Hey, just a quick heads up that this episode contains some heavy subjects, including discussions of domestic violence, child abuse, and religious trauma. Listener discretion is advised. So one of the things I say a lot is that fundamentalism is attractive during times of chaos. And it's a lovely aesthetic.
So the fundamentalism that we encounter on Instagram today through the Trad Wife movement isn't really that different than what we called ourselves 20 years ago, with the traditional wives, you know, like we saw in the doggers. The aesthetic back then is more of a back to the land prairie, 20 kids in long dresses. Today the aesthetic looks like home-steading. If we had had Instagram back then, it would look identical and try to short for traditional. So I mean the same thing.
But it's an answer to the chaos. So after 9-11, especially when the world felt very chaotic and scary, my trajectory of the past 30 to 40 years matches what happened in the wider evangelical movement, which was mainstream Christianity becoming more political and nationalist and fundamentalist over that span of time. So they lead with beautiful ideals and a pretty aesthetic that feels comforting. It seems soothing. It seems like simpler times.
And they promise a better life if you follow their formula. So that's very tempting. This is the Culture Study Podcast and I'm Anne Helen Peterson. And I'm T.E.Levings, author of a well-trained wife and I educate on the abuses in Christian fundamentalism. So I'm so excited for this episode today. You are so good at talking to people who have some background in evangelical fundamentalism, like who knows some of the terminology who might have been part of it.
But then you're also really good at introducing some of these concepts to people who did not grow up in this world or even adjacent to this world. So I'm really excited. So the other thing that I see amongst women in particular is an incredible fatigue with trying to like juggle everything in contemporary life. And it's not that they don't want like the advances of feminism. Like they still want to have checkbooks, right? They still want to have like fundamental human rights.
But they're so tired and so much of it has to do with what our current society expects of women in terms of creating what we understand is like a happy family, a happy marriage, a happy world. Like there's just so much to do in order to do that. And so there's something that says like, oh, if I just quit my job. Yes. And lived in this house. And even if I had eight kids, it would still be more relaxing than what I'm trying to do now.
And I don't think that's necessarily true, but it does seem like a nice fantasy. So that feeling, that fantasy feeling right there is what I want you to kind of lock on to in your belly. Because especially if you're listening to this and you're feeling exhausted and it just seems easier like it would come home. You are playing into the gentle velvet prison of the soft voice that's coaxing you gently into your cage. They made the world so exhausting.
They do that on purpose so that in your right teag, you will just back off, get back in your box, back, back, back, back, you know. And that's, it's a lot easier than fighting an army of women if you can just wear them out. And so they get tired and they go home. Now the big lie is that it's not going to be less exhausting at home without any rights or freedoms or agency to get out. And especially if you're trapped with an abuser. But that's not what they lead with.
Isn't it lovely to go back home? Wasn't life simpler when you were back home? And yeah, we want a nap. So we're like sure. Yeah, no, I think that that's something that I try to keep in mind when I'm like, child care is so exhausting finding child care, right? Well, that's that's on purpose, right? Like Republican legislators vote to make child care difficult. Like, there are solutions that we could have. We have examples from other countries.
Like, there are so many different systemic ways we could make life easier for women. And we don't because the people in power want a different world. Yeah, that's very important to remember. So today we're talking about, in part, what it's really like to be a tradwife, not just the image that is available in social media and why it's important that we understand the dynamics actually at work here. So I think for people who aren't familiar, can we start by defining what a tradwife is?
It's not a new concept. And so I'd love if you can root it historically for us and in your experience. Yeah, so again, tradwife is just a quick vernacular, a little hashtag short for traditional life, traditional wife, traditional lifestyle. It's whatever comes back to the way things used to be. And you can go back as far as 1950s or you can go back to the 1800s, you can go back to the Puritans. It depends on how far the traditional role that you're looking at.
But it's based on this complementarianism model which teaches men and women are different by design and they have assigned roles according to their genitalia. So men are only good at one thing and women are only good at another thing. And so the woman's place in that system is at home raising children, bearing children, and that is all. And her entire time and energies and ambitions and output will be in support of that joint mission to raise the family.
Doesn't really allow for any exceptions or anomalies or individual strengths, progress, growth, research, evidence, all of that's out the door. This is, this is they did it when the founding fathers did it. So therefore it must be the best thing for all of us. And we must go back to that if we want to have what the ideals were that the original Americans had. And you also describe what fundamentalism is because I think sometimes people align it with evangelical. Evangelicism.
Evangelical culture. And I think that it's important to make this distinction. Yeah. So let's talk about the word fundamentalism for a moment. It's fundamentalism at its core is a system of belief where you have a formula that's going to result in a certain outcome. You have a promise. And so you have the fundamentals of the faith or ideology. And then the fundamentalism can be in anything. You can be fundamentalist about your soul cycle. You can be fundamentalist about your nutrition.
Anything can have that rigidity in this step, step, step, step equals process. Christian fundamentalism is just fundamentalism that's applied to Christianity. And then to just confuse things even more within the Protestant denominations, there's a fundamentalist denomination. And so sometimes Christians will say, well, we're not fundamentalist Christians. And what they're actually saying is we are not of that denomination. It doesn't mean that their denomination isn't fundamentalist in nature.
