Chapter 1: What is the trad wife trend and where did it originate?
In recent months, it seems that Erica Kirk has been everywhere but at home. Today, we are investigating how trad wives move from Nazi fantasies to a performance conservative women everywhere are doing. Have you ever had the urge to drop out of society and work on a farm and then post clips of that to TikTok? Is that something you dream about?
I dream about the farm part. I don't think I dream about the posting the farm because I feel like that would go against the farm part. The fun part of the farm part, which is being completely disconnected from the world that we're in. And I think having to performatively post would take the fun out of it.
Like all men with a beard, I have fantasized about going to the woods to eventually die alone there. Is that the dream?
Is that what men want?
Yes.
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Chapter 2: How do traditional gender roles manifest in the trad wife movement?
All men want, if a man gets stressed enough, he'll just start fantasizing about dying anonymously in the woods somewhere. It's a thing. Like a dog. Okay. Like a dog, like a dog or like an old cat. Yeah. Our audience was like, Hey, women want this too. So at least in our listenership, they are. Oh yeah. Apparently our, our women listeners also want it. Yeah.
Interesting. That's not a fantasy for me. I do have the, I do have the farm fantasy, but it does. Yeah. I'm too codependent. What's the satisfaction for men of, of dying alone instead of dying with, with someone like the couple in the Titanic holding hands?
Chapter 3: What societal issues are contributing to the appeal of the trad wife lifestyle?
Like why is doing it alone better? Yeah.
You know, I've never really interrogated it. It's just a feeling. Like your comparison to an old dog or a cat or something. I'm drawn to the woods to disappear there. Like the guy from Into the Wild. Yeah. That's the dream. Got it. But as you said, the act of posting about it ruins the fantasy. I guess it does. It does. And that is what we're going to be interrogating today.
We're going to be interrogating the desire to drop out of society and then, of course, post nonstop about it. And we're going to try to figure out, is it connected to a large-scale fascist takeover of America? This is what we're talking about today on Panic World. My name is Ryan Broderick. With me, as always, is my trad wife, Grant Irving, my lovely producer.
And this is a show about how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and eventually reality. And yeah, with disturbing frequency, regressive ideas about where women belong is becoming increasingly mainstream. And we're going to try to figure out where those ideas are coming from and how they took over the internet. And joining us today is the host of Boy Problems, Liz Plank.
I've been a fan of yours for a very long time. Welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me. The feeling is mutual.
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Chapter 4: How did social media influence the rise of trad wives?
before we talk about women and we're gonna be talking about women a lot today but like do you think men are okay too like like how how would you compare how would you compare like the genders right now who's doing worse who's doing worse yeah i that's a good question i do think men are faring worse but i don't think that i i think that women are better at coping
I think women and men both are feeling like crap, I think women are better at coping with it. I think that if any, we've learned anything from the manosphere documentary, and sort of the last 10 years of the internet, it's that like, there's a lot of male suffering that can be monetized.
Yes.
Women tend to internalize pain and men tend to externalize it. And so, no, I think men are acting out more than women. But I think women are really sad, too. You know, there's all this, you know, talk about the loneliness crisis. I really women are really lonely, too. We're just not going out and like shooting like up like massage parlors. Right. No. Yeah.
I was going to say the the mass violence would be the difference. Yes, it's less visible. Like a lot of things that women do, you know, a lot of it is invisible. The labor, the suffering.
The hidden emotional labor of not killing everybody.
Yes, I agree. But I do, okay, I think about this. I've been thinking about this really a lot lately. I don't know when this episode is coming out so you can cut it, but the whole Taylor...
it's taylor frankie paul she has like three first names yes yes and i'm not familiar at all with um unfortunately um the well i've watched like one episode of the mormon wives they sound really fun and entertaining but um you know the whole thing about her throwing a chair at a guy and i'm like i feel like it's a miracle that and not even a miracle it's actually unsettling that we don't
throw more chairs at men. I think that's actually on us and requires some thinking because I think that we're not doing that enough. It is weird. It is.
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Chapter 5: What role does TikTok play in the trad wife phenomenon?
Sort of like emotions or thoughts that would challenge his own view of being a man. I think actually trad wives are like a lot about making men feel better.
You know, so our research actually backs it up and we're going to get to where the term comes from in just a second. I wanted to start with this. yeah we were actually surprised um but we let's start with uh this cnn segment about erica kirk uh because i think that she's probably the most kind of visible of this group right now oh yeah she's in the home all the time she's always we never see her
She's at the family farm and we never hear about her. She's always barefoot in the kitchen. She's not in some sort of WWE Thunderdome shooting Charlie's casket into space or some shit. She says to CNN, I love submitting to Charlie because he's a phenomenal leader. I mean, clearly he had the larger forehead of the family. So you sort of, you know, you follow him. He's got a big head.
And so she says, as a woman, you are meant to be the guardian of your home, to be the helpmate of your husband, be that biblical wife you are supposed to be for him, an honor. The order that God had created marriage to be in when I met Charlie, that was it. I could care less about the career. Well, he's gone now and she really cares about the career. So that does seem to back that up.
But that's like the last Pokemon evolution of this movement. Erica Kirk is performing a girl boss trad wife. But let's talk about how we got here before we unpack how confusing that is.
Yeah, well, that's fascinating.
If I had to ask you, like, when the concept of a trad wife started, like in the modern context, how old do you think this idea is? Because this surprised us a lot. Like, how far back do you think this stuff goes?
I learned this recently on Amanda Montel. She came on my podcast, sort of surprised me in the way that she explained where the term originated, which is like 4chan. It was basically like the manosphere before we sort of had a term for it that came up with that term as a way to sort of mock women and degrade them. And then it was like turned into a positive, I guess.
