Aussie ‘trad wife’ movement exposed: ‘I’m not looking for a dog’
Amber Basanovic (right) with her husband. Photo / 60 Minutes
A former Married At First Sight contestant claims his controversial claim on wanting a “submissive” woman was misconstrued as an expert warns against the growing movement he wishes to be part of.
“Trad wife” is one of the latest trends to take off on the internet, used to describe women who want to stay home and take care of traditionally feminine roles such as cooking and cleaning while their husbands focus on making money.
Queensland woman Amber Basanovic told 60 Minutes she and her husband divvy up the “blue and pink jobs”, telling reporter Amelia Adams “nothing compares to the fulfilment that I feel being at home” supporting her family.
She spends her days making honey for her family after she became burnt out and quit her job as a corporate operations manager for a global makeup brand.
“I was always career driven. I had goals of what I wanted to achieve and then I just started getting burnt out and having a family too changed everything for me,” she told 60 Minutes on Sunday night.
“You want to be a good mum, you want to be a good wife, you want to be there for yourself too. And being so time poor … I couldn’t do it.”
She isn’t the only one caught up in the trend: MAFS contestant Tyson Gordon, who drew controversy in the programme’s 2026 season for saying he sought a wife “that’s submissive”, told 60 Minutes he is looking for his very own trad wife.
He claims he had used the wrong word while on MAFS and had meant to say he was looking for a “traditional” woman rather than a “submissive” one.
“So submissive was the wrong word to use. Traditional is the word I was looking for and traditional is a word I wanted to use,” he told 60 Minutes on Sunday.
He also told the programme he is not looking for someone to “serve and obey” him.
“I’m not looking for a dog, I’m not looking to put my wife on a leash at all,” he said.
He wants to be the “provider and protector” to allow his future wife time to focus on bonding with their children for as long as she wants.
However, Gordon emphasised he would support his future wife regardless of whether she wanted to return to work or stay home.
Gordon added he wants his future wife to “have time for herself”, too.
“I don’t expect to chain her up in the kitchen and say, ‘Make me a sandwich’,” he said.
“She’s not just going to be locked up in here all day. It’s nothing like that.”
“There’s really nothing wrong with wanting a traditional relationship in this, in this day and age. I think if you can financially support it, then why not?”
Director of The Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at London’s Kings College Professor Heejung Chung agreed with Adams that the movement is a “step backwards for women”, saying it appealed to men who were trying to “claw back their masculinity”.
“Men have lost ways of feeling, being a man … I can’t really be a protector because she’s a strong, empowered woman. So what do I have left?” she told the programme.
“So in a way, this is a way for men to kind of try to claw back their masculinity.”
She added one of the allures of the movement is “false nostalgia”.
“I think one of the dangers of what the trad wives are showing is that what they’re depicting never existed,” she said.
“This whole idea that, oh, in the 1950s, women were able to be, look pretty and leisurely kind of break bread from scratch never actually existed. There was a lot of housework to be done. There was a lot of drudgery.”
She said being a housewife without financial independence could lead to issues with autonomy and spoke of the disturbing attitudes among young men uncovered in her research which found a third of Gen Z men believed women should always obey their husband.
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