Trad Wife Discourse is everywhere. It’s been everywhere for a while, in part because it offers a twisted fantasy of ease to women who are attempting to negotiate life, and family, and career in a society whose policy is actively hostile to women working outside the home. But I’ve seen a spike in interest in the ramp-up to the 2024 U.S. presidential election, where a Trump victory — paired with the explicit goals of Project 2025, J.D. Vance, and Christian Nationalism in general — will make trad wife life just, well, life. It doesn’t happen overnight. It happens incrementally, as choices are very slowly taken from you, or made more attractive. To get to what lures women into this life, and just how difficult it is to escape, I wanted to talk to someone who gets it in a way that those lurking in the Instagram comments simply cannot. So today we’re talking with Tia Levings, who left her trad wife life and, through a bunch of therapy and processing and support, figured out how she wanted to tell her story.

Content Warning: In our conversation, we talk explicitly about emotional and physical abuse and coercion. If you’re not in a place where you want to listen to that discussion, I’d suggest skipping this episode.

• Tia Leving’s book, A Well-Trained Wife, is an absolute must-read. As Melody put it: I’m not even a memoir person and I devoured it. You can find it here.

• You can find more about Tia, her work, and how to book her for interviews here.

• Tia’s Fundie Baby Voice TikTok (I also recommend exploring the rest of Tia’s Toks)

• Tia is also in the Amazon Prime documentary Shiny Happy People, about the Duggars, Bill Gothard, and the Institute for Basic Life Principles. Here’s the trailer:

• I didn’t talk about this in the episode, but I highly recommend Seyward Darby on the place of trad wives in the white supremacist vision of the future

• My piece on Trad Wife Life as self-annihilation and some reflections on the recent Ballerina Farms discourse, which ramped up after we recorded this episode

• Why is Paul Mescal so hot

• Sydney Sweeney (and Gen-Z Stardom)

• Learning to craft / make things / hobby-around-the-house

• For our continuing series on romance novels: QUEER ROMANCE

• Artificial Intelligence (we’re gonna see if we can figure out an actually interesting theme here, so send us your weirdest or most mind-boggling questions)

• The economy, a.k.a. why is everything so damn expensive right now (my dream here is like an Odd Lots guest who doesn’t have private equity brain, please let us know if you have suggestions!)

• Contemporary ideas of self-care

• Buy Nothing groups and/or the current state of the secondhand market

• Anything you need advice or want musings on for the AAA segment

• You can submit them (and ideas for future eps) here