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- [00:01]
Akilah Hughes
This episode is brought to you by JCPenney. And if you've been to JCPenney recently, yes, JCPenney, you'll know it's becoming the way to find good clothes for prices that still make sense. They've got hidden gems for everyone and every budget, with deals and rewards that actually make a dent. If you already shop JCPenney, you feel like you know a secret. But if not, it's time to ask. Wait, am I sleeping on JCPenney? Shopjcpenney.com, yes, JCPenney the Guardian recently accused.
- [00:32]
E.J. Dixon
Me of running a psyop to turn American women thin, fertile and conservative. I'm here to publicly say the accusations are true. So what you have is a ballroom in Texas full of not only young women but young girls in high school being told that their biological clock is ticking. Finding a husband should be their top priority.
- [00:56]
Madelyn Peltz
Sorry, I didn't mean to laugh. But come on. If you've been online lately, you've probably seen a curious form of entertainment emerge. A woman in a kitchen, dressed in high fashion, going to painstaking lengths to make something from scratch that she could have acquired from a grocery store for less than $5. Seen and barely heard. Because for some reason, speaking above a concerted whisper is considered unbecoming for a dutiful spouse and a doting mother. These women are called tradw wives or traditional wives, and to many they're pushing outdated anti feminist tropes for what women should aspire to. But how did we get to this point in lifestyle content? What was the pipeline that seemingly regular women entered to end at this point in 2025? And is this phenomenon even real? Or is it just fictional lifestyle content for entertainment purposes only? I'm Akilah Hughes, and for the next two weeks I'm diving into the digital pipelines targeting young women and young men. This week, I'm looking into what's convincing some girlies that they don't need rights, they just need a ring. And asking how is this better? Before we get into the whole trad wife fad wife, we have to zoom out and back up to figure out how we got here. In the years leading up to Trumpism, caring about your health was seen as something for granola eating, tote bag wielding liberals conservatives were up in arms about proposed laws limiting how big of a soda you could purchase, pissed about the Obama administration's gentle suggestion that school lunches have something green on the plate, and really furious that the body positivity movement that insisted more than one body type could be acceptable and gasp, even beautiful to large swathes of people could exist. Couple that with a slow destigmatization of therapy in the media, and the right was not having it. And comparing that era to now, where backlash to any deviation from a very specific body type and a very limited view of health reign supreme, it's clear that something changed.
- [03:05]
Akilah Hughes
But what I think that the left has really fucked up in terms of making itself palatable and marketing itself effectively to gen Z.
- [03:19]
Madelyn Peltz
That's E.J. dixon. She's a senior writer at the Cut by New York magazine.
- [03:23]
Akilah Hughes
The left is still sort of propagating this idea of work as empowering and, you know, girl bossery being empowering, you know, this whole, like, white feminist ideology, and it's just clearly been exposed as, like, a lie. I mean, that's one of many respects in which I think the left has really failed to promote itself effectively for younger demographics. And they're realizing that because they're not stupid. And they're like, okay, well, this isn't working. Let's. Let's go. Let's go further, right? Let's. Let's try this out.
- [03:51]
Madelyn Peltz
The right has sort of, like, rebranded what I always saw as a very left approach to, like, health, wellness, whatever else, like eating organic, having limited ingredients, shopping at elevated grocery stores, those sorts of things. The right seems to have dove move into the aesthetic of it. Like, you'll be skinny, you'll be ripped, you'll have a happier home life, you'll find love. Whereas the left has often focused on like, well, you'll be wasting less, and this will make the world a better place. Like, fewer animals will die. Like, it's more of a sort of like, you're doing this out of a moral obligation versus a selfish one. I don't know if it's like, the question is if it's by design, so much as do you think that that's why it's been so much more successful coming from the right, where it's like, this is this fun thing where I'm now better than other people. It's almost like a f fixation on the self that is like, okay, well, then. Then I get to feel good.
- [04:39]
Akilah Hughes
100. I think that's a really good way of. Of putting it. I think that the left has really underestimated the extent to which social media has created a fracture in our culture where everybody sort of sees themselves as their own brand. And, you know, there's an emphasis on the individual rather than the collective. The example that I always think of it's kind of a random example, but the example that I always think of, that. That is kind of the culmination of this is the discourse about children on airplanes.
