Last month, politically conservative OnlyFans creator Anya Lacey started advertising a “husband application,” which she’s ostensibly using to find a follower who will make her a “tradwife.” But really, her new website—dateanya.com—is a cross between a dating app and a self-improvement boot camp for interested men.
Lacey shares nude photos on her OnlyFans—but “I’m not sleeping around with 10 different men, like what Bonnie Blue’s doing,” she tells Vanity Fair. Her largely male followers “want a relationship. Obviously I can’t be an in-person girlfriend to 500,000 people.” So she launched Date Anya because “there needs to be a way that people can really hone in on what they want. There’s been a lot of pushback, because people want a pill. They don’t want to make fundamental changes in their lives.”
She says she’s looking for a man who dresses well, communicates, and wants to live a “godly” lifestyle. She also wants one who takes charge. “Let’s say me and my future husband have differing opinions,” she says. “If he hears me out, I’m happy. But whatever he thinks is best for the household, at the end of the day, I will follow him in that.”
In theory, putting something in the dictionary is supposed to settle its meaning once and for all. But already, Cambridge Dictionary’s definition of tradwife—which the reference manual added just a couple months ago—feels out of date. According to that dictionary, a tradwife is “a married woman, especially one who posts on social media, who stays at home doing cooking, cleaning.” Now, though, it seems that the word has become an umbrella term for a still-shifting set of values, one a woman needn’t be married to espouse.
The social media phenomenon of the tradwife is usually traced back to the pandemic era, when social distance and doomscrolling led increasing numbers of women to the feeds of influencers who were dolled up like 1950s housewives or doing Laura Ingalls Wilder cosplay. But as the conservative manosphere reached peak saturation after last year’s election, a market opportunity emerged for the women who see themselves as those men’s potential partners. In this space, tradwife is less of a literal descriptor and more of a marketing term for a woman who is willing to put herself second in her real—or theoretical—marriage.
Lacey, for one, aspires to this sort of relationship. “The full meaning of a tradwife is like you do the sourdough, you frolic in the field, you have your animals, but also at the end of the day, you submit to your husband,” she says. “He is the head of the household, and you live your life in a very godly way. There’s a lot of people that really don’t want to get into that. They just want to have the fun parts of that.” But if you want to do it the right way—as defined by Lacey—then she thinks you count as a tradwife, even if your housework includes some camgirling on the side.
The Venn diagram of sexual-content creators and morally upright Christian conservatives is looking more like a circle as they begin to share space on each other’s platforms. Lacey has been a panelist on the Whatever podcast, where a group of women, including influencers and OnlyFans creators, debate—and are sometimes joined (and berated) by conservative men. (Charlie Kirk guest hosted the show multiple times before his killing last month. The podcast memorialized him with a post: “CHARLIE KIRK REST IN PEACE! It was an honor to have you on the show. You were a remarkable man. RIP.”)
For conservative magazine Evie, getting raunchy is also okay—as long as the sex is safely within wedlock. In April, the outlet published a story headlined “I Grieved Through My Vagina and It Healed Me,” a first-person account of a woman who responds to the death of a friend by having sex with her husband. The magazine, which has a stated goal of rejecting feminism in favor of “femininity,” and whose founders also created a Peter Thiel–backed wellness app for women, mixes profiles of prominent women like Ballerina Farm’s Hannah Neeleman and MAHA influencer Vani Hari with laments about how online pornography has ruined men. The “grieving vagina” post came with a content warning: “Contains explicit adult content and is intended for married women for educational purposes only.”
Conservative Christians have used similar messaging to excuse content they might otherwise find objectionable since the Victorian era, but social media has supercharged its reach. The increased normalization of this content has also revealed deep cracks in right-wing unity. In August, a group of conservative women went viral for a profane public fight about influencer Sarah Stock’s engagement announcement. What began as a post of her small but nice engagement ring turned into a MAGA-woman cage match, complete with unprintably lewd rants alleging public sex at a Turning Point USA event. The fight pitted some women who believe that women should work outside of the home against the ones who think they shouldn’t, but above all else, it made for fascinating social media fodder.
Savanna Stone, a 20-year-old stay-at-home wife who went viral earlier this year for making a video about wearing a sundress for her husband, found herself in the middle of the fight, defending Stock. “The right-wing mean girls make me want to log off,” says Stone in an interview, noting that she was surprised to learn how many of her fellow conservative influencers were not living a traditional lifestyle either by being unmarried or working outside of the home. “This is why I don’t identify as a conservative or right wing. I’m my own person. Don’t put me in that box. It’s just interesting to me how these women call themselves conservative, but they’re really not conserving anything.”
