tradwife conspiracy theories

actually, this whole issue is about girl performance art on the Internet

Discussed:

🍞 tradwives are lying to us

📺 why we should be messy on YouTube again

📓please don’t read my diary…I mean notes app

Hiiiiii girlie pops.

So Substack rolled out this feature called “notes” and I’ve been posting on it like it’s Twitter in 2015, which is to say, a few new girlies are subscribed to this little newsletter and I want to welcome them!

If you’re new here, Internet Bedroom is a newsletter about girl culture and nostalgia. Every other Wednesday, I pick out a few relevant items of girl culture past and present and…I don’t think I actually provide that much deep thought or cultural critique but I do have fun writing about them.

And I sincerely do not know what got into me this week, but this is maybe the messiest issue of this newsletter that I have ever penned. I hope you love it <3

obsessing: tradwife as performance art

If you are a girl on the Internet, you probably don’t have to travel that far afield of your algorithm to find tradwife content. The art of housewifery has proven itself to be endlessly adaptable to both the perfectly curated imagery of Instagram, with enough elements of a side-show attraction to ensure enduring virality. Tradwives promote a lot of what social media likes to push: whiteness, traditional femininity, conventional beauty, consumerism, the idea that you can have six kids, make sourdough from scratch, butcher cows, and win beauty pageants.

I think that Sophie Elmhirst nailed it when she identified tradwife content as a fantasy that is alluring to followers who are burnt out, tired of job instability and “economic insecurity, or tempted by the promise of a single, coherent identity gathered around a distant, simpler time.”

But, girls, let us be so for real: when we are watching tradwife content, we are in it for the recipes. And this is why many of us absolutely, under no circumstances can look away from Nara Smith’s page, which I can only describe as tradwife-lite blended, apparently, with Wattpad fanfic realized (I wish I didn’t know what this is).

Nara first popped up on my FYP when her husband (of Wattpad fame) took her on a shopping trip that ended with her purchasing an engraved Louis V duffle after eating a quesadilla from Chipotle (and buying a new computer, most of Williams Sonoma, and a Bottega bag). She has since gone repeatedly viral for discovering apple slices; considering naming her unborn child Bubble or Frosty (said child is now here and named Whimsy Lou); and making her toddlers cereal from scratch, among other things.

Now, a lot of TikToks have already been stitched discussing Nara Smith, but none have been quite so interesting to me as this girl’s read of Nara:

@natalyatoryanskiThat voiceover hook be silly asf

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Tradwife as real, earnest lifestyle? Boring, played out (in the 50s), repetitive (how many more videos can I watch of you baking bread). BUT TRADWIFE AS PERFORMANCE ART???

Not to go down the rabbit hole, but I feel like Nara cosigned this read of her content because she made bubble gum from scratch this past week.

@naraazizasmithwho doesn’t love bubble gum! #easyrecipes #homecooking #candy #bubblegum #fypツ

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remembering: the era of Storytimes

I often have the desire to just turn my brain off and descend into madness for 45 minutes to an hour. And back when I was writing my dissertation in grad school in the mid-2010s, I escaped both my terrible home life and the demand that I be very smart (because I was a doctoral candidate) by watching Tana Mongeau Storytime videos.

I truly believe that Storytimes are a genre of YouTube video that the girls need to bring back. Like, fuck demonetization and algorithm-speak and well-researched videos about why BookTok is ruining literature (no disrespect to Mina Lee tho). I desperately want to hear about the time your sugar daddy ended up being a dog walker on Rover (I made that up).

And I do not want to listen to a podcast!!! I want you to sit in front of the camera in your cavernous apartment and talk to me like we’re at a slumber party. The Storytime video is truly becoming a lost art. We got a taste of it earlier this year when one brave soul dropped about 60 TikToks detailing her marriage, but I fear that mess is slowly being driven off the Internet thanks to monetization, and I, for one, will not stand for it.

reading: ur notes app

It is a truth universally acknowledged on the internet that a girl’s notes app holds the secrets to the universe. Or at least, a universe. Her universe. And when some guy noted on Twitter earlier this month that, “A women’s [sic] Notes app is the most interesting thing in the world,” many girlies took to TikTok to share a snapshot of their own notes app.

And yeah, there is something freeing about an app that doesn’t want anything from me. I read somewhere that social media is our collective unconscious, but my notes app tends to just sit on my phone or at the bottom of my computer screen, waiting for me to pour into it my unconscious. My grocery lists, the texts I’ll never send to people I’m mad at, a letter to my dad, the beginnings of stories I’ll never write and phone numbers and email addresses and account numbers. I don’t know what any of these things are for or who they go to. There’s a note that just reads “kimchijigae” beneath a text I drafted when I was fighting with my husband and then a list of stuff to get at Target that only includes “a trash can.”

When I die, please no one open my notes app. Thank you.

Ok that’s all I have for you this week <3 thank you so much for reading and for being here. I have a few long-form things I’m working on like a zine and an essay about girlhood essays!!! I just love writing, don’t you?

xxx rachel moss