Trad Wives and the Horror They Inspire

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]Thank you to our patrons and today's sponsor, Surf Shark, for making this video possible.

[00:00:05]>> Rita makes the bread from scratch. It's the kind of thing they like the Marthas to do. A return to traditional values.

[00:00:13]>> Fertility is a gift directly from God.

[00:00:15]>> People always ask how many kids we're going to have.

[00:00:17]>> Rachel envied her sister and said unto Jacob, "Give me children or else I die."

[00:00:24]>> And the answer is, you know, only God knows.

[00:00:26]>> Only God knows. Yeah. You will bear children for them.

[00:00:35]>> You're scrolling through your feed when you see her. A natural, effortless beauty. Blonde curls tumbling down her back. A gingham apron wrapped around her milkade dress. She slices bread in a farmhouse kitchen and blondhaired, blue-eyed children bounce on her hip or cling to her skirts, all gazing up in adoration. But it's all a lie. She spent hours perfecting her hair and tops up her sun-kissed blonde every 6 weeks. Her natural makeup routine would run you about $700 and the Milkade dress about 1,200, but that was # gifted. The rustic kitchen cost hundreds of thousands in renovations. The bread is storebought.

[00:01:13]The sunlight beaming in is from an LED panel. And her beloved god-fearing husband, she hates him. Maybe the children, too. We never know what is behind the performance of perfect submission. And this is the premise of TRD wife fiction. In the past 10 months, five books about wife influencers have been published. Three of them are called Triwife. Triwives have been having a viral moment since co. So, it's not surprising to see that reflected in media. But what is surprising is how all of these books are horrors or thrillers.

[00:01:46]for a little peek into the blurbs.

[00:01:48]Rosemary's Baby for the Digital Age. A disturbing horror novel, The Perfect Wife, The Perfect Life, The Perfect Nightmare. A chilling tale of a journalist's descent into horror as she uncovers the dark secrets behind a Triwife influencer. A gripping, electrifying novel that is as darkly funny as it is frightening. I have read four of these Triwife influencer centered books from the past year, and all of them reveal a danger hidden in plain sight. They show how this digital portrait of happy farm families conceals control, abuse, and overall much darker reality. Why is the world obsessed with triedwife influencers in real life and in fiction? Why is horror fiction the dominant medium for this obsession? If horror is a genre that explores culture and anxieties, what anxieties are stirred up by the trod? And finally, is the trodwife influencer a victim, a villain, or both? My followers have been craving a video on trod wives. So today I decided to make one from scratch. I started off reading some fiction and when that was done moved on to researching the psychology of right-wing women. Oh, sorry. I got a bit sucked in there and what I saw was uh terrifying, but at least it's not as terrifying as surfing the web unprotected.

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[00:04:12]Thank you, Surf Shark. We can't talk about Triwife fiction without deconstructing the figure of the Triwife herself. So, how I'm going to be structuring this video is I'll break down what a Treadwife influencer is, their ideology, their implications, and the anxieties that they bring up. Along the way, we will be seeing how those anxieties have historically been explored in the horror genre and how they're popping up today. The two fiction books I'm focusing on are Triwife by Sarah Toga Schaefer and Yester Year by Carol Cla Burke. But I'll also touch a little on Everyone Is Lying to You by Joe Piaza and The Trod Wife by Carrie Hughes, but not The Trod Wife by Sarah Langan because that book isn't out yet and I couldn't get an advanced reader copy. There will be light spoilers for all of them, but I'll flag any serious spoilers. I did my best to like examine the themes without giving too much away in case you want to read any of them. Horror. Horror.

[00:05:06]I've said horror so many times that I feel like I'm saying it wrong. I It sounds like I'm saying horror. Anyway, horror is a genre that explores culture and anxieties and film critic Robin Wood argued that horror signals every turn the repressed. So basically anything that we as a culture or individually try to push away will pop back up in monstrous forms. I've talked a lot about horror on this channel. Specifically, how it engages with themes of female sexuality and motherhood, and other common themes include control, abuse, religion, performance versus reality, the sense that something is wrong, but nobody else can see it or that nobody believes you. So, are we starting to see kind of how it overlaps with tradife anxieties? The trwife influencer is a loaded cultural figure, depending on who you ask. They are wholesome women who just show off their godly lifestyle or they are tools for right-wing propaganda. I'm in camp number two. Trod wife is a port monto of two words. It's very tricky to parse out. I'll give you a couple seconds.

[00:06:15]Traditional wife. Did you get it? Tried wives are not all the same. And wives and wife influencers are not the same.

[00:06:23]And last one, drad wives and stay-at-home moms are not the same thing. To be very, very clear, this video is not an attack or criticism of stay-at-home moms. I think domestic labor is vital. It is undervalued and it should be paid. And I have a huge respect for women who decide that they want to work in the home because they do. They work in the home. Being a stay-at-home mom is a 24/7 job. Like I've said many times, I'm more interested in examining social structures, systems of power rather than critiquing individuals. So even with my case study of Ballerina Farm in a little bit that will be looking at the brand, the public image and its perception, all the discourse around it, not a critique of the woman, Hannah Newman herself. The difference between a triedwife and a triedwife influencer. Triwives are essentially conservative women who believe in traditional gender roles.

[00:07:16]They believe that women should stay in the home and perform all the domestic labor while the men should be the head of the household and they should be providers. Pridewife influencers perform their domestic labor for an audience.

[00:07:30]Pridewife influencers are paradoxes because they believe in traditional gender roles that women shouldn't work outside the home and yet they are working as content creators and generating money from brands, ads, and maybe even merch if they're successful.

[00:07:46]The Triwife influencer is often an attractive thin white woman who adheres to conventional expressions of femininity. A lot of triives are white and American, though not all. But because all of the fiction focuses on white Americans and is set in America, I will be focusing on American tribe wives. Their ideology is informed by religion, mostly Mormonism, evangelical Christians, and Christian fundamentalism. And triedwife ideology is built on false nostalgia. It is built on an image of a past that never existed. Simone devoir in the second sex wrote, "Modderern marriage can be understood only in the light of the past it perpetuates." And trwives really embody this literally because they hearken back to either 1950s America or kind of pioneer frontier America. Carol Clare Burke's book Yesterday labels its protagonist the manic pixie American dream girl. And like I said, it is a dream. It is a fantasy. It is not real. Women were not always the angel in the house baking bread and kissing their husband on the cheek as he goes off to hunt or plow or mine crypto.

