Helen. That'substack.com. That's where culture study is.

And maybe by the time this is out, our culture study podcast will have launched as well. Oh, hooray. Well, that's our show. Thanks so much for listening. Stick around for a new cult next week. But in the meantime, stay culty. but not too culty. Sounds like a cult is hosted and produced by Amanda Montel

and edited by Jordan Moore of the Podcabin. Our theme music is by Casey Cole. This episode was made with production help from Katie Epperson. Our intern is Reese Oliver. Thank you as well to our partner All Things Comedy. And if you like the show, please feel free to check out my books, Word Slut, a feminist guide to taking back the English language, cultish, the language of fanaticism,

and the forthcoming, the Age of Magical Overtinking, notes on modern irrationality. If you're a fan of sounds like a cult, I would really appreciate it if you leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. 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?

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