Nara Smith is on a press tour for her new book, Homemade. And seriously, someone give her publicist a raise because this woman has been everywhere, including places she has no business being. The Bon App crew practically came out with pitchforks after her blender pancakes stunt. The main through-line of Smith’s press tour, though, is essentially ‘I’m not a tradwife, actually, I’m a girl boss’. Every piece of media I’ve seen from her – which is a lot – highlights how hard she works and how much work she does. This quote from the Guardian Piece is really revealing:
‘What is staggering about Smith is that as well as devising and researching the recipes themselves, she does all her own styling, makeup, art direction, video editing, voiceover and mixing, spending upwards of eight hours a day on one 90-second clip. Her agents and managers beg her to take on help. “I always say no. I am very type A.” Type A? “Very rigid, very scheduled.” Her assiduous attention to detail and devotion to her “art” mean “I’m still figuring out where to relinquish control”, she says’.
I guess this was supposed to clarify something about our parasocial relationship with Smith? But I’m not sure it’s achieving what it thinks it is, because mostly she sounds boring and anal and not that cool. What she’s trying to do is distance herself from a regressive feminine politics. What she actually does is double-down on ‘have-it-all’ feminism, which is just the flip side of a shitty oppressive coin.
The copy for her cookbook makes this abundantly clear: ‘You may think you know Nara Smith―the glamorous outfits, the soothing ASMR voice, the beautiful family, the seemingly effortless approach to making food from scratch―but behind it all is a working mom with a relatable goal: preparing nourishing whole foods for herself and her family’.
You see it right? The implication is that if she can have it all and do it all, so can you!! That preparing nourishing whole foods for yourself and your family is what a ‘good mum’ does. Even when she also has to work a regular full-time job, and carry the mental and emotional load, and do all the physically demanding care work.
This is not a relatable goal to me. My goal is to get through dinner time as quickly as humanly possible without losing my fucking mind. My goal is to Abolish The Family Dinner. My goal is to have more time and energy for rest and leisure and hanging out with my kid. Not creating ten million dishes that need to be washed.