[00:09:00]>> I'm like, men used to hunt. Men used to hunt. Sylvia Federici's book, Caliban and the Witch, charts how domestic labor became devalued and gendered as feminine. I know we're going back a while, but it it all comes together, okay? So, stay with me. She talks about how European women worked in the Middle Ages. Women worked in the fields in addition to raising children, cooking, washing, spinning, and keeping a herb garden. Their domestic activities were not devalued and did not involve different social relations from those of men as they would later in a money economy. When housework would cease to be viewed as real work. Women were in guilds. They used birth control. They were midwives and they had control over their pregnancy. Federichi argues that in the shift from feudalism to industrialization. The state panicked at the population decline because they needed workers for the factories. How do you ensure that the population will go back up and you will have workers for your factories? Well, you force women to birth them. Midwives were pushed out for male surgeons. Infanticide and birth control were criminalized. The witch trials saw the murder of single women, poor women, widows, midwives, and women who were suspected of terminating their pregnancy or had a miscarriage. The state and church denied women control over their own bodies, and they stoked fears around the unmarried, uncontrollable woman. Sound familiar?

[00:10:30]>> Run in this country via the Democrats, via v via our corporate oligarchs by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made. And so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too. You look at Kla Harris, Pete Budajage, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children.

[00:10:49]>> I told you it'd be coming back around.

[00:10:51]This all set the stage for the modern nuclear family in which domestic labor is women's work. Gender roles are said to be the natural product of biological differences. But even the image of 1950s America was a fantasy and a construction. It was a response to the Cold War that created a sense of stability and nationalism.

[00:11:13]>> This is how American families are living in their new homes.

[00:11:17]>> Triwives may stir discomfort because they embody very conservative values and they champion a cultural regression.

[00:11:25]They reject change and they say that we need to go back to the good old days.

[00:11:29]The good old days. And there's an ideological binary between the girl boss feminist and the trod wife. The trod wife doesn't want to shatter glass ceilings. She wants to shelter a nest under a farmhouse roof. I want to take inspiration from Naomi Klene and position the tradife as a sort of doppelganger to the feminist because watching a trwife does sometimes feel like looking in a warped funhouse mirror. Klein's 2023 book doppelganger examines how the same circumstances can act as a catalyst for radicalization in polar opposite ways. Klein tracks how Naomi Wolf, the author of the beauty myth, used to be a feminist but got radicalized to the alt-right. Klein questions how we could experience the same fear and outrage over world events like CO and rationalize and react in very different ways. Did CO make you distrust the government and become an antivaxer? Or did you wear masks and get vaccinated for community safety? Klein is fascinated by Wolf and other alt-right figures like Alex Jones. And I think that same fascination in the other side is stirred by the tradife influencer. Klein writes, "This book is an attempt to use my own doppelganger experience, the havoc wreaked, and the lessons learned about me, her, and us as a guide into and through what I've come to understand as our doppelganger culture. a culture crowded with various forms of doubling in which all of us who maintain a persona or avatar online create our own doppelgangers, virtual versions of ourselves that represent us to others. All of politics increasingly feels like a mirror world with society split in two and each side defining itself against the other. Whatever one says and believes, the other seems obliged to say and believe the exact opposite. I think a lot of us can view the trout as that kind of other doppelganger to ourselves. The uncanny feeling stirs up discomfort and mistrust. And the double is a figure that is employed by horror time and time again. The doppelganger, the double, it also feels quite gothic to me. And so much of the Gothic genre is about the suffocation of and confinement to the home. So, it makes sense then that this kind of undercurrent of Gothic horror that goes back hundreds of years would resurface at a time when women are being told or telling other women to return to the domestic sphere. Like Klein Highlights, we are in a world of virtual doubling where we construct an image of ourselves online and we are aware that everyone else online is also a constructed image. And the foundation for all of the wife fiction I read is the awareness of that performance.

[00:14:10]There's discomfort in the fact that we don't know and will likely never know how the trwife influencer truly feels.

[00:14:17]We never know what's real. And that is terrifying when we see women preach complete submission and promote a return to traditional values. When women romanticize an era where marital rape was legal, you couldn't have a bank account or a credit card. You had no control over your own body. Black people had no rights. Others aestheticize pioneer America again conveniently breezing over the millions of people who had their land stolen and were slaughtered. I think that dark underbelly, what is unsaid or ignored, provides great space for horror, but more on that in a little. Treadwives blame feminism for women's unhappiness.

[00:15:03]>> Susan Futy, author of the 1991 book backlash, the undeclared war against women, outlines these beliefs as they popped up in the 80s. Quote, "Women are unhappy precisely because they are free.

[00:15:15]Women are enslaved by their own liberation. The women's movement, as we are told time and time again, has proven women's own worst enemy. Even though Futy wrote that 35 years ago, we hear those exact same points coming out of the mouths of modern trwives. Triwives rebel against corporate feminism. And some cite their workplace experience as the catalyst for wanting to return to traditional gender roles. They feel like they've been lied to. the girl boss fantasy of empowerment was a lie. I understand this and I agree with a lot of their points. Women have been told that they can have it all if they just lean in. But with wage gaps, lack of child care, healthcare, parental leave, with women continuing to perform the majority of domestic labor, we know that the girl boss was a lie. But where feminists believe that this should be motivation to change the system, trades abandon it in favor of the home. And this ideological conflict is not new. We saw this pretty much exact same thing playing out in the 80s between the new working woman and the housewife. 80s Hollywood really pushed the nuclear family. Films portrayed working women as miserable, unfulfilled, or murderous. Fluty writes, "In typical themes, women were set against women.

[00:16:34]Women's anger at their social circumstances was depoliticized and displayed as personal depression instead, and women's lives were framed as morality tales in which the good mother wins and the independent woman gets punished." Fatal Attraction is probably the most famous of these like 80s horror/thrillers about these very themes. It's the film that coined the term bunny boiler. And if you don't know what that is, all I'll tell you is it is very, very literal.

[00:17:03]Michael Douglas plays a married father who cheats on his beautiful angel in the housewife with the working woman, Alex, played by Glen Close. Alex goes insane when he tries to end things. Um, spoiler alert, Alex attempts to go on a murderous rampage, but is shot dead, and the film ends with the nuclear family safe, contained, and happily ever after.