- [05:05]
Madelyn Peltz
Yes.
- [05:06]
Akilah Hughes
I don't know if you've seen this where there's all these stories that go viral on Reddit or like social. Other social media platforms where somebody will go on and be like, a mom asked me to like, trade seats with her, but I paid for my ticket and like, my comfort is prioritized over anybody else's. So I said no. The response is uniformly, like, almost uniformly, like pretty positive, like, yes, you go, girl. Like, put yourself first. And like, I don't know. I mean, I understand in that specific scenario, like, why somebody would react that way, but I just think that's just such a classic example of how social media has created this ecosystem where we are all thinking like, like that person who's being asked by the mom to switch seats on the plane. We're all prioritizing ourselves over thinking about the collective or, you know, prioritizing empathy. It just manifests itself over and over and over again on the Internet. And I think the right has really capitalized on that very well.
- [06:04]
Madelyn Peltz
It's just making me think about the sort of maha of it all and how the left, I think, doesn't necessarily disagree on a lot of these things. Like, maybe they're against the sort of conspiratorial nature, the anti science nature of a lot of the, like, health choices that people make on the right. But I think a real, like, tent pole of the left's approach to, let's just say health is more of a, like, collective right, where it's like, well, are. Do people have grocery stores? Can people afford medical care? Whereas on the right, it's really about like, am I a good mom? Am I a good person? Am I optimizing my health? It becomes so about the individual. To your point.
- [06:39]
Akilah Hughes
Yeah.
- [06:40]
Madelyn Peltz
Do you foresee a world where we get back to or even find a happy medium between a collective and a hyper fixation on the individual?
- [06:48]
Akilah Hughes
I hope so, but I don't think it's gonna happen anytime soon.
- [06:52]
Madelyn Peltz
So it's super clear that the current Make America Healthy Again movement is largely backlashed to what I'm sure they'd call woke health trends. God, give it a rest. But what if it's actually all a stunted response to something bigger that the right has refused to process in any meaningful.
- [07:08]
E.J. Dixon
Yeah, I have been following the burgeoning marketing of conservative ideology to young women for several years. I think that the wellness conspiracism was given a major jolt in the wake of COVID And you saw just the number of people who were dissatisfied with the pandemic response turning to right wing sources that were telling them conspiracy theories about vaccines. And I think from there it really spiraled into like an all consuming lifestyle overhaul that with the merger of the Kennedy campaign and the Trump campaign at such a critical moment in the election, you really saw the coming together of the Trumpian vision of especially like womanhood and motherhood and this sort of outsider coalition that Kennedy had been, had been building. So it really took off in a new way during sort of in the last few months of the 2024 campaign.
- [08:15]
Madelyn Peltz
This is Madelyn Peltz, an independent journalist who's been covering right wing media for nearly a decade for outlets like Media Matters. Now she's writing on her substack number two pencil and working on a book about trends in right wing media. I wanted to talk to both she and EJ because they both recently attended the Turning Points USA conference aimed at young women that majorly capitalize on this sort of wellness to barefoot and pregnant in a kitchen pipeline.
- [08:43]
E.J. Dixon
Yeah, I mean, I think it fits into like the larger construction of like the wellness and health marketplace. Like, women are spending more money than men on makeup and skincare. So Make America Healthy Again comes in and tells you, like, all of the things in your medicine cabinet are poisoning you and poisoning your children and here's like 10,000 new things that you can buy.
- [09:09]
Madelyn Peltz
Right.
- [09:10]
E.J. Dixon
So much of this is just a consumerist trend. It is also of a piece of this, like, deconstruction of our public health infrastructure. Because, like, the message is like, you don't need Medicaid, you need red light therapy.
- [09:24]
Madelyn Peltz
Oh, goodness.
- [09:26]
E.J. Dixon
So I think that it is in a lot of ways, like just a rebranded version of like Reagan era austerity.
- [09:33]
Madelyn Peltz
Yeah.
- [09:33]
E.J. Dixon
As we all know, like, there is tremendous pressure on young women to look a certain way. So it really just taps into the way that these young women are socialized.
