Pornhub recently singled out Tradwife as one of the most popular search trends of 2024. It’s an odd kink with deep links to conservative domestic fantasies of constraining women into homemaker roles, idealizing a life in which the doting wife makes dinner for her husband coming home from a long day at the office. Some go back even further and envision a fantasy of a farmer wife who, like, harvests potatoes while breastfeeding her brood of Aryan children or something.
The point is that the fantasy is weird and not rooted in a reality that many women actually want. And those who have lived it really disliked it. Case in point: NPR interviewed women with growing TikTok followings who self-identify as former tradwives — they don’t recommend the lifestyle.
For every Hannah Neelman, the content creator behind Ballerina Farms, a tradwife TikTok account with 10 million followers, there’s a Jennie Gage. Gage is an ex-tradwife who grew up in a Mormon community where she was encouraged to prioritize raising a family and keeping up someone else’s concept of domestic bliss over her ambitions. She eventually realized that her marriage was abusive and the Mormon church was oppressive, so she left it all behind.
Jennie was living in a car when she found out about the tradwife trend on TikTok. She describes the first time the algorithm served her a Ballerina Farms video: “She just came up in my algorithm, and I had a visceral response. I was furious.” Jeannie decided to use TikTok as a platform to provide some tradwife counter-programming.
Ex-Tradwifes Are Slamming the Tradwife Lifestyle
Jeannie is one of several women who have become anti-tradwife influencers — women who try to de-influence the lifestyle by sharing their real-life, non-glamorized stories of how oppressive the lifestyle can be. And how many avenues in life it shuts down for any woman who envisions a life for themselves beyond simply raising a family and maintaining a home.
Not every woman interviewed by NPR completely casts aside all traditional domestic roles. Some find a balance, like Sharon Johnson, another ex-tradwife, who didn’t think the tradwife trend represented her life at all until her husband lost his job and she was forced to take on the role of a breadwinner in her household.
The gender roles reversed, waking her up to the realization that she had been in a tradwife situation for years without realizing it. She says they’re both happier than they’ve ever been while her husband plays the role of the stay-at-home dad raising their six kids and she uses her monetized social media presence as a steady income. “Both of us stopped having this pressure of these roles we had to play,” she told NPR. “I feel like I am a person, and a wife and a mother second.”
The post The Tradwife Life Isn’t as Great as TikTok Makes It Seem, According to Actual Tradwives appeared first on VICE.
The post The Tradwife Life Isn’t as Great as TikTok Makes It Seem, According to Actual Tradwives appeared first on VICE.
