Why tradwife content is so seductive
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A killing in the night. Where's Simone? 20 years later, police still haven't solved the case. And I want to know why. Did you kill Simone Stradwell? No, never. If you lied about one thing, you may lie about other things. Just because someone's lying doesn't make them a murderer. I'm Richard Baker. Join me to investigate Lies in Lismore, the new season of Unravel. Search for Unravel on ABC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Today is my husband and I's fourth wedding anniversary, so I decided to wake up super early and make some bagels and cream cheese from scratch. He gave them a 10 out of 10, which is very rare. I was very pleased with that.
In 2025, a couple of new words were added to the Cambridge English Dictionary. One of those words was dilulu, which is basically diluted, but with a sprinkle of playful Gen Z ennui. The other new word was tradwife. It didn't used to exist, but now it does, as a word and as a thing. A trad wife, as we've come to know her, is a social media creation. She's perfect, immaculately dressed, with linen-clad, beatific children and a huge fucking subtext. The subtext is, you know all those things that you find really impossible? Like the pressure to look appealing after you've had kids? Or the demands of cooking healthy meals for your family all the time? Or the boredom of child rearing? Well, the Tradwife performs these duties with saint-like devotion while looking breathtakingly beautiful, rich, clean and sexually alluring.
So the subtext is you might not be nailing life, but she is. Look at her. And of course, off Instagram, there are women who live in those traditional gender roles far away from the brand deals.
What exactly is a “tradwife” and how did the term emerge?
but I'm interested in the ones in front of the camera and what it says about us watching along. Should we be worried about the influence of this highly curated version of domestic life that squarely places a woman back in the home and positions the man as the head of the family? Or is it just entertainment? I'm Yumi Steins. Ladies, we need to talk about the trad wife trend with Heejung Chung.
I think in the pandemic, a lot of us were juggling four, five, six, seven roles at a time, homeschooling the kids while trying to work on Zoom. It was a bit of a fantasy.
Professor Heejung Chung has spent years researching how workplaces shape and are shaped by gender at King's College in London. During pandemic lockdowns, Heejung was one more working mum, trying to balance the continuing demands of her job while home was complete chaos. And it was at this time she noticed that her algorithms were starting to serve up lifestyles of women in a very different reality to hers.
There are certain elements which really just look like parody. And majority of the people in the comment sections were just really dismissive, you know, talking about how improbable this is. But what we've seen in the last kind of couple of years is that rather than being this kind incredibly outlier, weird thing that's on the internet, it has become mainstream.
For anyone who's not familiar with this world, can you explain what a trad wife lifestyle looks like?
So a tradwife lifestyle, you have to be a bit careful because these were not actually the lifestyle that women back in the 18th century or in like the 1950s have lived. So the tradwife in quotation marks lifestyle is someone who has given up work, a stay-at-home mom, but they're not just a stay-at-home mom that needs to do the toilet cleaning or, you know, doing the washing and the laundry and making sure to, you know, get the lice off of your kid's hair.
The key to the draw of the Tradwife lifestyle is the aspirational aesthetic. Soft lighting, happy children, luxurious backgrounds. Heejung says that previous attempts to pitch a more traditional stay-at-home lifestyle online didn't have the same appeal because it focused on the actual work that has to be done in a home to keep it running, as opposed to polished soundbites of egg collecting and baking bread while wearing couture, which, my friends, is
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–2:13
2
What exactly is a “tradwife” and how did the term emerge?
2:13–7:03
3
How did the pandemic boost the popularity of tradwife content?
7:03–10:11
4
What visual and aesthetic elements make tradwife videos so seductive?
10:11–13:22
5
Why do viewers feel drawn to the calm, curated domestic fantasy?
13:22–17:10
6
How do influencers like Nara Smith and Hannah Neeleman monetize the tradwife lifestyle?
17:10–21:11
7
What are the psychological impacts of watching tradwife content on stress and anger?
21:11–22:28
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from Ladies, We Need To Talk
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