It means that there's a word semantic that they're drawing a distinction between. Yeah. Fundamentalism infiltrated the mainstream evangelical movement through organizations that taught a biblical formula for holy living. And it applied to all denominations. So while the Baptists became more rigid and formulaic in their approach, the Presbyterians did as well. And it dovetailed with this movement towards reform theology. So again, it drills back down to there are rules and you will follow them.
And this should be your outcome. This is, you know, it's this big, wider agenda, bigger movement. Yeah. So can you situate for us, where were you in the early 2000s? Like what was your situation? Yeah. I grew up in a Southern Baptist mega church in Jacksonville, Florida. We were the largest mega church in the southeast. That was, we moved there one in 1984 when I was 10 and I grew up a mainstream evangelical Christian who knew that my job was to become a Christian wife and mother.
My church was becoming more fundamentalist through Bill Gothard's Institute of Basic Life Principles at the same time. And so by the time that I was a young wife at 19, I was married to someone I didn't really know very well, was we were encouraged to do quickly so we would not have sex before marriage. And I needed to quickly learn how to be a wife to a man who was abusive.
I was mentored into the IBLP that way and then we followed this trajectory into a more high control ever restricting, reformed theology through the next seven years. I escaped in 2007 after being excommunicated in Chandon and near murder at midnight. So that's kind of like the broad umbrella of my story. When your memory you write that I'd convinced everyone our life was picture perfect, not even my parents knew the truth. What was the truth that you're talking about there? Oh my goodness.
So at that time that in the scene, in the book, my parents lived two blocks away and the truth was that my husband was spanking me. The truth was that we lived in high control and abuse. We lived in some of the most rigid fundamentalist expressions that this movement has. They are not niche or weird or fringe or unusual. It's just that survivors are too ashamed to talk about it or they're too wrecked if they manage to get out there to wrecked to talk about it.
I'm the reflection of 10 years of trauma therapy and a deep conviction that I need to tell you the truth of what it's like to live that way because it's coming for our country. I am horrified that the life I ran away from and barely escaped with my life is part of our headlines and I know I have the capability to tell that story. That's not true for most people.
When they're dealing with the truth of what that fundamentalism does and how it grinds you down, those women usually die or they're depressed or they're dysfunctional. They're breeding the new generation of fundamentalists and they fade into the background without names. That's much more common of a result. In one of your newsletters, you wrote about how one of the primary tasks of the wife in these families is to serve as PR to really do an incredible job of selling this lifestyle.
Was that a role that fit for you? Yeah, so I think that I'm a great example of an ambitious creative, talented woman who's put into a box and she's allowed one justifiable expression. And it's really convenient when you want for yourself what the patriarch he wants for you. That's the sweetest spot. When your gifts and abilities match what they need, you have a little golden time. And so yeah, I was great at marketing. I was an early adopter of the internet and the tools that it provided.
I really believed that our lifestyle was the best way and the right way and that we should show a beautiful example of a beautiful family. But I also really wanted those things. I wanted my children to have a happy household. And I wanted to emphasize the good and be positive and not air our dirty laundry by telling our secrets, but showing how gorgeous my canning jars are. I had beautiful canning jars and beautiful home births and beautiful cloth diapers all lined up on the clothes line.
It's just one of my favorite tactile sensory things. And so I was a very good proponent of the aesthetic. That's why I know that if I'd had Instagram in my hands, I'd have been all over it because I've got those chops. And so a lot of those tradwives, I'm like, you go girl, you are showing that you have more to yourself than the little box they want to put you in.
Well, and this is something that I think a lot of people who don't understand the inner workings of what it's like to be in one of these marriages or just how proselytizing works, they're like, wait a second. These wives are supposed to be so submissive. Why are there husbands letting them have an Instagram account? And it's because they're selling the lifestyle.
Like you said, it's that little pocket of you are allowed to do something here that uses some of your creative skills that you get positive feedback and you are spreading God's Word, right? Like that. As long as you are also careful, and I've seen this inner fighting amongst influencers about like not being too ambitious or like keeping humble or like modesty in all of those different things, but it's absolutely okay. They're like, yeah, do more. This is great. It's called lifestyle evangelism.
And so it's very intentional. The Dugger girls all have to account. They're going where the people are to show a better way to live. And they're hoping that you buy it. Evangelism is all about sales and rabid and contagious enthusiasm. And so they show the best of the best. And I really think that there's a part of them that truly believes what they're producing because I did. I believed, and it was the truth, the things that I was showing actually did happen. I just didn't show the whole truth.
I wallpapered over those dents. I didn't tell the truth of what was happening because I knew the audience wouldn't like that. They wouldn't fall for that. Like if I said, my husband corrects me the same way he corrects our children, that would have been a turn off. People would have probably, someone would have called the police. I like to think. But maybe not. People do talk. They do tell their news stories online. And there is that distance of, well, we aren't going to get involved.