That's sort of the origin story as I understand it.
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Chapter 6: How have perceptions of feminism shifted in relation to trad wives?
But maybe you have a different...
So, searching on X these days is kind of tough, but our researcher Adam went pretty deep, and he thinks he found the first use of the word tradwife on Twitter. It was May 2016, and it was an account named paraxial underscore logic, who was writing a Mother's Day post. uh, to his, uh, wife, I guess, um, whose name is a purposeful wife.
And, uh, this guy writes happy mother's day to Alia, our dear lady, best to you and your family. So maybe it's not his wife. I actually have no idea what this means, but anyways, he then uses the hashtags hashtag trad wife, hashtag trad life, hashtag white girls are magic. Yeah.
Wow.
Which would have been a response to the Black Girls Are Magic.
That last one.
Yeah, so this was from the jump associated with white supremacy. So this is what this account looks like. It's private now, but these are older posts. And it was very active mid-2010s. They identified as a Church of Latter-day Saints, a trad wife. They identified as alt-right. Mm-hmm. They are also posting like a bunch of like Nordic, like traditional, you know, clothing and stuff.
And yeah, it was, it was, I'm not even totally clear. This is a real person, you know, like this was back in those days where you're just making up kind of like white women to say racist shit before you could just find white women to say white racist shit. The 4chan guys used to have to make them. So it isn't very common still in 2016.
But then in 2017, there is something called the White Baby Challenge. Oh, yeah, yeah. Do you remember this? Yeah, yeah. Well, I remember reading about it.
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Chapter 7: What are the consequences of the trad wife ideology on women's choices?
clearly going against like whatever was happening on black twitter at the time and then in august 2017 this woman uh is invited to speak at the unite the right rally in charlottesville and uh allegedly declines writing certainly a women's perspective is important and i plan to speak on the importance of families but this event was quickly becoming something more something bigger something for the leaders of the movement not for a mom of six children which definitely you know sounds like this is a real person yeah
And this is all real.
They killed a white woman at that rally. They did. So she had a good, maybe she, yeah, she had a good premonition.
Maybe. But yeah, it's really heating up in 2017. Reporter Will Somer writes at the time. So basically far-right guys are obsessed with telling the women on the scene to get married and have kids. Everybody's hunting for a hashtag trad wife. And this is the beginning. And what's really fascinating, this is a bit of data science here, In 2014, the number one search term on Pornhub was lesbian.
In 2015, as Tradwife started to enter the consciousness, stepmom became number one. Really fascinating psychosexual kind of peer into the world.
Wasn't there also, and forgive me, I don't remember the term, but there's a term for a certain kind of porn that was also sort of trending, but this was more around 2020, so maybe it was after that stepmom moment. Where it was a kind of porn that happens within the home where a woman is literally in the middle of a domestic chore and the man starts having sex with her while she's doing the chore.
Oh, free use? What's that called? I think it's called free use is what you're describing? Yeah. Yeah.
Didn't that also then become really popular? And then some people say that it was like an extension of Tradwife, but also an expression of the pandemic and the fact that we were all sort of indoors. I mean, many of us were indoors.
Stepped into a digression that I have a lot of thoughts on because I have seen this as well. I've seen this argument as well. I've had a theory for many years, though, that the incest stuff, the free use stuff, the MILF stuff is all actually an expression of a very, very limited housing market.
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Chapter 8: What does the future hold for the trad wife movement in the digital age?
So even our sexual fantasies reflect back that you still live at home.
So there was a New York Times piece that came out, I think, a few days ago, and they published it on or did a carousel on Instagram. And it was like, millennials, you know, love living with roommates and, you know, this resurgence of like, and wasn't he, it wasn't even just roommates. It was like, people are living with couple, like couples are living with couples are getting a roommate.
That's right. Yeah. Everyone in the comments was like, um, it's called a housing crisis. Like, like, like, are you fucking joking me?
So yeah, that's super interesting that then it would affect, I mean, it's affecting us in so many different ways and, and yeah, it's really funny to see them or see all the theories except the one that's very obvious, which is like, we're in a fucking housing crisis.
Right. People aren't gooning to free use porn because they're fascists. They're doing it because they can't afford, although maybe the housing market is exacerbating the rise of fascism. Yeah, I think that's possible. But isn't it also that we no longer go to work? There's no places to go. There's barista porn everywhere. Right. You don't order a plumber to come over. Yeah. Like that's it.
Exactly. It's like it's like it has to suddenly be your stepmom who's really hot. Like it's like women. You have no larger network of social stuff. Yeah. So in the late 2010s, the back half of the decade, the term trad wife is kind of bouncing around the Internet. It doesn't get true mainstream attention until the New York times covers it.
And they open with this anecdote about a woman who is much happier being a stay at home mom. Um, and it reads, I always wanted children that looked like me, blonde hair, blue eyed babies, but I kind of had to say it under my breath. The digital far right frequently called the alt right is largely regarded as a man only space.
The movement shares DNA with so-called incels, and it is defined in part by its misogyny and anti-feminist anti-woman language and But some members of the alt-right have been weighing whether the absence of women from their movement is a problem. Nationalist Marcus Follin says you might not like that women have the right to vote.
You might not like that anyone has the right to vote, Mr. Follin conceded. But it's about winning a long-term political victory. And that's, I think, the real kind of breakthrough is that when the whole alt-right thing fizzles around 2018, the larger far-right ecosystem is like, we need a way to bring women in. And what's fascinating is it starts to look exactly like the way ISIS treated women.
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