Maximally Likable: The Stay-at-Home Girlfriend and The White-Collar Woman
As day-in-the-life videos proliferate on social media, we are granted windows into lifestyles different from our own, ones algorithmically ordained “entertaining.” Take the simultaneous rise in popularity among “Stay-At-Home Girlfriends” (SAHGFs) and “work from home women” on TikTok. These two camps of women find themselves embattled—and their conflict, illustrated in vitriolic comment sections and apathetic “parody” videos, reveals a certain flavor of psychopathology enmeshed in working culture under a technologically-mediated late capitalism.
Formally, these two strands of day-in-the-life videos exhibit many similarities. Usually under one minute in length, they present a soft-spoken, manicured woman working and taking care of herself and her home. They employ the intentionally soothing, monotone narration ubiquitous on TikTok and feature trending background music. The demographics of each group is predominantly white, college-educated, and conventionally attractive (at least the ones that bubble to the surface of your For You page).
The SAHGFs appear to overwhelmingly share characteristics of the white middle class—they extol individualistic pursuits and emphasize both their college degrees and former work history as status signifiers. They typically make it known that they used to have a job, but prefer the “soft” life that they now choose. They could work, they maintain, but why would they when this deal is on the table? The implication is that the ambient boyfriend (and it’s always a boyfriend, never a girlfriend), hovering on the periphery of the video, is earning enough money to support them both.
Their videos usually consist of meal preparation, skincare routines, and exercise, but they also instruct viewers on how they too can become a SAHGF: you must meet the right people and look a certain way (read: meet the Western beauty standard). These videos make overt the labor to keep oneself beautiful, which includes tactful minimal caloric consumption, toning exercises, numerous elaborate facials, and hair and nail grooming. The videos also detail the work one can put in to manufacture and operationalize likability, especially in upper class circles—which, ironically, seems to be absolutely critical to any kind of career in business: Many videos about networking touch upon strategic proximity to wealth and power, presenting yourself to suit a situation, and subtly massaging men’s egos in order to be perceived as maximally likable. No wonder SAHGFs seem to strike a chord among the predominantly female commenters who bemoan the entire premise:
“What is a stay at home girlfriend? Unemployed?”
“Contributing nothing to society”
“dear journal… I have a vapid life. The dishes were so exciting. No one cares.”
The lack of specificity in these comments, which denigrate SAHGFs on indistinct and subjective grounds, suggests that projection is in fact doing the heavy lifting of meaning-making for these commenters. These judgments elucidate how very brittle the terrain is upon which SAHGFs trod.
On the other side of the day-in-the-life video trend, we peek into what it’s like to work at a coveted, in-demand tech job, such as a Product Manager at LinkedIn. For the average middle-class white-collar worker, the pandemic ushered in a comfortable era of labor that leaves substantial time to produce TikTok videos about the joys of the remote corporate lifestyle. Yet there is a conspicuous lack of detail about the actual “work” in these videos, other than sending emails (a hilariously recurrent task in both types of videos).
For a SAHGF or a white-collar woman, what constitutes a day worth sharing? As many influencers note to viewers suspicious of omissions of “real life” or quotidian mundanity, social media posts often serve as highlight reels. And the highlights for both types of videos are uncannily similar. The multi-step skincare with oils in tincture bottles, the soft-toned hand weights and yoga mats, and inexplicably, the daily consumption of a dried “greens” powder which promises impressive nutrient density. Many of these similarities boil down to a day centered around consumption. This includes maintaining an attractive, manicured appearance prepared for algorithmic distribution. The starkest difference in the actual activities among the two types of videos is that there are more shots of work at the computer for the WFH camp.
Seldom do viewers gain insight into the actual tasks or goals of whatever work is being done on the computer. The lack of work is so visible that many of the day-in-the-life corporate videos sparked a distinct uproar online, wherein viewers deemed these cushy roles the apotheosis of “bullshit jobs.” This outrage cycle notably occurred before the recent wave of massive tech layoffs, after which there has been a marked drop-off in videos gloating about a day full of perks sans work. Best not to boast about any extraneous perks as the job market currently stands; surely someone from HR is watching, and will not look favorably upon your little joke next time the market dips.
Any apparent vitriol between the two camps is to be expected. Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class details how the pervasiveness of America’s white middle keeps class structure intact by enforcing certain social norms and shaping normative attitudes about culture. She describes an undercurrent of low-grade moral panic about an ever-moving target of generational or cultural characteristics: “Like affluence, permissiveness crystallized in the middle-class fear of going soft, giving in, and eventually losing the will to succeed.” This sentiment is at the crux of both the fascination with and knee-jerk disparagement of SAHGFs: in their own words, they have gone soft and vocally do not wish to succeed in any kind of career.
Amid wage stagnation, historically low union membership and mass corporate layoffs, it’s increasingly common among young people to lament the precarity and Sisyphean nature of a corporate job. We can’t afford houses, it’s going to be difficult to retire before age 85, and haven’t you heard of climate collapse? Why bother? Or so the sentiment goes. The majority of people under 30 are downwardly mobile in the U.S., with most of us on track to make significantly less than our parents. It’s unsurprising that attitudes toward work have soured.
No shock, then, that there’s been an incredible increase in subscribers over the last couple of years to anti-work subreddits: r/antiwork, r/latestagecapitalism, r/ABoringDystopia, to name a few. They offer community, commiseration, and solidarity. Among both zoomers and doomers, it’s becoming more socially acceptable to not want to work. White-collar prestige for young people is rapidly becoming passé, even “cheugy,” to borrow from TikTok parlance. The pearl-clutching uproar over “quiet quitting” and “resenteeism” among corporate managers and Wall Street Journal opinion columnists betrays an awareness and acute discomfort about evolving contemporary attitudes about work.
