Have Tradwives Killed Feminism?

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1:04Hello and welcome to this special bonus series of The Rest is Entertainment with me, Marina Hyde. And James Kanagasuri. Well, this is a turn up for the books. I am so happy to be joined by you today, James. For any of our listeners and audience who don't know, James is an absolutely brilliant pollster, an all-around great guy. He is the chief polling officer of Focal Data. He's worked on how many election campaigns here and around the world have you worked on? A lot. Double digits. Double digits. Unbelievable. He coined the term the Red Wall, which turned out to be quite a consequential piece of our political language.

1:42Three weeks before Keir Starmer was elected, he talked about his Sandcastle coalition. This was the idea that despite the likelihood that Keir Starmer would win a huge landslide, it was like a sandcastle, his victory built on nothing stable and liable to be washed away extremely fast. So I guess everybody makes mistakes. You know, it's solid, solid as a medieval fort, his castle. But enough of politics, because as that brilliant pollster, James is plugged into all the currents and trends in public opinion that shape our world. and in this series we are going to look at some aspects of entertainment and culture with that brilliant analytical eye.

2:20James, hello. Hello Marina. I'm looking forward to this one in an advised way. We're talking about tradwives, the whole culture content. Now I will have to begin because what are tradwives? Tradwives, it became a thing as a sort of internet trend so we can immediately be suspicious of it but it's a sort of submission to your husband in traditional gender roles it promotes financial dependence on men he's the breadwinner he makes all the key financial decisions um it's different from stay-at-home mothers we should say that because there's lots of stay-at-home mothers who wouldn't describe themselves as tradwise what does it involve um if if you're online and you're one it involves a lot of bread making homeschool lesson plans.

3:05The Christian elements are often very strong. In terms of content, which is watched, by the way, by a lot of people who are not trad wives. So I don't know how we hate watching is always an interesting thing, but we can talk about that. Baking bread, like I said, homeschooling, cleaning by candlelight, really elaborate school lunches that you could never, flower arranging. It's all sort of aesthetically appealing. There's a kind of prairie wife homesteading thing to it all. Some of the big ones in terms of content are there's Nara Smith and she's got modeling and sponsorship and she's got a massive social audience.

3:42There's Hannah Nealman. She's like a business and media brand called Ballerina Farm. She used to be a Juilliard ballerina, but sadly had to give that up after her husband insisted on her getting married immediately. And she's now got, I want to say eight children. She's also got a multi-million dollar media brand and millions of followers. I guess what I'd say to you first, James, is, is TradWife culture big or do we just think it is? I found myself in a conference last year about culture and it was fine.

4:13James Kanagasooriam:It was quite good. And a guy called Adam Alexic, who calls himself the etymologist nerd, gave a talk and it was on TradWives. And I think he's one of the world's experts on TradWives. And I remember at the time being like, what am I doing? Why am I here? Why am I not at home? He's basically, he's an American based guy. He's very, very clever. He's basically has analysed where trad wives have come from, why they're important, what it says about America's culture, kind of over my whole world. And I was pretty sceptical at first because I was like, what is this? This sounds pretty weird. Can I just say it is weird?

4:46It is weird.

4:47James Kanagasooriam:It's an internet meme that he thinks came from 4chan, very well trusted source of information in 2019, but I hadn't quite understood how embedded it is basically in meme culture. Yeah. So it comes from, he thinks, what he calls the Wojak character. Have you come across the Wojak character? You've probably seen the cartoon. It's the cartoon that's like of a guy that's kind of drawn where he's looking, he's kind of grimacing. That's apparently called the Wojak character, which is a big meme. And he described this as basically, Trad Wife came about as a meme for 4chan where you basically had Chad, who's the idealised attractive man.

