October 14, 2025 • 50 mins
Taylor Swift is getting married. And on her new album, The Life of a Showgirl, she sounds over the moon about it. But online, everyone’s asking: Is Taylor Swift a “trad wife” now?
In this episode, Bridget dives into the rise of trad wife culture with author and journalist Jo Piazza, host of the podcast Under The Influence and author of the juicy new book about trad wives, Everyone Is Lying to You. They unpack what “trad wife” really means, why so many people are labeling Taylor Swift one, and what that says about how marriage, womanhood, and online identity are evolving in 2025.
If you’ve seen “trad wife” trending on TikTok or wondered what it has to do with feminism, marriage, and pop culture, this conversation is for you.
Everyone Is Lying to You is one of Bridget’s favorite books of the year: Penguin Random House
Listen to Jo Piazza’s podcast Under The Influence: Apple Podcasts
If you’re listening on Spotify, you can leave a comment there to let us know what you thought about these stories, or email us at hello@tangoti.com
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
There Are No Girls on the Internet. As a production
of iHeartRadio and unbost Creative, I'm Bridget Todd and this
is there are no Girls on the Internet. What is
it about Taylor Swift? Whenever she does something, it almost
doesn't matter what she actually did, because our reaction always
(00:26):
says more about us than it ever could about her.
Her fanbase is so massive that every little moment becomes
a mirror revealing all these cracks because Taylor Swift exists
at the crossroads of things like power, gender, class, race,
and visibility, and that means she is basically a magnet
for charged, messy, emotional, and sometimes even manipulated online discourse.
(00:52):
Case in point, after the release of her latest album,
The Life of a Showgirl, the Internet is asking, is
Taylor Swift Seek's really a trad wife? You know, the
kind of woman who uses her platform to say that
real liberation means marriage and submission. But that question isn't
really about Taylor, It's about us and help pop culture, politics,
(01:14):
and patriarchy collide online now. I am no scholar of
Taylor Swift's music. Honestly, gun to my head, I could
probably name five songs and I haven't heard her new album,
but even I could not escape this conversation online. So
I called up my friend Joe Piazza, host of the
podcast Under the Influence and the author of the new
book Everyone Is Lying to You, which dives deep into
(01:36):
the culture of tradwives, to ask what exactly is a tradwife,
why does everyone suddenly think Taylor Swift is one? And
what does all of this say about marriage today?
Speaker 2 (01:48):
Yeah, I mean, I did actually write the book on
tradwife influencers. And it's so funny because I've also weirdly
become like America's leading expert on trodwives, Like I've been
interviewed in like the international press about chradwives at this point,
and I'm like, I did not see this coming when
I've gotten economics degree in college, did not see it
coming at all. So one of the things I like
(02:09):
about your work is you kind of come at it
from this orientation of tradwives are essentially making tons of
money from lying about everything on the internet. They tell
women not to work while they themselves often are running thriving,
lucrative businesses. Why is it important for you to have
that orientation of like, Yo, these people are basically lying.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
Yeah, totally.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
I mean, and that's like the goal of everything that
I say about about the tradwives. And it's the lies
and the deception that really get to me because they're
pushing these messages and really influencing a lot of young
women saying, Hey, quit your job, It's okay to be
dependent on a man. A man should be the breadwinner
of the family.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
Go off birth.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
Control, have five kids, homestead, homeschool just like me. Look
how happy I am when really, these women are running
a multimillion dollar media business, making money off your attention span.
Usually they're the breadwinners in their families, and their husbands
are working for them. They have nannies, they have domestic staff,
(03:13):
they have like all of these things behind the scenes
that you're not seeing. And yet I talk to so
many young women these days that are like, why would
I climb the corporate ladder? Look how happy these child
wives are. I just want to quit my job and like,
live a soft life. And I'm like, they're not living
a soft life. Content creation is hard work and it
is labor, and they are making money and running a
business and pretending that they're not. I think that this
(03:36):
message is resonating with young women. Do you see it
resonating our women responding to this and saying, oh, yeah,
why would I want to work? This person has it
figured out. They've got a great life.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
All they do is hang out with their kids and
baked bread and wear prairie dresses I could have.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
That Is it working on these young women? It one
hundred percent is working, and and it's really insane, you know.
Some of like the best examples we have too are that,
you know, another part of messaging that we see in
a lot of tidwife accounts is you should go off
birth control. Birth control is dangerous. There's definitely a right
leaning pro natalist vibe going on. And I talk to
(04:11):
young women all the time who are like, oh, I
would never take birth control, and I'm like what They're like, Yeah, no,
I mean I saw this TikTok and I said, it's
going to make me infertile and give me cancer and
kill me. And I'm like, look, I didn't love the
pill in my twenties and thirties, and yet I loved
not getting pregnant.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
By every douchebag that I dated.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
So like, there are good and bad parts of it,
but that messaging is really resonating as is women are saying,
maybe I don't need to go to college, or if
I go to college, I'm just going to get my mrs.
So I'm just going to go to find a husband.
This level of influence is working on the generation that
is just coming out of their teens and in their
twenties right now, and also in women my age, I mean,
(04:51):
I'm forty five, who are burnt out from leaning in,
like it was exhausting trying to like be a girl
boss and have it all and do all the things
because society is not set up to support us. And
so we look at these images and think, wow, that
does seem easy, that does seem nice, But again, it's
all a fantasy. They're causlaying a kind of traditional America
(05:12):
that never really existed, or if it existed, it only
existed for like a very small sliver.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
Of rich white people. It's true, these women are ultimately
selling a fantasy that does not really exist and never did,
because this idyllic life of comfort and bliss never really
existed for most of us. But that doesn't keep tradwise
from selling this lie, using a kernel of truth to
sell it. For instance, birth control. It's true birth control
(05:40):
can have side effects for some of us, so they
take that kernel of truth to the extreme that it's
better to use no birth control whatsoever and have kids
before you're really ready, or another one that doing wage
earning work outside the house is often hard and stressful,
and most of us that do are burnt the fuck
(06:01):
out and exhausted and putting up with a whole handful
of stuff that we'd rather at. Yes, if you can't
tell that is true. So the extreme alternative that trad
wives would offer is that getting married, bowing out of
the workforce, economic and civic life is the answer, even
though that is not even what these trad wife influencers
(06:21):
themselves are doing. They're really exploiting this like kernel of
truth and blowing it up and saying, so it will
be better if you just got married, had a bunch
of kids, and relied on that person for all of
your economic decision making exactly exactly I mean, And there's
a kernel of truth in all of it. And that's
those are the themes that work so well.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
Again because like we are burnt out into watching these
like videos of sourdough or them running through a field
and gardening all day. Like one of my girlfriends, who's
a lawyer, said to me the other day, She's like,
I think I think I would really like just baking
bread all day.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
And I asked him, like, have you ever baked bread?
And she's like no.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
I'm like, do you like cleaning your kitchen after making
anything with flour? Because we never see that in the videos. No,
never see how messy a kitchen gets after baking bread,
and there is flour everywhere.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
There's gonna be.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
Flour, like in your hair, in your scalp, in your
kid's scalps, between your toes for weeks weeks, but we
never see that.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
She's like, no, I don't know what I'm like that.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
I don't think you would like baking bread. I think
you like the idea of this just ease, and I
think that's what we're craving. We're craving ease, and that's
what they deliver in these videos.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
Yeah. I think what they're really saying is like I
could use a fucking break, Like that's really I think
like at the heart of it, we're exhausted, we're burned out,
we're stressed, we're tired. Maybe you don't want to dedicate
your life to baking bread. Maybe you need a break,
and maybe you need institutional support systems to make all
of this a little less impossible.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
Exactly exactly. Maybe we just maybe we could use you know,
paid and subsidized childcare. Maybe we could use more time off, exactly, like,
we live in a society that is not cutting us
a break, that is not trying to make life easy
at all for women. In fact, it's making it harder
and harder on a daily basis.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
And that's what we want.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
We want this easy life. But we're very vulnerable because
we are anxious, we are burnt out, and that's why
these women can suck you in so easily. And then
they're all just selling you stuff. They are selling you
their fifty dollars high protein flour, They're selling you their
egg aprons and their courses on how to make money
online and be more like them.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
You said earlier that you didn't necessarily think that this
is what you would be talking about with your economics degree,
But so much of this is an economy.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
Yeah, exactly. I mean, the thing is it is an
economic story. It is a business story. When I first
started the under the Influence podcast, which is more than
five years ago, which is crazy to me, Wow.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
And started covering influencers. What surprised me.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
And again this five years ago, it was that we
were in the thick of the influencer economy, but it
was so much smaller than it is today. But it
was a multi billion dollar business run by women for women,
mostly ignored by the mainstream media because it was run
by women for women. And I've been to these mom
influencer conferences and I kind of satirize some of them,
(09:13):
and everyone is lying to you because the goal of
the book is it's a novel. It's a thriller. It's
pulpy and juicy. It is supposed to be a lot
of fun. But at the same time, there's so much
reporting that I've done that went into the book. So
I've been to these mom Influencing conferences and they are
a masterclass in business. Multimillion dollar deals are getting made
(09:33):
at these conferences. And also, because two things are true,
there are a lot of women high on weed gummies.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
So it is.
Speaker 2 (09:42):
It is a masterclass in marketing and branding. And also
Mom spring Break.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
If it wasn't for the lying to enrich yourself personally
part of that. That actually sounds like a pretty good
time to be totally, totally well.
Speaker 2 (09:56):
And to be fair, I've got to say this, the
influencer economy, not everyone is a grifter, right, So like
the influencer economy is the new form of advertising and marketing,
it is where eyeballs are. As a person who sells
books for a living, and I say this all the time,
I could get a profile in a major magazine and
(10:18):
I have, or beyond a morning talk show and I have,
and I won't sell as many books as when an
influencer just shows it on their Instagram feed. That is
the world we're living in right now. And so it
is a completely lucrative business. And at the same time
you have a lot of people who are grifting you
and who are lying in order to capture your attention
(10:39):
and make money off of you.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
Before journalists like Joe, who clocked the influencer space as
important early on, started looking deeply at what was happening
in these corners of the Internet. They were pretty much
ignored by the male dominated tech press, and that allowed
these spaces to do two things. I mass a whole
lot of power and influence and also refine the ability
to use that power and influence to expose women to
(11:04):
pretty dangerous political and social ideology. So you mentioned how this,
you know, when you first started leaning into this coverage
of what was going on with the influencer economy, it
was really ignored, like maybe it would be in a
in a style section or something, but certainly the Wall
Street Journal at this point was not, you know, taking
a hard look at what was going on in these spaces.