[00:17:25]In that wave of media, the working woman was a threat to the stability of the nuclear family and by extension the stability of society as a whole. So she needed to be eliminated or she needed to be enlightened and go back to being a mom and a wife. What I find most interesting about this new wave of backlash is how the fiction that I've read sets up the tradife, the domestic angel as the violent threat, not the working woman. The fiction represents tdwives as desperate, at their breaking point, sometimes dangerous and murderous. The women aren't afraid to sacrifice other women for their own safety or profit. And this is exactly what Andrea Dwarkin writes in right-wing women. For women, the world is a very dangerous place. One wrong move, even an unintentional smile, can bring disaster, assault, shame, disgrace. The right acknowledges the reality of danger, the validity of fear. The right then manipulates the fear. The promise is that if a woman is obedient, harm will not befall her. The danger is that the self-sacrificing women are perfect foot soldiers who obey orders no matter how criminal those orders are. Spoilers for Tradife by Saratoga Schaefer and The Tradife by Carrie Hughes. Guys, these book titles, they do get a little confusing. I will tell you that in Schaefer's book, the main character Camille becomes pregnant and gives birth to a demon baby. I'll explain that further in a little bit. It you don't need need to know why. The baby only feeds on human flesh. And initially, Camille sacrifices parts of herself to feed her baby, but when that is not enough, she murders her neighbor Renee and feeds her to that baby. In The Treadwife by Carrie Hughes, a popular Triwife influencer, Faith, lures a content creator and single mom, Melissa, to the ranch to work for her. Melissa is disillusioned with the corporate world and even though she is ideologically opposed to the trwife lifestyle, she is still lured by its aesthetics. Over the course of the novel, we find out that Melissa was lured there by Faith to become a sisterwife for Faith's husband.

[00:19:46]The book is mainly written in Melissa's perspective, but we do get these like italicized introjections from Fate's internal monologue. She's here, reeled in with the promise of a better life.

[00:19:57]This will be fun. She thinks she's in control. But women have no control on a ranch like this. The man's in charge.

[00:20:03]It's God's will. [ __ ] has no idea what she signed up for. This notion of distrust, betrayal, the call is coming from inside the house. Shows how domestic horror has changed in the past few years. Handmaid's Tale, Stepford Wives, and Don't Worry Darling are all domestic horrors about these kind of traditional women, but they all center around women who are forced to submit either through totalitarian regimes or through technology. Almost all of those female characters perform domestic labor against their will and some are complicit, but the stories all focus on characters that are realizing or rebelling against patriarchal domination. The new wave of this wife horror focuses on the women who are complicit. What if these women willingly submit? What if they choose this life?

[00:20:56]And from this point, we get two different narratives. One is how far will these women go in their complicity?

[00:21:03]How much damage will they perpetuate either for profit or to preserve their own safety? Or it asks what if the submissive woman made the wrong choice if it's not the outside world she needs protection from but her own husband. In simpler terms, it splits into a victim and villain dichotomy. And I think that really mirrors how we view realwife influencers. I want to take Ballerina Farm as a case study. I would argue that all of the trod wives in the four books I've read are directly inspired by Ballerina Farm. They have a lot of similarities. They all have rich husbands. They live on big ranches or farms. They're very religious. They have lots of kids or want to have lots of kids. And the iconography, descriptions of them kneading sourdough in a rustic kitchen or or milking a cow in a milkmaid dress is pretty much directly ripped from Ballerina Farm's feed.

[00:21:58]There's so much debate and discussion around Ballerina Farm. It brings up issues of control, Mormonism, whiteness, motherhood, performance, and the mistrust of that performance. And all of these issues brought up around Ballerina Farm pop up in the tried fiction. I think an in-depth analysis of Hannah Neilman and her brand really helps us understand the like pushpull of TRWife influencers, their political implications and their place in fiction.

[00:22:27]My name is Hannah Neielman. I am Mrs. American 2023.

[00:22:32]I am a mother of seven children almost eight. I was once a professional ballerina. Now I'm doing what I love most, being a mother, wife, a businesswoman, a farmer, a lover of Jesus, and making me mills from scratch.

[00:22:46]Hannah Neilman, who goes by Ballerina Farm online, is the quintessential triwife influencer. She may reject the label, but she checks all of the boxes.

[00:22:55]She's Mormon. She lives on a 328 ranch in Utah. She is married to a son of a billionaire husband. She has nine kids and posts herself cooking for her family with food from their own backyard. It's very easy to get sucked into these videos of like pastoral bliss. Millions have Hannah Neilman has 10 and a half million followers on Tik Tok and Instagram each. There's a lot of fascination, controversy, conspiracy around Hannah Neilman. And I think it's all from this huge appetite to understand the woman behind the brand.

[00:23:32]There are so many deep dives, think pieces, and subreddits dedicated to Hannah Neilman, and I understand the interest. She left what seemed to be her dream life of being a ballerina studying ballet at Giuliard in New York City to become a trad. I first heard of her after Megan Agnu's profile of her for the Times went viral in July of 2024.

[00:23:54]Agnu paints a portrait of a very imbalanced marriage between a controlling, doineering husband and a tired, submissive woman who was forced to give up on her dreams. Hannah and her husband Daniel met in college. He was 23. She was nearly 2 years younger.

[00:24:13]Daniel is the son of the billionaire JetBlue founder David Neilman. and he pulled some strings one day to get a seat next to Hannah on a flight before they started dating. One day she mentioned to Daniel that she was getting the 5-hour flight from Salt Lake City to New York back to Giuliard. She didn't realize his dad owned the airline. So Daniel was like, "I'm on that same flight." She says, "I remember checking in and them saying, you're 5A and you're 5B. I just thought, no way, that's crazy." Daniel smiles. I made a call. He had pulled strings at JetBlue and so began their first date. Kind of creepy.

[00:24:48]Not what I would call romantic, but each to their own. Back then, I thought we should date for a year before marriage, she continues. So, I could finish school and whatever, and Daniel was like, it's not going to work. We've got to get married now. After a month, they were engaged. 2 months after that, they were married, moving into an apartment Daniel rented on the Upper West Side. And 3 months after that, she was pregnant, the first Giuliard undergraduate to be expecting in modern history. Daniel wanted to live in the Great Western Wilds, so they did. He wanted to farm, so they do. He likes date nights once a week, so they go.

[00:25:20]They have a babysitter on those evenings. He didn't want nannies in the house, so there aren't any. Agnu was hoping to catch Hannah alone for some of the interview, but that never happened.

[00:25:31]I can't, it seems, get an answer out of Neilman without her being corrected, interrupted, or answered for by either her husband or a child. For an example of that, I feel like we're doing what God wants, Neilman says. We're on his errand a little bit, Daniel adds. We're on his errand a little bit, she repeats.

[00:25:46]This is not the bucolic dream of marital bliss that Hannah Neilman paints online.

[00:25:51]She seems to do it all effortless and content, but Agnu shows a woman who raises then eight, now nine kids with no child care, who sometimes gets so ill from exhaustion that she can't get out of bed for a week. Nilman responded to the article and denied what Agnu said.

[00:26:10]when we saw the printed article which shocked us and shocked the world by being an attack on our family and my marriage portraying me as oppressed with my husband being the culprit.

[00:26:24]This couldn't be further from the truth.

