‘Stay-at-home girlfriend’: Girls maintained by their boyfriends are trending on social media

Welcome to yet another episode of being a stay-at-home girlfriend, 25-year-old Helen says in 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, which refers to a woman who stays sat home while their boyfriend supports her.

These women’s lives consist of supporting their boyfriends and performing household chores like cooking and cleaning while maintaining a quasi-military schedule for their body, skincare, and gym routines. One of their most important duties as kept women is to always look 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 and productive women who defined an essentially millennial way of being in the world: the Zetas now aspire to a more comfortable life. Influencer Erika Wheaton has 25,000 followers, whom she shows what she defines as a “realistic” life with her boyfriend; he drops money off 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 to devote her time to herself, so that her only job is to always look perfect.

“I start the day playing with Sephora makeup that my boyfriend gave me, I walk the dog and I get 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 does advertisements. This proves that she has her own income, although her lifestyle and her social media success are based on saying that she does not work.

Viewed from a cynical perspective, the “Stay at Home Girlfriend” is simply what was once called “a kept woman.” The novelty is her presence on TikTok, which fetishizes the habits of its users and makes them look desirable to many of their followers. Janira Planes, a brand strategist at HAMLET Strategic Makers and a specialist in internet culture, explains that now “these trends are born out of imitation. The trend comes from wanting to be at home and not working, it has its origin in a certain disenchantment with life. These are movements that are born at the social level and find a form of visual expression on social media. It is not a coincidence that #SAHGF [features] young women who belong to the late millennial and Z generations [and] grew up with the false promise of economic security.”

Digital marketing expert Valeria Silva, of the Delirio&Twain agency, highlights another aspect of TikTok that can help us understand this phenomenon: it is a social media website that serves to compare one’s life with the lives of others. “Often, when hashtags become trends it is because users are imitating the behavior of someone whose lifestyle they find desirable. Seeing that many women’s routines engage in everything but going to work, many others are also thinking about their own existence.”

Nor can we ignore this trend’s political implications and its clear relationship with a phenomenon that emerged four years ago, the Trad Wives, driven by Alena Kate Pettitt in The Darling Academy, a digital website that defends and promotes a lifestyle based on the role of the traditional wife. In 2020, Alena was one of the most media-friendly faces of this movement that also developed on the internet and then manifested in real life. Back then, she explained why she gave up her job as a marketing assistant 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 came home and arguing for autonomy that, as she explained, consisted of using the monthly allowance he gave her as she wished to buy food and pay other expenses. “I am the CEO of my own company, the person in charge of the house,” she used to say. Her statements were ideologically driven: a New York Times report entitled “The Housewives of White Supremacy” showed that the origin of these communities were linked to white supremacy and male alt-right movements.

Whether such links exist in the case of the #SAHGF remains to be seen. The most famous of them, Kendal Kay, recently spoke to Newsweek magazine, and it soon became clear that not all that glitters is gold: “I am often criticized for not being financially independent, but I feel very secure. A common question I am asked is: “Isn’t this risky? Don’t you think this is a recipe for financial abuse?” I don’t always talk about this in my videos, but I believe it is incredibly important for anyone in a similar situation — whether you are a stay-at-home wife or mom — to have some sort of financial security for yourself. This can look different for everyone, but for me I still make some money doing content creation. I make around $2,000 per month, but I have savings from when I was working a lot, which is good to rely on.”

That is undoubtedly a smart move. A 2021 Stanford University study of user behavior on social media concluded that the content that goes viral the most — that is, the content that becomes a trend — is the content that violates people’s cultural values. In the age of fourth-wave feminism, that may be happening with the fantasy of kept women.

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