Today, Explained - Trad wife takeover

Episode Date: December 13, 2024

Trad wives are having a moment. A new conservative women’s magazine promising to be the anti-Cosmo is capitalizing on the trend. This episode was produced by Victoria Chamberlin, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Andrea Kristinsdottir and Rob Byers, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members The archetype of a 1950s housewife. Photo by Debrocke/Classicstock/Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you are a woman on God's green earth on Al Gore's internet, then your algorithm has at some point served you Nara Smith, the soft-spoken model who loves to cook for her husband and kids. When my toddlers were playing in the backyard, they asked me for a Capri Sun. Since I had all the fruit at home to make some, I told them to give me a minute. Nara's Capri Sun doesn't have any added sugar or citric acid or any of those sus natural flavors that are in the store-bought one. It's all from scratch. I also added some cold grapes and it was time to start juicing all of my fruit. But then she does put it in a little plastic pouch with the straw, just like it's a real Capri Sun, which is incredibly cute. And now somehow you've lost 10 minutes and there are hundreds more of these videos. And really, you need to get offline and go do something with yourself, but you cannot look away.

What is happening to you? You have entered the world of trad wives. They are coming up on Today Explained. Right as I was done cleaning up, they wanted a second one. Amazon Pharmacy presents Painful Thoughts. The guy in front of me in the pharmacy line is halfway through an incredibly detailed 17-minute story about his gout. A story likely more painful than the gout itself. Next time, save yourself the pain and let Amazon Pharmacy deliver your meds right to your door. Amazon Pharmacy. Healthcare meds right to your door. Amazon Pharmacy,

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please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Sarah Peterson, author of Momfluenced and the Substack In Pursuit of Clean Countertops. What is a trad wife? So I would define a trad wife. My definition has kind of changed in the last couple of years, but I would define a trad wife as somebody who adheres to traditional gender norms and does so in a public-facing way. First of all, you should be a mother.

If you're a woman, you should be a mother. And you should glory a mother. If you're a woman, you should be a mother. And you should glory in all things domestic. So not only should you take care of the house, clean the house, cook the meals, raise the children. Ideally, you're doing these things in a really aesthetically pleasing way. Often they homeschool their children. They're often making food from scratch. So they're doing all things, you know, mothering labor and domestic labor, but they're turning it up to a hundred. I submit and I serve my husband and the Bible has the man of the household, not the woman. This morning, my toddlers really wanted to color, but we were all out of paper. So I decided to make my own. There's a lot of disillusionment, rightly so, with sort of,

you know, the narratives of mainstream feminism that have been parceled out in, you know, the past 20 years. Lean in. So there's a real rejection of girl boss feminism at the heart of many of these accounts. There's a lot of exhaustion with the idea of having I wouldn't necessarily put in the trad wife bucket, who are also sort of united in this rejection of the version of feminism that they've been fed. There's soft girls who are living soft lives. Spend a day with me as a girl that prefers to live a softer life. Strong Black woman narrative. It doesn't apply to me.

I live a soft life. I just want a soft life. Very soft. As soft as it can get. And then I'm thinking of the stay-at-home girlfriend phenomenon. And these women really prioritize keeping their homes immaculate, keeping their homes immaculate,

keeping their bodies immaculate, a lot of focus on physical appearance, maintaining beauty standards and body standards. And I'm thinking of one, Kendall K on TikTok. Day of my life as a stay at home girlfriend. I first did my skincare routine. Then I did some ice rolling and some journaling. And I made the bed. It's really simple content usually. But I think the appeal is that it feels simple. And it feels sort of separate from the messiness of life that most of us are experiencing.

So, yeah. So is the word tradwife, is it something that this group of women embraces? Like, is it offensive if I call a woman a tradwife? It depends, which I know is an obnoxious answer. But I'm thinking of one who proudly wears the term, Aria Lewis. She's Mrs. Aria Lewis on Instagram. And she is constantly defining what it means to be a trad wife, owning the term trad wife. Being traditional is not a 1950s cosplay cult or a Little House on the Prairie cosplay cult. Being traditional is having a set of values that you make your life decisions from.

