Truly, Tradly, Deeply — Inside the Tradosphere with Annie Kelly
Annie Kelly has spent most of 2025 investigating the online world of so-called “traditional wives” or “tradwives.” On this episode she sits down with Travis, Jake, and Julian to talk about her new six-episode miniseries Truly, Tradly, Deeply for the Cursed Media podcast network. Among other discoveries: it’s more difficult than you might think to even properly define “tradwife,” much of the community promotes a fantasy about the pre-internet age, and tradwife content is far less fringe than it used to be.
The first two episodes of “Truly, Tradly, Deeply” will be released on the Cursed Media podcast network on the 29th of October.
https://www.cursedmedia.net/
Cursed Media subscribers also get access to every episode of every QAA miniseries we produced, including Manclan by Julian Feeld and Annie Kelly, Trickle Down by Travis View, The Spectral Voyager by Jake Rockatansky and Brad Abrahams, and Perverts by Julian Feeld and Liv Agar. Plus, Cursed Media subscribers will get access to at least three new exclusive podcast miniseries every year.
https://www.cursedmedia.net/
Editing by Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (instagram.com/theyylivve / sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (pedrocorrea.com)
qaapodcast.com
QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
On anonymous image boards like 4chan, there used to be a loose collection of aphorisms called the rules of the internet.
The most famous ones probably rule 34, which if you listen to this podcast, you should be familiar with.
I don't, I'm not actually not, so.
No, well, too bad.
You're gonna you're gonna remain ignorant.
Maybe hosting made it maybe dumber.
Yeah, yeah.
But there's also Rule 30, which says there are no girls on the internet.
So true.
That's because to these guys, like sex is gay, and there's no like nothing isn't gay in some way.
Yeah, and also just because you'd be kind of foolish to, as a woman, if you were using 4chan or anywhere like it to actually announce your presence, I guess.
Yeah, that that that invites uh poor treatment.
Yeah, so I did some digging into this claim.
Wound up not being true.
According to a 2024 Pew Research poll in the United States, 96% of men than 97% of women use the internet.
In fact, women are uh demographically overrepresented on the largest social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
Men, however, uh still uh have the majority on Reddit, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Oh, so this makes sense so much sense.
Yeah, this makes so every bad thing.
So much sense.
Oh my god, we just listed the three worst ones.
Of course, once you establish that there are, in fact, women on the internet, that, you know, invites some some uh some questions like why?
Where are they?
What are they doing there?
Who exactly are they posting on the internet for?
How are women online learning to navigate the challenges of being a woman in real life from other women online?
Uh me, it's more like how can I harass them?
What's their address?
Uh what's their middle name, you know?
Like is that what's their social security number?
Classic Bernie, bro.
Is there any way I can swap them?
What's what's their class in World of Warcraft?
Yeah.
Yeah, these kinds of questions may sound a little condescending the way I'm asking them, but when our UK correspondent Annie Kelly unpacks these kinds of questions, they make for some really genuinely perspective-changing podcasting.
Thank you.
I mean, I think part of that might be because I am also, despite being a noted woman, I am also a little bit of a stranger to a lot of the spaces that I'm I'm looking at in this series.
I guess because my research has always been on the far right and the manosphere.
I've always been on the kind of more masculine side of the internet.
Do you know that's been the my haunt?
And I've obviously like done some research on like, I think, you know, I I reported on this podcast about like QAnon spreading through parenting groups on Facebook, which was a lot of mums during the pandemic and stuff like that.
But I never honestly until I've started researching this series, been like heavily on Instagram and TikTok.
And now I'm on there all the time and it's driven me insane, but in a very feminine way.
Oh yeah.
No, the I mean, the scrolling and the feed has never been worse.
I I really cannot emphasize this enough.
You have to actively reconfigure your algorithm lest you be sucked into these various rabbit holes.
The first one, if you're if you're in any way like kind of, you know, uh signaling as a male is just endless amounts of like soft core porn, essentially.
Just so crazy.
I had to like tell my Instagram, like, no, no, no.
And you know what?
It worked.
Now it's just frogs that I cannot believe exist with colors that are so fucking beautiful that it like is breathtaking.
It's like feeding baby armadillos With little like milk uh droplets.
It's so good.
It's all just little animal stuff and bug stuff, and uh I'm loving it.
I'm loving it again.
But I had to really cleanse my timeline with fire.
Yeah.
No, I I need to need to get on that as a palette cleanser when I'm finished with this series.
On TikTok, at least, if you hold the screen with your thumb, like if you press your thumb as hard as you can into the screen, is almost as if almost to say I'm I'm trying to break you and never watch you again.
Um it'll t it'll say, Don't show me this content or not interested in this content.
And you if you do that enough, it'll phase it out of your algorithm, and then eventually you can be like me and get only skateboarding videos and uh NBA 2K builds.
This is it.
This is like what my algorithm is now, except on Facebook where I I don't have a personal account, but I have a work account that I go on there every now and again to like you know, try to see, you know, try to see what's happening.
And Facebook is is the w it's just like AI slop feeds and then impossibly chested women.
Like the just scroll after scroll.
It's like AI and then like boobs, and then that's it.
I love the idea of impossibly chested.
Impossibly chested.
I mean, such a good cut impossibly chested.
At first I thought they were AI.
I had to like I had to like uh uh you know scroll up and scroll back down to restart the video a handful of times and stay on the video even for a little bit to just is it real or is it not?
Well, something I can't figure out about about Facebook is it's clearly figured out that I like history stuff that clearly I'm doing something where sometimes a little historical fact or story or vignette will pop up and I'll clearly like I don't think I'm like liking any history pages, but clearly that's I'm pausing enough to read it or whatever.
But something I've noticed is that it will often AI replace like real photographs of people's faces and stuff to like make them more like a hunky or or more like kind of really babycious.
I don't know.
I'm just like looking, and it's like this is this is Queen Victoria's granddaughter, and it shows you like a black and white photo, and it's like, you know, here's her life.
She um ended up marrying this Duke, blah blah blah.
But like this woman quite clearly isn't a Victorian woman.
She's got Instagram face, right?
She's got the like she's babelicious, as you would say.
She's babelicious, yeah.
And I'm just like, this isn't this isn't right.
And then maybe that's I'm just training it that I like that more because I always end up doing the thing where you pause on something and you're like, that's not that's not right.
They they didn't look like that back then.
They have the weird like bigger eyes, and it's like, are they Yeah, yeah.
You just like know when you you know when it doesn't look right.
You d they've just got like a face that kind of only only a very specific kind of modern technique of plastic surgery can create today.
Well, you're you you know, you're looking at these pictures and your brain is going, that's not right, but your body is like Goldilocks at the end of the book, you know.
Just I'm like it's history, but they're all sexy.
Travis is so horrified.
Like he's lifting his fit his hand.
He's looking uh, you know, pissed off.
Uh what I was gonna say, uh, Annie, is that i I think it's worth a victory lap that a long time ago, and this is maybe my favorite Jake story ever, that uh you know, cast Annie as Queen Victoria about to eat eat a child and Prince Andrew's involved.
The episode's called Prince Andrew Doesn't Sweat.
He has been stripped of his royal titles.
So good job, Annie, you know, big fucking W for you.
You finally got my man stripped.
I know I noticed that, but don't you think it's all all a bit convenient?
Because now when we try and report on any of his misdeeds, we'll just have to be talking about someone called Andrew.
No one's gonna know who we mean.
It's genius.
It could be literally anyone.
Yeah.
Andrew, this guy, Andrew, is a child molesting pedophile.
And we can't do really much more to describe it.
If you see anyone called Andrew, treat them with hostility and suspicion.
You can't know it's not that one.
I know a couple Andrews actually, that's so that maybe I won't encourage that, but I will say he should be known as the artist formerly known as Prince Andrew.
He needs like a symbol.
He needs like a some sort of onk or or um some sort of like Epstein Island symbol.
So the reason we have you on, Annie, is because next week we're going to uh on our podcast series Network Curse Media.
Uh we're gonna release your brand new uh six episode series truly tradly deeply.
And uh it's research written hosted by uh yourself and uh the PhD student Megan Kelly.
No relation.
Well I get that clear.
No relation either.
And not uh and not a news host, also or or or the the the right wing news host.