- [09:43]
Madelyn Peltz
After the breakfast, that little event in 2020 that turned everything upside down and accelerated all of this. You know that one friend who somehow knows everything about money? Yeah. Now imagine they live in your phone. Say hey to Experian, your big financial friend. It's the app that helps you check your FICO score, find ways to save, and basically feel like a financial genius. And guess what? It's totally free. So go on, download the Experian app. Trust me, having a bff, like, this is A total game changer at Capella University. Learning online doesn't mean learning alone. You'll get support from people who care about your success, like your enrollment counselor, who gets to know you and the goals you'd like to achieve. You'll also get a designated academic coach who's with you throughout your entire program.
- [10:39]
Charlie Kirk
Plus, career coaches are available to help.
- [10:41]
Madelyn Peltz
You navigate your professional goals. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at Capella. Edu. Something that I personally think about all the time because I hosted a daily news show in the pandemic. I guess it's still the pandemic, but you know what I mean. At the height of COVID and being at home and how it's affected all of us in ways that maybe we haven't really addressed publicly because we have a media apparatus that does not want to talk about it. We just want to get back to normal. A lot of the trad wife, a lot of the alpha male, a lot of that sort of cultural leaning comes out of this moment, right where people are at home, they're disconnected from community. They feel like it's the left forcing them to stay home. Even though most of this was happening under Donald Trump. Do you think that that sort of, like, feeling of missing out on what was traditional dating and things were easier at some point, and trying to figure out why that was without thinking about COVID is part of why we're moving backwards, I guess, in terms of gender roles and how people are performing them?
- [11:44]
Akilah Hughes
Oh, absolutely. I think Covid played a huge role not just in radicalizing young people in particular, but also just completely, like, transforming how they view gender roles. I mean, from the mom's side, there was all this discussion about, you know, we were finally talking about women's emotional labor and, you know, women assuming most of the labor for parenting because of how incredibly stressed out mothers were at the time. And I think that conversation was exhausting to people. You know, like, we're tired of talking about how moms have it so hard.
- [12:15]
Madelyn Peltz
Right.
- [12:15]
Akilah Hughes
I heard this all the time, too, at TP usa. Like, Covid was the moment that really opened my eyes. Like, I just heard that over and over again. Like, Covid made me realize, like, what everybody was telling me was wrong.
- [12:27]
Madelyn Peltz
Yikes.
- [12:27]
Akilah Hughes
In my head, I'm thinking, like, okay, well, you could come to that realization, but you don't have to, like, take it to the point that you think every woman should be at home.
- [12:35]
Madelyn Peltz
Yeah, exactly. And that's the message Charlie Kirk has been explicitly sending to these young women, he said on stage, I think there is an argument to bring back the Mrs.
- [12:46]
Charlie Kirk
Degree. And no, seriously. And just be clear. That's why you're going to college, Right? Don't lie to yourself. Like, don't, like, I'm going, I'm studying sociology.
- [12:56]
Madelyn Peltz
No, you're not.
- [12:56]
Charlie Kirk
We know why you're here and that's okay, actually.
- [12:59]
Madelyn Peltz
And that's a really good reason to go to college. That's right. Charlie Kirk, a guy whose giant head resembles the curse of fruit gusher circa 1995, and whose gums are uppercase while his teeth are lowercase, advising a 14 year old girl to go to college to find a husband.
- [13:13]
E.J. Dixon
I think it's really like, first and foremost a hype machine. It's difficult to overstate how big a media footprint that Charlie Kirk has. When I talk to normies who aren't glued to this type of thing the way that I am, and some of your audience might be, they know Charlie Kirk. They know who he is. They've seen his, like, campus debate videos.
- [13:37]
Madelyn Peltz
Yeah.
- [13:37]
E.J. Dixon
The numbers that it's doing on TikTok are enormous. And so you have this sort of division that Charlie Kirk is orchestrating between, like, good girls and bad girls. Yeah, the bad girls are the college students who step up to the mic on these, like quad debates that he has and says things like, if I didn't have this XYZ civil right, I wouldn't be able to continue my education. Or like debating abortion access or LGBTQ equality. And what he does is he destroys them, he dominates them. Like, he takes advantage of maybe the emotions of the moment and the pressure of a camera on a stage like that. And those are like the bad girls. Right. And then you have these good girls that come to YWLS and they are socialized to be submissive. They are conservative. Right. So, like the church a lot of times primes these young women for this type of messaging. And they're religious. So, like, the environment at YWLS is very churchy. If you can find a way to harness your tongue in a way that's biblical and you dress appropriately, you don't have everything hanging out, you will attract.
