Feminism and Future Societal Shifts

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That's the octopus energy entourage that they have built around you. A great satisfaction not having to tell your story for new every single time, which I think most major celebrities also feel. Hello and welcome to this special bonus series of The Restors Entertainment with me, Marina Hyde. And James Kanagasuri. Well, this is a turn-up for the Birks. I am so happy to be joined by you today, James, for any of our listeners and audience who don't know, James is an absolutely brilliant pollster um and all round great guy. He is the chief polling officer of Fo Focal Data. He's worked on how many election campaigns here and around the world have you worked on? A lot.? Double digits Double digits, unbelievable. Um he coined the term the Red Wool, which turned out to be quite quite a consequential piece of um our political language. I three weeks before Keir Stummer was uh elected, he talked about his sandcastle coalition. This was the idea that despite the likelihood that Keir Starmer would win a huge landslide, it was like a sandcastle, his victory built on nothing stable and liable to be washed away extremely fast to guess everybody makes mistakes. You know, it's solid, solid as a medieval fort, his his castle . But enough of politics because um as that brilliant pollster, James is plugged into all the currents and trends in public opinion that shape our world. And in this series, we are going to look at some aspects of entertainment and culture with that brilliant analytical eye. James, hello. Hello, Marina. I'm looking forward to this one in a advised way. We're talking about trad wives, the whole culture content. Now I will have to begin because what are trad wives? Um trad wives it it became a thing as a sort of internet trend, so we can immediately be suspicious of it. But it's a sort of submission to your husband in traditional gender roles. It promotes financial dependence on men. He's the breadwinner. He makes all the key financial decisions. It's different from stay-at-home mothers. We should say that, because there's lots of stay-at-home mothers who wouldn't have trad-wise. What does it involve? If you're online and you're one, it involves a lot of bread mak ing, homeschool, lesson plans. The Christian elements are often very strong. In terms of content, which is watched by the way by a lot of people who are not trad wives, so I don't know how we d w hate watching is always an interesting thing, but we can talk about that. Baking bread, like I said, homeschooling, cleaning by candlelight, really elaborate school lunches that you could never um flower ranging. It's all sort of aesthetically appealing. There's a kind of prairie wife homesteading thing to it all. Some of the big ones that sort of in terms of content are there's Nara Smith and she's got modelling and sponsorship and she's got a massive social audience. There's um Hannah Nealman. She's like a business and media brand but called Ballerina Farm. She used to be a Julia Ballerina, but sadly had to give that up after her husband um insisted on her um getting married immediately and, she's now got, I want to say, eight children. She's also got a multimilli on dollar media brand and millions of followers. I guess what I'd say to you first, James, is is Trad Wives culture big or do we just think I found myself in a conference last year about culture and it was f it was fine. It was quite good. And a guy called Adam Alexic, who calls himself the etymologist nerd gave a talk and it was on trad wives. And I think he's one of the world's experts on tradwives. And I remember at the time being like, what am I doing? Why am I here? Why am I not at home? He's basically he's an American based guy. He's very, very clever. He's basically has analysed where trad wipes have come from, why they're important, what it says about America's culture, kind of open my whole world. And I was pretty skeptical at first because I was like, what is this? This sounds pretty weird we. As you say it'sird. Can I just say it is weird? It is weird. It's an internet meme that he thinks came from 4chan, very well trusted source of of information in twenty nineteen. But I hadn't quite understood how embedded it is basically in meme culture. Yeah. So it comes from he thinks what he calls the tr uh the wo jack character. Have you come across the wojak character? You've probably seen the cartoon. It's the cartoon that's like of a guy that's kind of drawn where he's looking he's kind of grimacing. That's called that's apparently called the WoJack character, which is a big meme. And he described this as basically Tradwife came about for as a meme froff 4chan where you basically had Chad who's the idealised the idealised attractive guy that is talk about and then Tradwife is is his wife. Yeah. And they are part of what a dialectic I know this sounds completely ridiculous, with Doomer Girl and Doomer Boy, who are memes themselves. And this this became like a a thing in 2019. Because I tell you, when they're out there making their sad though, you're not thinking about any of this. No, but the provenance I think is really uh kind of important. And basically it just took a life of its own. People saw that, it became a thing, it took a life of its own. The reason why I thought it was really interesting, a couple of things. First of all, Adam saw it in a much larger context, trad-wise. So if you ever go on if you go on Instagram and you look at Ballerina Farm, and then these other things, the other thing is the colour palette, kind of slightly