This is so fucked.
She's building the Kelly clan, and We've discussed this.
It's been a long war between me and the Kelly clan.
And now it's like, oh, that's a new Kelly, but don't worry.
Not at all related.
No relation and not sneaking up on you.
Yeah.
Hey, oh yeah.
So this new field uh has uh also arrived for some reason.
We don't know.
We're not building armies against each other on the border.
That's why you had to go to Japan assuring up military support.
Yeah, I'm trying to find like some Japanese fields.
Maybe they can help me out.
So you yeah, your series is all about trad wives or traditional wives, which uh, as I learned in the series is kind of a more difficult concept to concretely define than I originally assumed.
So yeah, very excited to have you back after a long but fruitful hiatus to uh discuss truly tradly deeply and uh what you call the tradosphere.
And uh Yama, you've been immersed in this like for for really uh what is it most of the year?
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
Yeah, I'm calling it the the tradosphere because I think that's a bit like the manosphere, it's a good way of getting across.
I think the way that internet subcultures will sort of gather around a theme, an idea, even if they have lots of different ideas on how to do it, they're coming at it from different philosophies, and the manosphere, I think, even if it became a slightly outdated term, really got across that you know,
these the subculture was gathering around the idea of masculinity and anti-feminism, and I think the tradosphere gets something similar across, you know, that these are women, some are coming from religious backgrounds, some are coming from a I think more explicit political far right background, some are coming from kind of secular reactionary feminist background, which is mostly UK-based, I would say, but they're all sort of gathering and exchanging ideas around the idea of the return to traditional gender roles.
What's kind of difficult is that not everyone in this sphere defines as a trad wife because of how that term has become I mean, just like really common slang, I guess, and often often a sort of way that people will it's a bit of a pejorative.
So there are people who who identify as a trad wife, but there's also a lot of I guess kind of mocking the concept, even if as they embody it and they'll say stuff like, oh no, I'm a biblical wife or something like that instead.
Oh wow, biblical wife, Jesus Christ.
Oh, yeah, that's a big one.
That's when instead of doing domestic violence through, you know, like fists or or or whatever, you uh hit uh the woman with uh Bibles, and uh that is uh a way to avoid uh you know being prosecuted.
It's a bit like in jail, how they hit people with you know phone books.
So what a beautiful thing.
I mean, I don't know, it's so it's so funny to me because you are really going against the grain.
I mean, right now the the very visible women are all saying, you were you got fingered at a TPUSA event.
Uh and you know, you are a fucking slut, and your husband took a dildo up his ass.
You were an OnlyFans girl.
Like everyone's just going at each other, and instead, you're like, hey, what about these these women who are like, I'm gonna recreate an Oreo from scratch uh in the kitchen.
I have four children, but I still somehow have time for this.
Julian, those are the same women a lot of the time.
Like it's uh the tradisphere is more.
Very messy at times.
I know.
I'm so glad to hear that.
Lots of bitchy infighting going on, which is a good idea.
This series is gonna be so good.
I'm so excited.
Gossiping in the sh in the soda shops.
Yeah, yeah.
Here's my homemade uh Oreo, you fucking stupid slut.
My best friend, and you you you idiot slut that like slept with my friend.
Yeah, I mean, it's a it's uh there's a lot of a lot of competition going on, I think, you know.
Of course.
I as is, you know, with with us too, you know.
I mean, as like um co-hosts, you know, we are always trying to cut each other down and uh interrupt each other.
Yeah, we're all competing to be the best wife.
That's right.
Um I am competing to be the best wife to Jake and Travis.
Yeah, I said Jake's sourdough sucks one time.
He got really upset.
Ooh, yeah.
His sourdough, I mean, I'll be honest.
When he had me over, he didn't really heat his plates.
So served on like minus 10 wife points.
Disgusting.
And the sourdough, yeah, his sourdough was inferior.
It was uh I could take I could taste the the the baking soda.
Sometimes in my heated moments, uh I attack uh Julian's uh chastity and uh virtue.
I'm saying that's so true.
You're always telling me that my cock cage is being unlocked, and that actually anyone can access it.
I've been I've been totally outclassed here.
The bits that you guys are doing is is involving stuff that like is so far into me.
I'm so far removed from any of that stuff.
Jake's like, what is sourdough?
I'm literally, I'm literally getting b I'm literally getting the only videos I'm getting right now.
It's like it's like how to dominate the competition.
It's if you suck at 2K26, what move what moves can you equip to like beat the competition?
That's a big thing in the Trad Wives scene, like uh how good you are at 2K.
It's the same thing, it's the same thing that Instagram has been doing me doing to me for years.
It's like here's all here's the ball that going bald here.
Oh, dick don't work.
Here you're the bill.
Too short here shoes to like make you taller.
And now and now they're coming after my video games.
They're going, oh, suck at 2K.
Here's a guy, here's uh uh OP animations that you can equip so you can like be good and still suck.
Hips not birthing enough, you know.
Breast breast not feeding enough.
Yeah, I mean, like quite genuinely, there was actually a whole thing going on on Trad Twitter the other day about um it was one of these really funny things where someone had put up that you know the reason that they thought the the problem with the Western birth rates is because people are just so down on giving birth these days.
There's too many horror stories that you hear.
You never hear you never hear the women who just enjoy being pregnant, they never hear about the women who just enjoyed giving birth.
Now, I have to say this was I think started by a woman who is pregnant herself, which she did then, of course, say, I'm really good at being pregnant, by the way.
Oh my god.
Which then I think, yeah, I guess spark this whole kind of Am I gonna be able to do death threats?
Because I do, I do want to threaten this person.
I want to threaten this person with death, but I I feel like a bit bad isn't misogynist to say if you're talking that way that I you should be fucking k with a high-powered fucking should have your No, Junior.
I would not recommend you sending death threats to a pregnant woman, however.
Right.
I thought she had maybe given birth already, which would make it totally fun.
You give it give her a three-month postpartum grace period.
But yeah, yeah, all of this sparked, I guess, yeah, this kind of I guess semi-altruistic.
Like, we're just gonna encourage all the women out there who might be afraid of giving birth.
Um might be afraid of getting pregnant, but at the same time, it kind of did quite clearly feel to me like also a little bit of bragging going on.
I know because I think this space so you know, it's so punitive about um any kind of displays of sexuality that often I think where on a normal kind of influencer space there would be more of that going on.
This kind of gets sublimated to displays of fertility.
Wow, that's so interesting.
Yeah, I mean that's that's my my read on it at least, you know, that that is the kind of in in a place that's you know specifically is kind of constantly policing women's sexuality and their modesty and their purity.
Fertility kind of becomes the stand-in for that.
God, I really fucking hate all these people so much.
Like I genuinely fucking loathe everyone involved in this fucking culture.
Fuck off.
Yeah, I mean some of them, I'm gonna be honest.
Some of them I kind of like of course, you like Ross Dalfat or whatever.
You didn't know.
You're a beautiful, intellectually superior Catholic.
Before we get into your series, Annie, I want to get your perspective on the kind of like an ongoing controversy in the uh sort of Christian conservative world uh that touches on like some of the concepts and the influencers you uh talk about in your series.
So uh this concerns the influencer Ally Beth Stuckey.
And she's got she's a real rising star in the space.
She's been active since uh for about a decade, and she's been a uh speaker on like college campuses, she's regular guests on Fox News, and she's the author of two books, both of which argue that overindulging in certain kinds of I guess gushy emotions can be destructive.
Her first book is You're not enough and that's okay, escaping the toxic culture of self-love.
And last year she published Toxic Empathy, How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion.
Here's how you know if your empathy is positive or if it has become toxic.
Three ways.
Your empathy becomes toxic when it encourages You to validate lies, to affirm sin, or to support destructive policies.
That is when your empathy has turned toxic.
Toxic empathy is the primary tool of persuasion used by progressives to manipulate well-meaning Christians.
They use toxic empathy by employing our language, our Bible verses, our concepts, and then pervert them to morally extort us into adopting their position.
Shut the fuck up.
Shut up.
I hate it.
I hate this so fucking much.
Everyone's soy.
Everyone's so fucking sore.
The conservatives are all going like, oh, well, the you know, the the actual version of toxic and cancellation and all this sh.