But they live in lives that are carefully crafted away from any mandatory reporters. And so it really takes a savvy eye to say, I can see beneath your surface. I know it's too good to be true. So we're going to hear a lot more of your story as we answer questions from listeners. Let's start with a question from Jacqueline that will help us outline what we are and aren't talking about here.
I'd love to hear your thoughts about why the simple, tradwife tasks of intentionally preparing food in specific ways, practicing low waste ways of living, like mending, and living in a more unplugged way, seems to still be made fun of by most other people who do not live the traditional script. Don't we all want a chance to slow down and not continue to grind through capitalistic American culture?
I think it is a shame that the traditional ways of life are seen as incorrect ways to live in the modern world. Sometimes those traditional roles still work for families, all while maintaining equity between partners. Okay. So, obviously, if you mend your clothes or garden or make your own butter, you are not necessarily a tradwife. But tradwives often do a lot of those things.
We had another listener write in to say that the more gardening content that they watched on YouTube, the more tradwife content, they got served by the algorithm. We recently published a newsletter on Culture Study about the Moody Kitchen Esthetic, which is a certain type of kitchen that leads you slowly into tradwife content. The algorithm does radical magic there. But yeah, how do you think about this idea? Yeah. Two words I really latch on there is incorrect.
Incorrect to live this way in your modern, it's a criticism I frequently hear. And that don't we all want to slow down? And the overlap of these good things is true. Like, the way the algorithm leads you down, because a couple things are true. If you're a tradwife, then you're going to be a gardener. It doesn't necessarily mean the reverse is true. If you're a gardener, you're not necessarily a tradwife. And there's nothing incorrect with any of these things. That is so important to emphasize.
All of these things are things by themselves and their choices. And if you want to be frugal, you want to mend your clothes, you want to mend your socks, you want to use cloth diapers, you want to make your own ingredients. I used to make my own ketchup, you know, like I used to do everything. According to the tradlife, the difference is that it's a mask in tradlife. It's masking an agenda. It's done to an end.
Versus, I'm doing this because I enjoy it, or I'm doing this because I think it's healthier for my family. Or my husband and I have equally the end of that question. What's about equal partnerships? My husband and I have equally divvied up the responsibilities and these are what I'm going to do and these are what he's going to do. That is not the same thing that we're talking about in the tradwife movement where you are being forced into a role because you have a vagina.
Just not the same thing, you know. And to this end of women should not be in the workplace and we should have as many children as possible. Their underlying theology in the trad movement is dominionism. They want the Christian worldview to take over the country and then eventually the globe. And so they have to have a few things to do that. They have to have a military at their disposal. They have to have a population that will cooperate.
And like I said earlier, the confrontational method isn't going to necessarily put us there. But the attractiveness of this simpler life will do it for a lot of people because we do want those things. And we just have to learn how to separate them from the wider agenda so that you can mend your socks and can your food without it becoming part of Gilead. Are there a couple of words that you that are like flags for you?
If you're watching content that's kind of pretending or like at least has us on the surface level is not necessarily tradwife content. But that indicates to you that the person behind the account is probably part of this larger movement and is trying to in some ways, you know, mask who they are in order to like this sounds like it's more diabolical than it maybe is. I mean, actually it's kind of diabolical, but it's pretty diabolical.
But like I think sometimes people think like it's so simple like why no one's like trying to trick you. And I'm like actually I think that sometimes they are trying to trick you with content that isn't explicitly religious. That will eventually lead you in. I mean, there's a reason why like young life when I was in high school had like cool music so that then eventually you would get roped into the larger world, right? So yeah, any keywords? Yeah, keywords, but also key looks.
So if there's if it's too pretty and there's nothing behind the scenes really showing any any true life because this is not simpler. It is not actually less work to do all this stuff from scratch. It is a grind. It will exhaust you. It is tedious and you're trapped. And when I was making my own catch up, it was because I couldn't buy a bottle of catch up, you know, but I could grow it tomato and I could grind it.
I could smush it and I could, you know, strain it and make catch up and add little rapidora, which was like a natural sugar I was allowed to use. You know, and I could go through all this work for it. So I look for those kinds of signs like is is there behind the scenes like does this look like a real life or does it look like a set? Are their children present or are they just conveniently off screen?
Because when you're quiverful, you you haven't as many babies as you can, but mommy has a lot of time on her hands by herself to make a lot of content. That's bullshit. The other thing is like the glowing smile. So the cult glaze is another tell for cult involvement. So if she's smiling serenely through the whole thing and she's very performative in her actions and there's a hypnotic effect to the ballet movements of her gardening big tell, big giant tell.
She's under mind control or she's trying to oversell the beauty and simplicity in a way that is lulling my brain and my critical thinking is starting to come offline. Yeah. I also think of anything that like references like larger plan, prepping. Yeah, anything like prepping like adjacent. Yeah. Some of that is more obvious to me. Blast. Oh my god. Okay. So we have another question that's trying to clarify what we are and aren't talking about.
This comes from Jen. How can we talk about tradwaves without devolving into a discussion about stay at home moms? Every time I try to talk about tradwives and specifically how ominous their work is inevitably someone in the discussion goes, well, my friend loves her life as a stay at home mom. And I want to scream, that's not what I'm talking about because I don't think the tradwives really want us to be able to choose to stay at home or have like family discussions about it.
