Last month, politically conservative OnlyFans creator Anya Lacey started advertising a “husband application,” which she’s ostensibly using to find a follower who will make her a “tradwife.” But really, her new website—dateanya.com—is a cross between a dating app and a self-improvement boot camp for interested men.
Lacey shares nude photos on her OnlyFans—but “I’m not sleeping around with 10 different men, like what Bonnie Blue’s doing,” she tells Vanity Fair. Her largely male followers “want a relationship. Obviously I can’t be an in-person girlfriend to 500,000 people.” So she launched Date Anya because “there needs to be a way that people can really hone in on what they want. There’s been a lot of pushback, because people want a pill. They don’t want to make fundamental changes in their lives.”
She says she’s looking for a man who dresses well, communicates, and wants to live a “godly” lifestyle. She also wants one who takes charge. “Let’s say me and my future husband have differing opinions,” she says. “If he hears me out, I’m happy. But whatever he thinks is best for the household, at the end of the day, I will follow him in that.”
In theory, putting something in the dictionary is supposed to settle its meaning once and for all. But already, Cambridge Dictionary’s definition of tradwife—which the reference manual added just a couple months ago—feels out of date. According to that dictionary, a tradwife is “a married woman, especially one who posts on social media, who stays at home doing cooking, cleaning.” today, though, it seems that the word has become an umbrella term for a still-shifting set of values, one a woman needn’t be married to espouse.
The social media phenomenon of the tradwife is usually traced back to the pandemic era, when social distance and doomscrolling led increasing numbers of women to the feeds of influencers who were dolled up like 1950s housewives or doing Laura Ingalls Wilder cosplay. But as the conservative manosphere reached peak saturation after last year’s election, a market opportunity emerged for the women who see themselves as those men’s potential partners. In this space, tradwife is less of a literal descriptor and more of a marketing term for a woman who is willing to put herself second in her real—or theoretical—marriage.
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