Stone says she didn’t even realize she was making content that could count as tradwife-adjacent until long after she started going viral for telling the story of how she got married when she was only 18. Her first video to break containment, filmed as a Get Ready With Me, told the tale in a straightforward way and was met with quite a bit of shock. “I didn’t even say anything controversial,” she says. “The comments still keep coming in today. They’re like, ‘Ugh, just give it 10 years. Can’t wait for the divorce.’ Just all these terrible things.”
She wasn’t expecting a huge audience when she started sharing videos on TikTok either: “When I first started posting on social media, I wasn’t really chronically online, so I actually didn’t even know that was a word until I started posting.” But her detractors called her a tradwife, and so did the New York Post; soon the label stuck. “My own personal belief is I don’t think anyone’s actually traditional in 2025,” she says. “I mean, I use a washing machine, I use a dishwasher. I’m not hanging my clothes on a line.”
Like other conservative social media influencers, Stone took the pushback as evidence that she should keep going. Her main message is that it’s okay to get married young. “This isn’t a weird thing. My grandparents got married at 16, so 18 is completely normal.” She lives in Florida with her husband, Noah, whom she’s with because she wanted “to marry a good leader who follows God so that I can completely trust him and submit to my husband.”
Nevertheless, she doesn’t want to be the face of the tradwives. “My perspective on all the labels is you can be a wife and have a great career,” she says. “You can embrace traditional values while also being a modern woman and using your cell phone and putting on makeup every day, whatever it may be.”
Earlier this year, theater director Josh Boerman and June Sternbach, social media editor at The Onion, were concerned that the left wing wasn’t paying enough attention to the new conservative approach to marriage and mothering. So they created a podcast called Ill-Conceived, where the pair draw out the connections between seemingly distinct trends like tradwife content, homeschooling networks, and Project 2025. In their show, they argue that the term tradwife really has morphed in meaning since it first entered the lexicon.
“It’s just shifted more to appealing to the male gaze,” Boerman tells Vanity Fair. “It’s a mercenary space because you are always competing for attention. If you are not at all times delivering on the fantasy, somebody else is going to deliver on it in a more compelling way. And so there is this constant pressure to keep up and keep on top of the trend.”
Ultimately, they’ve decided that tradwife is less a word that describes an actual lifestyle and more of a social media genre, like Outfit of the Day or Get Ready With Me—with tinges of soft-core pornography to boot. “I also don’t get the sense that these people have an ironclad ideological commitment to the honest-to-goodness natalist agenda,” Boerman adds. “They are not suffused with a desire to have 12 kids. But the people who do want that future can take these performances and use them as propaganda to their own ends.”
Sternbach is particularly fascinated by the new spate of “sexy” tradwives because she has seen similar delusions pop up on very different corners of the internet. “Everyone feels lonely, everyone feels very hopeless. So they look at this very aspirational content and they’re like, ‘One day I can be happy. One day I will have the perfect life,’” she says. “The part of their brain that is screaming at them, ‘This is fake’—they suspend their disbelief.”
It’s easy and fun for left-leaning bystanders to look at tradwife content and focus on the inherent hypocrisy of women choosing to embrace subservience. But Sternbach warns progressives not to fall into this trap: “Being hypocritical is not important to these people. It’s about ideologically winning, and that’s what they value more than anything else,” she says. “White nationalism, Christian nationalism—you start to see the pieces unfold [in] every rhetorical strategy and topic these conservatives talk about. I feel like I’m creating a corkboard with a bunch of string. That’s how I’ve been seeing the world now.”
Lacey and Stone are 19 and 20 years old, respectively—but the roots of the recent tradwife shift were planted much longer ago. “People on the left, including myself, don’t look long-term enough,” says Sternbach. “The right put forth a very intentional long-term project, and the ones who started it knew they would not be around [for all of it]. They would die [before] seeing it come to fruition.”
In our conversation, Sternbach mentions Alena Kate Pettitt, one of the original tradwife influencers. In 2024, Pettitt told The New Yorker that she was moving away from the movement after it had “become its own monster” and a new generation was taking it to mean something other than an enthusiasm for housecleaning. Talking to the content creators, it’s easy to imagine that their views on gender relations will change as they experience the setbacks of young adulthood. But even if they do, the conservative project will be happy to find new tradwives to take their place.
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