(11:26):
Do you think that that allowed for these spaces, that
them being overlooked in this way to kind of also
be used as vectors to push things like telling young
women not to be on birth control, or you know,
really being used as a pipeline to indoctrinate young women
into more odious kind of political or social ideology. Yeah,
(11:46):
and I think that that's still the case. We do.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
For the childwife accounts and the tradwives are short for
traditional wife. A lot of them were boosted during the
last election because they do push such right wing ideologies
of homesteading, homeschooling, strip women of their rights, strip women
of their agency. So we know that they truly did grow,
(12:12):
especially over the past four years, because they were being boosted,
and some of them were even created by Turning Point USA.
And I've been talking about this for a couple of
years now now about how Turning Point incubated influencers, and
they've gotten so much more attention, obviously after the murder
of Charlie Kirk recently. But he truly was a genius
(12:35):
when it came to branding these kinds of influencers.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
And he used to say is like the left has Hollywood,
they have celebrities. We have to create our own celebrities,
and if we win the culture, we win the war.
And it's this kind of soft proselytization of doesn't this
look beautiful? It's nicer over here, all of you, all
of you with your feminism. You seem so angry all
the time. We're the party that is.
Speaker 2 (12:59):
Fun and nice and easy breezy. And it worked to
sway a lot of young women. We talked too much
about how young men were swayed by like the podcast
bro Spear to switch parties. But I think that young
women have truly been influenced by Instagram.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
I remember after Charlie Kirk was murdered, watching Erica Kirk
gave a speech at his funeral and seeing so much
chatter online that was like, Erica Kirk just destroyed the
feminist movement. And then when I looked into Erica Kirk's background,
I thought, oh, well, this is someone who is very educated.
Before she she got married in her thirties, you know,
before she was married, she you know, ran her own
(13:40):
business and had was a very educated young woman. I
don't know that she did destroy the feminist movement because
I think that from where I'm sitting, the feminist movement
is why she was able to have all of those
great accomplishments and make the kinds of choices that she
was allowed to make one hundred percent. But here's the thing.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
Women like Erica Kirk Alex Clark, who's another Turning Point
influencer who's incubated in the Turning Point Universe, which I'm like,
it's like the Marvel Universe, but for tradwives, the Turning
Point Cinematic Universe, the Turning Point Cinematic Universe coming soon
to a theater near you. They it's okay for some
(14:17):
women to benefit from all of the things that feminism
has given them, but they do want other women out
of the workforce. They do want other women to depend
on men as the breadwinners of their family and to
stay in the home and raise their children. And the
thing that I also like to say a lot is
tradwife is not a stay at home mom. A stay
(14:39):
at home mom is the CEO of their household. The
tradwafe themes are that you hand overall agency to your husband,
that you're not in control of your finances, You're really
not in control of your life. And that's what's so
dangerous to me, and that's what Eric Kirk is preaching.
It was very funny because I was doing an interview
with La republica Italian national newspaper, about the book everyone
(15:03):
is lying to, and the journalist was in Rome, but
she read the book while she was covering Charlie Kirk's funeral,
and like while she was watching Erica Kirk on stage,
and she's like, there were so many parallels to the
way in your book, and I'm like, I know, it's
it's creepy, but the fact is these women have multi
(15:25):
million follower accounts. Erica Kirk, I think, I mean, I
might be wrong, but she definitely had less than a
million followers prior to her husband being killed. I think
hat something around like three hundred and fifty thousand, and
last I checked, she was around six million.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
I mean that's the like that like, that is power,
that is currency.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
That well, it is power, and that is the thing,
and it's something that I think we have to pay
closer attention to again, because women are being convinced to
give up their agency, to give up their rights by
these kinds of accounts, or to check out of politics altogether,
which is equally as dangerous. And I also talk to
(16:05):
young women who say what I just said. They're like,
all of you feminists are so mad, and I'm like, well, yes,
we have damn good reason to be bad, right, But
just showing the things that feminism has done for us
does not make a beautiful Instagram reel.
Speaker 1 (16:21):
Like I am ridiculously happy because.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
I was able to be on birth control and not
have kids until I met the man that I had
my children with. I friendly believe your husband is your
glass ceiling, and I married the right man who supports
my career. I can be successful because I was able
to have my kids when I chose to, and also
equal pay and also access to jobs. Like all of
these feminist things created a beautiful life for me, but
(16:48):
that doesn't look great in an Instagram reel.
Speaker 1 (16:50):
I've said this so many times for heterosexual women, especially
women who are ambitious or I have, you know, inclined
toward making something themselves or building something for themselves. You're
the person that you marry is either going to be
an anchor or a springboard, and there's really no in between.
And so it really is a very important choice who
you decide to marry. And in a lot of ways,
(17:11):
I think that for women, marriage can be kind of
a raw deal, and so it behooves us to not
be pushing women into doing it quickly or willy nilly,
or just to check the box. Really put some thought
of intention into who this person that you are anchoring
your life to, what they're about, and whether or not
even getting married at all is something that you actually
(17:32):
meaningfully want for your life. It should absolutely not be
something we just funnel young women to as a default.
Exactly exactly, And the messaging in Chadweth accounts is get
married as soon as you can get married at eighteen
and start having babies before before you're able to take
that springboard onto you know what kind of life you want,
(17:55):
And again, maybe maybe your choice is to be ambitious
about being a mom and about being a wife also awesome. Like,
what feminism is about is having those options, having those choices,
having access to money and credit and the ability to
live the life that you're choosing. And what tradwives want
(18:16):
to do is take away those choices. So is Taylor
Swift a tradwife? Joe and I get into that after
a quick break at her back earlier this year, after
(18:38):
being branded a childless, single cat lady in her thirties,
you know, the worst thing a woman can be. Taylor
Swift announced her engagement to Travis Kelsey. On her new
album Life of a Showgirl. That shift is front and center.
She sings about how all she really wants, what would
truly make her happy, is to get married, have kids,
and settle into a home with a basketball hoop in
(18:59):
a driveway. Sure, she's a billionaire, so that home would
probably be a huge mansion. But still, and all of
this does sound pretty traditional. So is this Taylor Swift's
big white lady trad wife pivot? So the reason I
wanted to talk to you was a criticism that I
(19:21):
keep seeing about Taylor Swift's new album, and I should
say I don't know a time about Taylor Swift. I
am not a Swift deep, but I keep seeing people say, oh, well,
Taylor Swift is a trad wife now because she's newly engaged.
Her new album seems to be about wanting to get
married and have kids and sort of fine enjoyment in
a domestic life. Now, I completely kind of understand and
unsympathetic to this feeling that, oh, you know, this woman
(19:44):
who was a public example of being a single woman
who a fabulous life then decides to get married. So like,
I genuinely do get it, but I don't necessarily feel
that making a record about wanting to get married and
have kids automatically makes someone a trad wife. Like a
lot of people saying online, what do you think folks
are missing about this conversation? They're missing so much. Just
(20:06):
because you.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
Want to get married and have kids does not make
you any less of a feminist. It's so obscene and offensive.
She is a I think she's still thirty five, maybe
she's thirty six now, I don't know, But like she's
writing songs about her evolving desires and what she wants
out of the world. I mean, I'm a married woman
(20:27):
with three kids, and I'm like a witchy feminist right
out there, just like preaching and screaming from my soapbox
every day. And all she said was I'm excited to
get married and have kids with this wonderful freaking man
by the way, who supports the hell out of her career,
who promotes her every chance he gets.
Speaker 1 (20:47):
I do not get it. I hate it so much.
It makes no sense to me. How do you think
we got to a place where simply wanting to be married,
or wanting to have kids, or opining about how this
might be something that would be make you kind of
got branded as being conservative. Well, because they were able
to capture it.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
And the conservative branding is so good that they've been
able to call a lot of things quote theirs. They've
taken on femininity, masculinity, marriage, kids, like all of these
things they're claiming are part of their platforms because they've
(21:26):
been really really good at branding and promoting it. While
and I say this all the time, I'm like, the
left like can't brand itself for shit. To be honest,
Like the left is just like they have no idea
who they are what they want to be, where they
want to go, and there's a reason that we lost.
And I feel like we are just like not willing
to look at that and be really honest about it,
(21:48):
or to form a coalition of maybe opinions that do
not all agree with each other, in order to be
fighting for the greater good, which is, you know, to
have a country not fall into fascism. Okay, so we
can't really talk about our country's slide into fascism without
talking about marriage. Marriage, especially for white heterosexual women, has
(22:13):
historically been a structure that upholds and reinforces certain conservative
or patriarchal attitudes. While white women overall tend to favor
Democrats and national elections, the picture changes once you look
at marriage and education because married white women, particularly those
without college degrees, have consistently voted for Republicans, and now
(22:34):
as women's rights are being rolled back and threatened across
the country, it's that same voting block married white women
that is helping to usher those restrictions into power. You
really hit on why this is such a weird sticking
point for me, because Taylor Swift is getting married and
talking about how excited she is to be married.
Speaker 1 (22:54):
Not all of her fans are white women, but she
is very popular with white women. I do think that,
especially for white straight women, structures like marriage can be
kind of politically dangerous married white women voting against their
own rights and things like that. But I do think
you're right that when we just simply give things over
to the right, like parenting, marriage, all of that that's
(23:17):
for them. I think it means that there'll be less
interrogation about what marriage actually means for folks and what
these how you actually do these things in systems and
structures that support you, right Like, I think it really
limits the conversation about what parenting and marriage can look
like and should look like. If you're just like, oh, well,
being married means that you're a Republican now, it kind
(23:38):
of invites us not to do any actual interrogation. It
invites us.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
Not to fix the problem, not to fix the problems
with marriage, not to fix the problems with not caring
for parents in this country. And I think it's very
dangerous because marriage isn't going anywhere anytime soon. I will
say I do think that heterosexual marriage often fails women
because they're is an issue culturally with most men, you know,
(24:04):
not being raised to support women the way that they should,
the way that would create a more equal marriage, and
culturally we just like do not do it.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
When I think about it all the time, I'm.
Speaker 2 (24:16):
Raising a boy child and he sees me work my
ass off, he sees my husband support me working my
ass off. And hopefully this next generation that we're raising,
these men will be men who support women. Not all
of them, obviously, but a lot has to change in
(24:36):
the culture. And to do that, we have to embrace
the idea that there's married people are going to continue
to exist. We should just fix the institution of marriage
to be.