But then you have people like Hannah Nealeman who was interviewed by the London Times and said she didn't really identify with the term. I think a lot of the time these women are saying they're just living their lives and we're the ones that are obsessed with labeling it and sort of pathologizing it, but they're just doing what feels right to them. Hannah Nealman is fascinating. Tell us about

her. I started following Hannah Nealman in 2019 or 2020. I wrote a piece for Harper's Bazaar. And at that point, she had under 200,000 followers on Instagram, which is absolutely wild considering she now has roughly 22 million followers across all platforms. She has just absolutely exploded in fame and just visibility. She is a mother of eight. She's Mormon. She lives on a ranch in Utah with her husband, Daniel Nealeman, who is one of the children of David Nealeman, who founded JetBlue. So there's certainly generational wealth at play. commercial mostly because Hannah's Instagram makes her life look really serene, I would say. She just leans into motherhood and domesticity in a way that feels absolutely impossible unless you have a ton of money and a ton of other privileges. I think a hallmark Hannah Nealman reel is her

cooking some sort of elaborate scratch meal. I'm getting started on my meat. So I put tons of herbs, bread crumbs, some spices, and then I put it in a loaf pan and bake that. Then while that was baking, I rolled out my sourdough pita. And pita is literally so easy to make. And she's either wearing a baby or has a toddler on her hip. Children are coming in and out of frame. And her voice, it never really changes in pitch or tone. It's like always calm. I wake up, nurse floor Joe, then we get the kids fed and ready for school, which is in a little schoolhouse we have here on the farm. And I think if you were

to ask most people, like, do you follow any trad wives? The one they would reference the most is Hannah Naleman. Producer Victoria Chamberlain, notably not a trad wife, she buys French salt from Ballerina Farm and then she posts images on our work slack. She loves the content. She watches it on Instagram. I do too. I don't want to be a trad wife. Why do I want to watch it so much? Why do we want to buy the salt? Like, what is the allure here? It's really beautiful content a lot of the time. You know, there's all these rolling hills, you know, open plains. The kitchen is rustic in this very like, you know, yesteryear type of way. And I think there's something so intoxicating about the idea of devoting oneself to just one thing

or to go all in on one aspect of your identity. I think that's especially salient for moms who, you know, we can't find affordable child care. We're constantly torn in two directions. And so to see somebody who isn't torn in two directions and who seems really happy and is living this beautiful life. Yeah, I think we all just want more simplicity. And I think we're also longing for the certainty that she seems to have in her lifestyle. You said she was controversial. What makes her controversial? Really that she's adhering to super specific standards of femininity and motherhood.

She's very thin. She's conventionally attractive. She even, you know, she participates in beauty pageants, which is just, you know, an explicit, like, best domestic goddess contest. And I think mothers across this country are mad. We're exhausted. We're under-resourced.

We're not supported by our government. And so to see somebody constantly selling this idyllic, romanticized version of motherhood that is wildly impossible for the vast majority of people feels sort of like a form of gaslighting. I think a defender of Hannah Nealman might say, but she's not doing anything bad. She and other women like her are just living their best lives, however realistically, on Instagram. And that's to her as she makes it seem. I do think Hannah Nealman has, her responsibility in the trad wife sort of phenomenon is hard to parse. I think what's more important is what politicians do with trad wives and how they, you know, explicitly or not weaponize them in the culture wars. While she has said that she aims to be apolitical for most of her public facing years,

she recently did a cover shoot with Evie magazine. It looks a lot like Glamour or Elle, but they're publishing articles about, you know, the toxicity of birth control and the importance of the nuclear family and how to be your best feminine self. And they were really big supporters of Donald Trump. So I don't think she can claim an apolitical stance anymore. I think if we weren't living in this really broken, you know, country where women's rights are just this, like, you know, constant object of debate, I don't think she would be quite the lightning rod she is. Sarah Peterson, Momfluenced is the book, and In Pursuit of Clean Countertops is the substack.