sepia, sepia colour, lots of pinks, lots of golds, lots of rose. It's a completely different lifestyle. And it's obviously not that trad because it these people are making millions and it's literally being filmed all day. But it has millions of followers. I was talking to someone at the Times who was saying their articles on Tradwife went off a scale in terms of traffic. So people are fascinated by this thing. Is it part of like burno ut culture and things like that? That you know, I went to Versailles of my daughter the other about two weekends ago. If you really walk a long way, you get to marry Antoinette Hallow, you know, which is you know when you can't really deal with the hecticness and the burnout of the actual palace and the court, you want your getaway fake place where you dye your sheep pink and you play it being some kind of shepherdess. Right. And we know that the pastoral idyll has been going for genuinely like hundreds of years, millennia, millennia. I mean, I'm not gonna say that you know those people were quite quitting. But were they? Well, luckily were the romantics quiet quitting. So I think there are two very different things basically going on. King's College London looked at this. So Julia Gillard, the ex-Prime Minister of Australia, has led a research project onto Tradwife with King's College London and we've run some research on it as well. We've been we've been looking at it. So since I met Adam, I was suddenly I just couldn't believe I'd missed this whole kind of vector of humanity. I had no idea what was going on. So I was like, I better take a look at this. So we did some polling and King's College London have also done some work. The first thing to kind of note is that people are quite ambivalent about it. It's not as hated as I think you would expect it. No, some people to be but there's a there's a yearning and we're definitely going to be using that word a lot in this series, but there is a yearning for that simplicity. I think that so so we we polled both the US and the UK because I had we had a hypothesis that people in the UK might be slightly different and in the UK about a third of the public. We described it pretty neutrally. Yeah. Um it's this particular life, you take on a certain role, the man does X, the woman does Y. It happens in this kind of cultural and aesthetic context. Fine, without judgment. And about a third of people in the UK thought that sounded quite nice. Forty-four percent of people went, uh , didn't really know, didn't have the view, twenty-two percent of people, so basically just above one and five. In the US, slightly more positive, forty-two percent were positive, forty percent said don't know, seventy percent were positive But again, it's not that the cultural penetration of Tradwife isn't high. In the UK, only one in seven people actually knew what it was and could explain it. So that I'm interested in what they think. And it's not how people live. It's not at all. Because people live in households where both people work. Or you have kind of more traditional setups that you would never describe as travel life. And it wouldn't be people having eight kids and a secret Instagram account that wasn't secret at all. That earned them hundreds of thousandss of pound a month. But the awareness is quite low. 64% of people in the UK had literally never heard of what a Tradwife was. But when we kind of looked into it, around half the public said they found aspects of it admirable and people should be free to choose. Twenty percent of people felt conflicted. They were like, mm, dunno. Sixteen percent of people just thought it was backwards and one in seven, which is I which is where I put myself, were pretty suspicious of it and thought it was kind of a social media performance. But if you go underneath the surface and you talk is is this about burnout? The answer is p partially. It's part of its appeal comes from people who feel burnt out and see something simpler and escapist. So we asked people who said, oh, that sounds okay, without under kind of without much context, right? They've never really known about it. We asked them one question about it. The top reason that people thought that it sounded appealing was the ability to focus on children without feeling guilty about not working. In other words, working and having kids is quite tough. This seems like a kind of basically an exit route out of that kind of tension. The second top reason was it was a slower, simpler pace of life compared to modern work culture. So people are saying something about the modern way of working. And then the third so the top three reasons basically are about stress, freedom of stress and pressure of a professional career. When you look at the people who are doing it, and I think that um Hannah Neilman's a case in point, I mean she is a massive brand, as I said, she was a bat ballerina, she's now a farm wife. There have been various interviews with her and the husband, and he never lets her off on her own. The comments underneath, there are people saying this is reproductive abuse. This is like an episode of Law and Order Special Victims Unit. She's exhausted. She's doing a beauty pageant 11 days after she's given birth and she's only to stop bleeding. It's all really intense. Sounds totally . Equally. Even those with fewer than 100 ,000 followers can earn several several thousand dollars a month. Some some who've got three hundred thousand followers, they're earning forty thousand dollars a month. These women are earning much, much more than our husbands. Some of them say, I don't even know how much I am. He deals with