[00:26:26]For Daniel and I, our priority in life is God and family. Everything else comes second. The greatest day of my life was when Daniel and I were married 13 years ago. Some take this as further evidence of her brainwashing or her submission.

[00:26:42]And this is where we get to like the choice aspect of it all. Hannah Neilman tells us that she is happy. She loves her husband. She loves God. She loves her life. And I think to discredit what she says to say that she must not mean it. It must be brainwashing. It must be Daniel putting words in her mouth does take away some of her own agency. But I also recognize there's a very strong temptation to not take her at her word because again like I said before we will never know what is real. We don't know how Hannah Neilman really feels. The family claim that they are apolitical.

[00:27:16]Is she a feminist? I feel like I'm a femin. She stops herself. There's so many different ways you could take that word. I don't even know what feminism means anymore. She quote absolutely feels as though she's become politicized by other people. We try so hard to be neutral and be ourselves and people will put a label on everything. This is just our normal life. However, in November 2024, Hannah Neilman appeared on the cover of the third print issue of Eevee magazine, Ballerina Farm, and the New American Dream. Eevee magazine was labeled by Rolling Stone as the Cosmo for the far right. It is a very conservative right-wing magazine that kind of masquerades as being a champion for women. I'll give you a sample of some of the headlines. The consequences of progressive parenting. It's time to bring back the haze code. If you don't know, the haze code was a moral code in Hollywood that prevented the depiction of immoral behavior. My birth control gave me a blood clot. Yes, it can really happen. The trans trend is collapsing.

[00:28:20]Why Gen Z are walking away from gender ideology in record numbers. What to wear to church. The etiquette guide every girl needs. My vibrator almost destroyed my marriage. In defense of white men, America's fake maternal mortality rate crisis is being used to push abortion.

[00:28:36]And finally, how Charlie Kirk influenced a generation to return to God and goodness. Yeah, save the best for last.

[00:28:43]The podcast Diabolical Lies, which is co-hosted by the author of Yestery Year, Tyler Clarber, has a fantastic episode on Eevee magazine, and they focus on Eevee's coverage of birth control. Eevee really fear-mongers about hormonal birth control. And there are definitely valid issues with hormonal birth control. Do not get it twisted. But Eevee are completely against it. They never have any kind of articles exploring the positives of birth control. you know, specifically that you can control whether or not you get pregnant. They often publish misinformation. They publish a lot of stories of abortion regret and very anti-choice rhetoric in general. Eevee promotes natural cycle tracking as the only healthy slash moral birth control, which is very in line again with right-wing rhetoric.

[00:29:32]There are non hormonal birth control options, as we all know, but they don't they don't talk about them. In one EV article about birth control, they say, "Here's one topic our readers have especially loved that's very near and dear to our hearts. Empowering women to understand their bodies and to help them make informed choices regarding their reproductive health. We've raised awareness around the negative impact of hormonal birth control on our bodies and helped women find healthier and more natural alternatives at a time when the subject is considered offlimits by all of mainstream women's media. This whole positioning of like yourself as a pariah as like I am the only one who is speaking truth is very alt-right farright right-wing. But back to that natural healthier birth control. The founders of Eevee just so happen to have an app that does just that. 28 their natural cycle tracking app. 28 is also funded by evil evil billionaire co-founder of PayPal and Palunteer Peter Theal. Back to the original point, the fact that Ballerina Farm was on the cover of this very right-wing magazine shows that they are not apolitical.

[00:30:47]She's not wrongly being politicized.

[00:30:49]>> All right, guys. We got to talk about Ballerina Farm. Look how cute they are.

[00:30:52]Look at this photo of them. They're adorable. Like, you can't hate these people. It's just not possible unless you're a leftist. In fact, the values perpetuated by Eevee magazine mirror Neilman's own as highlighted by Agnu. I want to ask her about birth control, but we are surrounded by so many of her children and Daniel is back in the room now too. Do you? I pause and look at her fixly. Plan pregnancies. No, Daniel says. Daniel says when he says no, Neilman responds gently. It's very much a matter of prayer for me. I'm like, God, is it time to bring another one to Earth? and I've never been told no, but for whatever reason, it's exactly 9 months after a baby that she's ready for the next one. He says, "It's definitely a matter of prayer." She says, "It's a matter of prayer, but somehow it's exactly 9 months." In response to Agnu asking about abortion, Daniel says, "We see the joy of having kids and the sanctity of life." Neilman says, "So, yeah, Neilman may claim that she is not political, but all of her actions point otherwise." She also glamorizes the American pioneers. In one Instagram caption, she said, "Like the champion farm wives of yestery year, I strive to be a good homemaker. Ballerina Farm is a brand and Neilman is a performer. She trained as a ballerina who are artists and athletes that perform extremely painful and strenuous physical feats while showing no sign of strain."

[00:32:18]Neilman was also a pageant queen. So, she has literally won competitions for performing femininity for being the most likable. When have you felt the most empowered?

[00:32:34]I have felt this feeling seven times now as I bring these sacred souls to the earth after I hold that newborn baby in my arms. The feeling of motherhood and bringing them to the earth is the most empowering feeling I have ever felt.

[00:32:54]>> She's a master of brand image, so no wonder she's appealed to millions of people. Her job was and still is to do exhausting labor all with a smile. Make it look effortless. If Hannah Neilman or any triedwife isn't choosing this life, then the fantasy shatters. We can't relax watching a real of a beautiful woman needing sourdough. If we know that she would rather be a ballerina in New York City, so it serves the brand image that this was her choice. The narrative of free choice makes the brand possible and it also makes it possible to sell you things such as $70 protein powder that comes with a lead warning, $46 bone broth hot cocoa, an $85 enamel bowl, a $259 cutting board, an $18 sourdough starter.

[00:33:44]The Neilman's talk about promoting a connection to the land of knowing exactly where your food comes from, which is also very like maha coded. I do think the pandemic was really good in that way that it it pushed people to maybe become more informed on where their food was coming from.

[00:34:03]>> But if they're all about this farm-totable connection, why then does their ground beef say that it comes from Ballerina Farm and other select partner farms?

[00:34:13]If we just know that it's from a select partner farm, we don't actually know where that food is coming from. Also, their food is not certified organic.

[00:34:21]There was a crack in the perfection of Ballerina Farm, the brand, when they underwent a raw milk scandal.

[00:34:30]There we go. Here we go.

[00:34:36]Oh, it's so good. It's literally the best thing ever.

[00:34:39]>> First of all, yeah, crazy that they sell raw milk. Raw milk is notoriously dangerous, unsafe, and you should not drink milk straight from the udder. It needs to be boiled, pasteurized in some capacity. Raw milk, also right-wing white supremacy dog whistle. Um, don't even have time to unpack that here, but Ballerina Farm had to recall their raw milk after it showed that it had unsafe levels of E.coli.