Speaker 1 (24:46):
Better for women. I have to be real here that
I am not someone who puts marriage or being married
on a pedestal, mostly because I think it can be
kind of a raw deal for women. And I think
for all the right wing talk trying to pressure and
fearmonger women into marriages and parenthood, shocker, those same Republicans
are also doing their damnedest to make marriage worse for
(25:08):
the very women they're trying to push into it. They're
stripping away the flexibility, freedoms, and support systems that make
marriage sustainable in the first place, take the efforts to
roll back no fault divorce laws that keeps women and
their kids trapped in bad or even unsafe marriages. And
while people love to frame attacks on abortion rights, reproductive health,
(25:29):
and our lack of paid leave as identity politics, the
truth is these are bread and butter economic issues. When
you have less control over when, whether and how you
have kids, you have less control over your household budget
and finances. And every cut or attack to an already
very fragile social safety net means fewer options for women,
(25:51):
especially the ones carrying the biggest load at home. So
if we keep seeding marriage and married women as the
rights territory to define marriage will keep looking like this,
or it will look worse, especially against this backdrop where
there are very real forces trying to make the institution
of marriage more harmful for women right now in very
(26:13):
specific and clear ways. Like if we just say, oh,
if you get want to get married, you are signing
up for all of this harmful stuff, good luck. I
think it really just ignores the problem and we don't
have to fix.
Speaker 2 (26:25):
It, and it totally does, and it also alienates people.
That is the problem here. Like I've talked to so
many women who are very progressive who say to me like,
I feel like I don't have a party anymore because
I feel like the party has left me. I am
a suburban mom with kids who wants women to have
reproductive choice, but is there room for me in their tent?
Speaker 1 (26:47):
And the other side will let anyone in their damn tent.
So Taylor Swift kind of responded and weighed into some
of this. So when fans were wondering if this was
going to be her last album because she was going
to quit when she got she said, that's a shockingly
offensive thing to say. Women don't get married so they
can quit their job. And I remember thinking, if she
(27:07):
were really a trad wife, she might have, you know,
upheld the lie. You know, if she might have had
something like, oh, the only job that matters for a
woman as being a wife and mother or something like that,
she might she might have downplayed the fact that she
is a working woman. But she didn't do that at all.
Speaker 2 (27:21):
No, no, because she's not a trade wife. And it
was the best answer ever to call out that question.
It was a man who asked it, a BBC interviewer
who couched it as being like your fans are asking,
but it's like, no, really, this dude is asking her
if she wants to know if she's just gonna quit
her job. It was shockingly offensive. That is the answer
(27:42):
I now want to give, which I get asked all
the time when I'm on book tour. When I was
on book tour, for everyone is lying to like, who's
watching your kids? I wand be like, that is a
shockingly offensive question to ask their other fucking parent. Okay,
Like men never get asked that, And so no.
Speaker 1 (27:55):
She's not a trad wife at all.
Speaker 2 (27:58):
Again, it is theest thing that the Internet has come
up with in a year of the Internet coming up
with really dumb things.
Speaker 1 (28:06):
I have this theory that we are all kind of
kind of stuck in a I don't know, a trauma
loop or something where women are being, as you said,
kind of told that we need to be married parents
to have full lives. On top of this like very
real rollback of our rights, and I think it has
created this dynamic that is very unhealthy where we're all
(28:27):
sort of hyper vigilant. And so when this heretofore single
childless woman living this great life gets engaged, I think
it's inviting us in a not healthy way to see
it as something that perhaps it is not, because we're
all in this healthscape where we have to be so
vigilant and so like hyper aware of everything all the time.
Speaker 2 (28:47):
Yeah, exactly, and it truly is. And what I would
like people to focus more on is the man she chose.
And I think that is I think that is very interesting.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
I truly do.
Speaker 2 (29:01):
She dated some real assholes, okay, and had some really
rough relationships. This isn't a woman either, who has just
been perpetually single and then all of a sudden, besides
she wants to get married. There's no one eighty here.
She has been like a serial dater since she's been
in the spotlight, since she's been a teenager and so
(29:22):
and yet the man that she chooses to settle down with,
to that she says she wants to have babies with,
is a man who supports women. And that's what we
should be focusing on. That's what we should be looking at.
That should be celebrated like that should that is something
we should want for all people that want it. To
find yourself a good partner who loves lifting you up.
(29:45):
I think that's part of this that.
Speaker 1 (29:48):
I want a world where if you want to be
married or partnered, you have good options for that working
out well for you. And if you don't want to
be married, don't want to be partnered, If you want
to be a single cat lady, if you want to
be polyamorous, like whatever it is that you want to
do that you feel supported to do that in a
healthy way that's going to fulfill you. And I just
don't like that we have boiled that down to oh,
(30:09):
in order to be a progressive woman, being a single,
childless cat lady is part of that. If that's not
genuinely what you want, like, we should be championing and
trying to build a world where people do have options
that align with the things that they want out of life.
I want you to have all the choices, literally, all
of the choices, all of the options. You know, we
are in this place where I think everyone feels it,
(30:32):
but for young women, especially where they are being bombarded
with so many conflicting messages online about who they are
meant to be, they what kind of life they are
meant to choose. Some of these things are benign, but
some of them really aren't. It's like that scene from
the book The Bell Jar, where she sees all these
different choices and outcomes for her life as figs on
(30:55):
a fig tree that she has to pick from. One
is marriage, one is being a famous writer, one is
traveling the world, and she's really stuck and can't choose
in all the figs wither and die on the tree.
Only in our scenario, some of these figs that young
women are being offered are also actually toxic or poison
and also the act of choosing one of the figs
(31:15):
itself has been hijacked and weaponized by bad actors. I
feel like we're living in the bell Jar, and I'm
just banging my head against the bell jar every day.
Right We're living in the bell Jar, We're living in
the beginning at the Handmaid's Tale. We're just we're it's
not a great world to be a woman right now.
But it's also I think that there is so much
(31:39):
virtue signaling saying, well, you have to believe in all
of this, you have to behave this way, you have
to speak like this like I said, or you're out
of our tent, which means that it feels like every
option is toxic because I'm not moving to the right
politically firm. I am a firm believer in progressive value,
(32:01):
and yet I'm not seeing a ton of candidates that
I think are going to fight for what I want.
We have to accept nuance and we have to start
giving people more grace we truly, truly do and expand
the tent. We have to be more welcoming instead of
less welcoming to people. Talk through these ideas.
Speaker 2 (32:23):
Talk to women and say, look, why are you following
these child wife accounts? Like what is appealing about that?
Then really dissecting it. And that's what I do when
I speak to young women. So I went on book
tour this summer for everyone is lying to and we
went to places that were very conservative.
Speaker 1 (32:41):
We did. We filled an entire theater in right outside Indianapolis.
It was gorgeous with young women who have had their
reproductive rights very recently taken away from them. And I
asked them, I like, what is appealing about these accounts
When they say, they're like, but it looks they make
they make life look so easy. They're like, Okay, let's
dissect that. What does an easy life mean?
Speaker 2 (33:02):
It means access to a good job, It means access
to money. It means freedom, It means all of the
things that feminism has given you. Those are the things
that actually give your life ease. Let's talk about how
anxiety inducing it truly is to be dependent on a
man for all of your money. Like would you like
(33:23):
it if you had to ask your husband if you
wanted to go, like buy a new purse, or if
you had to run your grocery list by him? Is
that a thing that seems nice and easy, because that
is what is actually happening in a tidwives home.
Speaker 1 (33:39):
And even when you look down the line, if your
husband turns out to be abusive, if he leaves you,
if he cheats on you, or he dies men die, yeah,
or yeah, if he becomes disabled or chronically ill and
you have to care for him, there are so many
things that could happen.
Speaker 2 (33:54):
Or it gets laid off when he gets replaced by AI,
like all of these things.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
Okay, yeah, I wonder if party. It is just we're
living in a media criticism kind of crisis where those
you see some you could make I friend leebly. You
can make anything look shiny and nice on social media.
I have done it. I have taken pictures of things
experiences that I knew were shit, And with you get
(34:19):
the lighting and the filter just right, you could make
anybody look like, oh I want to I wish I
was there, and I wonder if like we have just
we have a generation that has a little bit of
a hard time peeking behind that curtain, and I want
them to.
Speaker 2 (34:31):
That's it's really the point of the book is to
pull back the curtain on influencing, on trad wife influencing,
to say, Okay, what you're looking at is not real.
You're looking at someone creating a magazine. Essentially, these women,
a lot of them, are not even shooting the content
in their actual houses. A lot of influencers rent the
(34:53):
kitchens farms to do all of their content in in
a single day that they would shoot for them like
the entire month, changing outfits eleven times in a day
to make you think that it's different days. And then
they're posting their stuff. They have videographers, photographers, editors, and
like I said, in them behind the scenes, they have
nannies and house cleaners and people making this all look beautiful,
(35:16):
but it is no one's real life. And that's the
dangerous thing about social media is that we don't have
media literacy around it, and we think that we're looking
at people's real lives because we're looking at our neighbor,
like our neighbor is on the feed right, or like
our dentist or our kids teacher, but then also this influencer,
so you're like, well, that's my friend's life, so it
must be this influencer's real life.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
But it's not. It's never not funny to me when
you talk to somebody who actually lives a rural farm lifestyle.
I actually have a lot of people in my life
who have lived on farms, grew up on farms, worked
on farms, own farms, and I will pack my phone
and show them these trad wife influencers and I'll ask,
is this a lifestyle that you recognize? Is this what
your life on the farm looks like? They'll say no.
(36:00):
When I lived on a farm, I was up at
five am doing backbreaking labor and I was covered in
blood and poop path at the time. It's like stolen
valor more after a quick break, let's get right back
(36:24):
into it. It might sound strange, but if you really
want to see how effective these tread wife influencers are
at spitting fantasies and tall tales. Just look at how
they talk about what it's like to raise chickens. They've
managed to turn the messy, smelly, and sometimes even painful
reality of what it's like to live amongst hens into
(36:44):
some kind of a cozy, pastoral dream.
Speaker 3 (36:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:47):
So influencing is very popular on social media. It's people
just posting pictures of chickens to their millions of followers,
and for some reason, they make it look so idyllic,
so lovely, such a I have friends that have have
been tricked into getting chickens because HE influencers make it
look so beautiful I have. I have both a HE
(37:08):
influencer and an aspiring HE influencer, and everyone is lying
to you. And at every book event someone's like, that's
not real, isn't and like, let me show you these
like millions of followers henfluencing accounts. But we watched our
friends chickens up here in the Caskills while she was
away for a few days. And there's nothing lovely about
chickens in real life, Like they were such a holes.
Speaker 1 (37:27):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (37:28):
My text Shaine with my husband is amazing as he
tried to get them back in their roost one night
and the text Shain is just I'm gonna need a net.
I need three more adults to come here. These chickens
aren't going anywhere. It was it was kind of them,
one of them, one of my kids, Like it was miserable.