all of that for me. But it's like mm, but you are you are a mogul. The tradwives, a lot of the tradwives are moguls or want to be moguls. And what and why do you think it is that people are are who don't agree with it. Why is it of such interest, right? It's gone seriously viral. It's an easy way for a newspaper to get traffic. It's a little bit of a there's a lot of that s what I now have to feel I have to call like social media like OSINT, which is people who just want to find flaws in influencer stories, like they're doing detective work to expose them and say you're not who you say you are. And actually, these people, more than anyone, offer the most simple way to do that. It's like you're presenting yourself as this kind of pre-lapsarian bastardal beauty thing, and yet there must be there's probably two cameras on you at any one uh one time. Right. This is a massive business, you are earning money via platform s that we don't think of as having anything to do with farming. People love to see through it. And also, I'm sorry to say, people love to see plot lines in families that they follow. And they love to say, Oh my god, can you believe they're doing that to that child? And you know, the and there's been lots of exposures of YouTube families where you'll say people say, Oh my god, the mother gets them up every morning and they have to do this, it's really bad. Look how sad she's looking in this. Obviously there's things like Tatal Life in this country, but across Reddit, across everywhere, there are people dissecting this stuff and saying, This is not what we're being sold. We're watching, they're almost doing those kind of Netflix documentaries, true life documentaries about stories of abuse. I'm not suggesting that anyone particularly that I mentioned here at all is involved in one of those, but that people want to say there's such a gap between the image and the thing. And that's what people want to think about what they're shown for whatever reason , maybe because they're just shown so much these days. And they hate influencers as a class, really, generally, that people don't like influencers, or they say they don't, they spend a lot of time with them for people who don't like them. To me, it feeds into lots of conspiracy theories, which is the thing you're being told is not true and it fits in with that conspiracist zeitgeist. So on that, on the topic of conspiracy mindsets, I mentioned this guy called the etymology nerd. Yeah. Real n ame Adam Alexic. Uh this kind of American young twenty five year old who's bit of a kind of sage about Maha, where it's come from. He's tracked. That's Make America Healthy again. Make America Healthy again. But also trad wives. Yeah. And he said, look, it is about how people work and burnout and a sense that it's hard to have a career and to bring up kids, and about trade-offs and economic trade-offs. But he was far more interested in the cultural atmospherics around what he calls returnism versus futurism. And I remember being like, what's this guy talking about? And I I think what Adam was saying is that basically there is a growing orb of people in America, and I would say across the West, whose primary atmospherics are about nature, about analogue, about nostalgia, about being anti tech was very interesting. And that is related to other kind of aesthetics, like he mentioned something called cottage call. And I was like, what's Oh yeah. Well I was going to talk about this when we talked about trends. But yes. Neolodism. Yeah. And anti AI. I read about I read a survey last week, a America big, big survey th which found that something like forty seven percent of Gen Z want to live in the past. Right. And he was saying, look, there's there's there's this kind of axis of American culture where you know, some of it is returnism versus the futurism, which is about tech, uh this abundance kind of theory that's come out of of of of Silicon Valley and accelerationism, which is people who believe that the way is forward to embrace change, to go more, to go harder, is like avowedly kind of capitalist. And he was saying, right, you can talk about left, right, you can talk about Republican-Democrat. If you really want to understand tradwives, yes, it has kind of Republican versus Democrat coding. We've got some kind of polling on that, both in the US, but also how that transfers over to the UK. But he talks about this new axis of returnism versus futurism. And he was just like the aesthetics of Tradwife are absolutely critical. As you were saying to Cottage Corps in this survey of 47% of people who want to live in a cottage, which is somewhere along the lines, urbanism, futurism, a kind of culture that steers towards the future is not quite there. Now, we're you know, we're going to be talking in later episodes about music and Taylor Swift and music tastes. Yeah. And genericism. Genericism and the role of the past. But this is actually quite a similar theme, which is that uh trad wife is a kind of window into an alternative and other future that is far more rural. It's not just about gender roles and the polling around that and how people feel about that It does strike me as well when I think of all the type of content that they produce. And you know, I listed all those things like cleaning by candlelight and making these incredibly detailed school lunches things like this. All of these are things which one hundred percent you would not imagine AI will ever do. Right. And all of the things that are happening there you think people feel like this is a something that I could hang on to and actually the things that