I think they want us to be like obligated or forced to stay at home. Okay, so before we answer that larger question, which is great. And I love it. Jen calls tradwives work ominous. Why do you think that is? And I think part of this is the political aspect which you talk a lot about in your work. Right. I think there is a gut level instinctive awareness that this is being pulled back.
Like we are being pulled back from our rights and our agency through a backward way of living that we've evolved from. And so when we can pick up on that feeling of manipulation, even if we don't always have language for it. So this is a great question of an example where she can feel something's off and she's trying to convey it, but she doesn't have the verbiage. So a lot of my work is just providing the vocabulary.
And this is going to come back down to they're staying at home for an agenda versus staying at home because they like to stay home with their kids. And the big distinction like you can talk to on a personal level with somebody is do they have they retain their agency.
So are they staying home with a checkbook and a door and they have a say and equal say in their partnership or are they staying at home because they are rights and resources have slowly narrows so that there really is only one choice for their life and it gets
smaller and smaller and smaller and that if they change their mind tomorrow and decided to go to work, would their entire universe crack and crumble or would that just be a conversation they had with their husband and an adjustment in their family? Right, well and the thing that I think is seldom talked about is that there's also a lot of educational neglect in these situations.
So if you've grown up in one of these families, it's not like you can like leave your family get divorced and find a job, right? Like I found this when I was reporting on the FLDS communities, the women who have left the church and tried to make a life for themselves, they didn't even essentially have a high school
education, right? Because especially the women were not allowed to have access to that sort of education because within the church they knew you give women those tools and they can leave, you prevent them from having those tools and they can't. Exactly, exactly. My friend who is a stay at home mom has credit cards, like that's going to change your experience a lot. A lot. A lot. She's not asking her husband for permission to buy milk, you know?
She's not asking for permission to use their one car. If you're asking permission, big, big giant red flag, you know, it's no longer a dialogue you're having with your partner, it's a top down authoritarian model and that can slip in really easily when he's the one with the bread-winning agency and you're dependent on him. Now you are on equal footing with your children and there's a lot that changes in that world.
Yeah, and I think that's the part that people, if they aren't actually familiar with this theology, they're just like, oh, this woman just loves you. Love's her husband and her kids, like, and wants to make lemonade to take out to him on the tractor. Not, I have to ask permission to even get the ingredients to make this lemonade. Right. Yeah, it's not always nefarious and ominous either. He can mean well. He can be nice and the authority structure can still be there.
Yeah. Yeah. That's a really good point. It's not like all of these men are like devils with rods, right? They can be nice, but it's still reside within that larger authority structure and that understanding. Yeah, I call it benevolent patriarchy. Benevolent patriarchy is still patriarchy. It's still high control. Yeah. Yeah. Our next question is from May and it's about getting into the life and getting out of it.
Growing up in an omniscient conservative men and family, I understand how a tradwife type of lifestyle perpetuates itself when literally everyone who's known since birth is living in it and your whole world is built to reinforce it. But how is it sustainable when people come to it later, largely in isolation or at least physical isolation? Why is it still so hard for people to extract themselves from it?
So we knew this was the perfect question for you because this is basically what your book is about. Yeah. So what's the sort of short answer here as in like how do people get sucked in later in life? I think they get sucked in because in our culture almost no one's coming to this as a blank slate. It's part of our culture. And so the water turns up very slowly.
You mean well, you like in my instance, I turned to a mentor who had a lot of children because I needed help learning how to be a mother in a neurotic situation. And so women at Char Char Tott to turn to older women, it's the tightest two model. And so that's just a very gentle, easy example of how it just kind of seeped in and I just kind of swept into this world at the same time as the external atmosphere was becoming this way.
So pretty soon, I mean, I mean, I call it the cult without walls because even though I wasn't in an omniscommunity where you can actually physically see the borders and the way everyone lives, I was just as isolated. It's a country within a country. This is an America within an America. And so you are in the world, but not of it. And you don't have any access to anybody who's not like you by the time you're in that deep.
So extracation is for all the reasons we've already talked about just as hard. I mean, there's nobody to ask. There's no safe path out. There's no world where your husband isn't aware of your movements. There's no education to fall back on. And then begins the very hard work of convincing outsiders that you're really in danger. And for example, Project 2025 threatens to take away our right of no fault divorce.
So if the system is predicated on, you have to convince us that you have a reason to get divorced. You know, you're struck with convincing all that. And while you yourself are still coming to an understanding of what you've just experienced, extracations really, really hard. Right.
You're not only convincing yourself that you need to leave it, which is an ongoing process that I am sure is filled with doubt and second thoughts, but then if you're also trying to convince others that you deserve to leave, it's so much. Right. Right. And then we have JD Vance chosen as the VP ticket. And he is quoted as saying that women should stay with their abusive husbands because it's hard on the kids. Well, that like leaves out everybody who would be dead if they don't get out.
