By stacy lee kong

So, I would like to be living my softest life, right? (Ignore the fact that I consistently make professional decisions that are totally at odds with that goal, please and thank you. I am an elder millennial immigrant daughter—I can’t help it.) My actual behaviour aside, I am currently very into the idea of having the time and money it would take to devote myself to self-care, fine dining, luxury travel and the odd random but super involved cooking project. My TikTok fyp knows this, of course, which is why it regularly serves up videos of glamorous women who are doing exactly those things. And recently, it’s been one woman in particular: Nara Smith, a German and South African model/influencer of indeterminate age who lives in L.A. with her husband, Lucky Blue Smith—the Mormon model who became a fashion ‘it boy’ in the mid-2010s—and their children, Slim Easy and Rumble Honey. (She’s currently pregnant with their third baby, who might be named Pear, Pepper, Dawn, Frosty, Sunny or Silver, depending on gender.)

If you’re not familiar with Smith’s particular brand of social media content, The Cut delved into her popularity earlier this month, but briefly: she mostly makes TikToks of herself preparing elaborate meals for her husband and children while wearing beautiful clothing. Everything about her TikTok presence projects wealth: her marble counter tops, chic kitchen accessories, clean girl/quiet luxury style, the mountains of fresh produce she goes through every week and especially her wellness-tinged focus on homemade food, down to recreating Cocoa Puffs for her toddlers. And okay, that seems both unnecessarily complicated and useless (the whole point of Cocoa Puffs is that it’s sugary and bad for you), But aside from that, Smith’s content fits nicely into the life I’m currently daydreaming of. Nourishing my loved ones? Wearing luxe clothing? Never having to check my email? So down.  

However. The more she shows up on my various feeds, the more sketched out I get. Or rather, the more I see other people, mostly young women themselves, idolize her life, the more I worry. Her internet popularity exists at the intersection of several problematic ideas, including the conservative glamorization of the domestic sphere and what feels like a sharp decline in media literacy. So, here are five things I want us all to remember the next time she and her fellow tradwife influencers pop up on our feeds.

1. None of this is real

I thought we knew that the beautifully curated content we come across on social media doesn’t necessarily reflect the reality of its creators’ lives, and yet Smith’s comment section is littered with far-too-credulous comments, including:

“Also i’m impressed when u wear all those lovely outfits when u cook or bake and not get anything on them, it’s like magic. 🔥”

“All that cooking AND three outfit changes and 2 toddlers. I’m tired just watching. You are a strong woman.”

“I love you Nara, your life is my ideal. Career, Family, and your cooking skill! 💗💗💗”

Like… babes? Smith is not actually cooking all day every day in chic dresses that never get dirty or stained while her babies wait patiently, and more importantly silently, for their from-scratch peanut butter, jelly and bread, just like she’s not prepping her own ingredients, editing her own videos or, in all likelihood, caring for those kids by herself. She and Lucky are both signed to IMG, and while her modelling career doesn’t seem as established as his, they are clearly wealthy people. Also, she’s absolutely scoring brand partnerships thanks to her internet fame. All of which is to say, just because she’s the only one shown in each video, doesn’t mean she’s actually ‘doing it all.’

And yes, I’m using that phrase very deliberately, because Smith’s content really has to be understood in the context of the influential mommy bloggers who came before her. In a 2019 New York Times article, writer and momfluencer expert Kathryn Jezer-Morton broke down the eras of parenting social media content, starting with the messy honesty of early bloggers like Heather Armstrong and Catherine Connors, who pioneered a style of writing that made liberal use of what she described as “casual profanity, informal references to one’s reproductive organs, the eschewing of motherly ‘niceness.’” This was a direct response to the unrealistic vision of motherhood that has dominated pop culture since… um, pop culture began, basically. Then, with the advent of Web 2.0 (and, importantly, Instagram) in 2010, there was a sort of transitional period where “online motherhood shifted from uncensored to aspirational [and] many mommy blogs became ‘lifestyle’ blogs, and bloggers became influencers.” These women tried to maintain their claims to authenticity even as they attempted to ward off any and all controversy, but that balance was difficult to maintain, which is why this period was short-lived, running roughly from 2013-18. This gave rise to a new genre of momfluencers, who were “profane and genuinely self-deprecating, but glossier and more aspirational than mothers have ever been. They look, through the Instagram filters anyway, like beautiful, languid teenagers,” Jezer-Morton wrote. “The most influential moms in pop culture today tend to reinforce old norms about what it means to be ‘good’ and attractive.”