- [14:53]
Madelyn Peltz
A different type of guy. Less burnout, more babies, less feminism, more femininity. Did you feel like the attendees felt that contradiction of here are these women who we're supposed to be looking up to in their nice suits and they're talking to us about all of the success that they've had and how they're working with this organization. But Also, like, we're not supposed to have that. Did the kids seem to get it?
- [15:21]
E.J. Dixon
I think that the kids are much more practical about their own lives. It is just not a plan to say, like, I'm going to find someone who is economically stable and 19 years old and wants to marry me. Like, that is not a plan and it's not something their parents are telling them a plan. Like, a lot of these young women that I spoke to see a career in traditionally feminized fields that are just a way station between marriage and school. And there's nothing wrong with wanting to be married and raise children.
- [15:58]
Madelyn Peltz
Right.
- [15:59]
E.J. Dixon
So none of the young women were quite as extreme or condescending as what I was hearing on the stage. And then you have this like, not only hypocrisy of these speakers who have these big media careers that but for the feminist movement wouldn't be possible.
- [16:16]
Madelyn Peltz
Right.
- [16:17]
E.J. Dixon
Alex Clark herself is over 30 and unmarried and doesn't have children. And you have her boss on stage saying that that is a nightmare.
- [16:26]
Madelyn Peltz
Right.
- [16:27]
E.J. Dixon
He's speaking about his own employee that way, which I find horrifying.
- [16:32]
Madelyn Peltz
And who also makes him so much money.
- [16:34]
E.J. Dixon
Like, it really feels like a hostile work environment.
- [16:37]
Madelyn Peltz
Yeah. So it's jobs and opportunities for me, not for thee. When we come back, what the skepticism of the Turning Point USA attendees says about the content side of things.
- [16:54]
Charlie Kirk
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- [17:51]
Madelyn Peltz
Turning Point USA got their bag by selling impressionable young women a fantasy of happy marriage and motherhood where they'd never be asked to use their brains. At least not really ever again. But the current statistics about dating and relationships, relationships and parenthood tell a different story. In a 2023 Pew Research center survey of 5,073 US adults, 48% of women said that being married was not too or not at all important for a fulfilling Life, compared with 39% of men, up from 31% and 28% in 2019. In a 2024 Wall Street Journal NORC poll, 58% of women aged 18 to 29 said marriage was at least at least somewhat essential to their vision of the American dream, compared with 66% of men. And while there's plenty to unpack here with dating apps, general political divides among gendered lines, and more, there's also the obvious educational and earning divide that has increased as women, including the college age girls who attended the Turning Points conference, have gone on to higher education at higher rates. In 2024, 47% of American women ages 25 to 34 had a bachelor's degree, according to People pew, compared with 37% of men. A bachelor's degree increases net lifetime earnings by an estimated $1 million, according to a 2024 report from Georgetown University. Women are doing comparatively well when it comes to education in their early years in the labor force, and men are by all accounts falling behind in an increasingly expensive world. Does it even make sense for many of these women to pair up with these men and give up on their own potential for life? Less between this reality and the lifestyle content of tradwives selling us the glammed up version of motherhood where the day is spent scavenging for fresh ingredients to make meals and snacks for the grateful yet busy husband and kids, and the self awareness of girls who will likely finish their degrees even as they attend conventions that tell them not to, I had to ask are trad wives even real? Or is it Is this just lifestyle porn for young women who struggle to find partners and who hate their jobs to watch in hopes that one day they can be so affluent as to spend their time this way? I did some research, by which I mean I watched hours of this trad wife content and what I found was models selling a fantasy. And when the mask slipped and they spoke above a whisper, reality wasn't nearly as perfect as the short videos that made them rich made it seem.
- [20:19]
Nara Smith
I'm about to have four kids under five and I'm only 23. So let's talk about it.
