“Giving conservative preppy trad wife with an OnlyFans on the side,” says Noelle on X, who describes herself on the social network as the “dorkiest hot girl you will ever meet, mildly witty, woman in STEM (I boss around engineers).” Her description includes a link to her OnlyFans profile. She’s part of a new wave of women espousing conservative values and proudly embracing the role of the perfect domestic goddess — but with a twist.
The twist involves OnlyFans, a platform that already contains another twist: it began as a way for influencers and content creators to provide their followers with extra or more curated content in exchange for a monthly subscription. But (and this is the twist) the extra content quickly became sexually explicit material. This platform, then, should be considered by these conservative women as a digital hell. However, people like Anya Lacey are part of a new spectrum of tradwives with OnlyFans accounts. That is, conservative housewives who show off their naked bodies on social media and make a lot of money doing so.
“Does your dad know about your job? You’re a Christian but you have OnlyFans!” Lacey, who is 19, asserts in a TikTok video that makes it clear she’s aware of the contradiction her persona contains. “We all have phones, we all have social media. And if you can be traditional and at the same time make an income off of showing it to the world and promoting it to the world, all the better to you,” Lacey explained in an interview with Mashable.
She has also created a dating site (note: only for dates with herself). “I’m Anya Lacey, a former pizza delivery girl turned top-tier content creator who built a massive audience by offering unapologetic dating advice. I’m a conservative woman who wears red lipstick and believes in God, country, marriage, and traditional gender roles. And yes, I like to look sexy saying it,” she explains on her website. “When men present themselves as providers and protectors, women relax into their femininity, and everyone wins,” reads the caption accompanying a photo of her posing in a bikini adorned with the American flag.
In another image, she poses with a swimsuit model holding a machine gun in front of a huge SUV, and in another, she kneels beside the bed with the message “we pray before we play.” She makes her principles and ideology clear to potential partners. “I’m a staunch conservative who believes in the America First agenda. Gender isn’t a vibe, it’s biology. Both masculinity and femininity are good. I don’t split the check on a first date. If you want a friend, find a gym buddy. Monogamy over intimacy is my rule. Secure borders, secure families,” she asserts.
She started posting nude photos on OnlyFans and by the end of last year had left her job as a waitress. Many people are talking about the the reverse scenario: OnlyFans content creators who have become tradwives, like Gwen the Milkmaid. “I call it early retirement and I think it’s brilliant. Make money on OnlyFans, get rich early, and become a hot tradwife with followers,” reads the Mostly Peaceful Latinas account, commenting on this phenomenon while sharing an image of milkmaid.
Searches for “wife” and “marriage” skyrocketed significantly last year on Pornhub. Searches for “traditional wife” increased by 34%, and for “tradwife” by 72%. Relationship coach Michael Swerdloff comments on this growing interest. “As women become stronger, feel more empowered, and feel more confident, men who struggle with their masculinity and feel threatened may want to get aroused and masturbate in front of women who make them believe they are the man of the house, in order to feel less threatened.”
“Tradwife content isn’t really for women. It’s for men who want submissive wives,” journalist Jessica Grose titles an article published in The New York Times. And in The Cut, Kathryn Jezer-Morton explains that Instagram tradwives feature purely conservative aesthetics, while TikTok’s are much more ideological and obscene, with fetish dresses, tight aprons, and milky-white cleavages. “This is strictly observational, but I’m guessing the people driving this material are men,” journalist Max Read tells her in the article.
“These figures seem to me to be a clear example of the prevailing hypocrisy of our time, which continues to stigmatize and scorn sex workers. They are promoting a super-rigid idea of what femininity is, what it means to be a woman, and the role of women in upholding the status of the traditional family, when by having OnlyFans, they are actually businesswomen, which establishes a profound contradiction,” says the journalist and writer Noemí López Trujillo.
“It is important to take into account the gender bias that continues to exist in these types of ultra-capitalist discourses that say that we are all very free, we all have to be entrepreneurs and we can all do whatever we want with our bodies, but coincidentally it is women who have to sell their bodies and we, men, who buy them,” says Aaron Saez Escolano, author of Solo para fans (For Fans Only).
Some people see no difference between OnlyFans creators and tradwives, such as a Reddit user who started a thread titled “OnlyFans is a natural evolution of what traditional wives were.” “OnlyFans models do the same thing as a certain ideal of the female romantic couple: they act as sex objects for money,” he adds.
The fantasy of women who are both sex objects and caring housewives was also reflected, long before, in many Playboy articles: the bunnies, let’s remember, were waitresses. That is, sexy women who served men willing to pay. And popular U.S. fast-food chains like Hooters valued their waitresses’ cleavage-filled service to a predominantly male clientele.
In the 1970s, Ira Levin’s novel The Stepford Wives transformed the myth into a disoriented science fiction story: men began replacing their wives with perfect robots who were also cleaning machines and sexual pleasure machines. And it coined the term “Stepford wife” for those women who seem to combine both. Like Anya Lacey.
The problem with figures like Anya Lacey is that they send the message that depending on a man is positive and desirable, but they do so while making money through their OnlyFans content. These influencers, if they separate from their husbands, have their own income thanks to their videos (whether on OnlyFans or cooking for millions of followers on Instagram), while the women to whom they sell the benefits of being financially dependent on men usually do not have an independent means of support, which often ends in financial or economic gender-based violence.
Furthermore, they promote chastity and decorum while posting nude content on their profiles, selling the idea that we should opt for a modest look while they profit from taking off their own clothes. They deceive women, but also the men who fantasize about them, as Nerea Pérez de las Heras claims on the radio station La Ser. “They make you dream of 1950s mamas, but all those girls are earning money, filing quarterly reports, negotiating with clients, checking their audience statistics, and reading the news.” Because tradwives, whether they flirt with OnlyFans or not, earn money. And a lot of it.