You know, and that's definitely my story. My children were unhappy sometimes that this happened to our family, but it's because abuse broke our family, abuse broke our family, not divorced. Divorce was the way it was the path to freedom for me. And if that's how our country changes, women are going to die. That is the unhappy truth of that ideology. We know that from survivors telling their stories.
We have all of this trad lifestyle has tells, it has outcomes, it has evidence, testimonies, survivors. I'm a big one for like the historical timeline of progress. So we're supposed to be growing as a society that doesn't mean we go backwards to something we tried and it failed and we grew past because there were reasons. We didn't just like experimentally decide to give women rights. No, women fought. They went to jail. They lost their lives.
They fought hard to get our rights because not having rights wasn't working for them. There were problems with not having rights that we don't really want to return to, but they make it look really pretty. I know. We are in such a moment of regression, I think. And a lot of it is reactionary. I always think of like the history of feminism as two steps forward, one step back. Like we are in a massive step back right now.
But that doesn't mean that we're not, like there's still not momentum in the potential for continued progress. One thing that I've seen a lot with some influencers and people I know is kind of going deeper down the well. Like you start out going to like a cool church. And you're like, I need something even more restrictive because that feels more safe. So then you start going to a more evangelical church, even more.
And then like one of the influencers I follow left her evangelical church and is now part of like an orthodox church like she has to, she covers her head. She basically it seems if you're reading between the lines that she is craving even more control than ever before. And she's actually dragging her husband along with her, which is fascinating. Like convincing her husband to become part of the church and to become the patriarch.
Have you seen that similar progression of like becoming more and more? Oh yeah. It's very common. It's very common for the woman to lead the men into it because she's at home doing the research and she's saying here's the solution. So I think what happens is there's this ever constant doubt process that this formula didn't work. Clearly we need more. We need more structure. We need more rules. And the patriarch is always feeding you this diet of more rigid and more rigid.
And there's never a point where you would you've done enough. You know, there's you've never reached this limit where, oh, we submitted to these ideals. And now we have this happy family and we have no problems. And nothing bad ever happens to us because we were so obedient. That never happens. So as you face problems and as things happen to you and you face challenge and struggle, you go, you drill down harder and harder and harder.
And so when you're in one group and it wasn't quite satisfying, then you become more orthodox in your progression, that's really common. That's how that's how the extreme views manifest because each author leads to another author, each teaching leads to another. And the movement becomes more restrictive and more restrictive because it's in pursuit of ideological purity way back to the original definition of fundamentalism.
They are in pursuit of a pure ideology and they're using this formula in order to achieve it. So you're constantly trying to purify a narrow to get what you want. The promise never delivers. That's the big joke on everybody. There is no, this is not lead to what they promise. And if we look at the fruit of what they produce, we'll see that. We're just so caught up in the process. You know, it's the message is always, well, if it fails, it's something you did. So you must perfect yourself more.
And do this better. And you were just missing this ingredient. You know, pray more, pray harder, that kind of thing. And so you just keep doing more and more and more because there's never, there's never an attainment and there's never enough. High control environments breed more, high control practices, not the other way around. Yeah. Okay. Our next question is actually, there's a ton of questions that we received about a specific element of being a tradwife and that is Fundee Baby Boys.
Yes. The first time I saw people talking about this was when Alabama, Senator Katie Brit gave the Republican response to President Biden State of the Union address back in March. So we're going to hear a little clip of that. Good evening, America. My name is Katie Brit and I have the honor of serving the people of the great state of Alabama and the United States Senate. However, that's not the job that matters most. I am a proud wife and mom of two school aged kids.
And some people compare her voice to Michelle Duggers, so we will also hear a clip of that. So this is our great room and Jim, I'm going to design it where it was open to the kitchen area because that's where mom and the girls spend most of our time cooking and doing all that so we can be a part of everything that's going on and it just makes it really nice. I know this voice. I didn't know it was called Fundee Baby Boys. I just know it from a certain type of prayer circle.
But where does this voice come from? Can you talk more about it? Yes. First of all, we should say Fundee Baby Boys is an outsider term applied to this phenomenon that in attempt to explain it. We did not call it Fundee Baby Boys when we were doing it. We called it sounding childlike, keeping sweet, staying sweet, gentle spirit, being feminine. And again, it's that breathy, almost sexualized child prosody that coaxes you along.
And so it is a vocal manipulation to make a woman sound less threatening. Changes the sound of her own voice if you practice that voice long enough. You will no longer sound like you're a maturity. And it takes work. I've had to go through extensive vocal retraining just to get back to the sound of my own voice after leaving because you don't just snap in and out like a code switch. You're groomed to sound that way. As far as where it comes from, that's a little more complicated to tease apart.
It's one of those parts of our culture that's so pervasive that it's hard to say one thing. Although I can tell you that there's this dynamic and high control religion, and certainly in the 50s as it became like the 50s housewife and sounding sweet and pleasing and being hyper femme and all of that. In 1963, two books came out, the feminine mystique and fascinating womanhood.