Coming up, Evie magazine, Cosmo for conservatives. What's the sex column like? We're going to get into it. Thank you. and then you click the link only to realize it's spam. Or maybe you've had the IRS demanding payment in gas station gift cards. That sounds like a fun one. Or maybe you spotted a notification about a sign-in attempt from Moscow. Not so fast, Moscow. We've all been there. That's why WebRoot has set out to make a better digital life for all.

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at New York Magazine's The Cut. Tell me about Evie Magazine. Evie Magazine is a magazine that was started by a model named Brittany Martinez that was sort of branded as like the Gen Z right-wing version of Cosmo. And the mission was basically stemming from her frustration with the fact that most women's magazines are left-leaning. You know, they're too permissive about premarital sex. For years, women have been sold this lie by progressive media sources.

Oh, sleep around, do hookup culture, don't worry about family and kids, all this stuff. And now, like, women are more miserable than ever. And she wanted to come up with an alternative for conservative women aged 18 to 35, approximately. We're never going to encourage orgies or cheating on your spouse or whatever that women's magazines have talked about for decades. So we are counterculture in that way. She wrote an op-ed for this, I would categorize it as a right-leaning website, Quillette. And she sort of said that the mission was to quote, empower, educate, and entertain

young women with content that celebrates femininity, encourages virtue, and offers a more honest perspective than they get elsewhere. She's classier than Cosmo, sexier than Refinery29, and smarter than Bustle. And I immediately know what that means. Like, at first glance, it really looks

like a lot of content that you would find geared toward Gen Z women. Like the main story on the homepage right now is an SEO story about how much money Mariah Carey makes every year from all I want for Christmas is you. And like, I bet it's, I bet it's doing good traffic because like people are probably searching that this time of year. 10 romantic Christmas holiday ideas, best accessories, new feminine fragrances to try. And so it's all like none of that really seems conservative outright. But it's really when you scroll down that you kind of see these articles that are really buried that are more insidious. Like it's a very obvious pro-Trump conservative slant, but it's sort of buried amongst the more innocuous like apolitical pieces that you find on there. Can I tell you about one that I found fascinating? Sure.

So it was a first person article. It was titled We Had Sex in a Car with Strangers Zooming By, and it was the most thrilling quickie of my life. Did you read that one? I did not. Okay, so this woman is newly married. She's on her honeymoon. She's wearing a bikini.

Hubby was shirtless, aviators on, and the humidity had his skin glistening. So she's totally into him. Suddenly, he hit the hazard lights and pulled over. My heart instantly raced. I knew exactly what was coming. And then they proceed to have sex in the car. But here's the thing. After the first paragraph, where you're hooked, you're like, I'm going to hear this wild tale of this sexy time. There is a disclaimer that says, this is educational material for married women only.

It made me think, what exactly are you trying to do with this disclaimer? First of all, is Evie magazine serious? Am I really supposed to avert my eyes from the sexy tale because I'm an unmarried woman? Like, what do you think that's trying to say there? And who is it for? Yeah, you know, when you were initially describing the uh angle to me i was like huh that doesn't sound like something that they would run but then when you mentioned that the woman had just gotten married and she was this was on her honeymoon

i was like oh okay that makes sense um so yeah it makes perfect sense that they would run that disclaimer they are very and they have been basically since their genesis, very aggressively anti-premarital sex. They sort of adhere to this very old-fashioned line of thinking that sex is for after marriage, sex is for someone you love. And if you have sex before marriage that you're somehow spoiled or tainted in some way, and men, and it's always men, then men won't find you, won't be interested in you anymore. And I think they're serious as a heart attack, honestly. I think they're trying to make money. I think they're trying to capitalize on what they believe to be, and correctly, I think, believe to be an untapped audience. But I also think they genuinely believe a lot of the stuff that they're writing. I mean, you look no further than like the people who you see contributing.

