do you believe in coincidences?

Something is in the water because first it was Lindsay Clancy—a Massachusetts labor and delivery nurse charged in the deaths of her three children while allegedly experiencing postpartum psychosis, then Lindsay Barnett—whose husband (also named Patrick 😳) claimed she was suffering from postpartum depression and ended herself (he is now accused with ending her), and now Hayden Panettiere—a well-known and well-loved actor who spent years speaking openly about her own struggle with postpartum depression—passes.

These coincidences are exposing just how real the 4th trimester is and how many mothers are struggling during this phase.

The lesser-known term “fourth trimester” describes the 12-week postpartum period immediately after you’ve given birth.

The family, you and your baby will experience many changes during this time. Your baby will adjust to the outside world and you will adjust to caring for this little human. You also might experience some big emotional changes, thanks again to those pregnancy hormones.

— Source

And I’m not alone in this.

Women are telling their stories on the internet, at work, at home and in public – and experts say it’s a long overdue moment of reckoning with a system that has neglected mothers in need.

—Source

The newly released 2026 Maternal Mental Health State Report Cards gave the country its first-ever grade for “parental support”—covering things like paid leave and childcare access. The US received an “F.”

The overwhelming support for Lindsay Clancy during her trial (see the ladies in pink cheering her on the street as she makes her way to the courthouse) plus the counts of women sharing their postpartum stories online have made clear that public opinion on postpartum mental health is shifting.

Now if we can just get this opinion shift to actually remove the barriers to care for new mothers suffering postpartum mental health disorders.

power links

• Study reveals hidden mental health toll on women with endometriosis and PMOS. New research found women with endometriosis or polycystic ovary syndrome face dramatically higher rates of anxiety and depression than their peers, with nearly half of women with endometriosis reporting anxiety.

• Leading women’s health organizations launch national strategy to close the women’s health gap. ACOG, the Endocrine Society, and other major medical groups are pushing a $20 billion national investment plan to close persistent gaps in women’s health research and care, a rare moment of unified advocacy across the medical establishment.

• NCCN updates breast cancer guidelines to include AI-based risk assessment. National guidelines now formally recognize AI tools that analyze mammograms to flag breast cancer risk years before it might otherwise be caught, potentially catching high-risk women that traditional risk models miss.

• Workplace menopause laws demand new HR playbooks. A wave of new state and local laws is requiring employers to accommodate menopause symptoms at work, driven by data showing 2 in 5 women managing their symptoms have considered or actually did quit their job over it.

• Where women live may directly impact their heart health. A 20-year Harvard-affiliated study tracking over 1,200 women found those in socially vulnerable neighborhoods had cardiovascular health scores 6-10 points lower than peers in advantaged areas, with the gap emerging within just three years.

things i’ve been loving

• 📚 This is Your Brain on Birth Control by Dr. Sarah Hill. I read this book to prep for an upcoming episode. This book is to birth control as Helen is to Troy. It’s alluded to by many as the book that made women quit birth control (est. 2019). The book argues that the pill doesn't just prevent pregnancy and that it rewires how women think, feel, and behave by suppressing the natural hormonal fluctuations (particularly estrogen) that shape mood, stress response, attraction, mate preference, and even personality. Nowhere does Hill say women should quit. Her goal was to educate women on the full picture, and apparently the full picture made women say no thank you to their trusty pill packet.

• 💊 Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome Tok. Tiktok îs trying to diagnose me with EDS and I’m eating it up. I’m definitely hypermobile but does that mean I have EDS? No it doesn’t.

• 🧣This rollneck sweater. Literally the sweater-est sweater I own. Plus it’s 100% cotton so it’s perf for summer too.

That’s all for this week! See you on the next one. tysm. bye :)

This newsletter contains an affiliate link to Bookshop.org. All orders support local bookstores.

Lindsay Clancy is a former labor and delivery nurse in Massachusetts. In January of 2023, her three young children were found without life in the family’s home in Duxbury. She was indicted with their murders, and her defense is arguing that she was in the grip of postpartum psychosis and therefore not criminally responsible. Pr…

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the cortisol face industrial complex

Recently, “cortisol face” or “moon facies” went from a niche wellness-influencer bit to a full-blown self-diagnosis, complete with a whole industry of gummies and “stress-support” drinks built to fix it.

side note: “moon facies” is THE medical term

As with most things, the trend is rooted in some truth. Cortisol is the body’s primary glucocorticoid, and under normal (”physiological”) conditions it does real, necessary work: it maintains homeostasis, regulates metabolism and blood sugar, and actually has anti-inflammatory, immune-modulating effects. The dysfunction shows up specifically when the HPA axis (the brain-adrenal signaling loop that controls cortisol) is exposed to chronic, not acute, stress1. Over time that prolonged exposure causes feedback impairment and glucocorticoid receptor resistance, the tissue essentially stops “sensing” cortisol’s signal properly, which flips the same hormone from anti-inflammatory to pro-inflammatory and is linked to autoimmune and metabolic problems.

According to this article, the “cortisol face” trend is driving women to their doctors’ offices to request cortisol testing. According to Shroff, the trend has turned a complex endocrine diagnosis (Cushing syndrome) into a social media shorthand for facial puffiness, weight gain, and chronic stress. While it’s great that women are taking charge of their health and speaking to their doctors about their health concerns, some clinicians are flagging these tests as “unnecessary workups” which may manufacture false alarms in women who do not have Cushing syndrome.

Ordinary day-to-day stress does not typically raise cortisol to the levels needed to produce the classic fat redistribution seen in Cushing syndrome. And since a puffy face is more common than an actual Cushing syndrome diagnosis, a cottage industry of “anti-cortisol face” products are flooding the market.

A quick TikTok search will show “anti-cortisol” skincare creams and serums claiming to “block cortisol in the skin” despite there being “no clinical evidence that topical products can modulate systemic cortisol”. Stress-relief face masks positioned to “undo cortisol-related aging or inflammation”¹. Adaptogen blends and detox teas marketed to “target cortisol belly” with, per the same review, no clinical basis for the claim.

It’s a big enough business to be worth tracking since the cortisol supplement market alone is projected to grow from roughly $0.7 billion in 2026 to $1.7 billion by 2036.

It’s clear that “cortisol face” and cortisol the hormone in general is a growth market built on a diagnosis most of its customers don’t have.

I know we’re all protein-maxxing right now, but I’m already predicting cortisol will be the next big wellness thing.

power links

• “The Lindsay Clancy Case is Every Mom’s Worst Nightmare—Postpartum Psychosis.” We covered the Lindsay Clancy case on the podcast. This case has had everyone in a chokehold for the past few weeks and it’s bringing up two topics: postpartum psychosis and “failure to protect” legislation. Hot take which I fear should be lukewarm: women’s postpartum health is everyone’s problem. After all, we live in a world full of mothers and their children. When you save a mother, you save her children, you save everyone.

• 🧠 AI is not closing the women’s health gap. Researchers stress-tested 13 leading AI models on women’s health scenarios and found roughly a 60% failure rate, with models missing urgency most in the situations where women were in the most danger. A 2026 follow-up benchmark found no model topped 75% accuracy. So, maybe actually speak to your doctor and not an AI chatbot.

• 🌙 HRT for Menopausal Women. About 6,000 women a day hit menopause in the US, yet fewer than a third of OB-GYN residency programs offer a standardized menopause curriculum, and HRT use dropped nearly 50% within six months of the 2002 Women’s Health Initiative study which showed HRT increased the risk of breast cancer, heart disease, and stroke.

  Today, the literature suggests that HRT can be beneficial for women within 10 years of menopause (or below the age of 60), with many physicians recommending starting treatment early in perimenopause to maximize the benefits and avoid complications.

  —Kira Berman. “After Decades of Misunderstanding, Menopause is Finally Having Its Moment.” Yale School of Medicine. 2025.

  Despite these advancements, many women still hesitate to consider HRT, often because of persisting fears sparked by the 2002 study.

• 🧬 Women are here for a long time but not a good time (apparently). Women live 5–6 years longer than men on average worldwide but spend 25% more of those years in poor health, and only 2% of health-related VC funding goes toward women’s health issues, 90% of that narrowly focused on fertility.

things i’ve been loving

• 📚 The Lamb by Lucy Rose. Rose turns cannibalism into an act of maternal love. The book follows Margot and her mother as they lure lonely "strays" into their forest cottage, feed them, and eventually devour them. I read this last month and I still think about it to this day (the ending particularly).

• 🍞Trader Joe’s Braided Brioche. It’s the perfect amount of sweet and fluffy.

• 👙One-piece swimsuits. While I still love a good mini bikini moment, I’ve been reaching for my one-pieces more often. Does the hemline index apply to swimwear as well? Is this a recession indicator? Idk but I like it.

That’s all for this week! See you on the next one. tysm. bye :)

This newsletter contains an affiliate link to Bookshop.org. All orders support local bookstores.

I spent three hours in the comments section of tradwife TikTok this week instead of doing literally anything productive, and I need to talk about it. Somewhere in the last decade, “your prefrontal cortex isn’t fully developed until 25” went from a niche neuroscience factoid to the single most-cited reason in every conversation about what young women are and aren’t capable of deciding.

Everyone repeats it as if it were true, but I had to know the science behind it.

teen tradwife lobotomy chic

You’ve seen the TikToks: 19-year-old tradwives explaining that they “just know” marriage and motherhood is right for them, and the replies flooded in with “your frontal lobe hasn’t even developed.”