The fascinating womanhood is technically a Mormon book, but it didn't lead with its Mormonism and people don't always realize that that's its source. It's still in print today, and it teaches women to be ultra feminine and childlike so that they will become an angelic, soft feminine self. It's a big part of my story because it was handed to me by so many women, and that is how it's passed along from woman to woman. There were fascinating womanhood groups.
There are still Facebook groups, and this is where women learn to actually take that on so they can call their husbands big hairy brutes and fight and get basically coax the entire role play into place. If a woman sounds like a baby, she's not threatening. She's demotiv. She can get you to do the things that you maybe don't want to do. It gives her a feeling of empowerment, like getting him to cooperate. One way it's talked about is the man is the head of the house, but the woman is the neck.
The vocal training is how she turns his head or his will to her will. It's so funny because when I was writing a piece on a drag wife influence her last year, there's this woman who is not Christian forward, and I'm pretty sure that she's playing everything up for the algorithm. I do not think that of the vast majority of these women, but this woman I do.
She was a cosplaying as Marilyn Monroe, and her Fundy baby voice was right on that cusp of Marilyn Monroe, which is fascinating because it's like the voice associated with the biggest sex symbol of the last 100 years, but also a sex symbol who was incredibly powerful, but was always understood as innocent. There's a lot of overlap happening right now in what you just said.
The other thing that happens with the baby voice is that women's voices can truncate at the age they were first molested or interfered with. Sometimes they sound like young children because they were interfered with as young children and they kind of got stuck there vocally. That's not coincidental because when you want a grown woman to sound like a child, and that grown woman is someone you sleep with and find sexually attractive, those two things are related.
He is now finding a childlike adult woman attractive, which breeds more sexual abuse and sexual abuse is a huge part of patriarchy. These aren't things that we can put in little boxes and say, well this is this and this is that. Just like you can't where it comes from, the impact is all very much the same.
When Katie Britt splashed on the scene and brought it into the mainstream, it stirred up a lot of things, a lot of emotions for people because it is so tied to their own subjugation, self-subjugation, and their own sexual abuse stories. This idea of modesty culture where the church repeatedly tells us that that is where women are safe and that is where children are safe, except statistics don't breed that out.
Statistics show us that church is one of the most dangerous places a woman or a child can be because the church doesn't take abuse seriously and because they continually sexualize young children. Voice is one way the tell is where it comes out is that if they want you to sound like a baby but they're going to have sex with you, the disjointedness, I lose my brain. My words when I think of the horror of that because that is the mind fuck that we experience in that kind of high control religion.
So this is a good transition into kind of going back to May's question, the whole belief system is designed to keep people in, to keep them bound by secrecy, bound by this understanding that this is the only way to salvation. That's something that I think sometimes gets lost. People think if they leave, then they are damned and their children are damned. How do you get around that? That's really difficult. So what has to fall into place for people to leave? I think a survival instinct.
They're going to make sure that you know you're damned by demonstrating it. So when you leave, you do lose your community, you are going to be condemned. They're going to call you names. They're going to call you Heretic and Horror and Jezebel. They're going to cut you off from the resources and everything that you had. I was excommunicated and formally shunned. It's part of the experience.
And so unless you have a vein inside of yourself that says, I know that's what they're going to do, but that is not actually mean I'm spiritually damned. You might fall for it because they're going to be very convincing. In my case, in which I, what I think I've witnessed from other survivors is that something else comes online. And that is your survival instinct that says, your life is hell on earth and I've already experienced it.
And I would rather live and protect my children than experience another day of that. And that's where the courage comes in. So I can't imagine that many tradwives are listening to this podcast, but I do think that there are some people whose loved ones are stuck in some version of this. So what advice would you give them noticing that this is going on? Is there anything that people who on the outside can do? Yeah, I always encourage to keep the lines of communication as open as possible.
Try to be non-judgmental in your conversations with them. Make sure that they know that you are someone they can turn to when they want to or need to because that won't be a predictable thing. Leaving is almost always urgent. There's some sort of urgency attached to it. So it'll be a random. And if you want them to be able to come to you and not feel like they're cut off from that.
So I had an entire network of people I was able to turn to that they all had their sneaking suspicions that I was in over my head and that there were bad things happening at home. They were open to me and they always kind of conveyed that they'd be here for me when I was ready for them. Another way is to slip them non-traceable ways of payment.
So someone messaged me the other day and said she buys gift cards at the grocery store and then she leaves them for people who like if she sees something at the pediatrician's office or the grocery store or something and she'll just hand out these gift cards because they don't have access to their own finances. One lady made her escape simply because she had a stack of gift cards at her disposal. She'd been saving them up.
So little ways that you can think of one of the I get this kick out of my book and that so I wrote it for the lady that's going to put it in her card and target. I wrote it for the lady who's not allowed to go into a bookstore or show it on the receipt but she's going to toss it in her cart with the milk. And people will joke like we should put a new jacket on it and it says how to be a well-trained wife so that they're allowed to have it at home. Yeah. That's kind of the thing.
How can you support them? Even the title itself is ambiguous enough that if you saw, I don't know if you saw it somehow, I mean the illustration is a little unambiguous but I think the title, if you could say that like just the maybe the spine, it would be passable. Yes, it raises eyebrows and that's how I knew it was the title for the book. Okay, our last question is a reflective one and it comes from Elizabeth.
