I Met The Trad Wife on Only Fans

Our new film has literally just dropped, and the link is below. It's the last in what has somehow turned into a trilogy about trad wives. When we started on this earlier in the year, I thought we were making one film. Then it became two. Then, while we were in Miami, we got a message that turned it into three.

The message was from Anya Lacey (or Anya Matusevic, depending on where you know her from). She's an OnlyFans creator with over two million followers on Instagram, and she got in touch after watching our first trad wife film, the one about Savanna Stone, because she wanted me to know that she agreed with Savanna. She doesn't think women should vote either. She doesn't think most women should work. If she ever marries, she told me, she'd be giving her husband full control over her decisions and her body.

She also makes her living selling adult content online, mostly to men, and despite having issues with gay rights in America, some of her content involves intimate content with other women. A chunk of the internet has decided she can't possibly believe any of it and that the whole conservative thing is a marketing angle. She says it's all real. So I went to Florida to spend a day with her and find out.

A day in a monster truck

It's a strange day. Anya picks me up in a lifted black truck with wheels nearly as big as my head, and we go to a gun range where she shows me a custom rifle that she says Trump once fist-bumped her over. We tour her house, which has a room full of Lego and a room she calls her OnlyFans room, and I won't describe what's on the wall in there, you'll have to watch. I meet the man her followers call Hoodie Guy, who plays her boyfriend in her skits, sleeps with her on camera, sees her six days a week, and is also, it turns out, her full-time employee. For a woman who doesn't think women should be working, she has a payroll.

I spent a lot of the day trying to make the contradictions add up and mostly failing. When I asked how someone who wants a traditional society squares that with having sex on the internet, she said that if someone offered her the full traditional life tomorrow, she'd give up OnlyFans without a second thought. So I asked why she doesn't just do that now. Her answer was that the world we live in isn't traditional, so the scenario is different. I pushed. She pushed back. At one point she told me I love a loaded question, which I took to mean a question that challenges her views. And I'll admit, I am a fan of those. It's kind of my job as a journalist and documentary maker.

But somewhere in the Lego room she said something that shifted how I understood her, and it's the reason this film ended up being about something other than what I expected. If there was one message she wanted women to take from the documentary, she said, it was don't do what I do. For her, it was a job that came with negative consequences. If she could wake up tomorrow in a society where she didn't have the right to vote and didn't have to do any of this, she'd take it, because she thinks more women would be happier in that world than in the one she's in.

That's not really a film about politics any more. It's a film about a 20-year-old, the daughter of Belarusian immigrants who spent her childhood trying to hide that she spoke Russian, who has built a career out of a version of herself that she doesn't actually seem to like, and who told me, in her kitchen, that she has nobody to talk to about any of it. She'd like it to be her mum but doesn't want to burden her. She wants eight to ten kids but because of her work is frightened she'll never meet anyone who'll have her. I'll be honest, I came away more confused about why she believes what she believes than when I arrived, and also with a lot more sympathy than I expected to have.

As with everything we make, we didn't go in with a verdict. Watch it now, discuss it in the comments, and tell me whether you think she means it. I still go back and forth.

For the members

Freddie and I sat down and talked through all three films properly for a members-only series, and part one is on the site right now. It's the stuff that doesn't make the cut: how we got access to Turning Point with three days' notice, what it was like watching the Cory reveal happen in real time, why Laura's film seemed to land differently with people than Savanna's, and what it was actually like spending a day with Anya compared to what she looks like on a phone screen. If you've watched the films and want to know how the sausage gets made, it's at zand.land/join.

That members area is also now the single best way to support what we do. Everything we make for our YouTube is self-funded, these three films included, and the membership is what lets us keep doing it. Members get the behind the scenes stuff, all our films in one place, and 15% off the merch, but mostly they get to know that films like these exist because of them. If you've been meaning to, now would be a very good time.

Three films, one strange world

So that's the trilogy. Savanna Stone, “the most hated trad wife on TikTok”, headlining a Turning Point conference with a millionaire investor behind her. Laura Zachary, who runs the UK's only trad wife academy, sitting across the table from a feminist for a day. And now Anya, who lives in an even more confusing version of all this.

The first two films have had close to four million views on YouTube between them, which is more than anything we've done before, and the third is out today, so let's see how it does. Having spent the best part of a year inside this world, the thing that strikes me isn't really the politics. It's that all three women are, in one way or another, doing the same job. They found a niche, built an audience by saying things most people disagree with, and turned that into a living. Which is what a lot of people do now, in a world where being a content creator is one path to apparent freedom and self-determination away from the drudgery of the 9 to 5. The issue is how you know when the need to feed the algorithm has started to distort what you actually believe. We get to spend a whole day with someone and put the nuance back in, whereas a sixty-second clip has to flatten a person into a position. That gap between the clip and the human is basically what Zandland exists to film.

Thanks as always, Zandlanders. The film's out now, and I'll be in the comments. I may be a touch quieter than usual over the next couple of weeks, for reasons regular readers will know, but the team has things well in hand.

Ben Z

PS. Our next film moves us on from the trad wife investigations and into a completely new world. It's a Halloween special, in which I try my hand at magic and investigate the world of witchcraft. Tune in in a couple of weeks.