they are watching are very, very human. Even though it's kind of ridiculous because they're being done on the platforms and they're being done for money and they're making huge amounts of money and what have you. But the things that you are watching, in that slightly weird way that, you know, um sort of King Charles kind of fetishizes those Romanian peasants. He thinks Romania is this kind of amazing idyl. And I read a very interesting article shortly before he was crowned and he sort of went and thought it was absolutely wonderful and it's like but actually the people don't have any shoes and what they really, really want is satellite television and they want they want to Right they want the words and that's the access . Well that actually comes out from the polling. So we asked people in the UK, who do you think supports trad wives as a movement? The top one was nobody, because this is a very American phenomenon. It's not an American it's not a British one. First was Trump. Second was Farage. So that's political coding. The third one was the Princess of Wales at 18%. Fourth was Andrew Tate. The fifth was Nigella Lawson. God that's and then King Charles was also in the top ten. Isn't that interesting? Because actually think of the the content the Princess of Wales makes as an influencer, all the kind of I've survived cancer and I've done it via going back to nature, and these incredibly weird sepia I mean I think odd sepia control led versions of a form of influencing, really. Trevor Burrus, But it taps into something that I think is actually super mainstream, which is the changes that we see in the world. People are largely beginning beginning to think actually this change in this kind of future accelerationism isn't benefiting me. Whether that's technology And it may discard me entirely. Yeah. Whether that's housing, whether that's what how people live, whether that's what you do, whether that's how you bring up your kids, there is a strong mainstream seam of public opinion across both the US and the UK that maybe there is a way of looking back that is nostalgic, that actually is more is a better way to live. The reason why I think you get huge numbers of people who are like, No, I'm not trad wife, I wouldn't want to do that. I'm suspicious of it, but actually there are parts of it that I understand that I like. I think it sits on that bed of maybe backwards is better. And I think the we we haven't talked about the role of AI and the polling that came out of this, but Adam was very, very clear. He's a really, really interesting guy. I I was uh in America recently and I was like, let's meet up. And he was like, sorry, I can't answer my phone. And I was like, why? And he was like, Well, I'm hanging out with the Neo-Loddite no phone community in in New York. And he's spending time with them. And I found that super interesting because he's tracking what atmospherics are linked to what? And the fact that he's m already made that jump from trad wife to basically no phone usage, which is obviously one of the key it's one of the key things that we're all all now talking about, right? Which is like people going back to Nokia 3210. That's not Tradwife, but that's you know, that's somewhere halfway in between. No, all of this is friction maxing, or what everyone says, you know, or whatever it is, just making it harder. The dopamine hits coming less fast, basically. And yeah, what is obviously the big contradiction is that every single person is looking at this on their phone. Not that he's the total Jedi on the subject. But he you know Adam was saying that the online aesthetics are now shaping offline behavior. But basically there's now this paradoxical loop where you've got all of these people who are doing lots of offline stuff and then they simply come back online to say what they have done. So there's like a call and response feedback loop. So there's all a huge amount of social media content of people being like, right, I'll see you in a day. I'm gonna go and do all of these different things like grounding and making this and doing this and cutting wood and doing this and XYZ. And then I'm gonna return and talk about it. Dutifully talk about it. I want to talk about this on another one of our episodes, I have to say, because I yeah, I think that a lot of people work for the platforms . This episode is brought to you by Lloyd. Now I love it when characters are part of a club. You wouldn't know anything about that, would you, Richard? The Thursday Murder Club in some ways reminds me of the A Team. I would now like to map each of those characters onto the A Team and feel I probably could. 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I mean the other thing about the link between um make America healthy again. So you've you've given the kind of background to that, it's kind of forefronted by RFK. This idea that modern technology and modern science is is only truth adjacent, right? And that there are other wider truths that you can kind of tap into it's very very deep and that was the kind of the secret cohort of people that kind of Trump particularly in 2024 was really picking up on and I think it was absolutely critical to his like election victory and actually his brand and how he comes across is this Maha adjacency. And actually when we polled the US, we asked the same question of Americans like who do you think supports trad wives? Same people you would expect, come up top three. Trump, JD Vance, and then the fourth is RFK. So he's a I think we can really underplay the cultural impact of RFK, you know, eating roadkill, right? Yeah. As well as being