Many performed identities like the tradwife appeal to people because there is a kernel of goodness or truth somewhere in all the mess and harm. I think about this when I reflect on my experience as a former evangelical. When people stop performing that identity, there is a strong instinct to shame and fully reject that part of their experience. What parts, if any, of the tradwife identity and beliefs do you want to take with you?
Is there any piece of it that still connects with you or that you grieve? It's a heart one, I know. It's really good about it. No, it's a tender one and it's one where I get to speak up for younger me who I love so much because she tried so hard. I'm really grateful that it gave me the years with my children.
I had 12 years at home with my kids and I was subversive during those years teaching them things that I wanted them to learn and I have a great relationship with my children today because of those foundational years. It also helps with some of the sting that I gave my youth to pursue an ideology instead of self-development and becoming a strong person first.
While it sucked to have to mother while I healed, it's not fair to my kids that they didn't have a healed parent, it's tender that we got to learn together and I got to show them that you don't have to stay in abuse which I think is going to be something they carry with them forever. I loved homeschooling. When homeschooling can be done right, homeschooling is a beautiful relationship and it's a part of the conversation in a country that doesn't value the safety of its students.
I love all of the aesthetic. I love my birth stories. I love the midwives who took such wonderful care of me. I love canned food. I love gardening. I love walking barefoot in the dirt. I still love hanging my clothes on the line. I don't do it because I'm busy doing things but I love all of that stuff. To be able to reclaim it and say, I loved doing this just because I love doing this and it doesn't have to feed into any wider agenda.
It also has given me a resilience of spirit that helps me like when my money is tight, I know how to go cook food with from ingredients. I don't need convenience foods. That's like a tiny empowerment that I carry with me that my tribe life showed me. I know how to make good with almost nothing. I know how to be really thankful for the simple joys in life because that was the only joy I had in life back then. But now I choose it because it's not excessive or harmful to the planet or waste.
I carry her with me and I have integrated her into who I am today and I understand with empathy why people would find all of that attractive. I support the ability to stay home and the option to stay home. I support moms in their motherhood. I don't want our country to make it so that everybody has to do the same thing because they have no other options. This has been such a delight. I'm really like an honor and I really can't recommend the book highly enough.
Where can people find you if they want to know more about you, follow you? I hope you talk about the newsletter. Yeah. I am kind of everywhere. T11's writer on the social platforms. I do a lot of educational type content there. I also share my story of how I continue to break down anti-fundamentalist thinking in our politics, headlines, the deconstruction process itself, what it's like to heal from trauma at my substack, tealettings.substack.com. My website is tealettings.com.
A well-trained wife is available anywhere. Books are sold in hardcover, digital, or audio, which I read myself and people always ask that. Awesome. Thank you again. Thank you. All right. So today's episode is free for everyone. That means you'll get to hear the ask at anything, a part of the show that's kind of like a free for all, and normally just for paid subscribers.
We've talked about the best plants for your office, getting through a friend break up, slightly and impolitely shutting down fat, phobic talk, and today's question is a follow-up to a newsletter I wrote back in January called the right kind of busy. Malady, will you read this question for me?
This is from Liza. I loved Anne's recent essay about the right kind of busy and would be excited to hear specific thoughts on how to keep that kind of busy from tipping into things feeling overly hectic and bad, aka the wrong kind of busy. Liza. But I am currently in the wrong kind of busy. Same. But I know why I am.
The right kind of busy occurs when you have not over-programmed yourself so that if something switches in your life, if there's some minor catastrophe, if some work gets put on your plate, that you don't immediately switch over into the wrong kind of busy. And what happened to me is that I was right on the edge. It was like teetering. And then some work that I thought was done, got moved and consolidated into a month period of time. This will all become clear next month.
But basically, I am doing an additional part-time job on top of all of my other part-time jobs. And so that, to me, suggests that I had already overestimated what I could bear. Because if one extra thing has really put me into this burnout spiral, then I was already over-committed. What are your feelings on this? Oh, yeah. I'm in the exact same boat. And I think you're spot-on.
Like, you know, I neglected everything I was doing in June to get through the rest of the Supreme Court term and then thought I would have all of July to catch up. But two, literally two, emails have thrown July into disarray and I'm now going to be working like every weekend for the foreseeable future. And there's just like really no way out of it. So there's just no margin. There's no breathing room. And but I can't quite identify what the like final choice was that got me to that point.
Well, the hard thing for us as freelancers is that there is no predictability. And you can try and account for things and you can try the way both of us are right now to work ahead and get on top of things so that you can actually go on vacation. But really what it does is it just like puts you into this incredibly wrong kind of busy ahead of your vacation.
And I think the thing that I've been thinking about is that like both you and I and a lot of other people that I know who find themselves in this condom have accepted amount of work and responsibilities that if we never went on vacation, if we didn't have any sort of spontaneous friend meet up, if we never got sick, if no one in our lives ever got sick, then we're willing to work probably six days a week like everything would be fine. Totally deliberate, right?