5:27James Kanagasooriam:The idealised attractive guy. And then Tradwife is his wife. And they are part of what a dialectic, I know this sounds completely ridiculous, with Duma Girl and Duma Boy, who are memes themselves. And this became like a thing in 2019. Because I tell you, when they're out there making their sardo, you're not thinking about any of this. No, but the provenance, I think, is really kind of important. And basically, it just took a life of its own. People saw that. It became a thing. it took a life of its own the reason why i thought it was really interesting a couple of things first of all adam saw it in a much larger context trad wife so if you ever go on if you go on instagram and you look at ballerina farm yeah and then these other things the other thing is the color palette kind of like sepia sepia colored lots of pinks lots of golds lots of roads it's a completely different lifestyle and it's obviously not that trad because these people are making millions and it's literally being filmed all day but it has millions of followers I was talking to someone at the Times who was saying their articles on Tradwife went off the scale in terms of traffic.

6:25James Kanagasooriam:So people are fascinated by this. Is it part of like burnout culture and things like that? You know, I went to Versailles of my daughter about two weekends ago. If you really walk a long way, you get to Marie Antoinette's halo, you know, which is, you know, when you can't really deal with the hecticness and the burnout of the actual palace and the court. you want your getaway fake place where you dye your sheep pink and you play at being some kind of shepherdess and we know that the pastoral idyll has been going for genuinely like hundreds of years millennia millennia yeah i mean i'm not going to say that you know those people were quite quitting but were they well luckily were the romantics quite quitting i think there are two very different things basically going on king's college london looked at this so yeah Julia Gillard, the ex-Prime Minister of Australia, has led a research project onto Tradwife with King's College London.

7:19James Kanagasooriam:And we've run some research on it as well. We've been looking at it. So since I met Adam, I just couldn't believe I'd missed this whole kind of vector of humanity. I had no idea what was going on. So I was like, I better take a look at this. So we did some polling and King's College London have also done some work. The first thing to kind of note is that people are quite ambivalent about it. It's not as hazy as I think you would expect it to be. There's a yearning, and we're definitely going to be using that word a lot in this series, but there is a yearning for that simplicity. I think so. So we polled both the US and the UK, because we had a hypothesis that people in the UK might be slightly different.

7:55James Kanagasooriam:And in the UK, about a third of the public, we described it pretty neutrally. It's this particular life, you take on a certain role, the man does X, the woman does Y. It happens in this kind of cultural and aesthetic context. Fine, without judgment. And about a third of people in the UK thought that sounded quite nice. 44 % of people went meh didn't really know didn't have a view 22 % of people so basically just above 1 in 5 in the US slightly more positive 42 % more positive 40 % said don't know 70 % were negative but again it's not that the cultural penetration of trad wife isn't that high in the UK only 1 in 7 people actually knew what it was and could explain it so I'm interested in what they think and it's not how people live it's not at all because people live in households where both people work or you have kind of more traditional setups that you would never describe as trad wife.

8:43James Kanagasooriam:And it wouldn't... It's not a stay-at-home mother. And it wouldn't be people having eight kids and a secret Instagram account that wasn't secret at all that earned them hundreds of thousands of pounds a month. But the awareness is quite low. 64 % of people in the UK had literally never heard of what a trad wife was. But when we kind of looked into it, around half the public said they found aspects of it admirable and people should be free to choose. 20 % of people felt conflicted. They were like, I don't know. 16 % of people just thought it was backwards and one in seven which is i which is where i put myself were pretty suspicious of it and thought it was kind of a social media performance but if you go underneath the surface and you talk i'm with you is this about burnout the answer is partially part of its appeal comes from people who feel burnt out and see something simpler and 100 escapist so we asked people who said oh that sounds okay without under kind of without much context right they've never really known about it.

9:38James Kanagasooriam:We asked them one question about it. The top reason that people thought that it sounded appealing was the ability to focus on children without feeling guilty about not working. In other words, working and having kids is quite tough. This seems like a kind of basically an exit route out of that kind of tension. The second top reason was it was a slower, simpler pace of life compared to modern work culture. So people are saying something about the modern way of working. And then the third, so the top three reasons basically are about stress. Freedom of stress and pressure of a professional career.

10:10When you look at the people who are doing it, and I think that Hannah Nealman is a case in point. I mean, she is a massive brand. As I said, she was a ballerina. She's now a farm wife. There have been various interviews with her and the husband, and he never lets her off on her own. The comments underneath, there are people saying, this is reproductive abuse. This is like an episode of Law and Order Special Victims Unit. She's exhausted. So she's doing a beauty pageant 11 days after she's given birth and she's only just stopped bleeding. It's all really intense.