Speaker 1 (37:43):
But again it's something that you can make look really
beautiful online. When you were researching the book and putting
the book together, what are some was there anything that
shocked you where people wouldn't be because in reading the book,
I was shocked to learn how many of these women
are renting their farms, their house, batching their content. How
it's not real. They really do make you think this
(38:04):
is a slice of life from their like gorgeous life,
and it's just not. What other experiences did you have
while you were putting this book together and researching it
that might surprise people about the reality of what they're seeing. Yeah,
So the book was so easy to write.
Speaker 2 (38:19):
I wrote it in three months last summer because I
have been doing the Under the Influence podcast for five years,
so I had all of the reporting already done. I've
interviewed thousands of influencers. I've interviewed trad wife influencers, I've
interviewed former trod wives, and I think that people would
be surprised by a lot of things. I keep getting
(38:39):
asked all the time about it being a satire, and
it's really not. Almost everything in the book is very
true to life, and I kept trying to push the
boundaries and make it a little more bananas. So I
did make up this one storyline where an influencer really
wants to deal with pampers, but she doesn't want to
ruin her body, so she creates an AI baby and
a fake AI pregnancy baby bump, because honestly, one of
(39:04):
the reasons that these influencers have so many kids is
that Instagram and brands there's so much money in small
babies and pregnancy, and so they just like it's very
lucrative for them to keep popping out babies. So in
the book, this woman fakes a pregnancy and fakes a
baby with AI and I had a bunch of influencers
read it and they're like, oh, yes, like Stacey did that?
(39:26):
Like what, I'm like, I made this up.
Speaker 1 (39:28):
This is supposed to be.
Speaker 2 (39:29):
The most banana's detailed I put in this book. Like no, no, no,
Stacy totally did that for a pamburst yell.
Speaker 1 (39:33):
There's no end to how people will push the boundaries
of what you think is happening to sell us shit
on Instagram. No, there's no end.
Speaker 2 (39:41):
I mean one of my favorite things, I think this
one made it into the book too, is that that
last big hurricane to hit Florida, there was so much
like boosting people's accounts that were there that or reporting
from there that a lot of influencers pretended they were
in Florida with a green screen. And that's true for
(40:03):
some travel influencers as well, and some mom influencers that
if they see a certain place is trending, they'll just
completely photoshop themselves on like a vacation on the Amalfi Coast.
Speaker 1 (40:13):
When you think about the advancements that we're seeing with AI,
I mean, it seems like the possibilities are endless with
what they can do. The possibilities are endless.
Speaker 2 (40:21):
Instagram has already created a lot of AI influencers and
they got pushed back on them. But I do think
that we're going to see AI influencers really taking over
very soon because they don't have the messiness of real humans.
Speaker 1 (40:34):
Are the human tread wife influencers that you talk to.
Are they worried about this? All influencers are worried about this?
Speaker 2 (40:39):
Yeah, yeah, they're all worried about the bottom falling out
once Once AI influencers become much easier for brands to
create and then manipulate. I have a sense that the
influencer economy is I mean, it's not waning, but I
just think people are sort of sick of it in
a kind of way. We all maybe get the sense
that we're not being sold reality.
Speaker 1 (41:02):
I wonder are in it. How would you describe that
the climate right now for influencing.
Speaker 2 (41:07):
I think people like us are sick of it, but
it is only getting bigger every single day, and it's
only they're getting more influential.
Speaker 1 (41:16):
And I have this conversation with people a lot that
there are people who live in media like you and
I do. Right, Like, we've come up through traditional media.
Speaker 2 (41:25):
I came up in newspapers and magazines and now podcasts.
You are an OG podcaster like I am. We've been
doing this forever.
Speaker 1 (41:32):
So I think people that live in media are skeptical,
and then we think everyone's skeptical, but they're not. That's
probably so true. I often forget when you're mired in it,
you don't necessarily realize how it's coming off. For like
normis who are not consumed with media and thinking about
it all the time and reading about it all the
time and making it all the time, it can be
(41:52):
I can can I can really forget what the experience
of consuming this kind of media casually is like for
other folks. Totally, totally, And I do too. And that
was one of the things that I wanted to show
in the book too, because the main character in the
book is a journalist, is a regular mainstream magazine journalist
(42:13):
who's seeing her career destroyed by social media. So I
wanted to share that perspective of a journalist is stepical
of this world, because I am also skeptical of this world.
And yet, and yet, yet, the brighter side of influencing
and why we see so many smart women doing it,
is that corporate America sucks for women. It is really
(42:34):
hard to be a mom or a caregiver or even
first and that just wants to take care of yourself
in a corporate job. And that's why we're seeing so
many women become entrepreneurs and a lot of that entrepreneurism
involves Instagram. I first got interested in influencers because I
was living in San Francisco and a lot of the
(42:56):
early influencers. One they were Mormon, because you know Mormon,
the Mormon Church does actually preach that you should be
journaling your life in a very public way in order
to share Mormon value. But they were also, like San Francisco,
former tech entrepreneurs because they left the businesses because they
(43:19):
weren't being supported once they had kids, and they became
influencers in order to have a better handle on their time.
And it goes back to this idea of you know,
pretending that this is all happenstance. Somebody who left a
high powered job in tech or marketing or media there
there they know how to curate a digital presence that
(43:43):
is specific, but then they do it in such a
way that is like, oh, this is just a snapshot
of my normal life. This is someone has happened to
have a camera on me making bread and looking fabulous.
My favorite example and this this is this happened eight
years ago when I was living in San Francisco and
I knew one of these early mom influencers, and I
(44:04):
used to have these like bonfire parties in our backyard
because I had no friends in San Francisco. So if
I saw another new mom on the street and like,
do you like beer and sausages and fire pits, come
of my house on Friday, and it was so much fun.
Like we made a lot of friends that way. But
one day I invited one of these mom influencers over.
She didn't speak to anyone, she was miserable and sitting
(44:24):
in the corner the whole time. She actually went up
into my kitchen to get the one glass that was
like photo friendly. It's like an old mason jar. I
we were using it as a drinking cup, but she
decided to she put her own little striped paper straw
into it and then took a picture of it in
front of the bonfire that looked beautiful and posted like
(44:45):
had such a gorgeous time to my good friend author
Jopiafza's house. I'm like, you were miserable, you didn't speak
to anyone, and yet you completely manipulated this photo to
look a certain astet And that was one of my
AHA moments of oh my god, everyone is lying to
Is that why you wanted to write the book? To
(45:06):
to just peel back the curtain and say, hey, they're
all liars. You know, I didn't want to write the
book for a long time. The book didn't come to
me until very recently. I wanted to do the podcast
to feel back to curtain. Now there's always the goal
of the podcast, but then the podcast became a lot
more nuanced because the world of influencing is nuanced, because
(45:26):
the world of women is nuanced. I wanted to write
the book when I saw the rise of the trad
waves because that's what I thought was just so damn dangerous.
So I guess the big question in all of this
is how do we move through our social media landscape
in a way that allows us to cut through all
of these lies, lies about marriage, lies about tradwives, so
we don't get stuck feeling as if that is an
(45:48):
actual truth or reality. And honestly, to like, you really
have to remind yourself on a daily basis that this
isn't real.
Speaker 2 (45:56):
But this is no one's reality. It's not even your
neighbor's reality. Because even if you're not an influencer online,
everyone is choosing a lovely filter and also choosing what
to post. You didn't see their kid tanswering this morning,
or like the knockdown fight that they had with their
husband last night.
Speaker 1 (46:11):
And so you.
Speaker 2 (46:13):
Really have to look at it in the same way
as if you were looking at celebrities in like U
s Weeekler People magazine. You know it's not their real lives,
or you know that it is like life but enhanced.
And the goal of the book is really to try
to eliminate that shame and guilt that so many women
feel when we're scrolling Instagrams or rolling whatever our social
(46:33):
media drug of choices, because it is a drug, and
these platforms are designed to keep us coming back, to
keep us addicted, and to keep us feeling anxious and vulnerable,
because when we're anxious and vulnerable, we buy things.
Speaker 1 (46:45):
But here's the good news. You can change your algorithm.
And so I have been so proactive in that I
don't follow any news organizations anymore on my phone because
that's not how I want to get my news. I
want to get my news separately from this thing in
my hand. I also unfollowed any account that makes me
(47:05):
feel bad or guilt or shame, but I started liking
and sharing things that I do want to see on
social media which was mostly otters holding hands and fat bears,
and now my feed is a lot of otters holding
hands and fat bears and gay DAGs. These are things
that I like. And videos of Attachus finch Zet, the
sexy back oh with the glasses, Absolutely the glasses when
(47:27):
he's like in the jail and it really works. I
love that I know exactly what you're fucking talking about.
Speaker 3 (47:35):
I know, I know, Like that's the kind that's the
kind of content I want to open my scroll and
that's what I want, Like, I do not want to
look at some woman's fake picture perfect life or fake
picture perfect kitchen or someone telling me to bake my
cinnamon toast crunch from scratch, because I'll tell you I
tried to bake Nara Smith's cinnamon toast crunch from.
Speaker 1 (47:52):
Scratch that she posted on her TikToker or Instagram when
I was doing a live segment for Fox promoting everyone
is Lying to and it did not work. It took
four hours. My kitchen was so messy. My kid put
it in his mouth and it's spit it on the floor.
I was like, where's the real simon toast crunch time
well spent well. I do think that your point of
(48:12):
you know, I think that, especially for women, tech companies
are really exploiting us and taking advantage of us. And
I like that you saying, listen, did divest from content
that makes you feel bad about yourself? Divest from content
that makes you feel shame because they have a financial
incentive in making you feel shamed or anxious so that
you buy things and you can curate a more positive
(48:34):
social media and digital experience for yourself. You do not
have to succumb to that. You do not have to.
Speaker 2 (48:39):
Succumb to that. And there are certain accounts that I love, Like,
I love design, I love looking into people's houses.
Speaker 1 (48:47):
But I'm not gonna feel guilt and shame about like
them having a more beautiful house than I am, because
I know they're sponsored by freaking Wesdalm or Pottery Barn
or whatever, right, and or I know that they had
like a step designer help them make this like beautiful
tablescape of grape some skewers for their kids' birthday party,
Like they didn't just do this on their own. Uh.
Speaker 2 (49:08):
And so when I know that, I can still kind
of enjoy the content and be like, oh that is
that is that is pretty?