It sounds pretty scientific but is it really?

Full transparency on my process: I assumed the “25” number would check out in some form. It didn’t, not the way it’s being used. The number traces back to structural imaging studies—measuring things like white matter connectivity and cortical thinning, not decision-making capacity.1

A 2025 study actually blows the “25” number up entirely. Researchers at Cambridge mapped brain structure across 4,000+ people from birth to 90 and found the brain doesn’t settle into its adult wiring pattern until around 32, not 25.2 So if we’re going by the strict logic of “brain isn’t structurally done = can’t be trusted to choose,” nobody under 32 should be making major life decisions. This means, those under 32 cannot vote, cannot join the military, cannot get married, cannot take on debt.

The “25” number was never really about the neuroscience, since the neuroscience itself doesn’t even land on 25.3 Nobody’s telling 19-year-olds their brains are too immature to enlist, sign a lease, or take on debt. It shows up specifically when a young woman makes a choice—marriage, kids, a partner—that many perceive as regressive. The brain science isn’t the argument. It’s the cover for the argument.

So if the brain science is a red herring, what’s actually driving the pushback? Probably some very real concerns. Financial dependency at 19 with no income history, isolation from friends and career networks before either is established, building your entire identity around a relationship before you’ve cultivated one on your own. These structural and social risks a 19-year-old is less equipped to handle, not because her brain can’t process the choice, but because she hasn’t had the years to see what those tradeoffs actually cost.4 Spoiler alert: they cost a lot!

I fear the frontal lobe discourse is made to sound scientific to let everyone skip the harder conversation: that teenage tradwifery is not the smartest choice and is giving lobotomy chic.

power links

• 🎙️ “Your Boyfriend is Making You Sick.” This video is on the impact of men on women’s health. Literally everything is fractal because what do you mean the girlies are confronting their male partners about their role in social dynamics and now women’s health? Love to see it 🥰

• 🧬 80 new genetic clues to endometriosis. A genome study of 1.4 million women found 80 genome regions linked to endometriosis risk, 37 were never seen before.

• 💊 Hormones + weight-loss drugs, a surprise combo. Mayo Clinic found postmenopausal women on hormone therapy lost 35% more weight on tirzepatide than women on tirzepatide alone (19.2% vs. 14.0% of body weight).

• 📱 Gen Z trusts creators over doctors. Survey data shows Gen Z is roughly 2x as likely to get health guidance from creators/online communities than clinicians. Hi I’m flattered but talk to your doctor please.

things i’ve been loving

• 📚 Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte. A short story collection following characters navigating internet-warped desire, isolation, and social failure. If you’ve ever wondered how someone becomes terminally online in a way that sinks into antisocial, this is a sharp and funny and very uncomfortable read on it. It feels adjacent to a lot of what we talk about here—how online culture reshapes how people see themselves and each other.

Read more

If a married woman gets diagnosed with cancer, there’s about a one in five chance her husband leaves her while she’s sick. If a married man gets diagnosed with cancer? That number drops to about one in thirty-three.

I mean, so much for “in sickness and in health.”

Read more

Hey bestie!

On today’s edition, we are talking about how being a people pleaser is slowly killing you. Apparently, the way we expect ourselves and other women to always be the bigger person, to be gracious, to always give to those who always take, is partly the reason why 78% of all autoimmune disorders are diagnosed in women.

Women are heavily overrepresented when it comes to autoimmune disorders, and today, we’re going to talk about why.

Psychological stress, stress-related disorders, and emotional suppression leading to increased inflammation on top of established biological factors play a role in women’s development of autoimmune diseases which has led so many to conclude that “you need to be a b*tch or get sick.”

And as your resident scorpio, I will teach you in this class how to be a proper b*tch so you don’t get sick. Get ready to enter your villain era… [mwahahaha]

for your health, though.

And as a clarification, to be a “bitch” as defined in this episode, is to literally just draw and enforce normal boundaries. But if you have been a people pleaser for sometime now and other people have gotten used to you being a people pleaser, having normal boundaries may make you feel like you’re being a bitch or other people actually call you a bitch when you’re just giving them the natural consequences of their actions or inaction. So this won’t be a class on how to harm others but rather how to end the harm inflicted on you by others.

I feel like a common theme in a lot of our episodes is reclaiming derogatory words used against women, and “bitch” is one of those words. Once you wake up to how negative words are hurled towards you to police you from advocating for yourself, these words lose meaning. For example, “spoiled,” “gold digger,” “greedy,” and the like… these are words used to make women feel bad for not allowing others to take advantage of them. It’s giving DARVO. They accuse women of the very behavior they are engaging in. So that’s a common theme, right? And we’ve woken up so these words have no power over us anymore.

When people call you all sorts of names when you’re really just advocating for yourself, the response is: “okay, and?”

a quick word i promise

This episode is made possible by all the girlies who joined our Youtube Membership. I started this YouTube channel back in 2023, and we’ve had a lot of growth since then. And with that growth comes an ever-expanding audience, bigger conversations, and honestly, new challenges that come with being more visible on the internet.

So our Membership is really the space that helps protect and sustain the work we’re building here.

It’s for the girlies who want to go deeper with the ideas, support the channel more directly, and help keep this space thoughtful, independent, and intentional. Because the more this channel grows, the more important it is to have a grounded inner circle of people who actually understand the work, the nuance, and the mission behind it.

In my work here, I have found that putting feelings and ideas into words is one of the most validating and supportive acts we can do.

So if this channel has given you language, clarity, comfort, or just a place to think with other women, consider joining the Membership. Your support makes it possible for me to keep making these episodes with the level of care, research, and intention they deserve.

You can join by clicking here.

And to all of our current members: thank you. You make this work possible. I appreciate you so much. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

women are sick and tired… literally

This SonderMind article on suppressed rage and autoimmune disorders in women shares stories that feel awfully familiar:

“I was always the ‘nice girl’ who avoided conflict at all costs,” Emily, a 38-year-old school teacher, recalls. “I never stood up for myself at work, in relationships, or even with friends. I thought keeping the peace was the right thing to do. But all the while, my body was breaking down.” She was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s thyroiditis after years of chronic fatigue, joint pain, and digestive issues. Looking back, she realized she had spent most of her life suppressing anger.

Sarah, a 45-year-old marketing executive, was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis at the peak of her career. “I lived my whole life trying to meet everyone’s expectations. I suppressed every feeling of frustration and anger—telling myself it wasn’t worth rocking the boat,” she shares. When she started experiencing excruciating joint pain, she brushed it off as stress-related. However, after her diagnosis, she began exploring the emotional triggers of her disease.

—Dominique Zumwalt. “Suppressed Rage and Autoimmune Disorders in Women.” Sondermind. 2025.

Now, what’s the common theme between these two stories? These women have spent their lives being the peacemakers and keeping their head down and prioritizing others before themselves. And this pattern that self-effacing women continue on to develop autoimmune disorders has been on the radar of researchers and medical professionals. The article writes that,

One of the most compelling discussions surrounds the correlation between suppressed rage and autoimmune disorders, particularly in women.

—Dominique Zumwalt. “Suppressed Rage and Autoimmune Disorders in Women.” Sondermind. 2025.

Dr. Gabor Mate writes in his book When the Body Says No,

The repression of anger, which is an automatic and unconscious mechanism, disarms the body’s defenses against illness. Those who are unable to say no, who constantly prioritize others over themselves, are at a much higher risk of developing chronic conditions.

—Dr. Gabor Mate. When the Body Says No.

And these conditions include chronic inflammation, hormonal imbalance, gut dysbiosis, and nervous system dysfunction—all major indications of autoimmune disorders.

The Autoimmune Registry’s piece on anger suppression and autoimmune disease is careful to point out that the link between suppressed rage or self-silencing and autoimmune disease is still under-researched but it does point toward a larger trend that emotional suppression can be part of chronic stress, and chronic stress can affect immune function.

The Swaddle’s piece on gender, silent rage, and autoimmune disease makes this point clearly: autoimmune diseases disproportionately affect women, and while biological explanations matter—hormones, chromosomes, immune differences—the gendered experience of stress also deserves attention.

Women are socially conditioned to always be calm while literally going through the worst things imaginable. We always live in fear of being called “emotional” as if displaying normal emotions is a bad thing. And I would argue, the lack of emotion in a situation that would make a normal sane person emotional is in itself, the irrational and abnormal behavior, but I digress. Women are made to feel weak when they cry, our right to vote, to run for office is questioned because we are so “emotional” and make decisions based on “emotion” and “intuition,” nevermind that intuition in itself is a form of intelligence.

Anyway, if women are already more vulnerable to autoimmune disease biologically, what happens when those same women are socially conditioned to suppress anger, ignore boundaries, and overfunction?

Well, you get the statistic that women have a 3.5x higher chance of developing autoimmune disorders compared to men.

women and autoimmune disorders

Autoimmunity is a women’s health crisis.

The NIH says autoimmune diseases include 140+ chronic conditions, can affect nearly every organ system, and nearly 78% of people with autoimmune disease are women.

We’re going to look at 3 areas that may explain why autoimmunity is largely a female domain:

• psychological stress,

• stress-related disorders,

• and emotional suppression and inflammation

Let’s get into the first one: psychological stress

psychological stress changes immune function

A major meta-analysis by Segerstrom and Miller1 reviewed 300+ empirical studies and found that psychological stress is associated with measurable changes in immune system parameters.

