The first rule of influencing: Always be getting more attention. It doesn’t need to be good attention, because a page view is a page view and a comment is an interaction, even if the valence of that comment is overwhelmingly negative.
Nara Smith, a model and influencer who has built a following of over 12 million on TikTok through an outlandish portrayal of domestic perfection, is getting a lot of attention right now for an interview she did on the popular podcast “Call Her Daddy.” In the interview she vehemently disavowed the term “tradwife,” insisting that people were reading into her content and life something that was never there.
“I’m a working mom,” Smith told the host, Alex Cooper. She went on to explain that she and her husband, a fellow model, Lucky Blue Smith, have an egalitarian arrangement, in which he does the dishes and half the child care. She insisted that viewers of her content were “stuck in this narrative” about retro gender roles that she didn’t purposely create.
But let’s look at Nara Smith’s content, which is all that many casual viewers see. Her most viral videos involve speaking in a breathy baby doll voice (unlike her normal speaking voice), making everything from gum to crackers from scratch in an immaculate kitchen, reading the Book of Mormon and wearing prairie dresses. This is a woman who chugged raw milk while pregnant with her fourth child and made content with a fellow domestic content creator and Mormon mom of many, Hannah Neeleman (a.k.a. Ballerina Farm).
Though Smith has never identified herself as a tradwife, she seemed happy to appeal to fans of conservative politics and gender roles. (Even the MAGA stalwart Katie Miller thought so.) Smith’s interview with Cooper was also a different tune from the one she sang in 2024 when she did an interview with GQ’s Carrie Battan. Then Smith didn’t seem to mind how people viewed her. “I just put content out there to inspire people. Everyone can take whatever they want to from my content,” she said. She also seemed to relish making viewers mad; she and her husband joked to Battan about rage-baiting their followers by cultivating a garden because it would take her bucolic, scratch-made persona a step further.
I have long maintained that tradwives weren’t a real-life trend. There was never any evidence that lots of young women were eager to drop out of careers and get back into the kitchen, even if tradwife content regularly went viral. There was also never much evidence that young men wanted a life of throwback gender roles, either. So what’s changed lately?
Even in Utah, the tradwifeyest state in the union, couples are having fewer children and waiting longer to have kids, in part because the cost of living in the state is so high, The Times reported last month. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is having trouble retaining young women, as are other faiths that do not allow women to have leadership roles and that emphasize female subordination and large families.
The second Trump administration, which has aligned itself with narrow and cartoonish ideas of masculinity and femininity, is showing itself to be an unmitigated disaster. MAGA media in general has lost its luster, and many right-wing influencers have been struggling to retain their large audiences. Young people have turned on the right. The brothers Andrew and Tristan Tate, once kings of the manosphere, are in jail, and nobody really seems to care.
It’s no longer considered cool, even in an edgelord kind of way, to be tacitly embracing the Trumpian vision. It’s tired, and people are sick of it. It’s not cute anymore to be spending hours making Skittles from scratch when so many people can’t even afford haircuts and toilet paper.
Beyond the superficial politics of Smith’s content, there’s evidence that one-note influencers are having trouble retaining their audience, because what used to get them brand deals and followers has become stale.
Influencers are now having to work harder to retain attention and preserve their incomes. In an article about the influencer recession in New York magazine, Rebecca Jennings explains, “Once upon a time, influencers could post beautiful photos of their lives — their outfits, their coffee, their vacations, their children — and, with enough consistency, amass an audience of followers who looked to them for inspiration or escape.” But now there are so many good-looking people doing the same thing, you need something to set yourself apart. She describes the pivot of an influencer named Alexia Delarosa, who was making content in the mold of Smith and has further “exaggerated each aspect of her videos to maximize engagement.”
Which brings me back to Smith. While her denunciation of the term “tradwife” has gotten the most attention in her interview with Cooper, she also talked about struggling with postpartum anxiety and revealed the pain of seeing one of her four children through cancer treatment. She discussed how hard it was to have no time off from working, posting content as if everything had been OK while she and her family were privately suffering.
If the outcome of Smith’s commentary is that we have more popular influencers who can speak honestly about the realities of working motherhood in America, that would be a wonderful shift that I would welcome. If she raises awareness about the financial and emotional costs of having a sick child in a country that is increasingly stingy with health care, that could help millions of people. If she reflects the truth that stay-at-home moms and working moms are not at war but, in fact, are often the same people at different points in their lives, I would love that even more.
Only time will tell if Smith’s new persona is genuine or if she’s just another influencer with a new audience she wants to reach, riding the changing tide of public opinion and the algorithm to further fame and fortune.
End Notes
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Thank you to one of my favorite newsletters, Garbage Day, for introducing me to the term “genderslop,” which is viral content about gender relations that is not based in real-life conflict; it’s meant just to make people angry. For example: videos discussing whether women really expect that men should pay for a car service on the first date. I talked to the Garbage Day creator, Ryan Broderick, for an episode of the “Opinions” podcast in 2024.
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I have been feeling paralyzed and scared about raising girls in the current moment of insane body discourse and the conspicuous shrinking of many already thin actresses and singers. In Slate, Scaachi Koul gets to the heart of Ariana Grande’s announced step back from the public and the conflicted chatter around her: “No one really wants to say anything about Grande’s body. We don’t learn a lot of lessons as a society, but among her fans, at least, there’s a clear push and pull between allowing Grande bodily autonomy while also aiming to make sense of a triggering appearance.”
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Relatedly, in the aftermath of writing about GLP-1s a few weeks back, I heard from many mental health professionals that the ubiquity of Ozempic and similar drugs can be challenging for people struggling to recover from eating disorders.
Feel free to drop me a line about anything here.
The post The Tradwife Illusion Meets the Anti-Trump Reality appeared first on New York Times.