No, it's just it's a whole it's a whole lot of words to, you know, there's there's a little piece of everybody, I think, that knows deep, deep, deep, deep, deep down that's when something doesn't feel right or feels weird, but they're so far into it that like or you know, they've they've been conditioned, they've grown up into it, whatever reason.
But the this is like the kind of stuff that you have to come up with so that like at night when the demons come, like you have like pre-prepared talking points for them in your head.
And it's not good enough, like at night alone.
So then you also have to like figure out a way to get these same talking points like out and say them to other people because then it feels like it's real and you don't and it's not just you and the demons like late at night.
That's that's what I think uh about this.
Oh why not just get a um like a therapy degree?
Like it sounds like all these people want to do is just analyze, psychoanalyze, but they're too lazy to actually get any kind of real education in this.
So they end up at like TP USA being like toxic empathy is uh uh the most powerful tool.
It originates in the pituitary gland.
Like what are they talking about?
Well, you know, it's it's a real kind of uh rhetorical judo move because like you're you're right.
This talk about like toxicity and like you know, social or interpersonal context is very touchy-feely.
But the way she uses it is like it's actually kind of toxic for you to discuss these uh, you know, desperately poor migrants who are maybe running from a violent situation, and why this is actually why is good for the United States to provide some sort of asylum system for them.
Like really uh encouraging us to provide asylum to uh migrants fleeing violence is a little toxic.
So fucking embarrassing.
I mean, both of the books, You're not enough and that's okay, and toxic empathy are quite clearly they're targeting what she sees as attributes of women, right?
That are making women turned off, especially by the Republican Party.
And I I think it's like I think it's really interesting.
Both of them are as the Republican Party takes a quite explicitly hard right turn, one which kind of very much glorifies violence, it's intimately connected with the manosphere.
And the first one, I guess, yes, she's talking about therapy culture, I think, and and how this kind of understanding of women's of sort of sort of knowing their own worth, which funnily enough has been become a bit of a target here in the UK by right-wingers, but on a slightly different level.
And also, yeah, the the toxic empathy book, which I haven't read all of, but I have read a little bit, and maybe had just like one of the most insidious chapters.
I it was really genuinely like quite horrifying, I think, which described the experience of a woman in Texas who was forced to give birth to her baby, which had I I forget the condition, but it basically meant that the baby lived a few hours and then died, and that was always going to happen.
It had no chance of surviving.
So this was a child that was really, really wanted, but yeah, was just born with this genetic condition that meant that it was going to be born, suffer, and then die.
And due to the new abortion laws in Texas, the mother was not allowed to get an abortion.
She had to go through that.
And Stucky writes with incredible rhetorical empathy about this woman's position.
She says, you know, I'm a mother, I can only imagine how hard that must have been for her.
On the other hand, you know, why do we empathize with the mother and not the baby?
And she kind of goes into a sort of diatribe about abortion more generally, about how because we don't see the fetus, that we don't empathize properly with that, and we instead kind of so toxic empathy makes us empathize with the mother, but not with the unborn, essentially.
And I mean, it's funny because I would have thought the idea of toxic empathy was a Slightly nonsensical term.
But actually, as I was reading it, I was like, you're doing toxic empathy.
Right here, this is it.
Do you know?
You're pretending to empathize with this woman while basically supporting this entirely brutal law, which made her go through what must have been just the most traumatic experience of her life.
And you you you kind of say, well, that's tough.
Do you know?
Yeah, they that's that's what I'm saying.
They have to go out and they have to go out and defend these things that they know deep, deep, deep down go against what it is to be human, which is to have real empathy.
That there's so much of this I see, like in this space where these people are just out and they're so angry and they're on stage, and it just feels to me like they're just saying, I'm I'm good actually.
No, this is good.
This is this is how it should be when when it seems to go against, you know, just the natural tendency of of compassion and uh, you know, as as a human being toward towards your fellow, you know, your fellow creatures.
So as much as I may despise Stucky's message and political goals, I have to acknowledge that she's she's very talented, you know, she's very well read.
She has some kind of interesting rhetorical gifts, even if they use she she uses them for sinister purposes.
She obviously studies like classical Christian apologetics.
She has this kind of like really kind of disarming kind of friendly way of speaking, and her kind of unassuming charisma has earned her a very large audience both on and offline.
Just last week, Stucky was the headliner at a Christian conference in Dallas that drew an arena audience of 6700 women.
Now, given all that, you think that, you know, the uh conservative Christian community would feel nothing but pride and support for her.
But this is not the case.
The problem is that Stucky is a married mother of three, and she seems to spend a lot of time on her successful career as an author, podcaster, and pundant.
This is a little uh girl bossy for some conservative Christians, and some um of her speaking activity, according to them, gets dangerously close to preaching.
And this is women preaching is a big no-no in the community.
So Stuckey has defended herself against these allegations by arguing that, well, she is capable of preaching.
She actually doesn't because that is not her role as a woman.
Even though, even though I know I am mentally and physically capable, mentally and physically capable of stepping to a pulpit on Sunday morning and delivering a more biblically sound, exegetically exquisite, persuasive and dynamic sermon than many male pastors in America today.
I can't do it because that is not the realm to which God has called me as a woman.
I could be the dopest pastor of all time.
Yeah, I mean, she she she obviously got in trouble for that one too.
I saw quite a few figures on, I guess the Christian right uh denouncing her for having the the audacity to say that she she could be as good as a man, even if she isn't cool to that.
But it's it's an interesting example, I think, of basically how much more confident the American right has become on gender essentialism than even it was ten years ago.
Funnily enough, I actually found uh I I haven't included it in the final series because it doesn't quite fit, but I found some old interviews with Ali Stuckey, and this was about 10 years ago.
And she she sounds like a like a girl boss.
She's talking about how, you know, there's sexism on the right and we need to be more confident calling it out.
Like even now when she does defend herself against quite clearly sexist allegations, she never uses that language anymore.
And I think you see this actually on a lot of female figures who've been around on the right as.
I think the right has become, I would say, much more closely connected with the manosphere, and as manosphere politics have become mainstream on the American right, there has actually been a yeah, there has been a kind of renouncing of previous tenets of feminism that even though most of these women were never calling themselves feminist, you know, they were whisper explicitly, they would often do so in a kind of way that was much more girl power.
Do you know it was I don't need feminism because I'm strong and independent and I don't need a movement like that.
Now that would read as uncomfortably feminist to too much of their audience.
So now they kind of often do more of a retreat from even that kind of language.
They say stuff like, sorry, I think my son just yelled behind me.
There's even a retreat from that kind of language now where it's, you know, they they wouldn't wouldn't even most of them wouldn't even dare say I'm I'm strong and independent and want a career.
They will back away from that kind of language because I think of how how much of a zeitgeist antifeminism has become uh on the far right and how because it's a reactionary movement, it's never quite satisfied.
It just wants to take more and more.
I mean, even to the extent that it seems like she stopped talking about I I guess like gender-based sort of like hostility.
Like you would recognize that sometimes I'm like an uh yeah, obviously sometimes attacked or insulted or disrespected uh, you know, because I'm a woman.
But you know, there is like something that's like something that you can shrug off, but they feel like she isn't willing to acknowledge her personal experience in that that way anymore.
Yes.
Yeah, I think something similar has happened with um Megan Kelly, and this time I have to be specific.
I don't mean my very talented, brilliant co-host on truly tried the deeply Megan Kelly.
I mean American former Fox News uh media personality, Megan Kelly.
Megan with a why.
She actually used to be much more pro, again, never described as a feminist, but much more pro-women having careers.
I mean, famously she had that altercation with Trump where she kind of questioned him about some of his rhetoric around women.
And she has also, even though I think she maybe still is a bit more firm, particularly I think on the backlash and the general right against women just having careers in general, because as someone who has had such a glittering career, I guess she can't not.
But her rhetoric has, I think has taken has retreated on these issues as well.
And now she will be much more conciliatory and say, well, of course I wanted a career, but you know, I would never have wanted that, the sacrifice of having my beautiful children.
And the problem is too many women these days don't realize that that's the gamble that they're taking.
So there has been a real walking back, I think, of lots of women on the American right from previous positions.
I wonder if um, because like as the base goes further and further right, that the money is like also going further and further right.
And so to some degree there's this like element of like protect the money, protect the money.