Like I remember when I was trying to reach out to writers when I was reporting the piece out, there were all these names. Like when I looked at people on LinkedIn, these were people with ties to PragerU, which is this conservative digital media behemoth. These were people who, you know, attended Hillsdale College, which is this private Christian college in Michigan with strong ties to the Trump administration. Like these were like one of the contributors early on was like the conservative influencer, Abby Shapiro, who's the sister of the Daily Wire founder, Ben Shapiro, except she was going by her married name then, Abby Roth. I mean, you really only need to look at like the people who have invested in EV adjacent enterprises, like the natural family planning app that Brittany Martinez launched to know that they're serious. Brittany Martinez is also the founder of this planning app called 28, which launched in August

2022. And it's basically this wellness app that encourages people to adopt natural family planning methods and offers like personalized fitness and nutrition recommendations based on where a user is in their cycle, which kind of sounds like innocuous and apolitical on the surface, but it's actually like the anti-birth control argument is like a pretty strong talking point on the right. I don't think that birth control is moral.

I think that there are a lot of other better, healthier methods that are good for your body and don't introduce hormones into your body. Actually, when Evie, you know, in the first year or two that Evie was running, there were a lot of stories that were like very broadly skeptical of birth control in general. These are headlines like the birth control pill could increase your risk for breast cancer. 13 reasons why you should quit hormonal birth control in general. These are headlines like, the birth control pill could increase your risk for breast cancer, 13 reasons why you should quit hormonal birth control. And it didn't disclose the relationship between EV Magazine and 28. So obviously there's sort of an inherent conflict of interest there. And 28 had conservative backing. It had $3 million in backing from Peter Thiel,

who's the right-wing billionaire who served on Trump's transition committee. And she's denied that he has any involvement with Evie in general, but it really, it does raise questions, especially since 28 was initially branded as 28 by Evie and the URL for 28 initially redirected to Evie, like it does raise questions about like what the agenda is here. I think in the past couple of years, there's definitely been a reckoning about the kinds of magazines that women were sold for many years, things like Cosmo, right? And we're looking back and we're like, was Cosmo good for women? And I think the answers are mixed, right? And so what I'm wondering about is like, I was like, I was like a Cosmo girl in like the early 2000s and whatnot. I was reading about how to like make an appletini. And I do

wonder, in 2024, we've got this magazine that is very popular that appeals to be growing that is selling a very different story about what it means to be a woman. And I'll use one of their kind of lines that I read repeatedly, which time that we're living in in the way that I think Cosmo really did tell us something about where we were 20 years ago. I do. And this is sort of where my feelings about Evie Magazine get a little bit more complicated because I think everything that you're saying is like totally spot on. Like I do think I came of age in the early 2000s where I was being inundated with, you know, the how to give a good blowjob listicles, but also told that I shouldn't dress too sexy and... And be very, very thin and yeah. Yeah, exactly. And like a really bad time in retrospect for young women.

And I do think that this idea that young women, these very conflicting messages that young women got about being sexual were really harmful and continue to do harm to this day. And I do think that there is a need for a corrective to that. And there is a need for a conversation about how like, well, women were sold a false bowl of goods to some extent. You know, we were told we could have it all. We were told we could have great sex lives and have these amazing careers and like have these families. And now as millennials are coming of age,

we're sort of slowly realizing that no, like this is actually not possible in this country. as millennials are coming of age, we're sort of slowly realizing that no, like that's, that's, this is actually not possible in this country. Like it's really, really hard to have even one of those things. And we feel like we've been sold a false bill of goods. So I think they're really tapping into that, whether or not I agree with it as a blanket statement, like, obviously I don't, but I think the, like, I don't. But I think the, like, I don't think it needs to be either or, you know, like I don't think it needs to be so black and white

as to say, well, casual sex is good for women or casual sex is bad for women. I think the truth is somewhere in the middle, but I will say I do give them credit for sort of trying to carve out a space in the conversation. E.J. Dixon of New York magazine's The Cut. Victoria Chamberlain produced today's show. Amina El-Sadi edited.

Senior researcher Laura Bullard has some questions for you, Evie. Andrea Christen's daughter and Rob Byers are our engineers, and I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. Thank you.