Speaker 1 (49:14):
I do like that, right, but I don't want to
make me feel like guilt or shame. We shouldn't be
feeling guilt or shame about our choices because at the
end of the day, it isn't the algorithm that gets
to decide who you are. You do got a story
about an interesting thing in tech, or just want to
(49:36):
say hi. You can reach us at Hello at tengody
dot com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode
at tengody dot com. There Are No Girls on the
Internet was created by me bridget Toad. It's a production
of iHeartRadio and Unbossed creative Jonathan Strickland as our executive producer.
Tari Harrison is our producer and sound engineer. Michael Almado
is our contributing producer. I'm your host, bridget Toad. If
(49:56):
you want to help us grow rad and't review us
on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, check out
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
There Are No Girls on the Internet. As a production
of iHeartRadio and unbost Creative, I'm Bridget Todd and this
is there are no Girls on the Internet. What is
it about Taylor Swift? Whenever she does something, it almost
doesn't matter what she actually did, because our reaction always
(00:26):
says more about us than it ever could about her.
Her fanbase is so massive that every little moment becomes
a mirror revealing all these cracks because Taylor Swift exists
at the crossroads of things like power, gender, class, race,
and visibility, and that means she is basically a magnet
for charged, messy, emotional, and sometimes even manipulated online discourse.
(00:52):
Case in point, after the release of her latest album,
The Life of a Showgirl, the Internet is asking, is
Taylor Swift Seek's really a trad wife? You know, the
kind of woman who uses her platform to say that
real liberation means marriage and submission. But that question isn't
really about Taylor, It's about us and help pop culture, politics,
(01:14):
and patriarchy collide online now. I am no scholar of
Taylor Swift's music. Honestly, gun to my head, I could
probably name five songs and I haven't heard her new album,
but even I could not escape this conversation online. So
I called up my friend Joe Piazza, host of the
podcast Under the Influence and the author of the new
book Everyone Is Lying to You, which dives deep into
(01:36):
the culture of tradwives, to ask what exactly is a tradwife,
why does everyone suddenly think Taylor Swift is one? And
what does all of this say about marriage today?
Speaker 2 (01:48):
Yeah, I mean, I did actually write the book on
tradwife influencers. And it's so funny because I've also weirdly
become like America's leading expert on trodwives, Like I've been
interviewed in like the international press about chradwives at this point,
and I'm like, I did not see this coming when
I've gotten economics degree in college, did not see it
coming at all. So one of the things I like
(02:09):
about your work is you kind of come at it
from this orientation of tradwives are essentially making tons of
money from lying about everything on the internet. They tell
women not to work while they themselves often are running thriving,
lucrative businesses. Why is it important for you to have
that orientation of like, Yo, these people are basically lying.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
Yeah, totally.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
I mean, and that's like the goal of everything that
I say about about the tradwives. And it's the lies
and the deception that really get to me because they're
pushing these messages and really influencing a lot of young
women saying, Hey, quit your job, It's okay to be
dependent on a man. A man should be the breadwinner
of the family.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
Go off birth.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
Control, have five kids, homestead, homeschool just like me. Look
how happy I am when really, these women are running
a multimillion dollar media business, making money off your attention span.
Usually they're the breadwinners in their families, and their husbands
are working for them. They have nannies, they have domestic staff,
(03:13):
they have like all of these things behind the scenes
that you're not seeing. And yet I talk to so
many young women these days that are like, why would
I climb the corporate ladder? Look how happy these child
wives are. I just want to quit my job and like,
live a soft life. And I'm like, they're not living
a soft life. Content creation is hard work and it
is labor, and they are making money and running a
business and pretending that they're not. I think that this
(03:36):
message is resonating with young women. Do you see it
resonating our women responding to this and saying, oh, yeah,
why would I want to work? This person has it
figured out. They've got a great life.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
All they do is hang out with their kids and
baked bread and wear prairie dresses I could have.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
That Is it working on these young women? It one
hundred percent is working, and and it's really insane, you know.
Some of like the best examples we have too are that,
you know, another part of messaging that we see in
a lot of tidwife accounts is you should go off
birth control. Birth control is dangerous. There's definitely a right
leaning pro natalist vibe going on. And I talk to
(04:11):
young women all the time who are like, oh, I
would never take birth control, and I'm like what They're like, Yeah, no,
I mean I saw this TikTok and I said, it's
going to make me infertile and give me cancer and
kill me. And I'm like, look, I didn't love the
pill in my twenties and thirties, and yet I loved
not getting pregnant.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
By every douchebag that I dated.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
So like, there are good and bad parts of it,
but that messaging is really resonating as is women are saying,
maybe I don't need to go to college, or if
I go to college, I'm just going to get my mrs.
So I'm just going to go to find a husband.
This level of influence is working on the generation that
is just coming out of their teens and in their
twenties right now, and also in women my age, I mean,
(04:51):
I'm forty five, who are burnt out from leaning in,
like it was exhausting trying to like be a girl
boss and have it all and do all the things
because society is not set up to support us. And
so we look at these images and think, wow, that
does seem easy, that does seem nice, But again, it's
all a fantasy. They're causlaying a kind of traditional America
(05:12):
that never really existed, or if it existed, it only
existed for like a very small sliver.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
Of rich white people. It's true, these women are ultimately
selling a fantasy that does not really exist and never did,
because this idyllic life of comfort and bliss never really
existed for most of us. But that doesn't keep tradwise
from selling this lie, using a kernel of truth to
sell it. For instance, birth control. It's true birth control
(05:40):
can have side effects for some of us, so they
take that kernel of truth to the extreme that it's
better to use no birth control whatsoever and have kids
before you're really ready, or another one that doing wage
earning work outside the house is often hard and stressful,
and most of us that do are burnt the fuck
(06:01):
out and exhausted and putting up with a whole handful
of stuff that we'd rather at. Yes, if you can't
tell that is true. So the extreme alternative that trad
wives would offer is that getting married, bowing out of
the workforce, economic and civic life is the answer, even
though that is not even what these trad wife influencers
(06:21):
themselves are doing. They're really exploiting this like kernel of
truth and blowing it up and saying, so it will
be better if you just got married, had a bunch
of kids, and relied on that person for all of
your economic decision making exactly exactly I mean, And there's
a kernel of truth in all of it. And that's
those are the themes that work so well.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
Again because like we are burnt out into watching these
like videos of sourdough or them running through a field
and gardening all day. Like one of my girlfriends, who's
a lawyer, said to me the other day, She's like,
I think I think I would really like just baking
bread all day.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
And I asked him, like, have you ever baked bread?
And she's like no.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
I'm like, do you like cleaning your kitchen after making
anything with flour? Because we never see that in the videos. No,
never see how messy a kitchen gets after baking bread,
and there is flour everywhere.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
There's gonna be.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
Flour, like in your hair, in your scalp, in your
kid's scalps, between your toes for weeks weeks, but we
never see that.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
She's like, no, I don't know what I'm like that.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
I don't think you would like baking bread. I think
you like the idea of this just ease, and I
think that's what we're craving. We're craving ease, and that's
what they deliver in these videos.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
Yeah. I think what they're really saying is like I
could use a fucking break, Like that's really I think
like at the heart of it, we're exhausted, we're burned out,
we're stressed, we're tired. Maybe you don't want to dedicate
your life to baking bread. Maybe you need a break,
and maybe you need institutional support systems to make all
of this a little less impossible.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
Exactly exactly. Maybe we just maybe we could use you know,
paid and subsidized childcare. Maybe we could use more time off, exactly, like,
we live in a society that is not cutting us
a break, that is not trying to make life easy
at all for women. In fact, it's making it harder
and harder on a daily basis.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
And that's what we want.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
We want this easy life. But we're very vulnerable because
we are anxious, we are burnt out, and that's why
these women can suck you in so easily. And then
they're all just selling you stuff. They are selling you
their fifty dollars high protein flour, They're selling you their
egg aprons and their courses on how to make money
online and be more like them.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
You said earlier that you didn't necessarily think that this
is what you would be talking about with your economics degree,
But so much of this is an economy.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
Yeah, exactly. I mean, the thing is it is an
economic story. It is a business story. When I first
started the under the Influence podcast, which is more than
five years ago, which is crazy to me, Wow.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
And started covering influencers. What surprised me.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
And again this five years ago, it was that we
were in the thick of the influencer economy, but it
was so much smaller than it is today. But it
was a multi billion dollar business run by women for women,
mostly ignored by the mainstream media because it was run
by women for women. And I've been to these mom
influencer conferences and I kind of satirize some of them,
(09:13):
and everyone is lying to you because the goal of
the book is it's a novel. It's a thriller. It's
pulpy and juicy. It is supposed to be a lot
of fun. But at the same time, there's so much
reporting that I've done that went into the book. So
I've been to these mom Influencing conferences and they are
a masterclass in business. Multimillion dollar deals are getting made
(09:33):
at these conferences. And also, because two things are true,
there are a lot of women high on weed gummies.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
So it is.
Speaker 2 (09:42):
It is a masterclass in marketing and branding. And also
Mom spring Break.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
If it wasn't for the lying to enrich yourself personally
part of that. That actually sounds like a pretty good
time to be totally, totally well.
Speaker 2 (09:56):
And to be fair, I've got to say this, the
influencer economy, not everyone is a grifter, right, So like
the influencer economy is the new form of advertising and marketing,
it is where eyeballs are. As a person who sells
books for a living, and I say this all the time,
I could get a profile in a major magazine and
(10:18):
I have, or beyond a morning talk show and I have,
and I won't sell as many books as when an
influencer just shows it on their Instagram feed. That is
the world we're living in right now. And so it
is a completely lucrative business. And at the same time
you have a lot of people who are grifting you
and who are lying in order to capture your attention
(10:39):
and make money off of you.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
Before journalists like Joe, who clocked the influencer space as
important early on, started looking deeply at what was happening
in these corners of the Internet. They were pretty much
ignored by the male dominated tech press, and that allowed
these spaces to do two things. I mass a whole
lot of power and influence and also refine the ability
to use that power and influence to expose women to
(11:04):
pretty dangerous political and social ideology. So you mentioned how this,
you know, when you first started leaning into this coverage
of what was going on with the influencer economy, it
was really ignored, like maybe it would be in a
in a style section or something, but certainly the Wall
Street Journal at this point was not, you know, taking
a hard look at what was going on in these spaces.
(11:26):
Do you think that that allowed for these spaces, that
them being overlooked in this way to kind of also
be used as vectors to push things like telling young
women not to be on birth control, or you know,
really being used as a pipeline to indoctrinate young women
into more odious kind of political or social ideology. Yeah,
(11:46):
and I think that that's still the case. We do.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
For the childwife accounts and the tradwives are short for
traditional wife. A lot of them were boosted during the
last election because they do push such right wing ideologies
of homesteading, homeschooling, strip women of their rights, strip women
of their agency. So we know that they truly did grow,
(12:12):
especially over the past four years, because they were being boosted,
and some of them were even created by Turning Point USA.