Like I everything is so much for like Instagram and the clippables.
Like I'm looking at um Ali Stuckley's Instagram page, and she reminds me of this girl that I knew out in Los Angeles who like came here from the East Coast who was just like, chill, she worked in sales.
And then she became like a life coach.
And you see a lot of these, like if you're on social media, especially especially on the West on the West Coast in cities like Los Angeles, where they almost adopt this kind of like template where they're like, have you ever felt like lonely and afraid?
Like, well, girly, you're not alone.
Here are three things to do, and it's all kind of this like, and I'm and like everything is curated and they have like the the right thumbnail with the block of text that's doing this.
It's like there is so much of this that's so performative and like capital driven that like it makes sense to be actually that everybody's walking back their shit because they don't actually give a fuck anyway.
They're they're just like trying to protect what measly little carving that you know that they've made for themselves without having to like sit in an office from nine to five and like listen to a boss who they fucking hate like mo like most everybody else, you know, in the world.
It's so important to get away from that if you can, you will compromise whatever ethics or morals that you've established for yourself, I feel like.
Feel like I'm Julian right now.
What's going on?
So Ellie Beth Stucky, uh, so she she kind of like yeah, justifies the fact that she does absolutely anything else with her life besides be a wife and mother by uh identifying as a complementarian.
And this is something you discuss in the second episode in your series.
So I'm curious, like what exactly it's like in my understanding, it seems like it's kind of like this sort of like middle ground between like just a total hierarchical patriarchy and egalitarian liberalism.
This is like this is if you feel like this this is a way to kind of like escape with like both these positions.
Yeah, exactly.
So complementarianism as as a specific philosophy on gender was actually only kind of defined and developed by I think they called themselves the Biblical Council on Manhood and Womanhood.
Or the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, something like that in the 1980s.
So people often talk about complementarian ideology like it's very old.
But the truth is it's actually a response to feminism itself.
And essentially the idea is that this council was concerned with what they saw as an encroachment of feminism into the evangelical church.
But they were also kind of conscious that the fact that, you know, times were changing and that the kind of good old-fashioned religious patriarchy was just not being sold to young people.
It was, you know, a kind of losing proposition if they just really stubbornly stuck with the idea that, you know, no, the man's meant to be, you know, the dominant force in the household, and you are to submit to his leadership.
So they kind of softened this approach a bit more and decided to rely on the concept that men and women were not better or worse than one another.
They complemented each other, you know.
Men were just better at some things, women were good at others.
But together, if they work together in harmony, you know, they were part of a wider whole.
They were part of a wider family unit.
And it might, yeah, interest you to know, you know, that there's still some people in the evangelical church for whom complementarianism is is considered, you know, unbearably woke.
Which is often funny because I think feminists and feminist theorists often find themselves railing against complementarianism.
But I think it had a lot of appeal for people because I think there is something to that, whether you're in a, you know, whether you're in a heterosexual relationship or a queer one or whatever that I think often people do find themselves to be attracted to something in their partner, something that they kind of want, something that they know they lack a bit themselves, do you know?
Sure, yeah.
I think, yeah, the example that me and Megan talked about is that we're both kind of quite sort of neurotic types, and I think we need we're look for some calmness in our in our partners, I think.
And I think, you know, so that I think was quite clever because a lot of people were like, yeah, sure, that does sound a bit like my relationship, actually.
You know, I'm not so good at this, and he is kind of good at that.
Yeah.
And so I think it it worked and it had a romance to it as well, which um I think was a another way that uh biblical submission, which was becoming a tougher and tougher cell in the post-woman's lib era, became, you know, sort of prettified, I think, for for the well, I guess for the modern generation, but I think particularly for the social media age.
Pritified.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, one of the ways that uh sort of like uh Stuckey expresses her complimentarianism is that you know, she she believes that like she defers to like, you know, male Christian leadership in like the home and the church, but like in civil and social life, she can justify going to a conference and speaking to a group of women,
you know, she can justify having a social media presence that like is specifically tailored to communicating with fellow women, and then she can be a public figure in this way without it sort of violating some sort of like conservative Christian biblical sort of like concepts.
But some conservative Christian commentators just think is the this complementarism is just too far, just outrageously sort of progressive and liberal.
I mean, like Stucky's comments about like you mentioned, how she can preach a sermon, but she just doesn't, even though she could, if she did, she could do it better than like many men who work the pulpit today.
So that's uh that sparked a lot of controversy.
Some argue that Sucky is like wrong because uh like in their view and in their understanding of the Bible, women like metaphysically cannot possibly preach a sermon.
Yeah, it's like have you ever have you ever taken a um a shopping cart like too far deep into the parking lot and the wheels just kind of lock up on you.
The same thing happens whenever a woman tries to uh ascend to the pulpit, she'll get to that first step and her feet just kind of lock, you know.
It's like you you you know, like God has put a little bit of a barrier there.
Yeah, it's an interesting kind of view.
So I mean, like this is the this is the uh commentary from uh sort of a conservative Christian who who sort of endorses the patriarchal view named A.D. Robles.
God has given us this clear prohibition because of the way he created women.
And so it's not correct that she has the capability of preaching a dynamic sermon.
It's not correct.
That's not true.
She has the ability to say words.
Of course, um no nobody's denying that, because I saw some people saying, Well, this is just ridiculous to deny this.
Of course she can say words and theological thing.
Well, no, of course she can do that.
But she but that's not what she's saying here.
She's saying she's capable of preaching.
Fundamentally, she's got an egalitarian assumption that that she's just as capable as these men, in fact, more capable than a lot of men, to do something that God designed Her not to do.
That's that's just not correct.
She's she's wrong about that.
He could be talking about like baseball or something.
But no.
I mean, I always have a personal dog in this fight.
It seems a very internal community kind of like debate.
But it's just struck me, it seems like Stucky is just kind of like in this kind of like really impossible position and where she like claims to be like really a really rock ribbed traditional Christian conservative and wants to advocate for her worldview, and she has she has the talents to do that, but because she's successful at it, she becomes accused at failing to defer to men in a sufficiently biblical way.
Yeah, and you know, I think this is a really interesting paradox of female anti-feminists just in general.
Because I think the truth is anti-feminism has always relied on having talented, ambitious, smart women speaking for it.
The truth is, as a movement, it just doesn't really go anywhere.
It doesn't really get off the ground without those women.
It just sounds like a bunch of men telling women what to do, and that just kind of looks bad.
And so it needs it needs these women, do you know?
But at the same time, because of the underlying ideology, it will punish them for getting good at it.
And I think something that I've noticed is that the more successful women in this field get, and on the online on the right in general, the more anti-feminist they have to become.
It's almost like this is a kind of paradox that they have to live out.
It's like you said, Travis, they kind of will get around the fact that they are going on tours, doing their speeches by saying, you know, well, I'm not lecturing men.
I'm just lecturing all of these women, these poor misled women who, you know, have been sold so many lies by the left, and you know, uh and think that they, you know, want to be feminist career women.
I, you know, personally would love to be at home with my babies, but unfortunately, because of the degenerated state of society, I just have to go out on do my book tour and do all of these speeches and fly all over the world.
Gosh, I hate it.
But unfortunately, that's the that's the world we live in.
You know, and I think Sucky is not the only one that I've seen.
Candace Owens, I think you can see getting more and more stridently anti-feminist, the more children she has, and the more this question gets asked of her as well.
You know, I saw a clip of her, we play it in one of the episodes of her.
She's heavily pregnant.
I would say third trimester, definitely, speaking at a TP USA conference, saying, you know, who is the feminist who chose this life for us?
I just want to be barefoot in the kitchen.
And you're like, well, Candace, you're making enough money.
The feminist who chose this life for you is you.
Yeah.
You could be barefoot in the kitchen.
In fact, you'd probably be doing less damage.
There, but it's so it's to me, it's so interesting that it's just this seems to keep boiling further and further down to people like Stucky, you know, going to conservative men and going, guys, guys, hey, hey, hey, we're making your wives better for you.
You know, it's not even that like uh we're, you know, they still have to be relevant and continue to be allowed to be influencers, I think, like within this circle.
Like they still have to sell themselves as like, hey, we're gonna make your wives more subservient.
We're gonna, you know, make them less ambitious, you know.