- [20:23]
Madelyn Peltz
You'll notice a few things from the most famous of trad wives, Nara Smith's breakdown of having a fourth kid at age 23.
- [20:30]
Nara Smith
What have been the biggest differences from this pregnancy to last? I think I've just been so busy with work that during the first trimester I was on set, constantly about to pass out, feeling really nauseous, and it wasn't the funnest of times.
- [20:46]
Madelyn Peltz
She still has to work.
- [20:47]
Nara Smith
How do I manage it all? Lucky and I are really good at tag teaming. We tag team and really figure out our work schedules and what we have to do and then the other person takes care of the kids and then when we're lucky, family come and help out when we're both traveling or when it's just a little too much and the workload is piling up.
- [21:05]
Madelyn Peltz
She considers her lifestyle a choice.
- [21:07]
Nara Smith
I just wanted to be a young mom and do everything while I was really young, and I think that's just a personal preference for me. I love being a mom and making that choice.
- [21:15]
Madelyn Peltz
Her husband helps out with the kids, a traditionally feminine role when she's too busy, and all of this is how they pay their bills. She has by far the most amount of followers across platforms out of the two of them. So considering they're both models, it's incredibly likely that she's the breadwinner. And all of that is fine. But it's not a realistic lifestyle for the overwhelming majority of Americans and in fact plays into the trope of affluent people cosplaying as homesteaders and homemakers. Because of course, the easiest way to be either of these things in 2025's economy is by being rich. Take the couple behind Ballerina Farm, which boasts tens of millions of followers across platforms, and they have a gorgeous 1800s era farm where they chase chickens, milk cows and pick the freshest produce. Idyllic and pastor, but also a performance. You see the husband, Daniel, well, he's the son of the founder of JetBlue airlines and they're billionaires. And this very traditional way of living isn't even how they actually live. It's just an easy image to sell to people who wish their lives could be so simple. Poverty in the modern world isn't baking bread or milking cows as horses. Put in his incredible video why Rich People Love Pretending to Be Poor. And there are some something to all of these traditional women online, using the freshest, most expensive ingredients to make their own versions of food easily available in stores. He posits that this is a very old tradition that feels new thanks to social media. Even Marie Antoinette had a town built and workers imported with livestock where she could cosplay as a commoner as a hobby. Think just how many followers Marie Antoinette would have had on social media media today. So with all of this in mind, how is it better to dedicate your life to playing a role that can be summed up as food maker and cleaner, even when you possess all the potential on earth to do amazing things. I mean, I think you should have the choice, but I also don't think it's better. Everyone across the gender spectrum is looking for role models and people who seem to have figured out how to be successful in this troubling world. And of course, those broadcasting perfect hair, skin, bodies, clothes, families and endless time to love them through dutifully cooking and cleaning for them and keeping them healthy. Well, that looks pretty great. But it's not real life. It's tv. It's social media. It's well played capitalism. And unless you're getting your bag as an influencer doing it well, it's probably also not that fulfilling. One thing you never see in these videos is a person saying thank you. Maybe just consider that before you dive into that pipeline next week. We didn't forget about the guys. Are you all okay? By the way, we're looking into the content that is flooding your for you pages and wondering, is this optimization stuff doing anything other than making young men feel more isolated? And why does this stuff feel like it has an underlying political message? Tune in next week to find out. Thank you for listening to or watching. How Is this Better? Have you been enjoying the show? Great. Please leave a rating, preferably five stars, and review to let us know what you think. We'd love to hear from you and it's going to help introduce our new show to more people. Finally, Follow Slash, subscribe, whatever they're calling it on your platform of choice. Or frankly, all the platforms Apple, Spotify, Courier's YouTube. That way you won't miss any new episodes. Thanks and we'll catch you next time. How Is this Better? Is written and hosted by me, Akilah Hughes. It's produced by Devin Maroney and edited by Shane Verkhest. Courier's National Managing Director and Executive Producer is Kevin Dreyfus, RC Demezzo is their VP of Brand and Social and Charlotte Robertson is the Deputy Director of Brand and Social. Tracy Kaplan is Senior Vice President of Sales and distribution and Marianne Kuga is Director of Marketing. Show artwork by Danielle Del Plato and original theme music is by Used People Sam.