And I've been talking about this for a couple of
years now now about how Turning Point incubated influencers, and
they've gotten so much more attention, obviously after the murder
of Charlie Kirk recently. But he truly was a genius
(12:35):
when it came to branding these kinds of influencers.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
And he used to say is like the left has Hollywood,
they have celebrities. We have to create our own celebrities,
and if we win the culture, we win the war.
And it's this kind of soft proselytization of doesn't this
look beautiful? It's nicer over here, all of you, all
of you with your feminism. You seem so angry all
the time. We're the party that is.
Speaker 2 (12:59):
Fun and nice and easy breezy. And it worked to
sway a lot of young women. We talked too much
about how young men were swayed by like the podcast
bro Spear to switch parties. But I think that young
women have truly been influenced by Instagram.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
I remember after Charlie Kirk was murdered, watching Erica Kirk
gave a speech at his funeral and seeing so much
chatter online that was like, Erica Kirk just destroyed the
feminist movement. And then when I looked into Erica Kirk's background,
I thought, oh, well, this is someone who is very educated.
Before she she got married in her thirties, you know,
before she was married, she you know, ran her own
(13:40):
business and had was a very educated young woman. I
don't know that she did destroy the feminist movement because
I think that from where I'm sitting, the feminist movement
is why she was able to have all of those
great accomplishments and make the kinds of choices that she
was allowed to make one hundred percent. But here's the thing.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
Women like Erica Kirk Alex Clark, who's another Turning Point
influencer who's incubated in the Turning Point Universe, which I'm like,
it's like the Marvel Universe, but for tradwives, the Turning
Point Cinematic Universe, the Turning Point Cinematic Universe coming soon
to a theater near you. They it's okay for some
(14:17):
women to benefit from all of the things that feminism
has given them, but they do want other women out
of the workforce. They do want other women to depend
on men as the breadwinners of their family and to
stay in the home and raise their children. And the
thing that I also like to say a lot is
tradwife is not a stay at home mom. A stay
(14:39):
at home mom is the CEO of their household. The
tradwafe themes are that you hand overall agency to your husband,
that you're not in control of your finances, You're really
not in control of your life. And that's what's so
dangerous to me, and that's what Eric Kirk is preaching.
It was very funny because I was doing an interview
with La republica Italian national newspaper, about the book everyone
(15:03):
is lying to, and the journalist was in Rome, but
she read the book while she was covering Charlie Kirk's funeral,
and like while she was watching Erica Kirk on stage,
and she's like, there were so many parallels to the
way in your book, and I'm like, I know, it's
it's creepy, but the fact is these women have multi
(15:25):
million follower accounts. Erica Kirk, I think, I mean, I
might be wrong, but she definitely had less than a
million followers prior to her husband being killed. I think
hat something around like three hundred and fifty thousand, and
last I checked, she was around six million.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
I mean that's the like that like, that is power,
that is currency.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
That well, it is power, and that is the thing,
and it's something that I think we have to pay
closer attention to again, because women are being convinced to
give up their agency, to give up their rights by
these kinds of accounts, or to check out of politics altogether,
which is equally as dangerous. And I also talk to
(16:05):
young women who say what I just said. They're like,
all of you feminists are so mad, and I'm like, well, yes,
we have damn good reason to be bad, right, But
just showing the things that feminism has done for us
does not make a beautiful Instagram reel.
Speaker 1 (16:21):
Like I am ridiculously happy because.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
I was able to be on birth control and not
have kids until I met the man that I had
my children with. I friendly believe your husband is your
glass ceiling, and I married the right man who supports
my career. I can be successful because I was able
to have my kids when I chose to, and also
equal pay and also access to jobs. Like all of
these feminist things created a beautiful life for me, but
(16:48):
that doesn't look great in an Instagram reel.
Speaker 1 (16:50):
I've said this so many times for heterosexual women, especially
women who are ambitious or I have, you know, inclined
toward making something themselves or building something for themselves. You're
the person that you marry is either going to be
an anchor or a springboard, and there's really no in between.
And so it really is a very important choice who
you decide to marry. And in a lot of ways,
(17:11):
I think that for women, marriage can be kind of
a raw deal, and so it behooves us to not
be pushing women into doing it quickly or willy nilly,
or just to check the box. Really put some thought
of intention into who this person that you are anchoring
your life to, what they're about, and whether or not
even getting married at all is something that you actually
(17:32):
meaningfully want for your life. It should absolutely not be
something we just funnel young women to as a default.
Exactly exactly, And the messaging in Chadweth accounts is get
married as soon as you can get married at eighteen
and start having babies before before you're able to take
that springboard onto you know what kind of life you want,
(17:55):
And again, maybe maybe your choice is to be ambitious
about being a mom and about being a wife also awesome. Like,
what feminism is about is having those options, having those choices,
having access to money and credit and the ability to
live the life that you're choosing. And what tradwives want
(18:16):
to do is take away those choices. So is Taylor
Swift a tradwife? Joe and I get into that after
a quick break at her back earlier this year, after
(18:38):
being branded a childless, single cat lady in her thirties,
you know, the worst thing a woman can be. Taylor
Swift announced her engagement to Travis Kelsey. On her new
album Life of a Showgirl. That shift is front and center.
She sings about how all she really wants, what would
truly make her happy, is to get married, have kids,
and settle into a home with a basketball hoop in
(18:59):
a driveway. Sure, she's a billionaire, so that home would
probably be a huge mansion. But still, and all of
this does sound pretty traditional. So is this Taylor Swift's
big white lady trad wife pivot? So the reason I
wanted to talk to you was a criticism that I
(19:21):
keep seeing about Taylor Swift's new album, and I should
say I don't know a time about Taylor Swift. I
am not a Swift deep, but I keep seeing people say, oh, well,
Taylor Swift is a trad wife now because she's newly engaged.
Her new album seems to be about wanting to get
married and have kids and sort of fine enjoyment in
a domestic life. Now, I completely kind of understand and
unsympathetic to this feeling that, oh, you know, this woman
(19:44):
who was a public example of being a single woman
who a fabulous life then decides to get married. So like,
I genuinely do get it, but I don't necessarily feel
that making a record about wanting to get married and
have kids automatically makes someone a trad wife. Like a
lot of people saying online, what do you think folks
are missing about this conversation? They're missing so much. Just
(20:06):
because you.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
Want to get married and have kids does not make
you any less of a feminist. It's so obscene and offensive.
She is a I think she's still thirty five, maybe
she's thirty six now, I don't know, But like she's
writing songs about her evolving desires and what she wants
out of the world. I mean, I'm a married woman
(20:27):
with three kids, and I'm like a witchy feminist right
out there, just like preaching and screaming from my soapbox
every day. And all she said was I'm excited to
get married and have kids with this wonderful freaking man
by the way, who supports the hell out of her career,
who promotes her every chance he gets.
Speaker 1 (20:47):
I do not get it. I hate it so much.
It makes no sense to me. How do you think
we got to a place where simply wanting to be married,
or wanting to have kids, or opining about how this
might be something that would be make you kind of
got branded as being conservative. Well, because they were able
to capture it.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
And the conservative branding is so good that they've been
able to call a lot of things quote theirs. They've
taken on femininity, masculinity, marriage, kids, like all of these
things they're claiming are part of their platforms because they've
(21:26):
been really really good at branding and promoting it. While
and I say this all the time, I'm like, the
left like can't brand itself for shit. To be honest,
Like the left is just like they have no idea
who they are what they want to be, where they
want to go, and there's a reason that we lost.
And I feel like we are just like not willing
to look at that and be really honest about it,
(21:48):
or to form a coalition of maybe opinions that do
not all agree with each other, in order to be
fighting for the greater good, which is, you know, to
have a country not fall into fascism. Okay, so we
can't really talk about our country's slide into fascism without
talking about marriage. Marriage, especially for white heterosexual women, has
(22:13):
historically been a structure that upholds and reinforces certain conservative
or patriarchal attitudes. While white women overall tend to favor
Democrats and national elections, the picture changes once you look
at marriage and education because married white women, particularly those
without college degrees, have consistently voted for Republicans, and now
(22:34):
as women's rights are being rolled back and threatened across
the country, it's that same voting block married white women
that is helping to usher those restrictions into power. You
really hit on why this is such a weird sticking
point for me, because Taylor Swift is getting married and
talking about how excited she is to be married.
Speaker 1 (22:54):
Not all of her fans are white women, but she
is very popular with white women. I do think that,
especially for white straight women, structures like marriage can be
kind of politically dangerous married white women voting against their
own rights and things like that. But I do think
you're right that when we just simply give things over
to the right, like parenting, marriage, all of that that's
(23:17):
for them. I think it means that there'll be less
interrogation about what marriage actually means for folks and what
these how you actually do these things in systems and
structures that support you, right Like, I think it really
limits the conversation about what parenting and marriage can look
like and should look like. If you're just like, oh, well,
being married means that you're a Republican now, it kind
(23:38):
of invites us not to do any actual interrogation. It
invites us.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
Not to fix the problem, not to fix the problems
with marriage, not to fix the problems with not caring
for parents in this country. And I think it's very
dangerous because marriage isn't going anywhere anytime soon. I will
say I do think that heterosexual marriage often fails women
because they're is an issue culturally with most men, you know,
(24:04):
not being raised to support women the way that they should,
the way that would create a more equal marriage, and
culturally we just like do not do it.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
When I think about it all the time, I'm.
Speaker 2 (24:16):
Raising a boy child and he sees me work my
ass off, he sees my husband support me working my
ass off. And hopefully this next generation that we're raising,
these men will be men who support women. Not all
of them, obviously, but a lot has to change in
(24:36):
the culture. And to do that, we have to embrace
the idea that there's married people are going to continue
to exist. We should just fix the institution of marriage
to be.
Speaker 1 (24:46):
Better for women. I have to be real here that
I am not someone who puts marriage or being married
on a pedestal, mostly because I think it can be
kind of a raw deal for women. And I think
for all the right wing talk trying to pressure and
fearmonger women into marriages and parenthood, shocker, those same Republicans
are also doing their damnedest to make marriage worse for
(25:08):
the very women they're trying to push into it. They're
stripping away the flexibility, freedoms, and support systems that make
marriage sustainable in the first place, take the efforts to
roll back no fault divorce laws that keeps women and
their kids trapped in bad or even unsafe marriages. And
while people love to frame attacks on abortion rights, reproductive health,
(25:29):
and our lack of paid leave as identity politics, the
truth is these are bread and butter economic issues. When
you have less control over when, whether and how you
have kids, you have less control over your household budget
and finances. And every cut or attack to an already
very fragile social safety net means fewer options for women,
(25:51):
especially the ones carrying the biggest load at home. So
if we keep seeding marriage and married women as the
rights territory to define marriage will keep looking like this,
or it will look worse, especially against this backdrop where
there are very real forces trying to make the institution
of marriage more harmful for women right now in very
(26:13):
specific and clear ways. Like if we just say, oh,
if you get want to get married, you are signing
up for all of this harmful stuff, good luck. I
think it really just ignores the problem and we don't
have to fix.