It's still placate, you know, they're still trying to placate the uh, you know, the patriarchal aspect of it.
Yeah, yeah, it's uh a real bind and one one entirely of their own making.
Also, yeah, I feel I feel like yeah, the reason why yeah, they become trapped by their own success is that like I feel like yeah, the like the more successful they become and the bigger of a reach that they have, the the the more their message sort of like reaches the ears of like basically conservative men who might be interested in their content there or what their wives are listening to or whatever,
and the more their message reaches these kind of Christian conservative men, the more they start asking is like why is this woman speaking to me as if I have anything that I could ever learn from a woman I am not related to?
And so the only way they can tolerate that is through is through increasingly strident anti-feminist messaging, which it helps like the rest of the message go down.
It's like okay, as long as you're you know, you you recognize that this is uh that you're anti feminist, they can sort of tolerate hearing a woman speak.
Yeah, they have to justify their own existence as like essentially just a content creator And like motivational speaker.
You know, they're not going, I mean, I don't think so.
I could be wrong, and Annie, please correct me, but they're not going to school for four years, eight years getting the philosophy degree, even, or, you know, getting some kind of superior education.
So that, you know, when you're up on a stage teaching people things, there you you have somewhat of a, you know, there's there's somewhat of a reason that people would want to pay money, uh, you know, or or pay their time to listen to you.
But like, essentially to me, this is just like the ultra Christian version of like, you know, making a long self-help post on Instagram.
Yeah.
And that's what everybody's doing.
It's everybody's just posting, but like what kind of like how big your platform is, like, that's all that m that's all that matters.
Oh, if you can get off the internet and like go places, oh, you've got a book, like, oh, yeah, it's just all designed around like she's not going out and like having private conversations with like women in their homes about like, hey, this and Jesus and biblical and this would really work for me.
And if you're having trouble, you know, it's all like a presentation, it's all curated.
I don't know.
There's something to me that's like, there's just like it's just another flavor.
It's just like another flavor of content that, like, however crazy, you know, whatever your sensibility is, like, you know, maybe maybe this is for you.
One thing that really got me locked into the first episode of Truly Tradly Deeply is that you take the time to like uh define and unpack your terms, which I'm a big fan of.
Very Adler-esque of you.
So just if so, if I were to like come across like a woman's social media feed who is like sharing stuff about her family, how would I know if they are a trad wife as opposed to just a woman who happens to have a husband and kids?
Yeah, this one was very important to me because I think as the word trad wife has become such a buzzword, there's also been a lot of slippage, right?
And people will often use it to just mean any woman who is a stay-at-home mother.
And in fact, even when I wrote an article about it, I think it was maybe in 2018, I was writing specifically about a culture that was an offshoot of the alt-right, the white nationalists.
And, you know, I got so many people saying, you know, Annie Kelly says that being a stay-at-home mother means you're a white supremacist.
But I was wasn't talking about stay-at-home mothers, I meant this very specific online subculture.
So I wanted to be really clear on just defining what it is that I meant.
Because I think for one thing, we already have the term stay-at-home mother.
It's a really good term.
But also there was something more to this sphere, right?
They're not just stay-at-home mothers.
They are often subscribing to a specific relationship dynamic, which not every woman who stays at home is, which talks about, yeah, usually a complementarian lifestyle.
And more often than not, it will have an ideological component to it as well.
It's not just saying this works best for us.
It's often making claims about men and women and what works best for all of us.
Now, some of them will acknowledge that there are women who that this doesn't work for women who should go and have careers or be as they continually use the phrase be a boss babe.
That's just like the word for women who have careers in the tradisphere.
But they often will act as if this is a this is an aberrant kind of condition of of female psychology.
It's not the norm.
Um, some will even suggest it's a trauma response.
So there's an ideological component, and I think there's often a specific style of rhetoric which is constantly calling back to tradition, hence traditional why.
But often ancestors, history, you know, rejecting modernity in some degree.
I think it's not a coincidence how many accounts of these often seem to be on farms or homesteads or ranches.
You know, they're somewhere they're signaling essentially.
I don't know how far away they actually are.
Uh they could be very far away.
America's huge and most of them are American, but they're signaling, I think that they are separate apart from modern civilization.
And that seems to be a really significant part of the puzzle too.
So those were all things I, you know, you just come across a reel of a woman talking about looking after her kids, and there's a few visual cues you start to look for.
You start to look for is she wearing a pretty linen dress?
Is she, you know, does she have her hair in a sort of long and and flowing?
Um, but that sort of stuff, you know, is just fashion.
That's just aesthetics.
And there are funny enough some women who look like that and are stay-at-home Mothers, but uh kind of also talking about their support for feminism and vaccines and all of this stuff which was making me giving me the signal that this is not someone who I'm gonna is is part of this subculture.
So yeah, it was a it was a kind of holistic view.
I would look for all of all of these little signals together.
But then some of them do just very helpfully just straight up just go, hi, I'm a trad wife.
Near the end of uh the first episode, like you mentioned something about how like when men talk to you about like online travel wives, they say, like, you know, isn't that just fetish content?
I have to confess, uh like prior to listening to your episode, reading your scripts, that was kind of my assumption because of my experiences online.
What happened is like I like this like 2023 or so.
It's like my understanding was like mostly informed by like glimpses on Twitter and TikTok.
Like sometimes it would just be browsing TikTok and like I'd see a content creator who to me appears to be like performing a kind of like trad wife character, and there'd be like a short scene of them like preparing a meal or feeding chickens, and uh it seemed it seemed clear to me that like the content was like it was superficially kind of like you know, uh simple and wholesome, but it was like geared towards a particular male fantasy.
You kind of like explain in the series, like this is this is again, this is the TikTok Alderm trying to understand that I'm a man and trying to trap me into a certain content loop.
Yeah, absolutely.
And it's kind of funny, it's something I haven't really seen any of the maybe there is someone who's written about this, but I have in the many, many think pieces I've read about this phenomenon.
There seems to be an understated fact, right?
That there's almost two separate trad wife spheres going on.
And in fact, when you start digging into it, they have very little contact with one another.
And that is the stuff that's aimed at women and the stuff that's aimed at men.
And even though they're often using the same terminology, they're using, you know, the term trad or traditional gender roles and complementarianism.
It sounded completely different.
It certainly looked completely different.
I mean, literally the way these women look for the men's stuff, it's much more tight fitting.
I would say it's a lot less trendy, actually.
They're kind of they're wearing clothes that will impress men, but not necessarily impress women.
And they are often often talking in language that is much more sexually explicit than any of the stuff I've seen good at women, and kind of a lot more sassy, uh straight up mean, in fact, often about other women who don't choose this lifestyle,
just you know, straight up calling them whores and sluts and hags and stuff like that, which it's kind of interesting because even though I think a lot of the stuff that's aimed at women is quite like ambiently derogatory about other women, it kind of doesn't use that language.
It's not so confrontational.
It's much more, yeah, shall we say, well, I'm so sad for all those women who didn't love their pregnancy, but I loved mine.
Um I would say it's a bit more passive aggressive in that regard.
And yeah, I sometimes these spheres cross timelines.
Sometimes they will sort of interact with one another and usually kind of it have sort of hostile relations, but largely they are almost just totally different worlds.
Oh, and uh one thing I would say is that yeah, the stuff that's aimed at women, at least that I've seen, it's much more ethnically diverse as well.
I don't know if it's because the trad wife stuff that's aimed at men is specifically often targeting maybe a bit more of a like MAGA right wing white nationalist fantasy, but I couldn't think of any non-white women who were involved in that.
Whereas interestingly, I think there was actually a lot more ethnic diversity than I it's still a very white space, I should be clear.
And I think there's some very very obvious and and some more implicit reasons for that, but uh there was more the stuff that's aimed at women, the trad wife content aimed at women, was more ethnically diverse than I was expecting, actually, when I went in.
It's so interesting.
Uh I was thinking earlier, you know, you're talking about a lot of these videos, you know, you see the background, they're like on some farm or something.
And I I I've seen those two like over the last like couple years, and I always, you know, I always thought, and like maybe this is like showing my own naivety, but you know, originally trad wife to me was felt like it was just like different slang for trophy wife.
Like I I didn't at first understand that there was any kind of like um, you know, any kind of like religious, you know, sort of like connotation.