Apparently, stress isn’t just a feeling. It’s an immune event.

And what they found is very important: stress does not affect the immune system in one simple, uniform way. It depends on the type of stress, the duration of stress, and the condition of the person experiencing it. They asked, essentially: what kind of stress changes what kind of immune response?

They found that a short burst of stress—like public speaking, mental math, or a brief fight-or-flight moment—can actually produce a temporary, adaptive immune response. The body may mobilize certain forms of natural immunity, almost as if it is preparing for injury, infection, or threat. So not all stress is inherently destructive, but as stress remains unresolved and turns chronic, the pattern changes. The researchers found that brief naturalistic stressors, like academic exams, tended to suppress cellular immunity while preserving humoral immunity. And chronic stressors were associated with suppression of both cellular and humoral immune measures.

In short: the longer stress lasts, the less it is helpful as an adaptive system and the more it starts to look like immune wear-and-tear.

Next we have:

stress-related disorders

Now that we’ve established that emotional stress can translate into immune changes, the next question is: how might chronic stress become part of the pathway toward autoimmune disease?

Well, this 2018 JAMA study2 titled “Association of Stress-Related Disorders With Subsequent Autoimmune Disease” points the way. This was a Swedish population-based and sibling-matched cohort study, meaning the researchers did not just compare stressed people to the general public. They compared over 106,000 people diagnosed with stress-related disorders to more than 1 million matched unexposed individuals, and also to over 126,000 full siblings of those exposed patients. That sibling comparison is important because it helps control for shared genetics and early family environment, though it still cannot prove causation.

What makes this study so powerful is that it looked at subsequent autoimmune disease, meaning autoimmune diagnoses that appeared after the stress-related disorder diagnosis. The researchers examined 41 autoimmune diseases and estimated risk beyond the first year after the stress-related disorder diagnosis.

And the results were pretty striking.

During an average follow-up of about 10 years, the rate of autoimmune disease was 9.1 per 1,000 person-years among people with stress-related disorders, compared with 6.0 per 1,000 person-years among matched unexposed people and 6.5 per 1,000 person-years among their siblings. Compared with the unexposed population, people with stress-related disorders had a higher risk of later autoimmune disease, with a hazard ratio of 1.36.

Also, “person-years” sounds complicated, but it’s really just a way scientists count time in big studies. If one person is followed for one year, that’s one person-year. If 1,000 people are followed for one year, that’s 1,000 person-years. If 500 people are followed for two years, that’s also 1,000 person-years.

Back to the study, in summary: people diagnosed with serious stress-related disorders were more likely to later be diagnosed with autoimmune disease.

Now I’m not saying that every self-silencing, people-pleasing woman will develop a stress-related disorder of some sort and will for sure get an autoimmune disorder, but I wanted to share this extreme example to highlight how bad chronic stress can really get.

Because let’s be real: people pleasing and being the bigger person and holding your emotions in is stressful! And this gets us to emotional suppression and inflammation

emotional suppression and inflammation

One thing I found myself being very good at was restraint. People could be doing me wrong and I was turning the other cheek. I was minding my business whilst people we’re actively getting into my business. I was not checking people even when they needed to be checked. And the thing is: it’s not that I didn’t care. I was always thinking that maybe I was wrong in the situation. I was over-analyzing things and when I’ve come to the conclusion that I was actually right and I was actually being taken advantage of, I would get so angry. But like the moment has already passed, you know? So there was no other way for me to let that anger out… And so I would get angry at myself for not standing up for myself, for being too slow to react, for doing nothing! And I remember that happening so many times.

And I know I’ve never had a unique experience in my life so I know a lot of the girlies have experienced this as well.

And I would say that when I was at my most gracious, non-checking era, I was also at my sickest, most inflamed era thanks to my commitment to what researchers call ”expressive suppression” which is the inhibition of outward emotional expression. In plain English, it is when your body has an emotion, but you do not let that emotion fully show.

A 2023 systematic review3 looked across studies on emotion regulation and inflammation. Out of the included studies, 74% found evidence consistent with the idea that poorer emotion regulation is associated with higher inflammation and/or stronger emotion regulation skills are associated with lower inflammation. But the authors also emphasized that the findings vary depending on the specific emotion regulation strategy and the study methods so there’s definitely a lot more to be studied in this area.

Long story short, the way you experience the world emotionally 100% affects your physical health. And if your experience of the world is that of self-silencing or emotional suppression or people pleasing, chances are, you are putting even more stress on your body and it’s literally making you sick.

Now, knowing all that, what now?

Well, it’s time to be a b*tch.

how to be a “b*tch” 101

Step 1 - reclaim the word “bitch”

We already did that early in the episode but let’s practice.

omg you’re such a bitch.

you: okay, and?

okay, and!!!

Step 2 - check people

Now, this may be difficult to do with people you barely know, so practice with your loved ones.

Honestly, when we talk about “chronic” conditions, who could be more chronic, more omnipresent than your own friends and family? They’re always there so practice with them. If they’re doing something that annoys you or drives you up the wall, check them. Tell them exactly what they’re doing wrong and how they can do better. Like, tell it to their face. And obviously, do it with love.

My favorite starting phrase is “can we not…?” Like “can we not do that?” because the “we” kind of softens it, you know?

Sometimes, a simple “don’t do that” is good. Or just describe the behavior you observed. Like “that was crazy the way you were talking to x person.” Like, wait until it’s just you and the other person and bring it up.

It’s also like exposure therapy to confrontation. And checking people is like a micro-confrontation and maybe I’m so confident in doing it because eldest daughter core but anyone can do it. If I can do it, you can do it.

ABC! always be checking people!

Step 3 - no is a full sentence

NO.

Next!

Step 4 - draw boundaries and ALWAYS follow through

My pet peeve is when I tell people what will happen if they cross my boundaries or do something I already told them I didn’t like and what will happen if they did that, and they get pikachu surprised that I follow through with what I said I would do if they did what they weren’t supposed to do. Like I already told you what would happen… And it’s like some people find joy in testing people’s boundaries but I’m like, you’ve got the wrong person because I will always follow through. No exceptions.

And sometimes I feel like a mob boss. Like even if you don’t want to follow through because sometimes it’s effort, you have to because then you’ll look weak and no one will take you seriously next time.

And I care less about looking weak and more about the consequences of looking weak. Like next time, people won’t respect your boundaries, so it’s so important to always follow through.

If you tell people you will stop talking to them if they keep bringing up certain topics, stop talking to them! If you tell people you will leave if they do xyz, actually leave! there are no ultimatums. just pure follow through.

I fear that when we draw boundaries, we are trying to control the outcome instead of letting people show their true colors. You have to let go of that control.

And that pretty much wraps it up. Let me know if I missed any tips and tricks on how to be a “bitch,” but I think that’s a pretty good list.

I know it’s pretty sad that these are such simple steps but the way that people react to basic self-respect by making you feel like a bad person or outright telling you you’re a bad person is insane. But just remember that the people most ruffled by your boundaries are the very reason why you needed boundaries in the first place.

outro

Thank you for joining me in “how to be a bitch 101” but I don’t want you to leave this episode thinking you need to become cruel, cold, or closed off. That’s not what this is.

This is about coming home to yourself. This is about remembering that it’s okay to not be perfect, to not please everyone, to be emotional. Also, that you are allowed to be inconvenient, to disappoint people, to be strict, to be the terror when people are disturbing your peace.

I hope this episode gave you the permission to finally put yourself first.

Remember, you are the source, you are creation, and you are the future.

And our future looks healthy, happy, and a little “bitchy.”

That’s all I have for you today…

And a big thank you to everyone who joined the membership. If you want to support the work we are building here, click here to access our OG videos and new members-only videos, get updates about upcoming episodes, get early access to videos, and more. tysm. bye :)

“If you’re a feminist, I kind of expect you to be a hypocrite.”

This substack article has been living rent free in my head ever since I read it a couple months ago, and with the MJ Gray Tiktok controversy going on, we have to talk about it!!!

ensainte

If you’re a feminist, I kind of expect you to be a hypocrite.

Decentering men is basically the D.A.R.E. program for women. Remember how they taught people to “just say no” to drugs, as if the problem was a lack of willpower…

Read more

a year ago · 174 likes · 6 comments · saint

I have been wrestling with my relationship with the feminist label for a while now. Even though I have been engaging with feminist literature and committing to looking through a pro-women, pro-children lens, I’ve often felt like I wasn’t good enough to call myself one and I never dared because people always like to prove women wrong so the moment you label yourself something, there’s always someone who will tell you that you are not the very thing you identify with or that you are not enough like the thing you identify with or as.

And this has been bugging me for a long time now, so this episode is the culmination of a lot of topics that have been connecting for me. And with the recent controversy surrounding MJ Gray, a popular Tiktok creator who built her following on anti-marriage content (she literally told her followers to not get married with caveats!) and is now engaged, I think it’s the perfect time to release this episode.

A lot of people are very unhappy with her right now, and I always say art imitates life and vice versa. In this case, content imitates life. Content is art; it is performance art and whatever gets popular or “goes viral” reveals a lot about what we are feeling as individuals and as a collective. There are issues that have been boiling deep within us, and we find these feelings or sentiments released through performance art in media.

I could not escape this controversy on social media, and I figured there must be something there. Why is everyone so invested in this?