Speaker 2 (26:25):
It, and it totally does, and it also alienates people.
That is the problem here. Like I've talked to so
many women who are very progressive who say to me like,
I feel like I don't have a party anymore because
I feel like the party has left me. I am
a suburban mom with kids who wants women to have
reproductive choice, but is there room for me in their tent?
Speaker 1 (26:47):
And the other side will let anyone in their damn tent.
So Taylor Swift kind of responded and weighed into some
of this. So when fans were wondering if this was
going to be her last album because she was going
to quit when she got she said, that's a shockingly
offensive thing to say. Women don't get married so they
can quit their job. And I remember thinking, if she
(27:07):
were really a trad wife, she might have, you know,
upheld the lie. You know, if she might have had
something like, oh, the only job that matters for a
woman as being a wife and mother or something like that,
she might she might have downplayed the fact that she
is a working woman. But she didn't do that at all.
Speaker 2 (27:21):
No, no, because she's not a trade wife. And it
was the best answer ever to call out that question.
It was a man who asked it, a BBC interviewer
who couched it as being like your fans are asking,
but it's like, no, really, this dude is asking her
if she wants to know if she's just gonna quit
her job. It was shockingly offensive. That is the answer
(27:42):
I now want to give, which I get asked all
the time when I'm on book tour. When I was
on book tour, for everyone is lying to like, who's
watching your kids? I wand be like, that is a
shockingly offensive question to ask their other fucking parent. Okay,
Like men never get asked that, And so no.
Speaker 1 (27:55):
She's not a trad wife at all.
Speaker 2 (27:58):
Again, it is theest thing that the Internet has come
up with in a year of the Internet coming up
with really dumb things.
Speaker 1 (28:06):
I have this theory that we are all kind of
kind of stuck in a I don't know, a trauma
loop or something where women are being, as you said,
kind of told that we need to be married parents
to have full lives. On top of this like very
real rollback of our rights, and I think it has
created this dynamic that is very unhealthy where we're all
(28:27):
sort of hyper vigilant. And so when this heretofore single
childless woman living this great life gets engaged, I think
it's inviting us in a not healthy way to see
it as something that perhaps it is not, because we're
all in this healthscape where we have to be so
vigilant and so like hyper aware of everything all the time.
Speaker 2 (28:47):
Yeah, exactly, and it truly is. And what I would
like people to focus more on is the man she chose.
And I think that is I think that is very interesting.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
I truly do.
Speaker 2 (29:01):
She dated some real assholes, okay, and had some really
rough relationships. This isn't a woman either, who has just
been perpetually single and then all of a sudden, besides
she wants to get married. There's no one eighty here.
She has been like a serial dater since she's been
in the spotlight, since she's been a teenager and so
(29:22):
and yet the man that she chooses to settle down with,
to that she says she wants to have babies with,
is a man who supports women. And that's what we
should be focusing on. That's what we should be looking at.
That should be celebrated like that should that is something
we should want for all people that want it. To
find yourself a good partner who loves lifting you up.
(29:45):
I think that's part of this that.
Speaker 1 (29:48):
I want a world where if you want to be
married or partnered, you have good options for that working
out well for you. And if you don't want to
be married, don't want to be partnered, If you want
to be a single cat lady, if you want to
be polyamorous, like whatever it is that you want to
do that you feel supported to do that in a
healthy way that's going to fulfill you. And I just
don't like that we have boiled that down to oh,
(30:09):
in order to be a progressive woman, being a single,
childless cat lady is part of that. If that's not
genuinely what you want, like, we should be championing and
trying to build a world where people do have options
that align with the things that they want out of life.
I want you to have all the choices, literally, all
of the choices, all of the options. You know, we
are in this place where I think everyone feels it,
(30:32):
but for young women, especially where they are being bombarded
with so many conflicting messages online about who they are
meant to be, they what kind of life they are
meant to choose. Some of these things are benign, but
some of them really aren't. It's like that scene from
the book The Bell Jar, where she sees all these
different choices and outcomes for her life as figs on
(30:55):
a fig tree that she has to pick from. One
is marriage, one is being a famous writer, one is
traveling the world, and she's really stuck and can't choose
in all the figs wither and die on the tree.
Only in our scenario, some of these figs that young
women are being offered are also actually toxic or poison
and also the act of choosing one of the figs
(31:15):
itself has been hijacked and weaponized by bad actors. I
feel like we're living in the bell Jar, and I'm
just banging my head against the bell jar every day.
Right We're living in the bell Jar, We're living in
the beginning at the Handmaid's Tale. We're just we're it's
not a great world to be a woman right now.
But it's also I think that there is so much
(31:39):
virtue signaling saying, well, you have to believe in all
of this, you have to behave this way, you have
to speak like this like I said, or you're out
of our tent, which means that it feels like every
option is toxic because I'm not moving to the right
politically firm. I am a firm believer in progressive value,
(32:01):
and yet I'm not seeing a ton of candidates that
I think are going to fight for what I want.
We have to accept nuance and we have to start
giving people more grace we truly, truly do and expand
the tent. We have to be more welcoming instead of
less welcoming to people. Talk through these ideas.
Speaker 2 (32:23):
Talk to women and say, look, why are you following
these child wife accounts? Like what is appealing about that?
Then really dissecting it. And that's what I do when
I speak to young women. So I went on book
tour this summer for everyone is lying to and we
went to places that were very conservative.
Speaker 1 (32:41):
We did. We filled an entire theater in right outside Indianapolis.
It was gorgeous with young women who have had their
reproductive rights very recently taken away from them. And I
asked them, I like, what is appealing about these accounts
When they say, they're like, but it looks they make
they make life look so easy. They're like, Okay, let's
dissect that. What does an easy life mean?
Speaker 2 (33:02):
It means access to a good job, It means access
to money. It means freedom, It means all of the
things that feminism has given you. Those are the things
that actually give your life ease. Let's talk about how
anxiety inducing it truly is to be dependent on a
man for all of your money. Like would you like
(33:23):
it if you had to ask your husband if you
wanted to go, like buy a new purse, or if
you had to run your grocery list by him? Is
that a thing that seems nice and easy, because that
is what is actually happening in a tidwives home.
Speaker 1 (33:39):
And even when you look down the line, if your
husband turns out to be abusive, if he leaves you,
if he cheats on you, or he dies men die, yeah,
or yeah, if he becomes disabled or chronically ill and
you have to care for him, there are so many
things that could happen.
Speaker 2 (33:54):
Or it gets laid off when he gets replaced by AI,
like all of these things.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
Okay, yeah, I wonder if party. It is just we're
living in a media criticism kind of crisis where those
you see some you could make I friend leebly. You
can make anything look shiny and nice on social media.
I have done it. I have taken pictures of things
experiences that I knew were shit, And with you get
(34:19):
the lighting and the filter just right, you could make
anybody look like, oh I want to I wish I
was there, and I wonder if like we have just
we have a generation that has a little bit of
a hard time peeking behind that curtain, and I want
them to.
Speaker 2 (34:31):
That's it's really the point of the book is to
pull back the curtain on influencing, on trad wife influencing,
to say, Okay, what you're looking at is not real.
You're looking at someone creating a magazine. Essentially, these women,
a lot of them, are not even shooting the content
in their actual houses. A lot of influencers rent the
(34:53):
kitchens farms to do all of their content in in
a single day that they would shoot for them like
the entire month, changing outfits eleven times in a day
to make you think that it's different days. And then
they're posting their stuff. They have videographers, photographers, editors, and
like I said, in them behind the scenes, they have
nannies and house cleaners and people making this all look beautiful,
(35:16):
but it is no one's real life. And that's the
dangerous thing about social media is that we don't have
media literacy around it, and we think that we're looking
at people's real lives because we're looking at our neighbor,
like our neighbor is on the feed right, or like
our dentist or our kids teacher, but then also this influencer,
so you're like, well, that's my friend's life, so it
must be this influencer's real life.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
But it's not. It's never not funny to me when
you talk to somebody who actually lives a rural farm lifestyle.
I actually have a lot of people in my life
who have lived on farms, grew up on farms, worked
on farms, own farms, and I will pack my phone
and show them these trad wife influencers and I'll ask,
is this a lifestyle that you recognize? Is this what
your life on the farm looks like? They'll say no.
(36:00):
When I lived on a farm, I was up at
five am doing backbreaking labor and I was covered in
blood and poop path at the time. It's like stolen
valor more after a quick break, let's get right back
(36:24):
into it. It might sound strange, but if you really
want to see how effective these tread wife influencers are
at spitting fantasies and tall tales. Just look at how
they talk about what it's like to raise chickens. They've
managed to turn the messy, smelly, and sometimes even painful
reality of what it's like to live amongst hens into
(36:44):
some kind of a cozy, pastoral dream.
Speaker 3 (36:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:47):
So influencing is very popular on social media. It's people
just posting pictures of chickens to their millions of followers,
and for some reason, they make it look so idyllic,
so lovely, such a I have friends that have have
been tricked into getting chickens because HE influencers make it
look so beautiful I have. I have both a HE
(37:08):
influencer and an aspiring HE influencer, and everyone is lying
to you. And at every book event someone's like, that's
not real, isn't and like, let me show you these
like millions of followers henfluencing accounts. But we watched our
friends chickens up here in the Caskills while she was
away for a few days. And there's nothing lovely about
chickens in real life, Like they were such a holes.
Speaker 1 (37:27):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (37:28):
My text Shaine with my husband is amazing as he
tried to get them back in their roost one night
and the text Shain is just I'm gonna need a net.
I need three more adults to come here. These chickens
aren't going anywhere. It was it was kind of them,
one of them, one of my kids, Like it was miserable.
Speaker 1 (37:43):
But again it's something that you can make look really
beautiful online. When you were researching the book and putting
the book together, what are some was there anything that
shocked you where people wouldn't be because in reading the book,
I was shocked to learn how many of these women
are renting their farms, their house, batching their content. How
it's not real. They really do make you think this
(38:04):
is a slice of life from their like gorgeous life,
and it's just not. What other experiences did you have
while you were putting this book together and researching it
that might surprise people about the reality of what they're seeing. Yeah,
So the book was so easy to write.