I just thought it was like somebody who was like cool with misogyny, you know, for whatever reason they were just like uh yeah, yeah, yeah.
But I wonder if like, as you know, America just continues to get like more and more cooked, and it just yeah, the the pressure gets more and more intense.
You know, I anecdotally have so many friends and we fantasize about like you know moving to a more rural area and like you know, sort of like doing what Travis does, like going back to getting more back into nature and like learning how to, you know, be like more self-sufficient and just like away from the gr, you know, away from the grind.
And like it seems that on one hand this lifestyle offers that, but it's through a religious interpretation that like most likely is has been a foundational part of of this person's upbringing.
You know, you grow up in a crit in a Christian house and and and you're aware of this kind of stuff.
But I wonder if I wonder if if it's if it's a convenient pivot for for people who are like religious, but that like they're already into, you know, they're they're like they want to like, you know, have a more sort of like not traditional, not biblical, but just like human-wise, like back to the land, more community-based, like, you know, less, you know, metropolitan, like all whatever, all of that stuff.
And this is just this is like on the menu for people that uh, you know, are like in these communities already, and then they're being driven further right because that community overall is being driven further right.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's a funny paradox, isn't it?
Of like online content that the more heavily technologized our lives become, the more time we spend online, which I think you know, just it's more and more every year, basically, right?
When you see charts of it, it's just more and more every year.
There was a huge jump during COVID and then it never quite recovered.
Yeah.
But so much of that content that we're consuming online is actually about longing to be offline.
It's about longing to be away from the online world and in somewhere that we feel in a different world where we feel it's kind of simpler and cleaner, and there won't be so much noise.
We'll just be able to be at one with the with the world.
And you know, I think trad wives, um, particularly the ones who are posting this idyllic rural lifestyle with with children frolicking around.
Yeah.
They are kind of it's a nostalgia fantasy, right?
It's like maybe your childhood never looked like that, but maybe you could imagine that feeling of innocence, that feeling before you were on the computer all the time.
Yeah, it's like Little House of Prairie, like linens blowing gently in the wind, like clothespins, like the tree shimmer, you know, it's Forrest and Jenny sitting in the tree.
It's it's the thing that we all, people our age, my age, early 40s, like we all long for that because everything feels so um suffocating with the content that we're constantly.
I mean, I've got you guys here on my, you know, uh Google Meets screen, but my phone is in front of me and I should have the script off, but I've drifted over to Twitter and like I'm listening, but I'm also scrolling, looking at like 2K videos and just scrolling the feed, and we always have these little fucking boxes with us that are just constantly we're constantly you know, I flip mine open, so I have to open, I have to go through the act of actually opening it, thumbing it for a couple seconds, closing it.
You ever like uh like you're like scrolling on your phone late at night and you're like you open Reddit, and then you're like, don't know why you open it and you close it.
Then you open it again and you close it, and then you open it again and you close it.
Like, we're not meant to do this.
We're actually meant to be hanging the linens out to dry and like you know, getting the children wet with the bucket.
I don't know what I don't know why it's like.
Yes, no, getting the children wet with the bucket.
Can we just stop for a second?
And I'd love to know this this like uh ancient pastoral history where we got our children wet with a bucket.
I'm just like, there's a hill, there's a log cabin, there's one tree, there's one tree.
The tree's got apples all over it.
There's children, there's a wooden bucket, they're running up and down wooden bucket, they're running up and down the hill, they're splashing each other, laughing, getting wet.
Just like the shit that humans have done for thousands and thousands of years until the last until the last 15, the last 15 years of our existence, we've been around for a long ass time, but the last one.
You say in 2005 we were in 2010, we were still wedding the children with a bucket.
No, no, no, no, no.
2000, 2000, like five-ish.
I would say a little bit After.
I would 2010 is a good.
So the last 15 years, we've just been into we've been looking into the boxes.
We've just been looking into the boxes.
That's all we've been doing.
Like we're we're neo-sapiens now.
The way that humans have done it for the last like thousands and thousands of years.
That's done.
We're now we're box people.
We're looking into the screens.
We've got the rectangles.
They're fat in our pockets.
We've got them.
We gotta keep them charged.
This is what we are now.
And like people like us, we are the first generations that's watching it slide because we remember what it was like before any of this, and we're watching it all fucking slide down the tubes.
So how do we cope?
How do we cope?
We we have to, you know, go back, you know, retreat back into this idea that we're living the way you know we're living in this actually supernatural and like healthy way.
And I think for trad wives, it that's like it gives them something.
It gives them something, or it wouldn't be it we wouldn't be talking about it now, and you wouldn't have certainly enough material to do an entire miniseries on it, you know.
I really I miss the I miss the days where we would get so poor that we would have to wear a barrel.
I miss the days.
I miss the days where we would be falling asleep on the side of the street and our sombrero would be kind of popped up by our snoozes.
I miss I miss the days where there would be a tunnel painted on the side of a wall, and we would run into it.
I miss all of those.
That's what we're meant to do.
We are we are meant, we are meant to execute follies in the third dimension, not just like yap online and be like, oh well, here are three ways you can number one, and then like of uh a string of emojis.
Like we're not meant to all be turned into commercials, which is what we all are.
And I think that there is a psychosis that is ripping through the species, and there are these like bizarre, archaic outlets that fulfill some kind of prehistoric, you know, uh need, but unfortunately, because we're flawed, like they come with these like horrible other, you know, these horrible other pieces of it.
Like it can't just be, yeah, I want to live out on a farm and like feed the chickens, and like it has to also be like here's a video of it, and I'm gonna make money off.
It's like the unfortunately for white people it's it's very tricky because it's like, yeah, I miss uh just a few decades ago when we when we could, you know, uh use the switch on our slave because the rubber uh quotes quota wasn't met.
I miss I miss women not having the right to vote.
I miss, you know, there's just no there's no the this history, this this this kind of like moment in the past that is uh you know pastoral idyllic.
That is literally like how fascism happens.
They they they sell you on the bullshit, and then before you know it.
I mean, yes, I mean it's like, yeah, I think that yeah, this this idea of an idealized past is always bullshit and often the sort of like you know, paired with uh justification for fascism.
But Annie, we're talking about like I guess a longing for a time where I guess it was just practical to be offline most of the time.
That's within our lifetimes at least.
I was thinking about like 30 years ago, like your internet connection was charged by the hour.
So like you were did not you're you would not spend much time at there, like 20 years ago, like this before even the the very first iPhone, like you know, like a good computer, a broadband connection where we're we're expensive.
You weren't spending that much time online.
And now we got to the point where it's like yes, everywhere is online.
And if you know, if you're if you're broke or you know, yeah, you struggles, it does provide you with like endless free entertainment, but at the expense of like giving your sort of like dopamine reward center over to a group of Stanford grads who do nothing but figure out how to make you stay on their websites all day long.
And so, and so yeah, so we're just like, man, you like it's like I've indulged in the internet so much I feel dependent on it because that's this is what these people have engineered my behavior to be.
And God, I just wanted to be what it was like 20 years ago when they it wasn't like this.
Yeah, me and my husband have actually a joke about how we're gonna raise our son, and we always just say that we're gonna do the M. Night Shyamalan film, the village, but for the 1990s.
Yeah.
Where it's just like, yeah, you can go on the computer, you can go on the internet, but you just have to stop every time I make a phone call.
Yeah, and it just turns off, and that's it.
And sometimes I need it for work.
Just like you know, so we're saying the computer is somewhere you go to, the computer isn't fully integrated into your entire life.
Yeah, the computer isn't growing out of your of your good hand.
Yeah, there's a a really interesting book by the um the media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, uh called Present Shock.
And he talks about how he thinks that you know this era of instant telecommunications, getting better all the time, has kind of scrambled our sense of time in a way that we are it's it's changing because we uh on so many different levels at once, a bit like you say, I'm talking to you guys right now, but I've also got my phone here where people are texting me.
You know, I think he uses an example once where he's in one country because he's and he's like checking what his diary is there, but he was at another time he's also getting a call from someone from a different time zone, but he's also getting an email from a colleague in a different time zone, and that this is fundamentally changed our understanding of what the present is, that the present is something very different than um people in the past who have understood it.
