The rise of stay-at-home girlfriends – UnHerd

On a summers day, TikTok influencer Gwen The Milkmaid can be found frying up all-American comfort food dressed in a floral prairie dress. I dont want to be a boss babe. I want to be a frolicking mama. I want to spend my days baking bread, cuddling chickens, and drinking raw milk straight from the udder, she writes in her TikTok caption. In another video, she smiles beatifically at her nearly 50,000 followers, giving the camera a view of her ample breasts as she bakes a fresh sourdough loaf.

Gwen is a self-proclaimed trad-wife, one of a number of women across TikTok, Instagram, and Reddit forums extolling a return to ultra-traditional gender roles and financial dependence on a male partner. Like the swinging dicks of WallStreetBets and crypto bros, the online trad-wife is an expression of 21st-century financial nihilism. Disillusioned by the girl-boss feminist fantasy, these young women are turning to men to pay off their loans and fund their lifestyles. And, why not? Thegood lifeisnt coming any other way.

Growing up, Millennials and Gen Zs were sold a false promise of economic security and self-entrepreneurship. They were raised to believe that if they only worked and studied hard enough, success was in their futures; failure was a personal blight. Born between the mid-Eighties and early 2000s, their identities were shaped by the vacuum of post-Communist politics (I was sent, aged five, to a fancy-dress party styled, not as a Disney princess, but as the Berlin Wall). There was no sense that the future would be anything but Game Boys and capitalism.

It turned out not to be so easy. The speculation and excess of the Dot-com era, followed by the 2008 financial crash, undermined faith in the economic system, while the public investments in health, education and housing that Boomers enjoyed have been switched out for volatility and risk. Somewhere along the way, the dream of the good job and the good house was replaced by an acceptance that the good life could not worked for, or bought, or built. What began in general rumblings about why we cant have it all progressed to a sense that maybe nothing matters anymore.

If some men respond to this creeping nihilism by staying in with the curtains drawn, YOLOing their rent money on Tupperware stock, some women are choosing to retreat to a time when things felt more secure: the Fifties. Today, women are not only expected to parent like they dont have jobs, but to work like they dont have children. Often, they are expected to do both of these things without the public resources (affordable childcare, healthcare, and education) or social supports (neighbours, family) that previous generations enjoyed. So really, is it any wonder that we just want to watch a woman bake sourdough? Trad-wife influencers embrace the lives second-wave feminists fought to leave behind the role of the housewife, her routine, her wardrobe, but also, if the bimbo ethos of no thoughts, just vibes is to be believed, her lobotomised outlook on current events. Betty Friedans sedated housewife in the suburbs is no longer a cautionary tale; suddenly shes a manual for survival.

Of course, its no longer necessary to be an actual wife or mother to retreat to the home: nowadays, you can be stay-at-home girlfriend. While the trad-wifes job, steeped in post-war nostalgia, is to keep her home and family, the girlfriends main project is to keep herself: thin, young, and desirable. She is her main project and her job is, as Jia Tolentino has written, to always be optimising.

Take Kendel Kay for example, whose boyfriend Luke Lintz is the CEO of Highkey Enterprises LLC. This is my typical day as a stay-at-home girlfriend, Kay intones in her flat little voice to her more than 500,000 followers on TikTok, sounding more like an Alexa than a real woman. Every day is more or less the same: beginning with a sun salutation in athleisure followed by various forms of superior hydration, iced waters, green smoothies, and matcha teas. There are small household tasks sprinkled throughout the routine, inconsequential things such as refilling ice trays, lighting candles, and watering the couples two lotus flowers. The work of content creation aside, Kays job is her own self-care, from workouts to complicated probiotics meals and 12-step skincare regimens.

Kay is one of a number of stay-at-home girlfriends now active on TikTok. There is also the content creator Aliyah Wears, whose videos are filled with sample sales and fat-melting treatments. In one video, she asks her boyfriend how much do I owe you? at the end of dinner, while showing the camera her empty purse. Its ok, its on the house, her boyfriend says, sliding out his card to pay. Then theres Shera Seven, who dispenses caustic dating advice such as make sure the second date is a money date, which means shopping, some kind of gift or spending a lot of money. The faster you get him to spend money, the faster you get him to attach to you. Sprinkle Sprinkle.

There are tangible differences between the stay-at-home girlfriend and her older sister, the trad wife. While the trad-wifes invisible breadwinner tends to have an honest profession that would be at home in a country music song farmer, electrician, carpenter the girlfriends partner usually has a lucrative career in tech or finance. And where the OG housewife, like her carpenter husband, can be seen to do real labour, such as laundry, childcare and vacuuming, the stay-at-home-girlfriends work is mostly vapor. Contrary to the Victorian mother and Fifties housewife who was the angel in the house, devoting herself to the needs of others, baking cakes that were perfect every time, and raising tomorrows workforce, Tolentinos optimised woman is a trickier breed: shes #thatgirl on TikTok whipping up kale smoothies, shes the girl-online, the influencer.

While some women find Kays existence perplexing, many do not. Watching these videos in between school drop offs, work meetings, and cleaning up Lego is strangely soothing. I understand that I am being sold a lie, but I dont want to think. I want to vibe. When having it all means doing it all, theres an allure to doing almost nothing. People used to ask me whats your dream job, Kay writes in one video caption. I dont dream of labour. I dream of living a soft, feminine life as a hot housewife. Its as simple as that.

Many people criticise trad-wives and stay-at-home girlfriends for setting feminism back decades. Despite what Gwen the Milkmaid would suggest, the Fifties wasnt a golden age for women if Betty Friedan (who actually lived through it) is to be believed, many real housewives got by on silent desperation and a permissive approach to benzodiazepines. For decades, women had to make do with care work, staying home, and a weekly allowance. And women the world over still do, not by choice, but by necessity. For this reason, many feel trad-wives are romanticising financial dependence, and maybe even financial abuse.

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The rise of stay-at-home girlfriends - UnHerd