a secretary. Because it's sort of adjacent to that I'm just a girl thing online where people kind of fetishise some form of female incapabilities. You can imagine I hate this. Is it the end of feminism? No, I mean feminism and polling is a whole book. I should t I should hope so. And a whole show. I think again our friends at King's College London, in looking at Tradworth, I've had a look at some of the the the polling on feminism. And actually, there's a a I have colleague at another firm called Scarlett McGuire who's recently done some polling on the role of young women for the New Statesman. Very interesting. Broadly, if you ask people, are you positive or negative about feminism? In the UK, it's like 51% of men say positive, 17% say negative. So big ratio, positive, negative, but substantial minority. Women is 69% and 8%. So broadly people are not necessarily wanting to um get rid of that paradigm. But what I would also say is that obviously there there is a divergence occurring and that that female-male difference right is even more accentuated if you ask not just someone's gender, but whether they're coupled up or not, whether they're single. So if you are a single man who's not in a relationship, only 42% feel positive about feminism, and the same number is 20% uh negative. Whereas if you are a uh woman who is in a relationship, that's 71% to nine. So again, you're talking about a kind of two to one ratio uh being outstripped by a kind of almost eight to one ratio the other way. So things are more complicated. On balance, almost every group is kind of pro it, but you are starting to see far more conditionality right in the polling around it, which was like I think there was one particular question that I thought was very interesting, which was like, have things gone too far? And if you look at that polling, those polling numbers are much closer together. People have always said that. But it's w y you think about when I think about polling and you think about uh cultural shifts that have occurred, m you used to have this thesis that there's a a great arc of liberalisation, right? Yeah. There's just simply I I don't I don't think that anymore. And I reckon a lot fewer of us think it now. It's not it's just it's simply not the case. Things can unfur. I think it's far more interesting that kind of gap, I guess, between younger women and and younger men is comes out far more in other questions not to do with feminism, but to do with other issues. So I found really curious in Scarlet's polling. Yeah. Which wasn't it didn't it got a right up in the new new statesman a little bit, but I thought it's far more interesting that men, if you ask, is the UK a racist country? Which is interesting, right? We're talking about adjacencies here. We've got this whole kind of nostalgia adjacency of trad wives. You've then got what's the link to feminism? And then I'm like, oh, you look at the polling. Isn't it interesting that 29% of men think that the UK is a racist country, but 57% don't. But the plurality of women do. Forty-three percent women think that Britain is a racist country, UK is, and 38% don't. And that's super interesting. Because you've got all these other questions of culture that actually are flip far more and are far more kind of uh kind of culturally important and and predictive. And so when I think about what what is is is the Maha Tradwife, cottage call ne,oludite, returnism, or vice. Fotion maxing. Whatever you want to call it. I think it is slightly separate to a liberal conservative axis. I think it bakes in this sense that maybe the future holds more terrors than the past. And also the fact that maybe accelerating fast towards the future of AI, of urbanization, of all of these different things may not be the best thing. As I said, all of those things that you see them doing can't really be done or nor nor would they ever be done by AI. But rather it rather in the same way that you see people are kind of wanting to have more live experiences, all of these things are which again they take m more time to do and they're harder to get to and they're what have you. But all of these things are a form of flight from what they're being encouraged to do, which is to to run joyfully towards accelerative future. You look at the polling and it's just all any any of the research, right, and is what people are gonna spend on average like but so anywhere between five and fifteen to twenty years on their phone. So we've sund ev every family now has a new family, permanent family member and it's called your phone. I want to talk about this when we talk about trends and trend culture a lot and the spirit of the age. So I'm gonna have to pause it there. But I loved talking about this subject with you um in in a in an advised way. Thank you, James. Thank you, Marina. See you next time. See you next time. Well, I hope you enjoyed that chat with James Canagar Sorian. We have got five more of those episodes to come. We are covering Gen Z's obsession with label everything, labelling everything, whether Timothy Chalamet was right about opera and ballet, that's a huge question amongst many of you. How Martin Lewis could actually go about becoming the next Prime Minister, and if my beloved Taylor Swift is in fact just really basic and generic. Join the club now at therest is entertainment.com for these bonus episodes, plus ad-free listening, a brilliant weekly newsletter and early access to all our big interviews. Plus, we have now launched our summer sale. It is 25% off for a full year's membership. That's just one pound twenty a week. Join now at the rest of com