And I think it's interesting how many of the trad wives will talk specifically about their lifestyle and call it slow living.
It's another buzzword of theirs that I often see in their bios.
So I think there's like something going on with that understanding of time where they're actually rejecting the kind of or or making a show at least of rejecting, because ultimately they are still influencers and this is their job.
But they are making a show of rejecting the constant intrusion of technology into your lives, and I think that's part even of rejecting, you know, what they call when they say they don't have a job and often like minimize the job that they do have.
What they're essentially saying is that like I don't have a job where my boss can always call me and I'm never off the clock, right?
Because even if I have a commute, my boss can always call me at any time and make me do some work and I've got my laptop and stuff here.
Do you know I think they're rejecting that notion of work, which again kind of has really changed how we're mediated just through how good our technology has gotten in the last 20 years.
It does make me wonder because it's like, you know, if you read like an Upton Sinclair novel, you get an actual impression of what life was during the industrial age.
Like it was like, you know, going and like poisoning your lungs and and like shredding your hands at like the meat factory or whatever, and then going home with very little time and energy and spending that time drinking uh some of the worst grain liquor you can get and beating your wife.
And now we're like, yeah, actually, like uh the past was you know, insert here, insert whatever that we're being fed, right?
And like, of course, yes, you know, does living in nature exist?
Of course it does.
But it's kind of oftentimes being the dominion of people who could afford to escape from the industrial cycle, which is the majority of how most people existed, and it's the way that humanity has subsisted since industrialization.
And so, you know, uh obviously you can also get into you know the rights of of different uh you know groups of people and such, but I think it is important to remember that like that wasn't really the history of most people.
Like you would have to be a very, very privileged person or kind of look out in general, like, oh, you know, my my dad brought me up on this.
And then if that does actually come true, if if you really do manifest the totally natural history that we're all fucking dreaming of, it's not little house on the prairie.
It's fucking subsistence, it's like this year's crops fucking died.
Yeah, and I couldn't raise them.
My child is going to die like before it reaches, you know, the six months.
We cannot feed ourselves this winter.
I do think that that we kind of tend to idealize in various different ways, not just the idea of the internet.
And of course, the 90s is great.
Hey, interesting that you would choose that.
Uh, you know, this is not to be condescending to like you or Travis, but the 90s were literally the economic boom under like neoliberalism.
It was the flooding of the economy with cheap money.
It was the moment where we basically forfeited our future to get uh some you know excess consumer goods in our present.
And I do think that like a lot of this is just so a historical in like so many different ways.
Um, so yeah, I don't know.
I just wanted to kind of blab about that for a moment.
Yeah, we blew it all on extreme flavored chips.
Yeah, well, we we were like, great, oh my god, moon shoes.
Oh god.
I want to be clear, we're only doing the M night Shyamalan the Village thing specifically for the internet setup and the house.
Oh, actually, I think you're doing the beach that uh the the old the beach that makes you Old for your son.
It's very sad.
It's because you want to hang out with your son.
One of my favorite.
That's one of my favorite M nights, by the way.
You want to be the same age and you want to go and have like a martini with your son, which is so messed up.
It's so messed up.
Well, that's the thing.
Julian, you you make a really good point.
And like I think that's why it has to be about God.
Because like anytime you do have to do something that like kind of sucks.
Like if you say that it's about God, it like makes you feel like, ah, well, it was worth doing that.
Like going to church.
Nobody wants to fucking go to church.
Like the seats are uncomfortable.
You gotta sit there for a long time.
Jake, I love the idea that going to church is like something that someone would be like, it's about God.
I'm just saying another thing.
I'm just saying, like going to church, you know, like going to church, like it sucks.
Ah, but uh, you know, you don't want to go back to sucks.
So it's like you're out in the wilderness, like, there's no call of duty out there.
Like it kind of sucks.
Like, here's the thing.
Like, if there's a call of duty, but it's more primordial, Jake.
Yeah, yeah.
Call of yeah, call of duty to Ezekiel Thom, your husband who's also your cousin that like you were promised to when you were 11.
You're your call of duty is your duty to check all of the traps to make sure that some game came in this winter or else you'll die.
Yeah, that's the only game you'll be playing, is like poorly tasting, undercooked, undercooked hair.
If they were like hashtag slow living and they were like, I found the secret, like they wouldn't be online.
They would be like if you really found the secret to happiness, you wouldn't be like online.
Sorry, like no Wi-Fi posting or even involving yourself with like national politics or international politics, like because you would be like content and you would be hashtag slow living.
So like the fact that they're like it probably sucks for them.
Like their husbands are probably like I can't I can imagine the kind of relationships and and the kind of because you know, no relationship is perfect.
Like the challenges that they have to endure.
And it's like, well, yeah, it's probably kind of sucks.
And that's why it also has to be like, and and it's about God, because like I'm pure.
I'm actually pure, I'm better than you, and I'm so and it's I'm so awesome that I'm gonna devote most of my time to making little videos and and superimposing text over it to let you know how like good you can have it too.
It just it doesn't add up.
If you're if you're fucking if you're truly happy, you're not online posting.
And if you're online posting about how happy you are, odds are you're probably you know, you're probably not that happy.
Yeah, everyone's having a great time out in the wilderness until Black Phillip shows up.
Everyone's having a great time until the goat is the satanic.
Great, great reference.
Talking about nostalgia, I think that I think that one one great point you make in the series is the whole premise of the idea that in the past there was really one template or one type of heterosexual partnership just isn't real.
And really it's it's a kind of thing that they're just calling traditional.
And I uh I was thinking about like very serious.
Something I was reminding you of the um relationship between the American founding father, John Adams, and his wife uh Abigail Adams, which is famously recorded in the like their thousand-plus letters they wrote wrote to each other.
Because uh John Adams, despite being a real miserable hard ass to the extent of like disowning his own son because he was kind of uh uh an alcoholic fuck up, had immense respect for his wife to the point that he was constantly seeking her advice and counsel on like career decisions, like asking like uh it's like, hey, should I resign the my post as like the chief justice of this uh of uh the Massachusetts while surveying Congress?
Like he was asking career advice for and like asking what should I do with my job.
Like most, I think people who identify with the idea that the trad wife thing would say, Well, that's that's not a trad relationship.
Going to your wife and asking about what should I do with my career?
Should I resign my position?
That kind of thing.
And then really believe because he had so much uh he had so much respect for her as an intellectual peer that he uh he really took her uh her advice to heart.
But this is again, this is like this is a founding father in the like even though they occupy obviously very different social spheres because of the time and place in which they lived in their personal relationship.
You know, they had a great deal of mutual respect and trust.
But that was again not the kind of like trad uh that the people who talk about trad wives are kind of like talking about.
Yeah, and uh some I mean, yeah, it's it's very true, and something I always try to underscore when you know this is constant reference to ancestral living and tradition and things that you know what that's looked like has always been historically contingent and culturally contingent, but also it's been very contingent just on what class you were in, do you know?
That relationship that you described, I didn't know about between John Adams and his wife.
But it reminds me of um some of the research that my co-host Megan looked into about the anti-suffragettes who tended to be pretty upper class women, and their reasoning for why they didn't want the vote and didn't want to get involved in the kind of ugly, ugly,
mucky world of politics was because they preferred their way of of of doing politics, which was just, you know, whispering in their their husband's ear or their brother's ear, you know, and sort of just gently advising him on the the correct course.
And you know, they sort of thought that this was a more feminine way of doing things, but you know, probably many of them were pretty powerful in that regard.
If you were well situated and persuasive and had the ear of several powerful men, but it of course ignored the fact that, you know, if you're working class woman who kind of works in a factory for 10 hours and your husband works there for 12 hours, you can whisper in his ear all you want, but it's actually not going to enact much political change.
And so I think, yeah, that relationship between class and political power is like a really interesting one when it comes specifically to the rich history of of female anti-feminists themselves.
Feminism often gets characterized as a uh bourgeois movement by bourgeois women, and that's true to a certain extent, but anti-feminism has also always historically been pretty bourgeois itself, because it's often upper class women seeking to keep ring fence their own political power by virtue of their relationships and their charm.
Yeah, I feel like when like the bulk of your personality is like made up of like w what your beliefs are, like the you've got it pretty good.
Do you know what I mean?