10:39James Kanagasooriam:Sounds totally normal. Equally, even those with fewer than 100 ,000 followers can earn several thousand dollars a month. Some who've got 300 ,000 followers, they're earning$40 ,000 a month. These women are earning much, much more than their husbands. Some of them say, I don't even know how much I earn. He deals with all of that for me. But it's like, but you are a mogul. the trad wives a lot of the trad wives are moguls or want to be moguls and what and why do you think it is that people are are who don't agree with it why does it have such interest right it's gone seriously viral it's an easy way for a newspaper to get traffic there's a lot of that's what i now have to feel i have to call like social media like osint which is people who just want to find flaws in influencers stories like they're doing detective work to expose them and say you're not who you say you are.

11:32And actually, these people, more than anyone, offer the most simple way to do that. It's like you're presenting yourself as this kind of prelapsarian, vast real beauty thing. And yet, there's probably two cameras on you at one time. This is a massive business. You are earning money via platforms that we don't think of as having anything to do with farming. People love to see through it. And also, I'm sorry to say, people love to see plot lines in families that they follow and they love to say oh my god can you believe they're doing that to that child and you know and there's been lots of exposés of youtube families where you'll say people say oh my god the mother gets them up every morning and they have to do this it's really bad look how sad she's looking in this obviously there's things like tattle life in this country but across reddit across everywhere there are people dissecting this stuff and saying this is not what we're being sold we're watching they're almost doing those kind of netflix documentaries true life documentaries about stories of abuse.

12:29I'm not suggesting that anyone particularly that I mentioned here at all is involved in one of those, but that people want to say there's such a gap between the image and the thing. That's what people want to think about what they're shown for whatever reason, maybe because they're just shown so much these days. And they hate influencers as a class, really, generally, that people don't like influencers or they say they don't. They spend a lot of time with them for people who don't like them. To me, it feeds into lots of conspiracy theories, which is the thing you're being told is not true and it fits in with that conspiracist zeitgeist so on that on the topic of conspiracy

13:02James Kanagasooriam:mindsets i mentioned this guy called the etymology nerd yeah real name adam alexic this kind of american young 25 year old who's bit of a kind of sage about maha where it's come from he's trying that's make america healthy again make america healthy again rfk kind of but also trad wives. And he said, look, it is about how people work and burn out and a sense that it's hard to have a career and to bring up kids and about trade-offs and economic trade-offs. But he was far more interested in the cultural atmospherics around what he calls returnism versus futurism. And I remember being like, what's this guy talking about?

13:42James Kanagasooriam:And I think what Adam was saying is that basically there is a growing orb of people in america and i would say across the west whose primary atmospherics are about nature about analog about nostalgia about being anti-tech it was very interesting and that is related to other kind of aesthetics like he mentioned something called cottagecore i was like what oh yeah well i was going to talk about this when we talked about trends but yes neoludism yeah and anti-ai i read about i read a survey last week america big big surveys which found that something like 47 percent of gen zers want to live in the past right and he was saying look there's this there's this kind of axis of american culture where you know some of it is returnism versus the futurism which is about tech this abundance kind of theory that's come out of Silicon Valley and accelerationism, which is people who believe that the way is forward to embrace change, to go more, to go harder, is like avowedly kind of capitalist.

14:44James Kanagasooriam:And he was saying, right, you can talk about left, right. You can talk about Republican, Democrat. If you really want to understand trad wives, yes, it has kind of Republican versus Democrat coding. We've got some kind of polling on that, both in the US, but also how that transfers over to the UK. But he talks about this new axis of returnism versus futurism. And he was just like, the aesthetics of Tradwife are absolutely critical, as you were saying, to Cottagecore and this survey of 47 % of people who want to live in a cottage, which is somewhere along the lines, urbanism, futurism, a kind of culture that steers towards the future is not quite there.