[00:35:05]>> Was unsafe raw milk ever sold at any Ballerina Farm store?

[00:35:10]>> That's a great question. And no, >> no, absolutely not.

[00:35:13]>> Absolutely not. My final point on Ballerina Farm is to run through the kind of controversy conspiracies that surround her. In a Business Insider article, we learned that Ballerina Farm has 100 employees across the farm, warehouse, office, and marketing teams.

[00:35:29]They said in the Times profile that they have no full-time nanny, but they have a babysitter. But we also know that they have a teacher that teaches at least five of the children. I feel like there must be more childcare behind the scenes. Even just her shooting for six hours a day will be very hard trying to take care of nine kids. But Hannah Neilman has also been scrutinized for issues around child safety after sharing videos and photos of children in the gym with a gun driving with a baby in the front seat unsecured. And a video went viral of Neilman kicking a goose which prompted kind of wider questions about the animal safety on the farm. And now whenever you go on to one of her videos, so many of the comments will talk about like, "This is a performance. This is a set. What a lovely video on your set.

[00:36:21]People don't believe that this house is her house and whether or not her house is a set, whether or not none of it's real." The fact that people aren't falling for the performance, I think says a lot. One of the books I read, Everyone is Lying to You by Joe Piaza, revealed the Wives House to be a set.

[00:36:38]They had like uh a mirror image of their house constructed and one half was where they lived and one half is where they shot. I think all of this debate and controversy around Neilman show the growing suspicion and awareness of her performance for profit. I think people are getting tired of it especially because there's like broader awareness around influencers and fatigue of constantly being sold stuff online.

[00:37:03]Harra Clare Burke writes for the Guardian. The tradife, like the 1950s housewife, is not a real person. She's not a trend or a cultural obsession. She is an advertisement, a curated performance of womanhood with a Lincoln bio for purchases who has shown up like a 1950s advertisement to remind women of their true purpose, serve, smile, procreate, and purchase. At the end of the day, whether you believe that Hannah Nielman is an oppressed housewife or a foot soldier of the patriarchy and white supremacy, I've said it before, I'll say it again. We never know what's real, and we likely will never know what's real. I think the ambiguity around Hannah Neilman and wife influencers like her is equal parts fascinating and uncomfortable. fiction that explores this ambiguity that imagines what happens behind closed doors or when the camera stops rolling feels like a natural response to this discomfort.

[00:37:59]It's hard to look at a woman surrounded by six, eight or 10 children and not think about the physical, emotional and mental toll, the sheer exhaustion for the mother of raising that many children and also the toll on the children, the older children that will become parentified. I'm Irish and I'm sure you've heard of the stereotype of the Irish Catholic family before. Both my parents come from families of eight siblings. But in Ireland, that came from lack of access to birth control and the belief that birth control was wrong, that it was against God's will. Birth control was illegal in Ireland until 1980, and it was still heavily regulated and restricted then. Abortion was only legalized in Ireland 8 years ago when we voted to legalize it. I'm very sorry to have to censor the word abortion. It is not my choice. Believe me, the US has actively rolled back access to birth control and abortion in recent years.

[00:38:50]Even worse and more terrifying, American women have been warned to delete their period tracking apps for fear that that data would be used against them in court to prosecute them for terminating or seeking to terminate a pregnancy. This is a dystopian level of surveillance and punishment. It's like living in a horror film. And it's not a coincidence that one of the most dominant themes across the trwife fiction and the horror genre is bodily autonomy, specifically around sex and reproduction. Sarah Toga Schaefer's book Trife has been described as Rosemary's baby for the digital age.

[00:39:27]The book opens with Camille setting up her phone to record herself taking a pregnancy test. Don't dare look at the pregnancy test. Not yet. First, I must set up the tripod, adjusting its legs.

[00:39:38]so that it's the correct height.

[00:39:40]Snapping my phone into the clutch, positioning it perfectly. I want my reaction to be genuine if it's good news. I remind myself to think positive thoughts. Worries create wrinkles. Smile instead. Camille is desperate for a child, but her desire to have a child is not out of a maternal longing. She wants to have a child because she wants to rekindle her relationship with her husband, but more importantly truly launch her tried influencer career. And even in the first chapter, we see how her desperation masks a rage. I need a baby. I promised our family. I promised my husband. I promised my followers.

[00:40:14]Looking at my reening face in the gold trimmed bathroom mirror, I picture slamming a fist into the glass, watching shards drive into my knuckles and wrist, scowlling as blood runs down my arm, staining my beautiful top linen dress.

[00:40:26]Instead, I shake my head, golden lock swaying, dab at my eyes, and smile.

[00:40:31]Camille has been enamored with the Proud Wife lifestyle ever since she saw it online. I saw their lifestyle and I wanted it. With Graeme's blessing, I started posting. Graham is her husband's name. She makes a wish at a well behind their like farmhouse and begins to have religious visions of a winged eye biblically accurate angel on the ceiling above her bed. Soon after, a winged creature with gray scaly skin appears.

[00:40:56]Camille believes that this is an angel from God who's been sent to get her pregnant. and sleeping with this angel.

[00:41:03]She experiences sexual pleasure for the first time. For the first time, sex is about her pleasure and not just about the man's. Her husband, Graham, doesn't believe in birth control, and he believes that sex is supposed to hurt for the woman. I knew that wasn't true, but I pretended otherwise. My perceived innocence pleased him, and I enjoyed that. Camille then gets pregnant and has a breaking dawn Bella Swanonesesque pregnancy and birth complete with the craving for human flesh and meat. And Camille experiences all of this pretty much in isolation. They live in a rural farmhouse. Graham takes their only car to work. She never consults a doctor and she gives birth at home. Graham comes home late smelling like perfume and he doesn't notice that their baby is a demon baby or that Camille herself is also undergoing a transformation. He doesn't notice her hair falling out, her scalp developing gray scales. He doesn't notice her skin turning green much like her baby, but her commenters do. A random account, one that doesn't follow me, has commented on a photo of Sweetheart in her crib fast asleep. Ew, her skin looks green. Shrek ass baby.

[00:42:14]Lol. Everything in Camille's life is for other people. For her father, her husband, her followers, and now her baby. But it's through failing at her online performance that Camille realizes and satisfies her own desires. The book distinguishes itself from Rosemary's Baby in that Rosemary's Baby is a tale of essay and manipulation, but Camille is aware of what she's doing and she is an active participant in all of it. She rebelss over the course of the novel and learns to say no to her husband for the first time. By the end, the book shows that the online triedwife performance is insincere and unstable and the lifestyle a cage. I stare at sweetheart. Will I raise her to be like me, following the whims of every man in her life? Will I teach her to be a wife, a mother, a homemaker? Or will I let her explore what she wants to explore? She could be someone I never got the chance to become. She could learn to live however the hell she wants instead of following a set of rules that keep her in a box.