And I think it’s because the MJ Gray controversy highlights issues that so many women have been grappling with such as the authenticity of decentering men content and consequently the authenticity of decentering men movement (is it really even possible to do that? Should we even try?), the very carceral way we police each other’s’ feminist identification (like, are you even a feminist if you do xyz, if you have a boyfriend, if you get married, if you like luxury items or a luxury lifestyle?), we will also talk about when misandry turns into misogyny (like, you hate men so much that you start hating the women who partner with them?), and also, why are your favorite feminists married? (like isn’t that a little contradictory?)

So, yeah, tons to cover today so buckle up because it’s a big one.

First, let’s get into the MJ Gray controversy that started it all.

well, this is awkward…

MJ Gray is a popular figure in the Tiktok decenter men cohort of content creators. She’s well-known for her anti-marriage takes and publishes commentary on women’s dating lives and such. She built this huge following on Tiktok with this content… and then she got engaged.

This development gave everyone whiplash because they feel like it’s such a departure from her old content. Like, what happened to never marrying? Like, what’s with the switch up?

Someone even said that they turned down a proposal because of her content 😳… Like, that’s insane.

People had a lot of beef with the switch up, and I don’t think we have seen anything like this since the Wizardliz controversy. And okay, one is a notable event, but two is the beginning of a pattern. And the pattern I’m seeing (shoutout to the pattern recognition girlies) is that with both these controversies, women are induced to grief.

Women are grieving and mourning not just the outcome of the creator’s life, but the fantasy the creator represented. They are saying, “I can’t believe the woman I used as proof is no longer proving the thing I needed her to prove.” In a way, the “downfall” of these women is revealing how we are instrumentalizing these creators and using them as proxy for our ideal selves. So if they fail—if the ideal fails—then what hope is there for us, the mere followers?

And that is such a specific kind of grief.

Because when women follow these creators, especially creators who speak in the language of self-worth, detachment, decentering men, anti-pick-me culture, high standards, and never settling, it’s not just entertainment for them. They are trying to recover from a lifetime of centering men and the punishment that comes with that, the years they spent auditioning for love, all the time they have spent settling for people and experiences that disrespected them and crossed their boundaries.

So when a woman online appears to have escaped all of that, when she appears to have transcended the humiliation ritual of heterosexual dating, when she appears to be above male approval, above romantic desperation, above the desire to be chosen, she becomes more than a creator. She becomes evidence that escape is possible. Because, let’s be real, a lot of women find heterosexuality a prison.

Due to women’s valid negative experiences with dating nowadays, many have embraced either heteropessimism or heterofatalism, and have disavowed dating as a whole, and the thing about turning away from heterosexual relationships as a straight woman is well… it’s hard. When your own upbringing and social conditioning as well as that of others as well as the media and literally every external thing you interact with reinforces heterosexual relationships as the norm, it’s difficult to go against the grain and say no to that.

We’ve already done an episode on how valid women’s desire to get married is and the many many reasons as to why women are obsessed with marriage here.

Anyway, because so many women are finding it difficult to shake off the habit of liking men, finding a creator who is so convinced that she already has done that is so refreshing. You are going to hang onto every single word.

And that’s also one of the main criticisms directed at MJ Gray. Now, people are saying that she said in absolutist terms that women should not pursue marriage—marriage is this really bad thing—and now she’s saying actually, she’s getting married because she’s in a “really good situation,” not like the other situations she described in which getting married would be the worst decision ever. And a lot of people took issue with that because they feel she’s projecting her own exceptionality as if she was better than her followers who cannot find for themselves a good husband.

And this reminds me of this sentiment online as well that “maneaters have the best husbands”

This sentiment isn’t isolated to just this one comment. I keep seeing it on Tiktoks and other comments. And it’s like, if so many women are saying it, can it be true? That maneaters have the best husbands? If you have any thoughts on that, drop a comment.

When I first read this, as a pattern recognition girlie, I kind of agree. But at the same time, I want to be careful with fully embracing it because no amount of women’s discernment or boundaries can fully insulate you from men’s misogyny. And making a blanket statement like this can put the responsibility of how amazing or terrible a relationship is on the woman’s shoulders.

Because yes, women should absolutely learn to recognize patterns and act accordingly and gatekeep access to our time, labor, and bodies, but discernment isn’t a 100% effective force field. A woman can be in her discernment and super cautious and self-respecting—and can still be harmed by a man dedicated to harming her. So while I understand the impulse behind saying your relationship reflects “how much you love yourself,” I think we have to be careful not to turn language that is meant to be empowering into another way of blaming women for men’s behavior.

And on that note, let’s talk about when misandry turns into misogyny, when you learn to hate men so much that you end up hating women instead.

the hate you give (and receive)

“Man eater tiktok is a lie”

This TikTok is basically arguing that the MJ Gray backlash reveals a deeper problem with the “man-eater”/“decenter men” niche on TikTok: a lot of it presents itself as feminist, but underneath, it often becomes another way for women to prove that they are smarter, better, or more evolved than other women because they made “better” romantic choices.

The creator’s main point is that while there are absolutely valid critiques of marriage, patriarchy, and the ways women are harmed in heterosexual relationships, this niche sometimes overcorrects into blaming women for their own oppression. And this is exemplified in how the decenter men creators would react to other women’s videos and sort of blame these women for tolerating the harm they are experiencing, and coming to the conclusion that if they just acted differently or were more in their discernment or didn’t pursue relationships at all, then they wouldn’t have been harmed in the first place. But the reality is that while discernment matters and you should be using it at all times, no woman can fully choice-make her way out of misogyny.

And we’ve touched on this before: nothing can prevent a man who is hellbent on harming you from harming you. How they treat you is never a measure of your inherent worth and value. You never deserve the mistreatment and harm you receive. Their actions say a lot about them than it does you.

Anyway, I found this in the comments:

This. I also came across this article titled: “‘Dump Him’ Feminism Isn’t Revolutionary. It’s Callous.” It’s not feminist to absolve yourself of responsibilities towards others. It’s individualist.

Sarkar argues that “dump him” feminism, which is literally women telling other women to “just dump him” or “leave him or leave us out of it” or “don’t tell us if you’re not leaving him” starts from a real problem—women are often overburdened with emotional labor, care work, and unequal relationship expectations—but it becomes shallow when the only solution ever offered to women is to opt out while also framing women’s bad relationships as personal failures, especially if the women end up staying.

And we’ve kind of covered this as well in our “bad boyfriend fatigue” episode. Increasingly, we are bombarded with bad boyfriend ragebait content so much so that we have been experiencing bad boyfriend fatigue. Like our patience for women who have bad boyfriends is this tiny. We are also experiencing empathy fatigue. Like how many times do we have to tell women they deserve better, they can do better? And how can you help someone who only wants to complain and doesn’t want to help themselves?

A lot of people are done with what they call “bird-brained behavior” and are resorting to saying, “leave him or leave us out of it.”

Speaking of leaving men, a lot of Gray’s followers are upset about her engagement because the brand of decentering men content she was making was 4B-esque in nature.

decentering men or Re-centering men?

The 4B movement is a South Korean feminist movement built around four refusals: no dating men, no sex with men, no marriage to men, and no childbirth. At its core, 4B is a rejection of the traditional heterosexual life script that tells women their lives should culminate in marriage, motherhood, and service to men. Gray’s content leaned heavily towards the 4B spectrum of feminism. So from what her audience gathered from her content whenever she would talk about “decentering men,” it was more in absolutist terms that you shouldn’t have any relationships with men. And women have so many valid reasons as to why they would want to partake in this movement, more power to them. The problem here is Gray positioned herself as a voice for this movement whether that was her intention or not.

I would say, though, that we could all be using the same terms but these terms may mean different things for a lot of us. For example, in the spoiled girlie support group, we’ve been very clear that decentering men does not mean never wanting or experiencing love.

Decentering men does not mean denying yourself love. If you happen to love loving men, that love is a beautiful, expansive thing. And I will always stand by that.

So I think we do have to be clear with what the terms we are subscribing to mean in the contexts we are discussing them in. This comment puts it beautifully:

And as someone who also abides by decentering men as defined in the SGSG, I also have been getting the vibe that decentering men content… center men a lot. And it’s quite understandable because we do live under patriarchy and a lot of our experiences have been shaped by male harm, but I think a lot of us are ready to model a world through content about what it means to not talk about boys every single time. Like, maybe that is what it truly means to decenter men.

Anyway, another criticism directed at Gray throughout this whole debacle is that for someone who says she is decentering men, men sure are centered a lot in her content. How can she call herself a feminist now that she is engaged to a man and soon to be married? How can she be a feminist when she wants a man period?

is this feminist?

Like I said earlier, I have been struggling with calling myself a feminist and I picked up Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist which gave me more confidence in calling myself one (at least just with my inside voice) and also helped me make peace with the fact that if I am a feminist, I am most definitely a bad one… and that’s okay.

Gay writes,

In the book, Gay mentions how feminism has this negative connotation and that’s why many women flinch from this label:

And it seems like feminism has a lot of rules. Feminism or the performance of feminism has become another standard women have to live up to… on top of all the other standards we already have to live up to. And one thing I’ve noticed is women are most often the harshest enforcers of societal behavior. And we have turned feminism into this purity test instead of a compassionate way of life. We have become so carceral in our behavior that we are now categorizing and punishing women for not being “feminist” enough not taking into account that we are all literally women living under patriarchy and that we are all human and imperfect and hypocritical.