15:18James Kanagasooriam:Now, you know, we're going to be talking in later episodes about music and Taylor Swift and music tastes. Yeah. And genericism. Genericism and the role of the past. But this is actually quite a similar theme, which is that Tradwife is a kind of window into an alternative and other future that is far more rural. It's not just about gender roles and the polling around that and how people feel about that. It's about saying actually maybe there's a different way of living. Attracts people maybe potentially who are a bit more conspiracy minded as well. It does strike me as well when I think of all the type of content that they produce.

15:51And, you know, I listed all those things like cleaning by candlelight and making these incredibly detailed school lunches, things like this. All of these are things which 100 % you would not imagine AI will ever do. And all of the things that are happening there, you think people feel like this is something that I could hang on to. And actually, the things that they are watching are very, very human, even though it's kind of ridiculous because they're being done on the platforms and they're being done for money and they're making huge amounts of money and what have you. But the things that you are watching in that slightly weird way that, you know, sort of King Charles kind of fetishizes those Romanian peasants.

16:29He thinks Romania is this kind of amazing idyll. And I read a very interesting article shortly before he was crowned and he sort of went and thought it was absolutely wonderful. And it was like, but actually the people don't have any shoes and what they really, really want is satellite television. And they want the world of progress. And that's the axis.

16:44James Kanagasooriam:Well, that actually comes out from the polling. So we asked people in the UK, who do you think supports Tradwives as a movement? The top one was nobody, because this is a very American phenomenon. It's not a British one. First was Trump. Second was Farage. So that's political coding. The third one was the Princess of Wales at 18%. Fourth was Andrew Tate. The fifth was Nigella Lawson. God, isn't that interesting? And then King Charles was also in the top 10. Isn't that interesting? Because actually, think of the content the Princess of Wales makes as an influencer. All the kind of, I've survived cancer and I've done it via going back to nature and these incredibly weird, I mean, I think odd, sepia controlled versions of a form of influencing, really.

17:29James Kanagasooriam:But it taps into something that I think is actually super mainstream, which is the changes that we see in the world. People are largely beginning to think, actually, this change in this kind of future accelerationism isn't benefiting me. Whether that's technology. And it may discard me entirely. Yeah. Whether that's housing, whether that's how people live, whether that's what you do, whether that's how you bring up your kids. There is a strong mainstream seem of public opinion across both the US and the UK, that maybe there is a way of looking back that is nostalgic, that actually is a better way to live.

18:02James Kanagasooriam:The reason why I think you get huge numbers of people who are like, no, I'm not a trad wife, I wouldn't want to do that, I'm suspicious of it. But actually, there are parts of it that I understand, that I like. I think it sits on that bed of maybe backwards is better. And I think we haven't talked about the role of AI in the polling that came out of this, but Adam was very, very clear. He's a really, really interesting guy. I was in America recently and I was like, let's meet up. And he was like, sorry, I can't answer my phone. And I was like, why? And he was like, well, I'm hanging out with the Neo Luddite no phone community in New York.

18:36James Kanagasooriam:And he's spending time with them. And I found that super interesting because he's tracking what atmospherics are linked to what. And the fact that he's already made that jump from trad wife to basically no phone usage which is obviously one of the key it's one of the key things that we're all now talking about right which is like people going back to nokia 3210 that's not trad wife but that's you know that's somewhere halfway in between all of this is friction maxing or what everyone says you know whatever it is just making it harder the dopamine hits coming less fast basically and yet what is obviously the big contradiction is that every single person is looking at this on their phone not that he's the total jedi on this subject but Adam was saying that the online aesthetics are now shaping offline behavior.

19:17James Kanagasooriam:But basically, there's now this paradoxical loop where you've got all of these people who are doing lots of offline stuff. And then they simply come back online to say what they have done. So there's like a call and response feedback loop. So there's a huge amount of social media content and people being like, right, I'll see you in a day. I'm going to go and do all of these different things like grounding and making this and doing this and cutting wood and doing this and X, Y, Z. And then I'm going to return and talk about it. dutifully talk about it. I want to talk about this on another one of our episodes, I have to say, because I, yeah, I think a lot of people work for the platforms.

