Nara Smith, the internet's greatest troll
*Oscar Isaac in TROS voice*: Somehow, Amy Explains returned
Our country is descending into a state of fascism. Right wing grifters are pushing the slogan “Make him a sandwich.” Our vice president is announcing that he “wants more babies in the United States” while attending events that support forced birthing. The mainstream media, for some fucking reason, cannot stop profiling pronatalists who hit their kids in public and and say things like, “I would be happy to die in labor” for the sake of having more children.
And Nara Smith is at home, making Cheerios from scratch.
It takes five hours.
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What’s a tradwife?
The phrase “tradwife” emerged in mainstream social media in the late 2010s. The term refers to a “traditional wife:” a woman who believes and partakes in traditional heteronormative American gender roles, specifically those that focus on homemaking and motherhood.
The difference between an average stay at home mom and a tradwife is that the latter emphasizes that it’s a woman’s imperative, biological duty to be a mother and homemaker, with the sole motive of submitting to and serving her husband. It’s also not just a lifestyle that they’ve adopted for themselves, but something they actively preach to other women to adopt as well: they believe that it’s intrinsically a woman’s role in this world to be a mother and wife.
The “trad wife movement” has grown intensely over the last 10 years in tandem with a slew of alt-right content that hearkens back to an over romanticized idea of Americana aesthetic, and the MAGA-fueled delusion that the picture-perfect 1950s straight, white, nuclear family cultivated peak happiness and social stability.
Who’s Nara Smith?
Nara Smith is a 23-year-old model turned social media influencer who documents her life on TikTok and Instagram. She is married to another model named Lucky Blue Smith, and they have three kids together named — this is very much real and not a joke — Rumble Honey, Slim Easy and Whimsy Lou. All three kids are under the age of 5. Their family is Mormon, but Nara infrequently speaks about their religious beliefs.
Nara’s lifestyle videos are usually structured like this: Someone in her family, whether it’s her, Lucky or one of their kids, suggests they eat something. Nara appears on screen wearing an extremely elaborate designer outfit. Nara proceeds to make the aforementioned food from scratch — and we’re talking from real, real scratch. If she’s cooking a lasagna, her first step is making mozzarella cheese out of milk and citric acid.
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The internet’s response to her has been a mixed bag:
Fans praise Nara’s lavish lifestyle and beauty, saying her handcrafted meals look “sooooo yummy,” fawning over her doting husband and adorable kids.
Detractors jab at her wealth and the overt opulence she showcases not only through her expensive clothes and house, but also with how she utilizes her time. While we all toil away at our underpaying jobs in times of unprecedented inequity, you get to sit around wasting seven hours making ice cream sprinkles from scratch.
There’s something deeply unnerving about someone taking mundane tasks — cooking, packing, homemaking — and turning them into a signifier of unattainable extravagance.
Let’s pause for a big caveat here: Nara Smith is a Black woman, and historically, the internet has proven to be extremely hostile towards Black women — in some cases, Black women simply existing is enough to warrant coordinated attacks. There’s no doubt in my mind that some of the backlash towards Nara Smith is rooted in anti-Blackness, and she has therefore received a disproportionate amount of criticism.
That being said, Nara Smith has still grown to be one of the most prominent creators in the (I won’t call her a tradwife, necessarily, more on that later) domestic labor influencer space, and deserves a certain level of balanced scrutiny for the ideology that she takes part in.
So what’s all this then
For months, I’ve watched Nara’s videos with both horrid fascination and frustration, simultaneously entertained and agitated by this woman’s uniquely opulent lifestyle. That is, until I saw this video.
“We were about to go to bed when I realized we were all out of toothpaste… So my husband went downstairs to make some.”
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And it finally dawned on me, “Wait… She’s trolling us super fucking hard.”
Nara Smith wants me to believe that she and her husband “forgot” they were out of toothpaste, but also conveniently had a tub of bentonite clay in their pantry so they could just make some instead of buying it?? She wants me to think that this insane outfit is her go-to uniform for chopping potatoes?? She’s telling us things like, she was considering naming her baby… “Dust”??????? This woman is actually the greatest troll of all time!
Nara Smith content teeters on the line between opulent luxury and deranged fantasy: she’s found the exact spot that gives her the best of both worlds between rage bait and actual aspirational content. Do I want to be her? Or am I mad that our class system allows for her to exist at all? Either way, she doesn’t care, because I’m still watching. And for that reason, I think she’s a genius content creator who has cracked the code to maximizing engagement.
So then… she’s just a person?
I categorize Nara as an “apolitical tradwife:” She doesn’t appear to have an explicit political agenda. She’s never advocated for others to adopt a lifestyle like hers. She’s never expressed that she thinks other women should have more kids or stay at home to be a homemaker. She has found fulfillment in her identity as a wife and mother, but she’s not trying to tell other women that they will too.
And yet, she still enforces tradwife values by presenting traditional homemaking as a luxurious dream. There’s no toilet cleaning or vacuuming or laundry doing or wiping of her toddler’s puke. It’s just the serene acts of making sourdough, sending her handsome husband off to work and drinking tea in designer gowns.
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In a perfect vacuum, there is absolutely nothing wrong with what Nara Smith is doing. She’s raising a family, she’s taking care of her home, she’s pursuing her culinary hobbies, she's carving out her space as an internet creator.
But we don’t live in a vacuum. Nara Smith did not just fall out of a coconut tree, she exists in all of the context that came before her, and that context is a society that demands for women to play caretaker and homemaker and dutiful wife and be perfect and be hot and be palatable for the rest of the world to consume. The context is a society that is quickly sliding backwards in time, that devalues women’s work and is pushing them in to the home with the intention of controlling and demeaning them.
Nara Smith has stated multiple times that she doesn’t hire any secret nannies or maids or chefs and to that I say… I don’t believe you! I literally don’t believe you! You’re telling me that while you’re spending three hours making bread, peanut butter and jam from scratch, your literal newborn baby is just changing her own diapers? This is a fantasy! This life only exists if you are extremely wealthy!
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Content like this, coupled with our country’s conservative shift and Gen Z’s sloppified TikTok brains, is making too many girls think this is real. Again I’ll reiterate that you can find so much joy and fulfillment in a traditional domestic parent role, but I can guarantee that it will look nothing, absolutely nothing, like Nara Smith’s life.
All of this is to say, this isn’t even really about Nara Smith. This is about the larger social movement to sell a fake fantasy of domestic godessness to women with the underlying motive of suppressing our autonomy and identity.
Being a homemaker and a mother is a wonderful, legitimate job that brings fulfillment to many women’s lives, and it’s a lifestyle that many people hope for. Most women would love to wear lavish gowns and spend time with their children and build a beautiful home. But when it comes to Nara Smith and these other tradwife influencers, it’s just not real. And I’m tired of these content creators pretending like it is.
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