Speaker 2 (38:19):
I wrote it in three months last summer because I
have been doing the Under the Influence podcast for five years,
so I had all of the reporting already done. I've
interviewed thousands of influencers. I've interviewed trad wife influencers, I've
interviewed former trod wives, and I think that people would
be surprised by a lot of things. I keep getting
(38:39):
asked all the time about it being a satire, and
it's really not. Almost everything in the book is very
true to life, and I kept trying to push the
boundaries and make it a little more bananas. So I
did make up this one storyline where an influencer really
wants to deal with pampers, but she doesn't want to
ruin her body, so she creates an AI baby and
a fake AI pregnancy baby bump, because honestly, one of
(39:04):
the reasons that these influencers have so many kids is
that Instagram and brands there's so much money in small
babies and pregnancy, and so they just like it's very
lucrative for them to keep popping out babies. So in
the book, this woman fakes a pregnancy and fakes a
baby with AI and I had a bunch of influencers
read it and they're like, oh, yes, like Stacey did that?
(39:26):
Like what, I'm like, I made this up.
Speaker 1 (39:28):
This is supposed to be.
Speaker 2 (39:29):
The most banana's detailed I put in this book. Like no, no, no,
Stacy totally did that for a pamburst yell.
Speaker 1 (39:33):
There's no end to how people will push the boundaries
of what you think is happening to sell us shit
on Instagram. No, there's no end.
Speaker 2 (39:41):
I mean one of my favorite things, I think this
one made it into the book too, is that that
last big hurricane to hit Florida, there was so much
like boosting people's accounts that were there that or reporting
from there that a lot of influencers pretended they were
in Florida with a green screen. And that's true for
(40:03):
some travel influencers as well, and some mom influencers that
if they see a certain place is trending, they'll just
completely photoshop themselves on like a vacation on the Amalfi Coast.
Speaker 1 (40:13):
When you think about the advancements that we're seeing with AI,
I mean, it seems like the possibilities are endless with
what they can do. The possibilities are endless.
Speaker 2 (40:21):
Instagram has already created a lot of AI influencers and
they got pushed back on them. But I do think
that we're going to see AI influencers really taking over
very soon because they don't have the messiness of real humans.
Speaker 1 (40:34):
Are the human tread wife influencers that you talk to.
Are they worried about this? All influencers are worried about this?
Speaker 2 (40:39):
Yeah, yeah, they're all worried about the bottom falling out
once Once AI influencers become much easier for brands to
create and then manipulate. I have a sense that the
influencer economy is I mean, it's not waning, but I
just think people are sort of sick of it in
a kind of way. We all maybe get the sense
that we're not being sold reality.
Speaker 1 (41:02):
I wonder are in it. How would you describe that
the climate right now for influencing.
Speaker 2 (41:07):
I think people like us are sick of it, but
it is only getting bigger every single day, and it's
only they're getting more influential.
Speaker 1 (41:16):
And I have this conversation with people a lot that
there are people who live in media like you and
I do. Right, Like, we've come up through traditional media.
Speaker 2 (41:25):
I came up in newspapers and magazines and now podcasts.
You are an OG podcaster like I am. We've been
doing this forever.
Speaker 1 (41:32):
So I think people that live in media are skeptical,
and then we think everyone's skeptical, but they're not. That's
probably so true. I often forget when you're mired in it,
you don't necessarily realize how it's coming off. For like
normis who are not consumed with media and thinking about
it all the time and reading about it all the
time and making it all the time, it can be
(41:52):
I can can I can really forget what the experience
of consuming this kind of media casually is like for
other folks. Totally, totally, And I do too. And that
was one of the things that I wanted to show
in the book too, because the main character in the
book is a journalist, is a regular mainstream magazine journalist
(42:13):
who's seeing her career destroyed by social media. So I
wanted to share that perspective of a journalist is stepical
of this world, because I am also skeptical of this world.
And yet, and yet, yet, the brighter side of influencing
and why we see so many smart women doing it,
is that corporate America sucks for women. It is really
(42:34):
hard to be a mom or a caregiver or even
first and that just wants to take care of yourself
in a corporate job. And that's why we're seeing so
many women become entrepreneurs and a lot of that entrepreneurism
involves Instagram. I first got interested in influencers because I
was living in San Francisco and a lot of the
(42:56):
early influencers. One they were Mormon, because you know Mormon,
the Mormon Church does actually preach that you should be
journaling your life in a very public way in order
to share Mormon value. But they were also, like San Francisco,
former tech entrepreneurs because they left the businesses because they
(43:19):
weren't being supported once they had kids, and they became
influencers in order to have a better handle on their time.
And it goes back to this idea of you know,
pretending that this is all happenstance. Somebody who left a
high powered job in tech or marketing or media there
there they know how to curate a digital presence that
(43:43):
is specific, but then they do it in such a
way that is like, oh, this is just a snapshot
of my normal life. This is someone has happened to
have a camera on me making bread and looking fabulous.
My favorite example and this this is this happened eight
years ago when I was living in San Francisco and
I knew one of these early mom influencers, and I
(44:04):
used to have these like bonfire parties in our backyard
because I had no friends in San Francisco. So if
I saw another new mom on the street and like,
do you like beer and sausages and fire pits, come
of my house on Friday, and it was so much fun.
Like we made a lot of friends that way. But
one day I invited one of these mom influencers over.
She didn't speak to anyone, she was miserable and sitting
(44:24):
in the corner the whole time. She actually went up
into my kitchen to get the one glass that was
like photo friendly. It's like an old mason jar. I
we were using it as a drinking cup, but she
decided to she put her own little striped paper straw
into it and then took a picture of it in
front of the bonfire that looked beautiful and posted like
(44:45):
had such a gorgeous time to my good friend author
Jopiafza's house. I'm like, you were miserable, you didn't speak
to anyone, and yet you completely manipulated this photo to
look a certain astet And that was one of my
AHA moments of oh my god, everyone is lying to
Is that why you wanted to write the book? To
(45:06):
to just peel back the curtain and say, hey, they're
all liars. You know, I didn't want to write the
book for a long time. The book didn't come to
me until very recently. I wanted to do the podcast
to feel back to curtain. Now there's always the goal
of the podcast, but then the podcast became a lot
more nuanced because the world of influencing is nuanced, because
(45:26):
the world of women is nuanced. I wanted to write
the book when I saw the rise of the trad
waves because that's what I thought was just so damn dangerous.
So I guess the big question in all of this
is how do we move through our social media landscape
in a way that allows us to cut through all
of these lies, lies about marriage, lies about tradwives, so
we don't get stuck feeling as if that is an
(45:48):
actual truth or reality. And honestly, to like, you really
have to remind yourself on a daily basis that this
isn't real.
Speaker 2 (45:56):
But this is no one's reality. It's not even your
neighbor's reality. Because even if you're not an influencer online,
everyone is choosing a lovely filter and also choosing what
to post. You didn't see their kid tanswering this morning,
or like the knockdown fight that they had with their
husband last night.
Speaker 1 (46:11):
And so you.
Speaker 2 (46:13):
Really have to look at it in the same way
as if you were looking at celebrities in like U
s Weeekler People magazine. You know it's not their real lives,
or you know that it is like life but enhanced.
And the goal of the book is really to try
to eliminate that shame and guilt that so many women
feel when we're scrolling Instagrams or rolling whatever our social
(46:33):
media drug of choices, because it is a drug, and
these platforms are designed to keep us coming back, to
keep us addicted, and to keep us feeling anxious and vulnerable,
because when we're anxious and vulnerable, we buy things.
Speaker 1 (46:45):
But here's the good news. You can change your algorithm.
And so I have been so proactive in that I
don't follow any news organizations anymore on my phone because
that's not how I want to get my news. I
want to get my news separately from this thing in
my hand. I also unfollowed any account that makes me
(47:05):
feel bad or guilt or shame, but I started liking
and sharing things that I do want to see on
social media which was mostly otters holding hands and fat bears,
and now my feed is a lot of otters holding
hands and fat bears and gay DAGs. These are things
that I like. And videos of Attachus finch Zet, the
sexy back oh with the glasses, Absolutely the glasses when
(47:27):
he's like in the jail and it really works. I
love that I know exactly what you're fucking talking about.
Speaker 3 (47:35):
I know, I know, Like that's the kind that's the
kind of content I want to open my scroll and
that's what I want, Like, I do not want to
look at some woman's fake picture perfect life or fake
picture perfect kitchen or someone telling me to bake my
cinnamon toast crunch from scratch, because I'll tell you I
tried to bake Nara Smith's cinnamon toast crunch from.
Speaker 1 (47:52):
Scratch that she posted on her TikToker or Instagram when
I was doing a live segment for Fox promoting everyone
is Lying to and it did not work. It took
four hours. My kitchen was so messy. My kid put
it in his mouth and it's spit it on the floor.
I was like, where's the real simon toast crunch time
well spent well. I do think that your point of
(48:12):
you know, I think that, especially for women, tech companies
are really exploiting us and taking advantage of us. And
I like that you saying, listen, did divest from content
that makes you feel bad about yourself? Divest from content
that makes you feel shame because they have a financial
incentive in making you feel shamed or anxious so that
you buy things and you can curate a more positive
(48:34):
social media and digital experience for yourself. You do not
have to succumb to that. You do not have to.
Speaker 2 (48:39):
Succumb to that. And there are certain accounts that I love, Like,
I love design, I love looking into people's houses.
Speaker 1 (48:47):
But I'm not gonna feel guilt and shame about like
them having a more beautiful house than I am, because
I know they're sponsored by freaking Wesdalm or Pottery Barn
or whatever, right, and or I know that they had
like a step designer help them make this like beautiful
tablescape of grape some skewers for their kids' birthday party,
Like they didn't just do this on their own. Uh.
Speaker 2 (49:08):
And so when I know that, I can still kind
of enjoy the content and be like, oh that is
that is that is pretty?
Speaker 1 (49:14):
I do like that, right, but I don't want to
make me feel like guilt or shame. We shouldn't be
feeling guilt or shame about our choices because at the
end of the day, it isn't the algorithm that gets
to decide who you are. You do got a story
about an interesting thing in tech, or just want to
(49:36):
say hi. You can reach us at Hello at tengody
dot com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode
at tengody dot com. There Are No Girls on the
Internet was created by me bridget Toad. It's a production
of iHeartRadio and Unbossed creative Jonathan Strickland as our executive producer.
Tari Harrison is our producer and sound engineer. Michael Almado
is our contributing producer. I'm your host, bridget Toad. If
(49:56):
you want to help us grow rad and't review us
on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, check out
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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