[00:43:15]Maybe I don't want to raise a traditional wife. Maybe I want to raise a feral woman. As well as bodily autonomy, financial control is a theme that is present across all of the novels. They examine how the trw wives are disempowered in a years'sl long process. Almost all of the trwife characters go to college but either forgo graduating or pursuing a career in favor of becoming a trod wife. From the start they are at a disadvantage because they either have no education or no career. They have no job skills or experience. And this is not saying that trod wives or stay at home moms do not have skills.

[00:43:54]I don't know why I'm doing Donald Trump hands. Domestic labor, as I said, is labor should be paid. I'm talking about in the capitalist machine of it all.

[00:44:00]Okay. Andrea Dwarkin writes in right-wing women, "Good behavior is the intellectual goal of a girl. A girl with intellectual drive as a girl who has to be cut down to size. An intelligent girl is supposed to use that intelligence to find a smarter husband."

[00:44:14]>> Let me also speak to some of the young ladies here in high school where your top if you who's here where your top priority, your top priority is get married and have kids. Raise your hand.

[00:44:23]Okay.

[00:44:24]Interestingly, I think there is an argument to bring back the MRS degree.

[00:44:29]>> The characters rely on either allowances or they have joint accounts with their husbands. They have no independent income. Any property is in the husband's name. And in some of the novels, the tradives secretly funnel away cash from their influencing in order to escape.

[00:44:45]This is based in very real abusive dynamics where financial control is fundamental. A lot of the time the answer to why didn't she leave her abusive husband is because she couldn't afford to. And with Triwife influencers, we know that they are generating income, but we don't know how much access they have to that income. And again, going back to Ballerina Farm, there's a lot of conspiracy around her where people say that they have found out that the Ballerina Farm LLC is just registered to Daniel's name, not hers. I tried looking for the tax information, but I couldn't find this to verify. But I think again even the fact that there's this kind of conspiracy behind it shows the doubt and like instability of her performance.

[00:45:26]Another aspect of autonomy explored across the tried fiction is in regards to the children. Can children consent to having their whole lives filmed and broadcasted? What happens to the children when the camera stops recording? There have been a couple really key scandals that taint family vloggers and have really like shattered the image of the good Christian family.

[00:45:49]The first is the Duggar family. This is a very infamous case. The Duggars had a show on TLC called 19 Kids and Counting which followed Michelle and Jim Bob Duggar and their 19 Kids. They seemed like a big happy traditional family and the TV show served as propaganda for their Christian fundamentalist church.

[00:46:11]Um, they used the show to present their values to the country, to the world. The women and girls cooked and cleaned. The kids were all homeschooled. They lived on a farm with no TV or radio. And they had so many kids because it was God's will. Be fruitful and multiply.

[00:46:28]>> How many children should you have?

[00:46:31]The answer is how many blessings of God?

[00:46:35]>> Overpopulation is is really a myth.

[00:46:39]>> The whole world population could fit into the city limits of Jacksonville, Florida.

[00:46:43]>> The show was cancelled in 2015 when it came to light that Josh Duggar, the eldest son, had said several young girls, including his sisters, when he was a teenager. In the years since the show was broadcast, some of the children and members of the church have come out and talked about how damaging the ideology was and how insidious everything was behind the scenes. The rise and fall of the Duggar family is documented in the series Shiny Happy Families, if you're interested. The natural evolution of the reality TV family is influencer families. And again, we see this pattern play out in terms of family vloggers and influencers. Mormon influencers are huge. A tenet of Mormonism is documenting and displaying your life by like leading by example. And what better way to do that than vlog every day and aestheticize your life for the internet.

[00:47:34]You no longer have to knock on doors to preach people. You can reach them in the comfort of their own home through their phone. Carol Clare Burke writes, "The ideal Mormon woman shows her connection to God in four critical ways. The first three are objectives. She must maintain appearances, be obedient to her husband, and dedicate her life to the well-being of her family. The fourth form of worship is not an objective, but the means by which she accomplishes everything else. She must make it all look easy. It's not enough for a good Mormon woman to just do her job. She also has to make the job look effortless at every moment along the way. For most Mormon women, it's the performance of a lifetime. And sometimes those performances mask horrifying truths.

[00:48:14]There was a huge controversy around Ruby Frankie who was a Mormon mom influencer and family vlogger. She ran the YouTube channel Eight Passengers which had two and a half million subscribers at its peak. Frankie documented how perfect her family life was or how perfect it seemed >> worth. HEY, I'M STILL RECORDING. YOU KNOW THAT this is what we do and everyone gets $10 for a video that they help with. We changed all the light bulbs from our yellow shade to like a bright white. It felt more like a set than a house.

[00:48:51]>> Chad, are you going to be willing to help me out or not?

[00:48:54]>> You be a little more talkative here.

[00:48:55]>> I am. I'm talking answering your questions.

[00:48:58]>> Just be yourself.

[00:49:00]>> That is myself.

[00:49:02]>> Well, then change it. In 2020, it came crashing down when they revealed of their own valition that the eldest son had been sleeping on a bean bag in the basement for 8 months after his bedroom privileges were revoked. In 2023, Frankie was arrested alongside her business partner Jod Hildebrandt for child abuse. They committed truly heinous child abuse against the youngest children in the name of religious salvation. Public trust in images of these happy Christian families has eroded because of scandals like the Duggars and the Frankies. Stories that make us question how happy these families truly are. And how does this relate to horror? The contrast between what the women broadcast and their like true nature is horrifying and it is a staple of the horror genre. Barbara Creed writes in Monstous Feminine, "She may appear pure and beautiful on the outside, but evil may nevertheless reside within. It is this stereotype of feminine evil, beautiful on the outside, corrupt within, that is so popular within patriarchal discourse about women's evil nature." Particularly for Frankie, the revelations around her child abuse contradict our assumptions or traditional beliefs around women, namely that they are inherently maternal, that they are nurturing and passive. We don't expect a woman to be violent. So, it's all the more shocking when she is. The the Hulu documentary about Ruby Frankie is called Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Frankie.

[00:50:31]Now, this isn't to downplay Frankie's actions at all, but how sensationalized and demonized she is is because she's a woman. I feel like I don't need to tell you, but how many rich, powerful men have been accused of domestic violence, abuse, SA, and do not have a dent to their career. They get elected president of the United States. The tension between The Beautiful Performance and The Ugly Truth is central in Fred fiction. My favorite tried wide fiction book and also one of my favorite books that I've read this year is Yesterday year by Carol Clareberg. I think this book is the most interesting and how it explores both the victimhood and the villain of its triedwife influencer protagonist. Yestery year allows us to empathize with the harm done to the protagonist Natalie and also confront the harm that she causes. Yestery Year is directly inspired by Ballerina Farm.