Like I remember like my early twenties and stuff when I was like working retail jobs and I was so broke, like I didn't care about pol I didn't care about anything other than like, am I gonna have enough to like cover rent this month?
And like, am I gonna like be able to like have enough for like a couple treats along the way, like maybe one night out, maybe like one McDonald's night, you know?
Yeah.
These were these were my concerns.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's it's really hard to be an activist when you're exhausted.
Do you think that's a good one?
Yeah, totally, totally.
What would you say, like through the course of your uh research and working on this miniseries, would you say is like um I guess the most dramatic sort of shift in understanding or perspective when it comes to the trad wife and the trad wife communities?
So I made reference to this earlier, but I guess I'll lay it out a little bit more explicitly.
When I first started writing about trad wives, they were a really, really small subculture.
And they were largely attached to white nationalist circles, and they very much spoke that language.
Uh they didn't really have a great eye to what was trendy or uh s aesthetic on women's social media.
A lot of them played maybe with the sort of vintage 1950s thing, which was a bit fun, but it was pretty pretty small, I guess.
And I think one thing that is really different about the Tradosphere today is that it has gone so mainstream.
Many of these women are, and I want to be clear, even though this circle is very right wing and still very attached to right wing politics, it's something separate, I would say, from the alt-right, even if there are still some influences who have a cozy relationship with it.
But a lot of them don't.
Uh, a lot of them are firmly posting lifestyle content.
And I think this shows how the right has got a lot more sophisticated, actually, in how it approaches women, how it talks to women.
Because even though a lot of this stuff claims to be a political lifestyle content, it is still making ideological claims.
And I think probably the most similar parallel I can actually think of is how the Manosphere did something similar, where it talked about the red pill as imbibing a whole political ideology, not just because it was, you know, the right political argument, but because it gave you personally a sense of power, a sense of strength.
Uh, and particularly it's often when you read people who have exited these communities who often seem to have spoken to a lot of young men when they were feeling kind of vulnerable when they were in a transition in life when they were just breaking up with somebody.
They were offered this ideology, this way of looking at the world as a way to gain some kind of power and mastery over their social environment.
And I think I see a similar way with the way the Tradosphere talks to women.
It's talking a lot about wellness.
It's talking a lot about peace and contentment.
And a lot of that is subtly suggesting that women achieve this through withdrawing from their ambitions, from the public life, from their career if they possibly can.
It's suggesting essentially a retreat from public life from the outside world in order to focus on their own well-being.
And I think there's also an element here which is quite deeply in tune with the fact that the right is getting more and more as far as I can see obsessed with the concept of birth rates and fertility and pronatalism.
And it doesn't strike me as coincidental that suddenly a lot of this rhetoric around what will you make you as a woman personally happy.
I mean sometimes it's just you know you have to be a mother you have to have babies or you'll be as JD Vance said a childless cat lady.
A lot of it's a bit more insidious than that because it's saying stuff like you need to get off your birth control.
It's toxic it's making you miserable it's making you you know depressed it's may you you you won't be pure without it you want to be natural.
And I think this stuff is quite insidious because it's harder to argue on a political level how do you debunk a young woman saying this made me happier in my personal life.
You sound crazy trying and yet the effect that it has of all of these women all giving their testimonies, all saying you personally will be so much happier if you give up liberal politics, if you give up a belief in egalitarianism, if you retreat from any ambitions that you might have if you get rid of your birth control, if you you know at the same time it feels to me like it's clearly making an attempt to shift the culture and for a while you might have been called alarmist if you said that the manosphere was going to shift the culture.
But I think we can visibly see that it has and I guess I I think something similar might be happening with the Tradosphere and going under the radar even for a culture that is so visible in some ways.
Yeah I mean this is something I I really really enjoyed the way that you really uh you know went deep into like the dynamics and the motivations of the people who create and consume this content.
And I I think it is attempting to write it off as silly if you know very little about it.
It's it's oh so it's women playing dress up or something.
Or like doing doing some sort of uh domestic sort of like performance or something something like that.
But no when you when you really get into it is like it's you know it's it's the wrong solutions but is a sort of like yes a system in the community that is offering uh at least the the rhetoric of solutions to problems that people are really feeling.
Yeah absolutely and it can be an uncomfortable position to be in when you're you're critically analyzing this stuff because you can find yourself reflexively taking on the position and I guess you guys will know this better debunking conspiracy theories right just because you don't think Bill Gates is doing whatever evil scheme doesn't mean you're endorsing Bill Gates and saying he's great guy.
Like everything he's done is perfect.
Yeah I find a similar frustration when you're you know saying well no I don't think we would all just be happier if we just give up our right to vote and just went back to scrubbing kitchen floors.
But at the same time I'm not saying that I think that the work uh life balance for most women today is perfect.
I'm not saying I think the modern dating landscape is perfect.
I think it's got a lot of problems.
Do you know?
And I think that's where I've tried to meet some of these influences where they're at.
I've tried to identify where I think the critique has a real has a real grounds for resentment and I can see why these women's audiences are grateful to them for articulating it, even if I don't agree with their solutions.
Well I feel like all popular movements especially things that tend to go like viral online like do on some basic level address like a core thing that we feel is like incorrect.
And it's you know, as Travis famously said very early on in the show the marketplace of of realities, you know it's not enough I think anymore to just pick something and kind of like make a go at it on your own.
You have to also convince other people that it's The best way and that they should do it too.
So I I can't wait to I can't wait to listen to these six episodes and find out more about this.
I yeah, I can't wait for everyone.
It's gonna be, yeah, we're releasing that.
It's gonna be next week.
It's gonna be uh we're gonna release the first two episodes on the 29th.
And uh and if you want to uh join the uh thousands of cursed media subscribers who will also be listening to it, I'm gonna put a link in the show notes so you can sign up and get those episodes as soon as they hit.
It's gonna be called Truly Tradly Deeply.
We're gonna be releasing it through the month of November.
And yeah, I can't wait to see uh people's reactions to it because I really do think that this is the is like the most like deeply researched and like carefully analyzed perspective of this culture.
Who better?
Who better to do this deep dive?
I cannot wait.
But boy, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Having the have any other plans after you're done with this series, I know there's been a long project.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, I have said to my husband Paul, I'm just like, I'm so excited to get off TikTok.
Uh that stuff.
If you're if you're on TikTok and you're not having this carefully curated your feed to be beautiful woodland creatures like Julian, like, oh my god, I don't know how you do it.
It's it just feels like just like a vector of just and in fairness, maybe that is because I'm saying show me the most deranged feminine content you can find, but uh yeah, I might just like just take some kind of cleanse there, yeah.
I just knew that when you covered like just pearly things, I knew it was just the beginning of a whole other I of course have have included some select quotes from just pearly things just uh oh because absolutely well because she bullies all the trad wives, she's the main instigator, I think.
Of course, of course she's like, I've gotta she's she's got no trad wife like qualities except for being just mean, just mean and awful.
And uh so of course she's like, yeah, fuck you guys.
Like you probably think my Dominican boyfriend is, you know, like racially inferior, so sad.
I'd like to take this opportunity to plug uh a new side business I'm running for a small fee.
And Annie, maybe you can be a c uh one of my first clients.
You can let me log into your TikTok, and I will manipulate your algorithm to get you like great stuff like woodworking content.
Uh skateboarding, Star Citizen videos, just like the most non-toxic like uh sampler platter of of content.
Yeah, sorry, Annie.
The side the side effect is that you will be advertised shoes that make you taller.
You will be advertised shampoos to make your hair grow bad.
You'll be advertised all the Jake stuff.
You will be advertised like the NBA 2K in any variant.
Very proud of you, Annie, for what you've done with this series.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAA Podcast.
You can go to Patreon.com slash QAA and subscribe for five dollars a month to get a whole second episode every week, plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes.
For everything else, we've got a website.
That's qAA podcast.com.
Listen it until next week.
May the deep dish bless you and keep you.
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If you don't know me, my name is Alex Clark, and the Guardian recently accused me of running a psyop to turn American win women thin, fertile, and conservative.
I'm here to publicly say the accusations are true.
Ladies, welcome to the biggest American conservative women's conference, YWLS.
And by the way, by the way, this is our 10-year anniversary.
You are in this room and you are witnessing a cultural revolution.
