The Public is Way Too Hard on Nara Smith
Criticism of Nara Smith is largely rooted in the fact that most people can't take a damn joke.
I would hate to be a popular public figure. People talking about me and making up their own determinations of me and my character would drive me to…well, let’s just say it ends with my mom and sister bickering about where I said my will was.
People are just…dense. I’m even nervous about defending an influencer while writing this. It does not matter if the claim has merit. So many people are driven by righteous indignation and just seeing “influencer” will set them off. I could go on a whole rant about people who perceive themselves as liberal intellectuals and overestimate their ability to offer thoughtful criticism. A lot of them miss the mark completely and just end up being assholes.
Case in point: Nara Smith.
Her latest controversy is an interview she did recently on Call Her Daddy. She was asked about trad wives and responded by saying that she, Nara, was not a trad wife because she worked. Well, that set people off.
Some people said she promoted the trad wife movement. Is she promoting the trad wife movement or is she just home a lot and has a bunch of kids?
Some people say the proof that she was promoting the trad wife movement was that she added #tradwife to earlier videos. Like…and? I’ve used #catmom on a photo. I am aware I did not give birth to my cat.
There’s also the fact that Nara and the woman who runs Ballerina Farm have spent time together. But they’re both Mormon content creators with large families. There are clearly other things to connect on. Ballerina Farm actually promotes trad wife culture with that whole farm situation she has going on. Nara lives in a wealthy Connecticut suburb and has shown us videos of her going to a grocery store.
The bigger issue here is that 1) most people make assumptions based on as little information as possible and 2) they also have no sense of humor. Nara Smith’s videos show her wearing designer gowns while making things from scratch in the most inefficient way possible. Her whole brand is clearly a joke, rooted in absurdity. So many people miss this. They think she’s serious and all their judgments are based on that misunderstanding. If anything, it’s actually kind of a mockery of trad wives.
People saw the cooking from scratch and the four kids, and projected trad wife. Nara didn’t even want four kids - she’s openly talked about how she wanted to stop at three but then had an oops. One less kid and she’s in an extremely normal range of children. As for the cooking, we’ve seen people wasting huge quantities of food on TikTok, and even that gets less ire than Nara making bread, jam, and peanut butter from scratch. It’s weird.
I’m tired of people being so unnecessarily hard on women.
Also, reminder: she’s 24. That frontal lobe ain’t even developed, yet she’s supposed to apologize for not predicting the rise of a huge cultural phenomenon? Please.
Trad wife culture isn’t even new; it used to be called hobby farming. As for the public interest in trad wife culture, that’s actually people who are tired of their life/jobs reacting to a desire to reconnect with the earth and nature, and live a simple, uncomplicated life. Why are we shifting societal failure onto Nara Smith?
Once again, we are redirecting the failures of capitalism onto women.