And Gay has addressed this in her book as well.

Yeah, me too. Please don’t pedestalize me. Like Roxane here, I also am a bad woman, a bad feminist, an imperfect human, sometimes hypocritical. I cite sources so you don’t have to cite me.

I swear to God, the way we pedestalize women and tear them down at the first sign of them showing their humanity must be studied. It’s almost like pedestalization is in itself a form of dehumanization. It’s sad.

Anyway, I am confused by this notion that to be a feminist is to number one: hate men and also number two: never date and number three: never marry? Where was that in the feminist handbook?

Nowhere… Also, there is no handbook.

Your favorite feminists are married

There is no feminist constitution that says you can’t date or get married to call yourself a feminist. There is no purity test to feminism. I would argue that feminism, much like religion, is a belief system. You can try every day to live by its ideals, and it’s no one’s business to police your relationship with the belief system.

Long story short, nowhere does it say that you can’t get married if you identify as a feminist. Now, maybe some of this confusion is coming from the popularity of the 4B movement, and 4B is a real political response to a real context: misogyny, gendered violence, marriage inequality, reproductive burdens, and the social expectation that women sacrifice themselves to heterosexual family life.

So I am not here to discredit 4B or anything like that but 4B is not the entirety of feminism.

Feminism, at its core, is not “never date men.”

As Kathy Bail writes in DIY Feminism,

Feminism is the belief that women are full human beings who deserve political, social, sexual, economic, intellectual, and bodily freedom. And that includes the freedom to refuse men, but it also includes the freedom to accept men, to love, date, marry, and have children.

Because if the only way to be a feminist is to never want a man, to exist within these rigid guidelines, then feminism becomes just another script women have to perform correctly. And that is the thing we cannot get behind. How can we be truly free when we have constructed yet another cage?

And it is true that many perceive marriage as prison, much like heterosexuality is a prison. But if marriage is such a prison, then why are our favorite feminists married?

Many of the most influential feminist writers were mostly married. In the early feminist tradition, Mary Wollstonecraft married William Godwin, while first-wave feminists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucy Stone married men while openly challenging the patriarchal terms of marriage itself. Stone even kept her own name, making her marriage part of her feminist protest. I mean, at the time, that was pretty scandalous.

Virginia Woolf was married, Betty Friedan married and later divorced, Kate Millett married and later divorced, Audre Lorde married a man before later living openly as a lesbian, and even Andrea Dworkin (radical feminist writer) eventually married her longtime partner. Then, in the late twentieth and contemporary feminist era, Gloria Steinem and Naomi Wolf also married.

So historically, marriage has never automatically disqualified a woman from feminism; many feminist thinkers critiqued marriage as an institution while still navigating marriage, divorce, partnership, desire, and contradiction in their own lives. And okay, times were different back then, maybe women needed to be married back then, but what about now? Even the popular Tiktok creators who align with feminism such as YV Edit and Mel Hamlett are also both married women.

And not that there is anything wrong with being married. Marriage can be a beautiful thing with the right person, but what a lot of people find disingenuous is that MJ Gray and other decenter men Tiktok creators are so adamant about decentering men 4B edition all while being fully married to men. And this brings us back to the exceptionality vibe. People are so upset with Gray specifically because the way things are unfolding, the implication is that she believes she is smarter than her audience so she is then allowed to play with fire and not get burnt. But everyone else? Remember Icarus.

Anyway, this brings us back to the beginning, in the Substack article titled: “if you’re a feminist, I kind of expect you to be a hypocrite.” Saint writes,

Feminists, because they are human, have always lived inside contradiction. Women are humans (I know, shocker) and humans are flawed and hypocritical. Women have critiqued marriage while marrying. They have critiqued men while loving them. They have critiqued beauty culture while participating in it. They have critiqued capitalism while making money and a lot of it.

That does not make the critique fake. It means the system is so all-encompassing and pervasive that none of us gets to live completely outside of it. The question is not whether a woman can remain perfectly untouched by patriarchy. The question is whether she can still tell the truth about it while navigating the life she actually has.

As Saint writes,

In short, we are all human and so we are all flawed and hypocritical.

I wanted to leave you with this quote from Bad Feminist:

And you know what? We can and will do better.

That’s all I have for you today. I just wanted to let you know that you have so much inherent worth and value in a world that is hellbent on devaluing you.

Now get that bag, bestie!

-Elle

Hey, bestie!

Summer is around the corner, so I’ve been getting travel inspo on TikTok, and I’ve been seeing women warn other women online about the emotional dangers of falling in love with your tour guide. I didn’t realize just how common falling in love with yo…

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Social media is abuzz with this new trend called “catching print.” This trend took off in late March after Anwar White, a dating coach, posted this video on Tiktok. In a series of videos, White gave the practice of speculating a man’s member size a system—Type A, Type B, Type D. He also gave celebrity examples and a diagram.

In an interview, White expanded on his intentions with sharing his catching print knowledge

“At the end of the day, my work is about empowering women,” White said. “And my hope is that you catching print has empowered you. Power to the matriarchy.”

— Ariel Messman-Rucker. “Gay TikToker goes viral for teaching voyeurs how to ‘catch print’.” 2026.

Anwar White may have popularized the trend on social media but the trend or practice in itself is nothing new.

The look existed long before “catching print.” What changes now is its political valence in the present moment; why it suddenly scratches at the surface of respectability, blindly unleashing in dating spaces while also being used to demean and punish.

—Ariexa. “THE FULL PACKAGE: A Brief, Dirty, Completely Unauthorized History Of Catching Print.” The Queer Gaze. Substack. 2026

This same piece also notes that women have long had their own informal traditions of looking, whispering, and assessing male bodies too. In short, Anwar White made “catching print” mainstream on social media, but the cultural practices behind it are older, messier, and very likely queer in lineage.

And I think that matters, because once you understand that history, “catching print” stops looking like some brand-new “feminist” innovation and starts looking more like a recycled visual practice that is now available to a new audience and in a new context.

White’s tiktok video now has multiple millions of views, and women are calling “catching print” empowering. Some are even calling it the rise of the matriarchy.

And I get why.

Because in a culture where women have always been assessed physically, publicly sexualized, and reduced to body parts, there is something undeniably satisfying about men suddenly realizing that they, too, can be assessed, sexualized, and reduced the same way. There is a kind of poetic justice in watching the gaze get redirected for once.

And that’s why you see a lot of comments saying “it doesn’t feel good now, does it?” or “how does it feel?” or “oh, so now all of a sudden you get it.”

And I want to be clear from the start: I am not coming at this from a prudish or pearl-clutching place. I am not scandalized that women are looking. Women have always looked. Women have always had desire. Women have always made observations about men because we have always had to. Where do you think we get our amazing pattern recognition from? From centuries of observing!

The interesting part to me and I think it would be to you as well is that “catching print” is not just about attraction. It is about power. It is about taking a practice of sexual appraisal that has historically been used against women and turning it around. And I understand why that may feel good. I understand why it feels like payback, like us women getting our lickback. I understand why some women are reading it as reclamation—as the beginning of matriarchy.

But I also think we need to be honest about something: catharsis is not the same thing as liberation.

Equalizing the field is not the same thing as changing the game. And that is the contradiction at the center of this trend. Something can feel satisfying without actually being transformative. Something can expose the hypocrisy of objectification without dismantling objectification itself. And that is where I am right now with “catching print.”

I understand the impulse. I understand the joke. I even understand the overcorrection. But I do not think reversal is the same thing as liberation, and I definitely do not think the matriarchy will be built by giving women equal permission to reduce other people to body parts. It’s the same objectification and dehumanization we have been fighting against and it doesn’t make it right or good just because we are the ones doing it.

And I’m sensing that a lot of us are feeling empathy fatigue—“playing fair fatigue”—because we are waking up to how the world is quite literally unfair, but we must refuse to succumb. We must refuse the nihilism foisted upon us during these times. We are so much better than that.

Because if we are actually trying to build something better—a better society connected to nature and centered on women and children—it cannot just be patriarchy with the genders flipped. We cannot use the same logic, the same degradation, the same dehumanization. Those things may feel powerful for a little bit, but it’s still the language and tools of the oppressor. If we do that, we’re just like them and they’re gross. If we do that, we will never be free.

Now, even though I do not support “catching print” as this catalyst for matriarchy, I can still admit that its popularity reveals a few things women are clearly hungry for. So let’s get into what the trend gets absolutely right.

what this trend gets right

First, catching print prioritizes female pleasure.

So much of heterosexual culture has been built around male desire being treated as the default and female desire being treated as either secondary, embarrassing, or something that doesn’t exist. Think of all the standards and preferences women have when it comes to male partners. You’re a gold digger if you care about a man’s income or net worth. You’re shallow if you care about his appearance. You’re picky if you care about anything else at all. Men get to be these creatures who just show up and get to be guaranteed love—at least in their boy-mom mothers’ eyes. Women, on a greater societal level, are policed from having any desires at all.

Catching print gives women the audacity to be choosy, to be picky, to only care about what brings them pleasure and nothing else. I’ve seen comments of women saying that because of this trend, they are now determining d size before they even progress to the talking stage.

Even if I disagree with the method, I can understand why this feels so refreshing to women who are used to being the ones under constant appraisal and to being the ones who are expected to settle lest they be called shallow and all these ungodly names under the sun.

