Welcome to yet another episode of being a stay-at-home girlfriend, Helen, 25, says in perfect English with a New York accent. The woman is trending on TikTok for showing her day-to-day routine while her boyfriend goes to work. Her videos have more than two million views and are part of the #SAHGF trend, Stay At home Girlfriends, which means in English to be a girlfriend who stays at home while her boyfriend supports her. It has accumulated more than 165 million views.
The lives of these girls consist of supporting their boyfriends and carrying out household chores such as cooking and cleaning while maintaining an almost military regimen over their body, their skincare and his gym. One of her most important duties as kept women is to always be beautiful for their boyfriends, Helen explains in her videos.
The phenomenon reflects how the new generations are moving away from the figure of the girlboss or productive women who defined a way of being in the world essentially millennial: The Zetas now aspire to a more comfortable life. The influencer Erika Wheaton has 25,000 followers to whom she shows what she defines as a “realistic” life with her boyfriend, while he leaves her money every morning and she doesn't work. She goes to the grocery store, does laundry, runs errands and cooks. In the afternoon, she goes to Pilates, shops for clothes at her favorite boutiques, and goes to dinner with a friend to end the day. Wheaton, like many of these women, says that her boyfriend allowed her to quit her 9 to 5 job to dedicate herself to herself and that her only job was to always look perfect.
“I start the day playing with makeup from Sephora that my boyfriend gave me, I take the dog for a walk and I receive the food that my chef sends me because girlfriends who are housewives don't cook,” Helen explains in one of her videos. The reality is that these videos are monetized by big brands for which she advertises. This proves that she has her own income, although her lifestyle and the success of her networks is based on saying that she does not work.
It is true that a “Stay at Home Girlfriend,” if viewed from a more cynical point of view, is simply what was once called “a stay.” What is new is her presence on TikTok, a network that fetishizes the customs of its users and makes them desirable for many of its followers. Janira Planes, brand strategist at HAMLET Strategic Makers and specialist in Internet culture, explains that what is happening now is that “these trends are born from imitation. The trend comes from wanting to be at home and not work, it has its origins in a certain disenchantment with life. They are movements that are born at a social level and that find a form of visual expression in networks. It is no coincidence that the #SAHG are young women belonging to the late generations millennials and Z who grew up with a false promise of economic security.”
Digital marketing expert Valeria Silva, from the Delirio&Twain agency, highlights another aspect of TikTok that may be interesting to understand this phenomenon: it is a network that serves to compare each person's life with that of others. “Many times when hashtags they turn into trends It is because users imitate the behavior of someone whose lifestyle they have found desirable. Seeing that the routine of many women is to dedicate themselves to everything except going to work, many others also consider their own existences.”
Nor can we ignore the political implications of this trend and its clear relationship with a phenomenon that emerged four years ago, the Trad Wives, promoted by Alena Kate Pettitt on The Darling Academy, a digital platform that defends and promotes this lifestyle based on the role of the traditional wife. During 2020, Alena was one of the most mediatic faces of this movement that also took shape on the Internet and manifested itself in real life. Even then she explained without any embarrassment why she changed her job as a school assistant. marketing for full-time domestic work. Claiming the satisfaction of having a freshly baked cake with which to “de-stress” and “surprise” her husband when he comes home and defending an autonomy that, as she explained, consisted of using the monthly allowance that he gives her to buy as she wanted. food and their own expenses. “I am the CEO of my own company, the person in charge of the house,” she said. None of her statements were free of doctrinal intent: the origin of these communities was shown to be linked to the white and male movements of the alt-right thanks to a New York Times report titled The wives of white supremacy.
Whether these links exist in the case of the #SAHGF remains to be seen.
The most famous of them, Kendal Kay, has recently offered her testimony in the magazine Newsweek and very soon it is understood that all that glitters is not gold: “I am often criticized for not being financially independent but I feel very secure. I get asked a lot: Isn't what you do too risky? Isn't that financial abuse, too? The truth is that I don't often talk about this in my videos but I think that for any woman who decides to lead this lifestyle it is very important before ensuring a certain financial autonomy. I, for example, have savings from when she worked a lot. And I am also able to generate $2,000 a month with the content I create on networks.” That is, not having a job is her job, a pose she cultivates to monetize.
The move is undoubtedly smart. A study from Stanford University on the behavior of users on networks published in 2021 concluded that the content that goes viral the most, that is, the one that becomes a trend, is the one that violates people's cultural values. In the era of fourth-wave feminism, that may be happening to the kept fantasy.
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