Given the tendency for many Millenials and Zoomers to regard dismal work prospects with increasing suspicion, or outright nihilism, a cursory review of the SAHGF landscape appears to present an alternative. Instead of cooperating with the labor market, how about circumventing it completely, and refusing any potential confrontation with its whims? Which raises the question, do SAHGFs represent a peregrination back to 1950s housewifery, with the focus on aesthetics and maintaining a manicured appearance?
Not quite, and this is where SAHGFs, who do not have children and are not married, are a notable departure from contemporary “trad” subculture, which does espouse the virtues of cooking, cleaning, and childbearing. The tone of the SAHGF is different—often defiant—in her insistence that her lifestyle is her choice. The Stay-At-Home Girlfriend landscape exists outside of the well-trodden battleground between professional working women and stay-at-home moms. There is no mainstream feminist script for this, beyond the notion that the girlfriends are “leaning in” to not working (surely to Sheryl Sandberg’s disapproval). A comment thread on TikTok illustrates this dynamic: “‘What happens if he leaves you?’ Girl I’ll get another job? I don’t need this life, I want it.” “COULDNT HAVE SAID IT BETTER MYSELF.”
As we trudge through the swamps of income inequality, egg inflation, and social media entertainment at the expense of our attention spans (or something more insidious), it’s unsettling that most of the insulting comments directed at SAHGFs come from women.
“Stay at home girlfriend is just code for loser with no future plans”
“Maid”
“She just seems so uninteresting. Like what about you is intelligent? You don’t even read. You do skincare for like a million hours & say ‘routine’”
“Stay at home girlfriend? Is that a future line in your CV?”
The “maid” comment in particular reveals how ridiculously sexist and anachronistic the insults on the videos are, while the snide remarks about work read as projection in many cases. This reveals how each group’s relationship to labor differs; the SAHGFs have temporarily (or permanently) excused themselves from the labor force, while the “work from home women” have a more prosaic relationship to money: they earn it through wages. This leaves little room for dalliances. Though many comments appear to stem from the perceived societal position of SAHGFs, it is unsurprising that there surfaces a defensiveness about how work informs one’s status and self-worth in contemporary American society. Another common variety of comment focuses on the woman’s appearance and clothing, an attack so outworn it barely requires mentioning.
In the book White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, Nancy Isenberg details the Puritanical roots of ambivalent American attitudes about social mobility: “Puritans never opposed commerce or the acquisition of wealth, but were clearly conflicted when it came to social mobility. The government enacted sumptuary laws, penalizing those who wore rich silks or gold buttons in an attempt to rise above their class station.”
Although sumptuary laws are no longer legally enshrined, punitive and suspicious attitudes about women who attempt to move up a class, and how they look while doing it, abound. The evidence of contempt is a bleak window into contemporary middle-class anxiety. And though times have changed, the righteous ethos that hard work prevails above all else, and that there are no shortcuts (so don’t try anything crazy), remains a fixture of middle-class sensibility. By policing how women who don’t work but instead receive money from a partner present themselves, cruel commenters enforce a kind of casual, millennial sumptuary code. Now, instead of protecting those who are born into wealth, these comments codify the middle-class relationship to labor: it is a moral imperative that all must work, and those who needn’t are not only threatening, but reprehensible.
Looking down one’s nose at “lower class” women trying to move up a class is nothing new. But the flavor of careerist pointedness about how people spend their days feels symptomatic of a grander dissatisfaction with working life and what remains of social mobility. The virality of the SAHGF images, and the subsequent meaning-making we collectively impart upon them is evidence of their potency. Erenrich writes: “The image of the baby being force-fed ‘goodies’ neatly summarized middle-class anxieties about affluence. At least adults had some ‘inner resistance.” It is insulting to the middle-class sensibility to see women sauntering through their days, replete with self-care and time for exercise, tea, and snacks, with such ease. For the middle-class worker, opting out of the labor force is a “goodie” we must resist if we are to remain rectitudinous.
Of course, social enforcement of normative attitudes ensures that they can exist and persist. TikTok contains an ability to simultaneously show us the world, then collapse us back into our smaller ones, through a distressingly effective feedback loop. In each group—the white-collar women striving to climb the corporate ladder, and the girlfriends striving to be as beautiful as possible to live comfortably and attend pilates classes—the women are living in a certain fashion, and reflecting their values back to viewers. Once the audience widens to people living in a wildly different fashion, via the alchemy of machine learning algorithms and the outpouring of human misery, we are confronted with a paper trail of comments at the nexus of these two converging, divergent worlds.
bell hooks once wrote that “the emphasis on work as the key to women's liberation led many white feminist activists to suggest women who worked were ‘already liberated.’” If corporate job TikToks evince a mere slice of liberation, the prevalence of caustic comments on the SAHGF videos suggests the girlboss’s fragile positionality. The waning virality of corporate America for people under thirty is largely sustained by middle management, brutish busy work, and the duality of American competitiveness and its upwardly-mobile aspirations. It can’t be sustained if women opt out, whether they’ve been radicalized on r/antiwork or are living today as a SAHGF.
I read hundreds of caustic comments from what would seem to be maladjusted working adults, yet their responses should be read as utterly system-specific. They remind me that every individual navigates a particular system with a certain set of rules that contribute to a collective paranoia that there are no concrete codes, structures, or oversight governing “success” for either choice, beyond a degree of financial security. But a SAHGF’s lifestyle can be abruptly and irreversibly withdrawn from her, should her relationship take a turn for the worse, leaving her vulnerable to the dating “market.” And a market dictates that anyone working for any company can get laid off, at any time.