Second, catching print also exposes a very obvious double standard.

A lot of men have spent their whole lives treating commentary on women’s bodies as normal, harmless, or even flattering. But the second that same kind of public assessment is turned back on them, suddenly it is invasive, dehumanizing, and inappropriate as if they weren’t doing it to others too since forever. And to be fair… yes! That is the point. I think part of why this trend has taken off is because it forces some men to confront, even for a little bit of time, what it feels like to be turned into a sexually readable object instead of being considered as a full person.

I also think the trend gives women permission to be seen as desiring subjects, not just desirable objects.

Women have always looked. Women have always had preferences. Women have always talked amongst themselves. But we live in a culture that still acts shocked whenever women become too visibly desirous, too opinionated on appearance, too direct in their assessments. So I understand why, for some women, this trend feels less like some vulgar thing and more like release. It feels like a good crispy curse word after stubbing your toe on the couch.

And maybe the biggest thing it reveals is that women are tired.

Women are tired of pretending not to notice. Tired of pretending not to understand how much power is in determining who gets to gaze at others. Tired of living in a world where our bodies are constantly scanned, discussed, and sized up while we are expected to remain silent and even thankful for being perceived and assessed and lusted at in that way. I can see why it feels so good and so cathartic. I can see why some women would want to hop on the catching print bandwagon. I really do get it because I’ve felt that way too.

But even with all of that said, I still don’t think this is the future. Because there is a difference between revealing a double standard and rising above it. There is a difference between finally getting a lickback and actually changing the way we relate to one another, if we relate at all. And that is where I draw the line with this trend.

I can acknowledge what women are reaching for pleasure, agency, relief, even a sense of justice by participating in this trend without pretending that objectification is empowerment or the beginning of matriarchy just because we women are the ones doing it.

And I think the real power behind this trend is not in what it does but in what it exposes: Women are tired of being “the fairer sex.” Women are tired of being good where being bad is rewarded. Women are tired of being “the bigger person.” Women are tired of acting like they don’t want for anything and are happy to receive any corporeal manifestation of patriarchy. Women are tired period.

But just because we are tired doesn’t mean we get to be mean and objectifying and dehumanizing. They literally win when they indoctrinate you with the same evil they have enacted on you. We are so much better than that.

with that being said though…

Now, I won’t claim that women catching print is the literal same as men catching cups and assessing women’s bust size, bum size, whatever size and literally lusting after them. The male gaze perusing women will never be the same as the female gaze perusing men because of this one thing: power.

The power distribution in the act of gazing is not the same between men and women.

Women have this very real observation that men are scared of being rejected by women but women are scared of being killed by men. There is always a threat of violence attached to the male gaze. And for the no nuance nellies, obviously, not all men are violent, but yet the threat persists. So to be gazed at and perused and assessed and even commented on or catcalled is oftentimes a terrifying experience because of the threat of violence this act carries. You never know when looking or staring or gazing or secretly filming will turn into touching and harming and killing. You never know and so the threat is always there.

Women literally fear for their lives when they are perceived by men. We’ve spoken about gym modesty discourse in a recent class, and the number of women harassed at the gym or gym parking lots or really, anywhere, is astronomical. And we women know this to be true: to be perceived by men is to be unsafe. And that’s why women participate in these bargains such as modesty to reduce their risk but in a patriarchal world, there is no bargain that works. Every bargain is a devil’s bargain.

A woman’s gaze whether she is catching print or not will never carry the same threat to safety or life that a man’s perusing gaze will.

I read Ariexa’s Article for The Queer Gaze on Substack and in the article, the author relates how the gay gaze from which the catching print practice originates was born of prohibition.

The gay gaze that catches print is historically a gaze born of prohibition. You look this hard because looking is all you are allowed, and doing more is persecution…

This male gaze is the water everyone swam in high school, the very logic of hallway violence lived inside every day. Boys snapping bras and calculating cup sizes by chancing their hands into a girl’s chest. Boys constructing code words for what color of underwear you were wearing when your skirt flew up. Boys who would press themselves between a girl’s legs in the guise of a joke and call it scoring. The school was an economy of looks, the male gaze the capital, and the currency flowed in that one-way direction. Catching print was, among other things, a hostile takeover of that economy. When the male gaze is flipped over by one of its voyeuristic children, what happens is an illegitimate son fighting for his place against his tyrant of a father.

—Ariexa. “THE FULL PACKAGE: A Brief, Dirty, Completely Unauthorized History Of Catching Print.” The Queer Gaze. Substack. 2026

This is what makes this trend attractive to so many women now. “Catching print” can feel like a hostile takeover of the permission to look, to be the watcher instead of the watched. But this difference in power is not moral immunity. Just because the female gaze is not the same as the male gaze does not mean having the social permission to look and scrutinize and objectify men is automatically “liberating” or “empowering.”

In fact, it may be the very opposite of that. Walk with me…

walk with me…

Now, while I am absolutely against objectification and most people—men and women—can agree with me that objectification is bad and it doesn’t feel good to be objectified, ummmm… some men absolutely love it 🤢. They want to be looked at. They want to expose themselves to women. They want you to see their full package.

This tiktok creator posted a cheeky video about catching print and got this hate mail from a man. He writes,

“You’re not attractive enough to be posting about catching print. but if you wanna look at my junk by all means go for it. it turns me on.”

We also recently did a class on dating apps, and one of these apps—Bumble, which was in hot water for their very tasteless ads—was originally founded by a woman who testified before Congress about the epidemic of men sending women unsolicited d pictures and that’s why she created a dating app in which only women can send the first message. Women receiving unsolicited d pics was such a huge problem in the dating app scene. No one wants to see that… Or at least no one wanted to see that.

And yet, now, we are being conditioned to perceive men exposing themselves to us or us demanding this exposure as “liberation,” as “empowerment,” as “progress,” as “matriarchy.” Uh, absolutely not.

This reminds me of the sexual revolution of the 60s and 70s which aimed for women’s freedom and liberation when all it did was, in Andrea Dworkin’s words, “make more women available for the f*ck” (loose quote).

That’s not progress. That’s not liberation. That’s allowing more men access to women’s bodies and energies for what? There is nothing empowering about a version of “freedom” that simply lowers the barrier of access to women.

There is nothing liberating about being told you are “free” when what that really means is that men now have even more cultural permission to sexualize interactions with you, send you unsolicited d pics, and call it progress. That is not emancipation. That is repackaged exploitation with better “feminist” branding. Like, is the feminism in the room with us?

Now, I don’t claim to be the ultimate arbiter of what is and isn’t feminist because I’m probably a bad one, but from the literature, it doesn’t track. And from my ick meter which is valid, it also doesn’t track.

And that is what this conversation reminds me of. Sometimes a culture will hand women a trend or a concept that sounds like power, it sounds like agency, like liberation, it looks good on the surface like we should be celebrating it and hopping on the trend, but in practice it just expands the terms under which our bodies can be made publicly available to men. I fear that catching print is normalizing men’s unsolicited exposure to women because now the narrative is that we are literally asking for it. Not only that: we are demanding it. And if they don’t want to expose themselves to us, don’t worry because we women are now trained to scan for penile topography with or without their consent. The overarching narrative is that we women now want it. And we want a lot of it.

Don’t you see? Catching print echoes the scam of sexual liberation. It is making more women more available for the f*ck. It is turning us into sexualizing creatures instead of the sexualized and it doesn’t matter as long as we are being sexual under patriarchal terms. Because in the eyes of patriarchy, that’s all we are ever good for.

And I think we need to be honest about that.

To be clear, I am not saying women being sexual is bad. Women are human beings with desire, appetite, fantasy, and erotic inner lives. The problem is not female sexuality; the problem is a patriarchal culture that keeps translating women’s sexuality into men’s access. Under patriarchy, what gets sold to women as “sexual liberation” can easily become a new demand to be more available, more performative, more visually appealing and more accommodating to male desire.

I seriously considered making this episode because I knew a lot of the girlies will not like what I have to say, but I’ve always been more interested in saying what we need to hear rather than what we want to hear.

And I always say, pay attention to your icks, so when this catching print trend started. I will admit, I got it. I got why the girlies are doing it. I felt the same release, the vindication, I 100% get why we’re all united in adopting this trend and normalizing it, but there was that ick… and outside of the main problems like the normalized objectification and dehumanization of others, it didn’t click until I saw this video of a man literally saying even though he was annoyed by the trend, it still turns him on to show strange women online what’s under his pants 🤮.

Catching print is not as liberating or “feminist” as we think it is. It is not at all the catalyst for matriarchy because the matriarchy will not be built on the objectification of others. Because if our matriarchy looks like patriarchy in a different font, then I don’t want it.

As Audrey Lorde writes,

In this context, Lorde was writing in the context of racism and homophobia, but I like to think of women as a race, of children as a race—as oppressed classes. The spirit of the quote remains the same: we cannot use the same tools—objectification and dehumanization—to dismantle patriarchy. Instead, we build the matriarchy NOW and let everyone jump ship because it is objectively a much better, more compassionate system—a system built on mutual understanding and consideration. A system that has no tolerance for objectifying and dehumanizing behavior. That is how together, we create a whole new world.

That’s all I have for you today. I just wanted to let you know that you have so much inherent worth and value in a world that is hellbent on devaluing you.

Now get that bag, bestie!