Content like Smith’s is just the next iteration of that approach; it looks beautiful, but totally belies the sometimes messy, stressful, complicated reality of parenting, providing audiences with a model of performative mothering that’s more about aesthetic than anything else. This type of content isn’t just sending a message about what motherhood ‘should’ look like, it’s also taking the usual capitalist approach of promoting products that will purportedly help the audience achieve that life. 

2. Housework is not glamorous or relaxing

Building off that point, I do want to explicitly point out that what Smith is presenting as beautiful expressions of her love for her family—and what her commenters perceive as both the ultimate representation of 2024 femininity and, somehow also, ‘peaceful’—is actually labour, and that reducing it simply to ‘care’ is a deeply conservative and capitalist strategy. In a 2021 Boston Review article about domestic labour which was pegged to the memoir-turned-Netflix series Maid and two other books about commodified care, writer Sophie Lewis pointed to Wages for Housework, a ‘70s feminist collective that argued, “under capitalism… ‘love’ often serves the interests of the ruling class because it can be leveraged to depress wages (surely you’re not in this for the money) or even withhold them altogether (do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life). The gendered injunction to care ‘for love, not money’ obscures the grinding, repetitive, invisible, energy-sapping, confining aspects of the work involved in making homes of any kind… In other words, the fact that caring for a household under capitalism often is an expression of loving desire, while at the same time being life-choking work, is precisely the problem.”

Interestingly, this piece goes on to grapple with class, and especially the ways wealthy women can replicate this same dynamic—leveraging the idea of love to ameliorate their exploitation—on the poorer women they hire to care for their homes and children. But that’s not an analysis we can really apply to Smith and other parenting content creators in this vein, because we don’t have any sightlines into the behind-the-scenes workings of their households… which is, in fact, necessary to upholding not just the story of the blissfully domesticated woman, but also the entire worldview that depends on her simultaneous care and exploitation.

3. Nara Smith is far from the first Mormon mommy blogger, and that’s by design 

I don’t know for sure that Smith became Mormon when she married Lucky but he’s definitely still religious, so I don’t think it’s unreasonable to characterize her brand as being, at the very least, Mormon-adjacent. And that matters, because mommy blogging has always been deeply influenced by Mormonism. As Dawn Araujo-Hawkins explained in a thoughtful 2021 longread about why so many momfluencers belong to the religion, “within Mormonism, there’s a belief that every member of the church ought to act as a missionary in their particular sphere of influence. For women, that’s traditionally been in the home, but increasingly, it’s been among their social media followers too. The idea that motherhood is a woman’s highest calling may not be unique to Mormonism. But Ann Duncan—associate professor of American studies and religion at Goucher College and the author of an upcoming book on women who view pregnancy as a spiritual experience—says the Mormon conceptualization of motherhood is truly distinct, and it’s one of the reasons Mormon women are so conspicuous online. They have a strong sense that their voices matter.”

This is why Mormon girls have long been encouraged to journal, and why it made sense that some of the earliest mom bloggers were Mormon women who initially turned to Blogspot and WordPress to share photos and stories about their families, before transitioning to Instagram and TikTok as new platforms emerged. (Hannah Neeleman, who posts on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok under the handle @ballerinafarm, is another Mormon blogger who portrays a bucolic, traditional life online, carefully glossing over details such as how her family pays for things like their $20K Aga stove.) (It’s that JetBlue money, fyi.) Importantly, as their circles of influence grew, these Mormon women kept their evangelical approach purposefully gentle. Personal finance blogger Jordan Page told Araujo-Hawkins that most Mormon mommy bloggers are “hoping to entice people with the happy family life that is the fruit of their faith.”

“Every once in a while, I will go on and hit the Jesus thing hard,” she said. “But because our religion is very highly scrutinized, we’re very careful to try not to be too preachy. We are already looked at as very strange, and I think we want to try to fit in as much as possible and teach by way of example.”

While Smith’s beliefs are her business, her posts do reflect this style of evangelizing—and I’m not sure that’s a good thing. This feels a little complicated to think about, because I’m wary of unfairly characterizing an entire religion, and I know that most of the world’s 17 million Mormons don’t belong to the fundamentalist sects that disenfranchise women the most, and subsequently get the most press. (Though, even the most mainstream iterations of Mormonism are still patriarchal, homophobic and contending, often poorly, with a very racist history.) Still, it’s frustrating to know that her content presents an unrealistic and limiting vision of femininity that doubles as marketing for her way of life, and that the young women who follow her may not see it that way.

4. Who benefits when women are constrained to the domestic sphere?

Or, you know, definitely don’t see it that way. The number of tweets I’ve seen that proclaim no one could ever make the poster, usually a young woman, hate Smith is truly wild. First because critique—of her content, and especially the message it’s sending about motherhood, femininity and independence—is not hate, it’s just critique. And second because that message is actually pretty fucked, especially right now, so perhaps it’s worth listening to the feedback????

