The “trad wife” trend has taken the world by storm and muddied the waters for any meaningful discussion of gender roles. Noticeably, the most ardent “trads” are those who did not grow up in and organically receive the “traditions” they discover for themselves and try to act out.
It’s not all bad. As we’ve discussed previously, having clearly, if strictly, defined roles can help men and women contribute to a marriage partnership and the daily demands of childrearing with clarity. The never-ending discussion of sharing the “mental load” is, frankly, too burdensome to take sometimes. Maybe people are responding to the tedious discussions of equity and charting a course for trad-land. It’s hard to tell, so strange are the ever-evolving identities of our age.
Enter the wunderkind Nara Smith. Inhabiting a social universe with names you might only find in Carl Sandburg’s “Rootabaga Stories,” Smith is an enigmatic figure to say the least. Married, at the tender age of 18 (or 19 or 24, depending on whom you believe), Smith is the mother of children with the unbelievable names of Rumble Honey (a girl), Slim Easy (a boy), and Whimsy Lou (another girl). These names are made more comprehensible when you realize her husband’s legal name is, apparently, Lucky Blue Smith. His daughter sired with another model, named, unbelievably, Stormi Bree, is, equally unbelievably, Gravity Blue.
Obviously, one could take an interest in Nara Smith solely for nomenclature. While Nara would be an unusual name in most families, she’s downright boring in the ironically named branch of the Smith clan. That’s, of course, not primarily why people are interested in her. It’s her bizarre and inimitable TikTok presence that has people alternately awed or outraged.
Clad in theatrical costumes—think lots of silky dresses with feathers and such—she narrates in monotone voiceovers video recordings of herself in a pristine kitchen cooking from scratch foods you probably have never even considered how one could cook from scratch. There’s the cornflakes, candy bars, gum (yes, chewing gum from scratch!), elaborate sandwiches, and loads of other stuff. It’s an impressive three-ring circus, and people are mad about it.
If you wondered if “smart” phones fundamentally change the way we interact with reality, this might be the proof you needed that they do, in fact. People are actually upset because a model with a family of bizarrely named people puts on fancy dress to make food from scratch (allegedly, we haven’t any way of taste-testing the homemade gum to see if the stuff is even edible). What does that have to do with the price of tea in China, we may legitimately wonder?
And yet, Nara Smith is—many will tell you—dangerous. She is giving impressionable young mothers an unrealistic view of motherhood. Consumers on the internet will be led to believe that just anyone can dress so fancy and cook so extravagantly while your progeny sally about the house totally unsupervised. In response to this deeply held concern, we can quote a fictional telegram: “Better drowned than duffers if not duffers wont drown.” If anyone is so out-of-touch and thick-headed as to be undone by the doings of an internet model, said person will have bigger problems to deal with than their hurt feelings. It’s ill-advised to fret over what might hurt people when we must trust people to cultivate their own common sense.
Some allege, with great moral outrage, that her narrative hooks don’t make sense. She will claim at the beginning of a video, for example, that her sister was in town and her sister loves gum, and since she doesn’t keep on hand, she had to make some from scratch (“But how could she just happen to have gum base in the pantry?” The critics demand.) She might claim her toddlers woke up with a hankering for conventional bagged cereal for breakfast, which—get this—she doesn’t keep on hand, so she, of course, had to make it from scratch. Who says that “social media” is a strictly realistic enterprise?
The videos are marvelous little artistic nibbles. The lighting, the visuals, the sound: curated. It may not be to your taste, but it’s impressive. There’s so little context, one cannot discern: Is she a legitimate “trad wife” living out some made up fantasy life she thinks she should have? Is she mocking so-called trad wives for acting like such over-the-top homemaking is their life’s purpose?
There’s really not, as far as I can tell, any way to find out. I haven’t the slightest interest in spending hours watching videos of this talented entertainer. It’s quite disturbing that people have forgotten that that’s what this is: entertainment. We are voluntarily giving our time and attention in exchange for being entertained. That such a production can induce angst, insecurity, and hatred in the viewer shows we’ve lost touch with what phones are and why we use them, who mothers are and what they might do in the home, and why any of this ultimately matters.
Nara Smith is a beautiful woman who makes interesting videos. People claim to know that she actually did live in Frankfurt and her German is evidently more believable than Hilaria’s Spanish, but, boy, do people like to hate the women they choose to pay attention to.
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