[00:51:25]It's very clear there's a lot of overlap between the main character and Hannah Neilman. Natalie Heler Mills is a good Christian woman, a successful tradife influencer who lives on a 500 acre farm in Idaho. Her husband Caleb is the son of a presidential hopeful. When we meet her, she's pregnant with her sixth child. And hilariously, a lot of the goods that she sells, you can probably find on the Ballerina Farm website. Natalie describes herself as a flawless Christian woman. The manic pixie American dream girl of this nation's deepest, darkest fantasies. The mother every woman wanted to be and the wife every man wanted to come home to.

[00:52:04]Like a nun in a porno, it didn't make sense. But also, by God, it worked. My name is Natalie Heler Mills, and I was perfect at being alive.

[00:52:12]>> I'm very important to God.

[00:52:13]>> Then she wakes up in 1855, and she's forced to live her tried lifestyle for real. There is no microwave or dishwasher hidden in a rustic wooden cupboard. There are no farm hands to milk the cows, nannies to take the children, and nowhere to escape to. Her kids and her husband are hers, but a little different. And again, there's that theme of the uncanny. In 1855, Natalie doesn't have any of the skills that she shows off in her videos. The bread in her videos was store-bought, and when she tries to bake it, it comes out hard as a rock. The patriarchal submission that she promoted to her audience is all too real and she hates it. She submits only as a survival technique. And here Burke engages with the themes of autonomy. Natalie feels trapped. Her escape attempts are thwarted. No one believes or listens to her. And she has no freedom. We go back and forth between Natalie growing up and becoming an influencer in the modern age to her life in 1855. Like Kenna Neilman, Natalie had a taste of the apple, but she spout it back out. But instead of going to New York City to become a ballerina, she goes to Harvard. Natalie was raised in an extremely conservative and religious household, mainly by her mom after her father left when she was 10. We get an insight into the insular community and her family's beliefs.

[00:53:32]Because when Natalie wants to go to college, her mother was surprised that quote, "I would want to venture outward into the world when the world so clearly had lost its way. Out in the coastal cities, nuclear families were an endangered species. Children ran around barefoot in the streets while their fathers philandered in thirdf flooror walkups and their mothers smoked crack on the stoops. Some women didn't know they were women anymore. Some men didn't know they were men. The birth rate was plummeting. Humanity was self- emilating. The white race was going extinct. A sheltered straighta overachiever, she imagined that Harvard would be a space for debate and curiosity among intellectuals. She didn't expect her dorm and lectures to be full of feminists that viewed her as a Jesus freak. She would get tucked into bed with her Bible while her roommate and their friends downed vodka crayons.

[00:54:20]She feels really isolated and finds comfort in the college Christian society. And then she drops out of college to be a housewife when she meets Caleb, the Christian man of her dreams.

[00:54:31]My mother turned and looked at me. A silent conversation unfolded. This is what you want then. If you marry this man, she said to me now with her blinking eyes. You will become his smiling shadow. A year ago, I wouldn't have wanted that. But the last six months have changed me. I blinked back and answer. I thought I wanted the world, mama. But I've seen the world now, and I want no part in it. Like Saratoga Schaefer's book, there is an undercurrent of violence and rage in Natalie from the beginning. In the first few pages, Natalie describes their chickens. I love our chickens. They were domesticated as dogs, as harmless as toddlers. Sometimes I went out to the coupe just to sit with them. I liked to stroke their silky necks. Let them peck softly at the feet in my cup palms. We'd be killing them soon. In the darkness, my mouth watered. I've been yearning lately for fresh bone broth. Tender affection turns to primal hunger in an instant. And Natalie's internal monologue is a constant tug-of-war between her true emotions and the emotions that she's performing to the world. She's constantly reigning in her own anger, but she imagines her audience or her detractors as angry women. She internalized their voices as this inner critic. In her mind, she reciprocates their hatred and belittles or curses out women that she comes across that she perceives as a threat that she perceives as an angry woman. Throughout the novel, Natalie compares her life to that of her college roommate, Reena. And here's that dichotomy of the girl boss feminist and the trod wife that we saw in '8s Hollywood. and Nat Lee constantly stalks Reena on Facebook and on LinkedIn and convinces herself that Reena is miserable in order to make her feel better about her own life choices in her relationship. Natalie is the dominant partner. She pushes the gender roles onto herself and her husband. Caleb Caleb didn't want to work. He was perfectly happy to stay home and play with the kids all day. He even wanted to become a kindergarten teacher at some point. But one morning when Caleb, still unemployed, rolls out a yoga mat in their driveway and starts doing yoga, when all the other men in the neighborhood are driving their luxury cars to their corporate jobs, Natalie breaks. Natalie is obsessed with how she's perceived and she cannot tolerate nonconformity. So, she asks her father-in-law for $5 million to start a ranch and in return promises him lots of grandchildren. Natalie has children because it is expected of her. She does not actually want children herself. And she even says, "If my mother hadn't lied to me about motherhood, I might never have had children." When she has children, she is very neglectful. Her eldest, Clementine, is dressed in too tight, too small dresses and has no furniture in her room. Is so exhausted from giving birth and raising children on her own that she loses a lot of time.

[00:57:18]She zones out. She forgets to cook dinner for her children. She forgets her baby in a hot car when she goes shopping. She very obviously does not like being a wife or a mom. She outsources the domestic labor as soon as she can. It's an enormous relief when Caleb finally relents and they hire nannies, but the nannies along with all the other help that they have are hidden from her followers. There's a lot around autonomy of children in this book that I found really interesting. And I won't say too much because I don't want to completely spoil the book because I still think everybody should read it. It is fantastic. But towards the beginning of the novel, the eldest daughter, Clementine, starts saying no to being filmed. She starts expressing her own agency and stops kind of performing the perfect child that Natalie wants. And though Natalie has always framed their participation in videos as a choice, she never actually expected them to rebel.

[00:58:14]Natalie's kids are homeschooled by Caleb in a very ideologically informed curriculum.