We're like, I'm not taking on too much. But that reality is if there is that margin, I'm like, yeah, I can take that on because I do have this space in time technically. But yes. And you have the creative energy to do it and you have the capacity technically to do it, right? And I think especially for those of us who came up working that way or learned to work that way, that level of full still feels like, oh, we've got room to go. I can still accept other things.
Instead of recognizing that full is actually like about half of where that was before. And that is a really, really difficult recalibration. And the other thing, like so many of us have realized this is that yes, I could keep at it even keel if none of those catastrophes happened. If I never took vacation, if I didn't have any room for friends, but that is a life that rotates around your work, not you having anything more than that.
And I think that that's really at the heart of the problem is that like, if we want to have strong connections and don't want to be lonely, if we want to build community, if we want to have rest and if we want to make room in our lives for each other and for our own care, we can't operate at that other level of full. But okay, we're just explaining why we're bad at it.
But no, I think we could, they can learn from our, other thing you've heard from me too, like as a freelancer is this is the first time in my life that I've ever had any say over how much money I make and I like making money and I finally again, for the first time in my adult life, can like spend money on kind of stupid stuff if I want to. And so I keep taking on more work because I like, well, there's more money to be made.
But my therapist dragged me recently where she was like, okay, but like at a certain point, like what is that money for? And I was like to see the world and she goes, oh, with all the time you don't take off. And I was like, okay, Rebecca. Right, right.
Yeah, so I think that the advice that I'm trying to take and I, like, I love that this question came in when it did because I was having a conversation with myself about this this week is that as I look to the future, I have to continue like every time an offer or a type of work comes in. I have to think like, is this something, again, I already operating at full levels? Yeah. Is this something that future me will feel absolutely overwhelmed by?
Yeah, God. And how do you have an honest conversation with yourself about that? Like, because I'm very good at talking myself into saying yes to things. And I think having people like whether it's, I send you things or I send like my fellow newsletter writer chat things, like having someone who can real talk me and be like, you don't need that. Yeah. You're already doing enough. You're already making enough money. It's fine. The future you think is so real.
I saw, it was probably on Twitter a long time ago, somebody saying like if somebody asks you to do something in the future, imagine they're asking you to do it tomorrow. And if it's not like, absolutely, I would love to do that tomorrow, then you're not going to want to do it in the future. Yep. Yep. Well, the other thing to emphasize here is that I want to have more space in my life to like offer mentorship and advice.
I want to have more space in my life to be a spontaneous friend, to spend more time in my community, like all of those things. I want to be the person who, when someone asked me to do something that is not related to work, that I don't think about future me, that like future me is like, no, you're not going to want to do that. You're going to be too tired. You're going to want to say no, right? Like, I want to be able to accept those things, but I can't.
Yeah. If I'm always saying yes to work things, because those work things offer me a sense of prestige and safety and money. Okay, so how do we get ourselves out of our conversation? Well, I do think that having someone else who can offer you perspective on these things is really useful. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that like, having seasons of no is also useful.
I really practice this at various points, like when I'm heads down on the book and that sort of thing, like, okay, everything that comes in, money or not, I have to be like, I over-scheduled myself and I'm now trying to compensate by declining a bunch of things.
Yeah. You know, Leah Litman, one of the hosts of Strix Grootney, is working on a book and she has an auto responder on her email saying she's going to be slow to respond because she's working on her book and she's also not accepting any new projects during this time, but thanks for asking. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then she doesn't have to like respond individually to everything that comes in. That's smart.
I also think, and this person is not asking about writing a book, but I think that's part of the problem and none of us should be writing books. Because books don't pay enough for you to actually focus on the book. So what you do is you do the book on top of your other thing. So unless you're writing a romance novel in your spare creative time like Melody, you shouldn't have. You can't use spare creative time as the point of one page in like three years.
I don't even, I just want time to pull the weeds on my garden. I've done that one time this summer. Well, and that's the thing. If someone looked at my life and they're like, you're doing too many things, like you shouldn't be running a microdalia farm. I'm like, no, that's the best part. I'm not giving that up. I need to give up the other things. Yeah. Um, all right. I think we answered that one. I think that was good. We mused. We do offer musings, not always advice.
Thanks so much for listening to The Culture Study Podcast. Be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. We have so many great episodes in the works and I promise that you don't want to miss any of them. If you want to suggest a topic, ask a question about the culture that surrounds you or submit a question for our subscriber only advice time segment, go to our Google form at tinyurl.com slash culture study pod. Check the show notes for a link. Today's episode is free for everyone.
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Just look in your email for a culture study promo code and you will figure out how to get that off. Alright, for this episode, this is a doozy. We have a lot to talk about here. But I think what I'd be interested most interested in hearing is how hearing from someone who had been inside and their reflections on the experience, how that has affected, textured, maybe changed or not changed your previous thinking on Tried Wives in general.
The culture study podcast is produced by me, Anne Helen Peterson and Melody Raoul. My music is by Pawnington Bear. You can find me on Instagram at Anne Helen Peterson, Melody at Melodius 47 and the show at Culture StudyPod.