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21:02James Kanagasooriam:I mean, the other thing about the link between Make America Healthy Again. So you've given the kind of background to that. It's kind of forefronted by RFK. This idea that modern technology and modern science is only truth adjacent, right? And that there are other wider truths that you can kind of tap into. It's very, very deep. And that was the kind of the secret cohort of people that kind of Trump, particularly in 2024, was really picking up on. And I think it was absolutely critical to his election victory and actually his brand and how he comes across is this Maha adjacency. And actually, when we polled the US, we asked the same question of Americans, like, who do you think supports Tradwives?

21:40James Kanagasooriam:Same people you'd expect come up top three, Trump, J.D. Vance, and then the fourth is RFK. So I think we can really underplay the cultural impact of RFK eating roadkill, right? Yeah. As well as being a secretary. Because it's sort of adjacent to that I'm just a girl thing online where people kind of fetishize some form of female incapabilities. You can imagine I hate this. Is it the end of feminism? No, I mean, feminism and polling is a whole book. I should hope so. And a whole show. I think, again, our friends at King's College London, in looking at Tradwife, had a look at some of the polling on feminism.

22:20James Kanagasooriam:And actually, I have a colleague at another firm called Scarlett Maguire, who's recently done some polling on the role of young women for the New Statesman. Very interesting. Broadly, if you ask people, are you positive or negative about feminism? In the UK, it's like 51 % of men say positive, 17 % say negative. So big ratio of positive, negative, but substantial minority. Women is 69 % and 8%. So broadly, people are not necessarily wanting to get rid of that paradigm. But what I would also say is that obviously there is a divergence occurring and that female-male difference is even more accentuated if you ask not just someone's gender, but whether they're coupled up or not, whether they're single.

23:02James Kanagasooriam:So if you are a single man who's not in a relationship, only 42 % feel positive about feminism and the same number is 20 % negative. Whereas if you are a woman who is in a relationship, that's 71 % to nine. So again, you're talking about a kind of two to one ratio being outstripped by a kind of almost eight to one ratio the other way. So things are more complicated. On balance, almost every group is kind of pro it, but you are starting to see far more conditionality, right? In the polling around it, which was like i think there was one particular question that i thought was very interesting which was like have things gone too far and if you look at that polling those polling numbers are much closer together people have always said that and they have always had said that but it's you think about when i think about polling and you think about uh cultural shifts that have occurred you used to have this thesis that there's a great arc of liberalization right yeah that's just simply i don't i don't think that anymore and i reckon a lot fewer of us think it now it's not it's simply not the case things can unfurl i think it's far more interesting that kind of gap i guess between younger women and younger men is it comes out far more in other questions not to do with feminism but to do with other issues so i found really curious in scarlet's polling yeah uh which wasn't it didn't it got a write-up in the new statesman a little bit but i thought it's far more interesting that men if you ask is the uk a racist country which is interesting right?

24:31James Kanagasooriam:We're talking about adjacencies here. We've got this whole kind of nostalgia adjacency of trad wives. You've then got what's the link to feminism. And then I'm like, oh, you look at the polling. Isn't it interesting that 29 % of men think that the UK is a racist country, but 57 % don't. But the plurality of women do. It's 43 % women think that Britain is a racist country, UK is, and 38 % don't. And that's super interesting because you've got all these other questions of culture that actually flip far more and a far more kind of culturally important and predictive. And so when I think about what is the Maha, Tradwife, Cottagecore, Neo-Luddite, Returnism, or whatever you want to call it, I think it is slightly separate to a liberal conservative axis.

25:18James Kanagasooriam:I think it bakes in this sense that maybe the future holds more terrors than the past. And also the fact that maybe accelerating fast towards the future of AI, of urbanization, of all of these different things may not be the best thing? As I said, all of those things that you see them doing can't really be done, nor would they ever be done by AI. But rather in the same way that you see people are kind of wanting to have more live experiences, all of these things are, which again, they take more time to do and they're harder to get to and they're what have you, but all of these things are a form of flight from what they're being encouraged to do, which is to run joyfully towards their insinuerative future.