Women’s School Can’t Fix MAGA Husbands

Is it difficult to enjoy your husband’s company? According to content aimed at conservative Christian women, the heaviest cross they can bear is learning to feel affection for their spouse — or at least faking it enough to buy some peace at home. That’s what I learned while browsing the growing number of influencers offering advice to aspiring professional women on how to make MAGA weddings work.

“Normalize loving your husband,” reads a T-shirt sold by Savanna Stone, a 21-year-old self-proclaimed marriage expert who sells content preaching marital submission with the support of shady far-right backers. At first glance, this may seem like an insignificant concept. But, as Stone makes clear in her video content, her definition of liking or even liking a husband is both laborious and ascetic in the extreme.

“Submission is not earned, it is granted through a marriage covenant,” Stone explained in a video. If a husband makes bad decisions, she says, it’s his wife’s fault because she doesn’t submit enough to give him the “confidence” needed to “assume the masculine role.” During her speech at the 2026 Turning Point USA Women’s Leadership Conference, Stone encouraged women to marry young, like she did at 18. If they don’t, the risk is that they will “build their own lives”, which she defined as “the death of marriage” because “two separate lives do not merge easily”.

Stone attracts a lot of attention due to her tender age and richly produced content. But she is part of a growing group of Christian influencers, most of them quite young, who present themselves as experts on marriage. Some dress in fashionable and sexy clothing, like Stone, while others prefer prairie-style dresses. Some are podcasters or video hosts; others offer online courses with names like “Wife School” or “Wife Academy.” But the message remains the same: They all speak of the deep disappointment and frustration that many Christian women seem to feel toward their husbands. The solution, however, always seems to be that women need to let go and submit even more to their men.

Recently, Alex Clark, the host of TPUSA’s “Culture Apothecary” podcast, married another Christian influencer after what appears to have been a whirlwind engagement lasting just a few months. (Not recently, in May, she lamented her lack of viable marriage prospects.) In the run-up to her nuptials, Clark hosted her own series “Wife School” that made marriage so miserable that a viewer’s only reasonable conclusion was to avoid being a wife altogether.

His first guest, Tilly Dillehay, got to work chastising women who are “difficult” because they want something from a husband beyond just a man who is “active in his faith” and makes enough money to “provide for a family.” Dillehay presented herself as an example of a woman who failed; she said she dated “casual” men, which seems to be her code word for having fun. Instead, even though she was “not immediately attracted” to her husband and he was not attracted to her, Dillehay still married him because he is a “steady man”, “serious” and not prone to “joking” like she is.

If that sounds like a formula for a miserable sex life, well, Dillehay didn’t seem to care. “God commanded you to participate” in sex with your husband, she said. An added incentive is that it’s “a way to protect each other from infidelity.”

“Half the time,” she says, “it’s only at the beginning that you start to get in the mood.” » What happens the other half of the time, she didn’t say.

“Remember, there are a lot of women whose husbands are at the bar tonight and who aren’t coming home,” Dillehay said. “There are many women whose husbands are not going to work today. It should be “enough,” she added, to have a husband who works and goes to church.

Dillehay’s view is particularly chilling in light of a recent Netflix documentary “The Death of the Pastor’s Wife,” which chronicles the suicide of Mica Miller, who spent years trying to satisfy the ever-increasing sexual demands of her pastor husband. This expectation does not appear to be an exception. As Dillehay showed in her interview with Clark, the view of sex as a wife’s duty is deeply rooted in conservative Christian culture.

Stone gained attention by saying that consent is not part of marriage. “Because when you say ‘yes,’ you’re committing to a sex life,” she explained in an interview earlier this year. “‘You didn’t fold your laundry. I’m not going to have sex with you. You didn’t unload the dishwasher. I’m not going to have sex with you.'” Citing these scenarios, Stone mocked women who withdraw sexually from their husbands, calling it “manipulative,” or even “sinful,” to feel that way.

Feminists might say that it’s hard to get in the mood with someone who doesn’t respect you. This opinion, however, carries no weight in MAGA circles. Yet there is clearly a lot of resentment among some conservative Christian women toward their husbands who don’t do the chores. Trying to quell anger over this is perhaps the most common topic in Christian marriage counseling content.

In her series “Wife School,” Clark interviewed her new sister-in-law, Katie Voetberg, a prairie dress-clad podcast host and mother of six, about how to avoid being a “nagging wife” and a “constantly dripping faucet.” Voetberg’s comforting advice? Give up all hope of having a responsible husband. If your husband forgets to pay the electric bill, she says, don’t remind him or hold him accountable. Instead, “light a candle” and hope he learns from the “embarrassment” of his failure. Presumably the wives in these relationships do not control the money, or could pay for it themselves. In cases where women have a little more power, Voetberg recommends simply doing all the tasks the husband can’t be bothered with.

“He hates going to the dentist” or doctor, she explained, so “I just put it on my to-do list” to make his appointment. Even when a husband doesn’t perform “stereotypical husband duties” like mowing the lawn or taking out the trash, she continued, the wife should take care of it and say, “it will never reach (the husband’s) radar.

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Other influencers agree. Millicent Sedra, a rising Christian right influencer who is pastor of Echo Church in Sydney, Australia, recently preached that wives should “stop complaining about having to help their husbands when our God-given role is to do just that.” Another of his sermons focused on Proverbs 21:9, which says: “It is better to live on a corner than to share a house with a nagging wife.” »

Laura Zachary, the creator of “Wife Academy,” billed as “a program for women to rebuild their marriages from the inside out, explained in a video why all household chores should fall to wives: “Women were created for a man. So a woman without a man to take care of, she becomes very empty, very soulless, very bitter. But Zachary’s logic is flawed: If cleaning toilets and doing dishes while their husbands relax on the couch was actually a natural inclination of women, then she couldn’t charge women thousands of dollars for classes that would teach them to love a submissive life.

Often these lessons of denial are presented to Christian women as a rebuttal to feminists. As a marketing ploy, it’s clever, but it’s not entirely honest. Feminists don’t listen to this content, and even if they came across it, they would simply move on. This does not spark a “debate”.

The real audience for these messages are Christian women, a fact that is telling in itself. The fact that these classes exist shows that, despite being told it’s their “natural” role, Christian women don’t really like to submit to their husbands. If women were willing to have sex in their conservative Christian marriages, there would be no need to tell them that it is their duty to have it, whether they like it or not. Obviously, many Christian women hate domestic inequality, otherwise they wouldn’t have to be told to accept it.

Why is there a “wife’s school” but no apparent equivalent “husband’s school”? Men in this situation are perfectly fine; they benefit from a system set up to serve them at the expense of women. As long as this remains true, it is inevitable that women will feel frustrated and resentful. “Wife school” cannot actually make women happier, because it reinforces the male domination that is the source of their pain. But it can certainly make men’s lives easier, if teachers can get women to stop complaining and instead learn to serve their master husbands in silence.