Kenneth Glad
Scroll through almost any social feed and you will meet quiet kitchens, sourdough bread, and calm domestic order. For millions of viewers, that aesthetic offers an escape from daily pressure. Behind the serene lighting, trouble is brewing.
Prominent influencers who built huge followings by promoting submissive marriage are walking away. Among them is Bernadine Barber, once known online as Bernadine Bluntly.
The 36-year-old mother of six previously sold anti-feminist clothing and ran courses coaching women to land traditional, masculine husbands. After leaving her husband and securing a restraining order during their divorce, she publicly apologised.
In a confessional video, Barber said she now rejects extreme gender roles, “especially when they’re wrapped in spiritual language and used to justify control, silence or harm.”
She added that the tradwife space has “become indistinguishable from the current wave of the red-pill manosphere”, according to The Guardian. Her ex-husband denies her abuse claims, while Barber told her audience: “If my past content contributed to that, I am so genuinely sorry.”
Even megastars of the homemaking genre are feeling the heat. Influencer Nara Smith, who married at 18 and cooks in designer outfits for millions of online fans, told the newspaper there is no secret “agenda” behind her clips.
Meanwhile, Ballerina Farm creator Hannah Neeleman, a mother of nine who documents ranch life in Utah for over ten million followers, recently responded to criticism by offering to listen. As Neeleman put it, “If there’s things that I’m sharing that people think are actually doing harm to our sex, then OK, let me take the feedback.”
Leaving with nothing
Behind the polished clips lies a harsh financial trap. Jennie Gage spent 24 years in a marriage where she was forbidden from holding a bank account or working. Raised in a strict Mormon household, she entered a church program at 12 where leaders trained young girls to iron shirts and clean toilets.
Decades later, she bought weekly groceries using cash stuffed inside an envelope, forced to return items whenever the allowance ran short. When she walked out in 2018 after discovering her spouse with a sex worker, she had to crowdfund her legal fees and borrow from friends just to stay afloat.
“I can’t go back and undo my past and erase all the horrible things I had to go through,” Gage told The Guardian. “I’m out to fight women not being financially safe.”
She now urges younger women to secure prenuptial agreements, establish spousal trusts, and set up independent retirement savings. Without money of their own, walking away can feel impossible.
Author Tia Levings lived through similar isolation inside the Institute in Basic Life Principles, an authoritarian religious group whose founder later resigned amid sexual misconduct allegations. Church leaders simply ordered Levings to obey her abusive husband more whenever she sought help.
Before social platforms exploded, Levings blogged about cloth nappies, beans, and home-baked bread, creating a cheerful facade that hid escalating violence. She eventually fled in the dead of night when she suspected her husband had gone to retrieve a firearm.
Now holding custody of their four children, she warns that pretty family blogs hide severe risks of control, lost education, and physical danger. As Levings explained, she had to act once she realised she was teaching her kids that treating women this way was normal.
Dropping the act
Former conservative activist Lauren Southern recently stepped away as well following a 2023 divorce. At 19, she went viral after releasing an online video titled “Why I am not a feminist”, later getting barred from the UK in 2018 over hardline anti-Islam rhetoric.
She eventually walked away from the submissive lifestyle she once championed. In a self-published memoir, she explained that an alleged sexual assault by internet figure Andrew Tate forced her to confront her former beliefs about rape culture. Tate has strongly denied the claim.
Reflecting on her years online, Southern compared the entire lifestyle to live role play. She confessed that even when her husband vanished for days after bitter arguments, she would still stage cheery videos cooking parmesan chicken and showing off fresh pies on Instagram, desperate to project the dutiful homemaker. Right-wing circles, she pointed out, impose harsh moral expectations on women while treating them like symbolic tools.
“I can’t change the past, I can’t give myself information I didn’t have when I was younger,” Southern reflected, choosing to tell the truth. Unlike other former creators, she still holds traditional conservative values and refuses to apologise for her past rhetoric.
For Levings, who watched the submissive trend collapse before its first generation of children even grew up, listening to older women offers the only real shield against repeating those mistakes. Now, speaking out remains the only way to warn others before it is too late.