-Elle

the tea

This new wave of gym modesty discourse started when a female fitness coach publicly criticized other women for wearing “revealing” gym clothes, filming from angles that emphasize their bodies, and allegedly behaving immodestly online.

And to me, this is a very specific genre of content: woman-to-woman policing disguised as accountability, having “class,” or standards. It presents itself as concern or guidance or trying to “help” other women carry themselves better. But what it is often really doing is reasserting a moral hierarchy among women: the respectable woman versus the embarrassing woman, the self-assured woman versus the attention-seeking woman, the modest woman versus the immodest woman, the wife versus the whore. And we’ve done so many classes already on how it is hurting all of us when we allow others to categorize us into these binaries of “good woman” and “bad woman.” For together we stand, divided we fall.

So I was really glad to see the girlies pipe up and defend their faves who this not-like-other-fitness influencers creator is bashing on.

see woman defending female creators

One of the main points of these female influencers as well is that they’re male gaze-y. That they want all the male attention and that’s why they’re wearing “immodest” clothes in the gym. But when you look in the comments, who is supporting these anti-butt scrunch creators? Men.

I mean, you can’t argue with the analytics. You can’t really be throwing stones from a glass house calling female influencers seeking male attention when your comments have all these men saying “protect this woman at all costs.” Because first of all, protect her from who?

Here’s a revelation: policing other women’s clothing is part of enforcing a patriarchal bargain.

We covered patriarchal bargains in a past class, and this situation is such a strong example of how women can become some of the strictest enforcers of these bargains. And I do not think most women do this because they are cartoonishly evil or malicious. They genuinely believe they are helping other women stay “respectable” and therefore safe, but you cannot expect respect from people who don’t even see you as human.

see mom saying her husband said that having his daughter made him realize that “girls are more than objects.”

And most of all, modesty is not the protection we think it is. No amount of modesty will protect you from harm. For as long as you exist as a woman, you will always be “asking for it” in the eyes of people committed to denying you your humanity. If it’s not your clothes, it will be your body shape. If it’s not your legs, it’s your ankle. If it’s not your appearance, it’s your voice. The target is always moving because the point was never really modesty. The point was control, invisibility, and erasure.

And that is why today’s gym modesty discourse is lowkey purity culture. Because purity culture does not just tell women to make choices about our bodies and how we share it with others. It tells women that our bodies are moral objects. It tells us that being visible is dangerous, that the gaze of others is our responsibility, and that male desire is something we must anticipate and regulate through self-surveillance.

And perhaps it is true. Perhaps this is really how the world works right now, but I think all of us in this here sgsg would like to change it. Because I refuse to recreate this world we are living in where if women are harmed, humiliated, objectified, disrespected, or lewdly imagined, the first place to look and criticize isn’t the person who harmed them and how awful they are but at how scrunched up their gym shorts were, how they were posing and filming for their videos, their overall perceived immodesty. But women are not responsible for other people’s thoughts and actions. We don’t make people do anything they weren’t already thinking and thinking of doing. It says a lot more about them than it says about us.

lower your gaze

In the Muslim faith, men and women are called to “lower their gaze.” Men, especially, are told that when they lower their gaze, their wife or their future wife becomes more beautiful to them. And so you will see Muslim men averting their gaze from women’s bodies. I think we all need to get on board with this. Not necessarily in a rigid, hyper-religious way, but in the sense that we shouldn’t be looking at people’s bodies as if they were objects.

“Lower your gaze” is super mild compared to what it actually says in the bible.

And even if you’re not religious, it’s still useful to know these things because so much of Christianity (and other Abrahamic religions) permeates our contemporary culture so whether you’re a believer or not doesn’t really matter because you’re still affected by it.

Anyway, in the bible,

Honestly, God is a girl dad because she was a mother and now she’s a girl dad because… where in the bible does it say that women are responsible for others lusting over them?

And also, a lot of modesty discourse, especially gym modesty discourse, is so heavily laden with religious undertones.

There’s also this wave of creators who are making “modest gym clothing” content and more power to them, but there is this undertone of them writing captions like they felt convicted to do this because they want to “respect themselves more” or protect their dignity, and it’s like when you say things like that, it’s difficult to not infer that they felt like they weren’t respecting themselves when they were less modest. Like that’s the logical conclusion, right?

I found this tiktok and it was so spot on

“Hot take but gym influencers who go from wearing immodest to modest clothes are annoying af because it’s never just a harmless transition. prior to you discovering sweatpants, your page used to be about fitness and not it’s just about how you’re not a raging whore like the rest of us”

I love the fitness creators who do their own thing whether they dress modestly or not. Like Leana Deeb, she’s doing her own thing. She has a modest line with Gymshark, there’s no shamey vibes. Her modesty is her own journey, her own conviction.

And that’s what our modesty discourse should be. Modesty is a PERSONAL and sacred conviction. It’s an expression of your own values, not a hostage negotiation with patriarchy and other women. You can’t be living out your Stockholm syndrome and forcing other women to conform to something so abnormal and so harmful—purity culture. Modesty isn’t something you perform in exchange for respectability or for protection because when you do that, it stops being devotion and starts becoming fear, and we women deserve so much more than a life organized around fear.

And most of all, modesty is not a performance, period.

In Matthew chapter 6, verse 1

And I really like this video because it sums up how to end this gym modesty discourse.

“Comparing your ideals to someone else’s might make you feel like you’re going straight to heaven but you’ll do nothing but drive others away by being so judgmental. That’s why you should stop trying to shame other girls for the way they dress and practice looking away instead

—source

In summary, LOWER YOUR GAZE.

That’s all I have for you today. I just wanted to let you know that you have so much inherent worth and value in a world that is hellbent on devaluing you.

Now get that bag, bestie!

-Elle

Why does it feel like every tradwife on TikTok is, like, 19 years old, baking sourdough in a linen dress and talking about “submitting” to her future husband?

At first glance, it looks like a backlash against feminism. Like young women looked at freedom, equality, and careers and said, actually, no thank you. But I think that analysis is too shallow. These women are not lazy or dumb. They are actually very spot on in their assessment that being a young woman nowadays kind of sucks.

“I would love to be a stay at home mom I would love to be a homemaker and wife I would love to be able to live on a homestead and go milk my cow and take the eggs out of the chicken coop and have one baby in the belly and on my hip and another toddler behind me that’s like my dream but I can’t do that because the way the economy is set up is I’m forced I’m forced to get an education a higher education a college degree in order to make enough money that I can be financially independent and afford my own home or my own rent or my own gas or my own groceries my own insurance and it’s extremely difficult to do that and it’s very isolating as a woman when you have to do all of that all on your own and you can’t find somebody that you can financial responsibilities like you would with a spouse so now being a single working woman absolutely sucks it’s the worst thing ever I hate it I would go back to the 1950s in a second just so I wouldn’t have to deal with this shit.”

—Source

Teen tradwife content is all over our feeds not because young women are rejecting work itself. They are rejecting the contemporary deal women have been offered: paid labor plus unpaid domestic labor plus emotional labor, all inside an economy that feels increasingly unaffordable.

Tradwifery then is a fantasy of relief and a patriarchal bargain in a postfeminist world. The anxiety they are naming is real; the cure they are choosing however, while real, is not true liberation. It’s another devil’s bargain made with a system that always wins.

while the tea brews…

As usual, we are not only going to talk about the problem. We are also going to explore possible solutions. I created the spoiled girlie support group to explore ideas of equity in women’s lives and relationships. My observation is that whenever women advocate for equitable conditions for themselves, they are called spoiled, gold diggers, all these ungodly names under the sun. And this series is a reclamation of these negative sentiments.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with being spoiled as a woman. In fact, we all need to be more so.

And as I’ve been making these videos, I came to the realization that: women are seeking equity in systems that never had their equity in mind.

The multiple waves of feminism were an attempt to garner such equity. And the counter-movements to these waves of feminism were women clinging on to patriarchal bargains they have made to protect themselves and their children—patriarchal bargains they found sufficiently equitable.

In the spoiled girlie support group, we take from tradition, belief systems, feminist thought, to introduce new ideas to women to help us navigate the systems we are under. I know it’s easy to hate on these teen tradwives and do a 20-minute takedown as to how they are wrong and evil and this and that. But today, I want to take a more empathetic lens and maybe wake us all up as to how the teen tradwives are not the enemy, “tradition” is not the enemy, gender roles are not the enemy, feminism is not the enemy, We are not each other’s enemy.

We are all running parallel social experiments and the only real way to find out who is right is to wait it out. But it doesn’t mean we can’t check up on each other and help each other improve our social experiments.

So for all the girlies going down the teenage tradwife pipeline, the friends of girlies falling into said pipeline, mothers raising girls and young women, literally any and all women, this video is for us. We are all living under the same pressures and it wouldn’t hurt to give each other a little bit more grace, and okay, sound analysis and constructive feedback.

Speaking of analysis, why are we facing a huge teenage tradwife epidemic right now?

the tea on the teen tradwife epidemic

Tradwife content thrives among young women because it offers a highly aestheticized, easy to understand script for adulthood at a moment when adulthood feels unstable and punishing and scary and uncertain!

These teen tradwives on tiktok package trad ideology as aesthetics first: homemaking, a narrow lens of femininity, a calm beige organic environment, conventional beauty, and domestic order characterized by gender roles. This aesthetic, compared with reality, seems peaceful, soft, and CERTAIN.