[00:58:23]Natalie calls Caleb a [ __ ] after he suggests that she use a baby carrier and strap their newborn baby to her chest when she goes jogging. He also gets radicalized down the manosphere and believes uh insane conspiracy theories, but Natalie just kind of refuses to engage with them and just ignores him and assumes that he is an idiot. Part of the homeschooling curriculum includes Caleb showing the children conspiracy theory videos and teaching them maths through the Ten Commandments. At age 11, Clementine asks a new producer, "What's the ocean?" So, it's clear that the the homeschooling is subpar, to put it mildly. Performance and surveillance is, I think, probably the primary theme of this novel. And to a certain degree, I think it's something that we can all relate to. In the age of social media, face recognition, Zoom classes, and Zoom meetings, we have all grown used to the panopticon in which we live. Burke examines this kind of social media aspect of the panopticon of this surveillance, but also the religious aspect because Natalie has this idea that God is always watching and she imagines that God is an audience member.

[00:59:37]And this is something that she has learned from her mother in order to ensure that her performance as a wife and mother is perfect. In the book, because it's from Natalie's perspective and her internal monologue, Burke makes the reader feel like an audience member.

[00:59:51]In the novel's first chapter, Natalie says, "My name is Natalie and I'm perfect at being alive. Not my life is perfect, not I'm happy or content, but I am perfect at the performance of life."

[01:00:03]And on the next page, she says, "I've never felt more connected with him than when I was tasked with carrying one of his creations." You see what I'm saying?

[01:00:11]Perfect. So, we are treated like an audience member. And there is online Natalie and offline Natalie. The woman in the videos with her flip book of smiles, that was online Natalie, and she was designed to be good at being alive.

[01:00:23]Nothing was hard for her. Not motherhood, nor marriage, nor building a business, nor serving him. Online Natalie is anti-chemicals, but offline Natalie uses debug spray and pesticides.

[01:00:34]Online Natalie loves baking with her children. Offline Natalie hands them off to the nannies as soon as she can.

[01:00:39]Though her performance thrives online, offline she doesn't always hit the mark.

[01:00:44]We see fractures in the performance and the narration. And it is clear that she is an unreliable narrator, which I thought was really interesting because Triwife influencers themselves are unreliable narrators. like we explored with Ballerina Farm. And Natalie gets so wrapped up in her online performance that she seems to lose her grip on reality. Spending so much time in the world of online Natalie, I sometimes found myself actively uncomfortable, almost revolted by the discombobulation of my offline life, the piles of dishes in the sink, the silent watchful eye of my daughter, no musical overlay to soften our interactions, terrible, like rubbing velvet the wrong way. There is some relief then in 1855 when she actually truly lives her life as a trod wife. Her performance is now reality and no one can call her a liar. Yesterday year is truly an amazing book. It is a very rich text and I'm going to leave my analysis there because I want everyone to read it. It's so good. I want to talk more generally about why we've been seeing so much trife media and why I think we'll see more and how I hope it will change or what I think it might explore. Obviously, America is in a time of great cultural and political regression. Maha overturning Row versus Wade, declaring war on a handful of countries, the good old days. With the silent majority, the realization of how many white women voted for Trump, I think empathy may be running out for the sad white housewife. Jesse Daniels wrote in Nice White Ladies, "Civility and appeals to authority have become the weapons of choice of white womanhood, allowing white women to maintain a veneer of innocence and even progressiveness while weaponizing a system designed to protect our comfort even at the cost of the lives of people of color. I think or I hope to see more stories that expose the insidiousness of the like white feminism, the white supremacy aspect of tradives. Stories like Yester Year that complicate the image of the TR wife as a victim and examine the harm that they cause and perpetuate. Though this video focused more on kind of gender aspects, the TR wife raises a lot of issues around race and class. Their lives are aspirational because they're white and wealthy. This affords them status and respect. And their decisions to have large families of six, eight, or 10 kids are framed as God's will, as a moral good of repopulating the earth with nice white children. And sometimes the whiteness of it all is in the like imagery, but some tribe influencers like Lauren Southern make it quite blatant. For example, she had a white baby challenge for poor women and women of color. Having multiple children isn't seemed as virtuous or aspirational. It's seen as the result of reckless behavior or attempts to like leech off the state with the welfare queen stereotype. And even with the domestic labor aspect of it, most women don't have the option to stay at home. It's not financially viable. Having one partner earn enough income that you can stay home is rare.

[01:03:55]And for a lot of working-class people, for people of color, domestic labor is not something that you can opt in or out of. Historically, these women have had to go home to care for their own children in like a double day or a second shift after spending the whole day caring for children of middle class or rich white families. Kabbec writes in my feminism, "What was traditionally deemed women's work in the 1950s and well before caring for children, keeping the home, preparing the meals, the household labor that grew and supported the careers of men has shifted to brown and black women's work and often was beforehand, honestly, thereby freeing up women with upward economic mobility to become the 1950s men in the postmillennial age." This comes up in yestery year. The Mills family employ immigrant workers from Home Depot. They employ several nannies and producers and all of this labor is hidden from the audience. So many aspects of the triive lifestyle are wrapped up in ideas of being insular of going back to the days when you knew your nice white neighbors in your white pickence neighborhood or you didn't have neighbors and you had hundreds of acres to farm. There's a lot of emphasis on homeschooling and I think this is less about what's best for the child and it's about controlling information. again protecting your child from outside influences. The whole lifestyle of fearmonger is about immigrants about like infiltration of the other and the fear that like good old white America is being diluted.

[01:05:25]Therefore, we need to repopulate the earth with 10 white children. I would love to see some fiction that also explores the children's perspective. We get glimpses of it in yester year of Natalie growing up in a very insular community. I think that would be interesting to explore. I also think we're going to see more domestic horror focus on the triedwife in the kind of line of Jordan Peele's Get Out. Racial horror that exposes the veneers of respectability and domesticity to the much darker, more damaging consequences that they hide. I would love to see more horror that explores that kind of dark seedy underbelly, the kind of white supremacy of it all, and that explores the Troife as a threat beyond just a threat to other white women. Yeah. So, those are my predictions slash hopes.

[01:06:14]Uh, thank you all for watching. Let me know if you've read any of these books.

[01:06:18]Let me know what you think of the Crowd Vive influencer. My voice is starting to go, but I also wanted to thank everybody for 200,000 subscribers.

[01:06:26]Crazy. Never my wildest dreams. I am so thankful for this dream job and for literally being able to research and write for a living. I think we have a beautiful like community here of um intelligent and critical thinkers and I'm very grateful for it. If you want to support me more, you can do so on Patreon. I'm going to be diving into all the sources that I read for this essay because um there were a lot. Some didn't even make it in the essay. If the Patreon is not your jam and you still want to help out, you can always like, subscribe, comment, etc., etc. My voice is really going now. Anyways, thank you all for watching and I will see you in my next video. Bye. Thank you to my patrons. Special shout out to Kelly T, Paula Boon, Icarus Moore, Eric Danielson, Cecilia Diarville, Euphoric, and my Sharpie Evans tier patrons.