Smith technically falls under the tradwife umbrella, though to me that label is starting to feel increasingly porous. But I guess that’s the problem. Tradwives sometimes do explicitly espouse far-right, authoritarian, white supremacist ideals, and sometimes they just make the stay-at-home mother/wife/girlfriend life look super chic, as Smith does. Either way, they’re promoting a worldview that encourages women to relinquish their personal, political and financial power and instead adhere to ‘traditional’ gender roles that have historically disenfranchised and oppressed them. (It’s also stressful for me to think about because what happens if they wake up in 10 years and they don’t like that man anymore, but they don’t have their own savings and there’s a huge gap in their résumés?)

Also, it feels like a particularly terrible time to… do that? Last year, I wrote about how conservative politicians are enacting laws and policies that “make society increasingly inhospitable to women.” So: underfund public schools and decline to pass gun control laws, but also craft narratives around the ‘negative influences’ children can run into at school, and naturally, homeschooling becomes an increasingly attractive option. Gut labour protections and allow corporations to make record profits, which contributes to an overall cost-of-living crisis, and what do you know? Moms end up leaving the workforce because childcare has become an unmanageable expense. Pass laws that infringe on women’s and girls’ reproductive freedom, forcing them to become mothers even when they don’t want to or aren’t equipped to do so. Soon enough, you have a society where it just ‘makes sense’ for women to retreat to the domestic sphere, where they can care for their children, husbands and households in a place where it’s ‘safe.’ (In this vision of the world, trans, non-binary and queer people conveniently don’t exist, by which I mean can’t safely be themselves, obviously.)

We have a very recent example of this: Last week, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled frozen embryos can legally be considered children, a decision that could have deeply troubling consequences for reproductive freedom across America, and beyond. Already, several Alabama IVF clinics are pausing treatments because they don’t want to put their employees at legal risk. But, as feminist writer Jessica Valenti argues, “this decision is not just about IVF—by further enshrining fetal personhood, Alabama is setting the stage for even more policies that punish pregnant people and strip away their rights.”

That’s why, as Julie Kohler argued in Teen Vogue last year, “the #tradwives are not a harmless social media trend. Through their cultivated depictions of domestic bliss, they are building demand for a set of policies that encourage—or even conscript—women to assume traditional roles. And they are distracting their audience from the politicians who are dismantling democracy and eroding rights and freedoms in service of that vision.”

5. We need more feminist media, because if I hear another argument for choice feminism I might scream

At the same time, we’re in a very scary moment for feminist and/or women-focused media; explicitly feminist publications are straight-up disappearing as are mainstream publications, especially in the lifestyle space, which tends to be most receptive to intersectional storytelling. Basically, media is being gutted by finance bros who don’t seem to believe in journalism as a public good—even though it’s increasingly clear that it is, and that a free and, you know, functioning press is essential to democracy. This is a pretty stark difference from when I was in my teens and early 20s, and I think it helps explain why so many young women seem enamoured with the life Smith and her ilk are selling—and willing to if not embrace it, at least excuse it as a manifestation of choice feminism. Young people are super smart and work hard to stay informed, but for all of TikTok’s value as a political tool, it also serves up a firehose of content that comes in varying degrees of credibility and correctness. It’s just not the same as reported, edited, fact-checked and vetted journalism, and I can’t help but believe that lack plays into the surprising embrace of this extremely regressive trend.

And Did You Hear About…

The L.A. Times’ look at the recent popularity of gender-bending Frankenstein retellings in Hollywood.

TikTok user ReesaTeesa’s 50-part viral story about marrying a pathological liar, Who TF Did I Marry. (If you, like me, never even considered watching 8+ hours of TikToks, there are also various summaries that give you the gist.) (Also: wild how quickly this series inspired prescriptive marketing lessons on LinkedIn, huh?)

The new iteration of the Instagram husband.

Vulture’s profile of Victor I. Cazares, a New York playwright who has stopped taking their HIV medication until the NY Theater Workshop, which they consider their artistic home, calls for a ceasefire in Gaza. “Maybe they don’t feel much for Palestinians. They can’t imagine. But they’ve spoken to me. They can visualize my life. They’ve seen me be among them. What I’m hoping is that my life means something,” they say.

All of these v. important contributions to society.

Also! Did I tell you I’m a podcaster now? (Well… sort of.) You can now find me co-hosting Pop Culture is Killing Me with the brilliant Tayo Bero. Recently, we’ve been talking about Beyoncé, Taylor Swift and how to think about celebrity when the world is on fire.

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