This has been a huge year for the tradwife agenda. Thanks to countless Nara Smith videos of cooking entire meals from scratch, a deep dive on the Ballerina farm, and the drama-filled premiere of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, conversations surrounding women in traditional roles practicing conservative values have been in full effect. But the interest in tradwife content hasn’t just been happening in public — it’s also been happening in the bedroom. According to PornHub’s 2024 Year In Review, the search for “traditional wife” went up 34% and the search for “tradwife” went up 72%.
It’s no surprise if you take a look at the type of content we’ve all been bombarded with this year, it’s pretty obvious why everyone’s suddenly so turned on by tradwives. Our FYP is filled with people like Nara Smith who sell us the fantasy of making extravagant, complicated meals entirely on our own for our model husband and weirdly-named children — all while wearing archival Dior dresses in our spotless kitchen, of course. Or, we’re shown people like Hannah Neeleman, who has eight children, lives on a beautiful farm, and spends her days happily churning butter in her egg apron. And when we’re not on TikTok, we’re watching shows like The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, where we’re taught about “Mormon garments” and “soft swinging.” We’re being conditioned to romanticize this type of content so that we’ll succumb to traditional gender roles. That’s why people are starting to become so interested in tradwife porn — it’s because it’s all they see in their regular lives.
So, what is tradwife porn? I, too, was confused as to what the genre could look like — and it turns out, it probably matches whatever idea you had in your head. It’s basically a woman with huge boobs in a 1950s-style dress cooking something in the kitchen until her husband comes home and fucks her from behind. Obviously, there’s some variety, but they’re all pretty much some sort of version of this. (Unsurprisingly, there’s not a lot of “female pleasure” focused positions like the oral sex scene in Don’t Worry Darling.) Basically, they’re always in some sort of apron, and they’re always in the kitchen. While I, too, enjoy being bent over the kitchen counter, this isn’t exactly the type of content I’m super into.
Some experts say that this shift is because people are frustrated with the emotional and mental gymnastics of modern relationships — particularly women. It’s no coincidence that we’ve seen these frustrations coincide with trends like the soft girl era and clean girl aesthetic.
“My clients often tell me how exhausting it feels to navigate equality while managing emotional labor,” relationship expert Dr. Channa Bromley tells Betches. “The ‘tradwife’ aesthetic offers an alternative — a dynamic with strict clarity, where roles are pre-defined and expectations are easy to follow.”
Others say that this shift is a result of male fragility.
“As women are getting stronger and feeling more empowered and confident, men who are struggling with their masculinity who feel threatened may want to be aroused and masturbate women who give them the illusion that they are ‘the man of the house’ and feel less threatened,” relationship and holistic counselor Michael Swerdloff tells Betches.
Ultimately, we should be wary of the huge shift that’s happening in our culture right now. While there are a lot worse porn people can be watching out there (can we stop with the step-family porn, please?), it’s a red flag that people have glamorized tradwife content so much that it’s seeped into our sexual subconscious. Does the idea of surrendering to this kind of (gender) roleplaying make you hot? Or, are you just being influenced to believe that a reality where women “stay in their place” is ideal?