We have to remind ourselves that humans love certainty. Knowing something bad is way more tolerable to many of us compared to not knowing. Many people prefer the devil they know vs the devil they don’t know—but guess what? It’s still the devil.

Teen Vogue described tradwife content as a polished, aspirational package that appeals to young women disillusioned with modern expectations. In an interview, author and podcaster Jo Piazza says,

And what exactly are young women disillusioned with?

it’s the economy

Young women are disillusioned with the economy.

In the Federal Reserve’s latest report on household well-being, inflation and prices remained Americans’ top financial concern, and the share of adults who said they were “doing okay” or “living comfortably” financially stayed below its 2021 peak.

That broader sense of instability is especially pronounced among younger generations: Deloitte’s 2024 Gen Z and Millennial Survey found that financial insecurity continues to weigh heavily on both groups, with cost of living as their top concern, roughly six in ten living paycheck to paycheck, and many reporting high stress.

So when young women imagine adulthood, they are often not imagining abstract freedom or empowerment; they are imagining expensive rent, unstable work, rising daily costs, and the prospect of future care burdens in a country where even child care remains, in the U.S. Department of Labor’s words, “almost prohibitive.”

We need to stop analyzing this trend like it appeared out of nowhere because women got manipulated by beautiful women in pretty dresses and sourdough bread on wire racks. Women are not that dumb. Young women are not that dumb. They are actually very very smart… in their assessment.

As Andrea Dworkin in Right-Wing Women writes,

Young women are responding to a real economy. An economy they personally experience or have seen the women around them experience. And on top of the economic times we are living in, they are also seeing the social times we are living in. A postfeminist social world that blames the success of feminism for the current ills of society. When in reality, the problem is not that women gained more freedom, rights, or economic responsibility. The problem is that the broader social order never fully reorganized itself around that new reality.

Women entered the workforce in greater numbers and climbed career ladders, but men were not socialized at the same pace to become equal partners in the home. Institutions did not evolve quickly enough to support working mothers, families, or caregiving. And patriarchy, rather than disappearing, simply adapted—repackaging women’s overwork as empowerment and calling it progress (i.e. the 2010s girlboss boss babe feminism).

So young women are not looking at feminism and rejecting liberation itself; they are looking at a version of liberation that still leaves women overburdened, under-supported, and expected to excel in every domain all at once.

In short, feminism made women independent of men but it did not make men independent of women—specifically, women’s labor.

the second shift

What many young women are reacting to is not “equality” itself, but the unequal distribution of labor inside supposedly modern and empowering relationships. The latest American Time Use Survey shows that women were more likely than men to do household activities on a given day, and when they did, they spent more time on them—2.7 hours compared with 2.3 hours for men.

More detailed BLS household data shows the gap is especially pronounced in food preparation and cleanup, interior cleaning, laundry, and household management, all of which still fall more heavily on women.

And Pew has found that even in marriages where husbands and wives earn about the same, wives still spend more time on caregiving and housework, while husbands spend more time on leisure. In other words, what many young women are seeing is not a world of true domestic equality, but a world in which women are still expected to carry the second shift even after entering the workforce.

Source.

So they’re seeing the promises made by feminism—promises of empowerment and liberation—as fake news. They perceive feminism as a scam because patriarchy evolved to co-opt feminism into something that will once again serve its needs. The second shift is the here, damn punishment women faced for daring to seek equity in the home and the workplace. What young women got was a hollowed-out postfeminist world that equated empowerment with individual achievement and career performance without restructuring care, men’s socialization, or domestic expectations.

Knowing all this, it is quite understandable why young women would want to go trad.

But that is a misdiagnosis. Their beef is not with feminism at its core. Their beef is with a patriarchal system that absorbed the language of feminism without giving women an actually transformed social contract.

And so what did these young women do? They drafted another patriarchal bargain.

tradwifery as a patriarchal bargain

A patriarchal bargain is a survival strategy women make within a patriarchal system: they accommodate, negotiate with, or even uphold certain gender rules in exchange for security, protection, status, or material support. The term comes from feminist scholar Deniz Kandiyoti, who argued that women strategize “within a set of concrete constraints” created by patriarchy, and that these bargains shape both women’s behavior and the kinds of resistance that feel possible in a given context.

Think of it as a fawn response to greater systemic pressures.

The tradwife bargain says: give up some freedom, and in return maybe you don’t have to carry the crushing totality of modern womanhood and adulthood alone. Maybe your husband provides so you don’t have to compete with others in a saturated labor market. Maybe your domestic roles are clearly outlined and dictated by gender so you’re not overworked. Maybe you only have to submit to your husband so you don’t risk submitting to multiple other men in the workplace and possibly get harassed or harmed. Maybe your life feels simpler but at least you’ll have certainty.

There is definitely a lot of appeal there, but this bargain is not liberation. It’s simply a survival strategy.

And at some point, we no longer want to just survive. When do we get to live?

habitus and revelations!

Habitus. What is a habitus?

Habitus, as purr Pierre Bourdieu, is the set of deeply ingrained dispositions people acquire through family life, class position, religion, schooling, and everyday socialization so that certain values, tastes, and future plans feel natural, obvious, and morally right rather than chosen. Habitus is the socially acquired dispositions or durable patterns of thought and behavior that shape how people perceive the world and what kinds of actions feel available to them.

For teen tradwives, habitus is the life script that makes “traditional” womanhood feel familiar, desirable, and morally understandable. But habitus is not a prison. A girl raised for traditional marriage can still use the gifts of feminism—education, savings and investments, legal awareness, and retirement planning—to protect herself inside the bargain she chooses.

I have a lot of grace for teen tradwives because I was raised with “traditional” and very religious values. This is why when these male influencers go online and say they want a “traditional” woman, I crack up because yeah, you can want a “traditional” woman but would a “traditional” woman want you back? You have no modesty (not just in the way you dress but also the way you speak and the way you flaunt your belongings), you are not monogamous, you have multiple close female friends, you want to “build together” i.e. you want a woman to provide for you, you don’t understand the love preached in the Bible and you use it as a tool for oppression when that oppression is what Christ is explicitly against.

I could go on about this all day.

So I grew up Catholic, went to Catholic school almost my whole life. Modesty in dress and thought was a big thing. Not having male friends was a big thing. Protecting myself from the male gaze was a big thing. Dating for marriage was a big thing. And at the time, it all felt so oppressive, and I have rebelled, but now that I’m older, I could see the logic behind these “traditional” values. It was all for protection. These were bargains made in a culture that still had a lot of grape culture embedded in it.

Modesty in dress is a bargain to decrease the chance of being paid attention to and possibly harmed. Modesty in thought is a bargain to decrease the chance of being paid attention to and possibly harmed. Not having male friends is a bargain to decrease the chance of being graped because most grapes are perpertrated by people close to the victim (i.e. her friends). Dating for marriage is a bargain to decrease the chance of being stuck in situationships and wasting time and being used by a partner. All of these bargains, I was taught to make and made them I did. And when I stopped making them, I understood why these bargains where set in the first place.

But just because I inherited this traditional habitus doesn’t mean I have to also inherit the traditional vulnerability that came with this bargain. I could easily have been a teen tradwife but I didn’t become one.

I still had an amazing academic education, a financial education, a pretty decent work ethic so I will always be able to provide for myself no matter what. I also was instilled a lot of confidence and disagreeableness and audacity that drove a lot of bad people away.

All this to say: if you or anyone close to you is perilously close to falling into the teen tradwife epidemic or the tradwife epidemic, give them some grace. But also, give them resources. The best conversations I’ve had were with women who also understood the pressures of the world we lived in and gave me the tools to improve how I moved within it.

Let us teach each other the importance of an education, degrees, certifications, marketable skills, financial literacy, having confidence, having the audacity, the willingness to leave situations no longer serving us, and most of all, understanding.

To all the teen tradwives and tradwives in their 20s and 30s and 40s all the way to their 90s, we see you and we see the sacrifices you have made. Tradition can be beautiful thing but it doesn’t mean you have to suffer to uphold it. Societies oppressing women will never ever be blessed. Women shape, carry, and pass on tradition. You have always had this power and it’s time you use it for good.

Tradwifery today may look like indentured servitude but it doesn’t have to be. Women, in a perfect world, should not have to work double or triple shifts in the home, should not have to worry about workplace harassment, should not have to be financially vulnerable to escape an exploitative labor market. But this is the world we live in. But it doesn’t have to be this way and only you can change it.

That’s all I have for you today. I just wanted to let you know that you have so much inherent worth and value in a world that is hellbent on devaluing you.

Now get that bag, bestie!

-Elle

I have been getting pressed and bothered by a lot of these ragebait accounts online especially the ones that have to do with disrespecting women or women tolerating egregious boyfriend behavior, the classic here’s something diabolical my boyfriend did, everyone agree with me but don’t tell me to leave him because I never will and you guys don’t know him. And as someone who has seen so many iterations of this come about on social media, I’m going to let you in on a secret: it’s ragebait. It’s women participating in humiliation rituals as a bid for social media fame.

And the thing is, it works amazingly (unfortunately).

And you know what? If you have ever thought of doing this, you do you, get your bag, but it’s absolutely not worth it. There are better ways to achieve your goals without insulting yourself and harming your self-concept.

We’re also need to talk about the collective harm that results from this ragebait boyfriend content. This type of content is leading to our collective bad boyfriend fatigue. We are so desensitized to bad boyfriend content online that we are now refusing to give grace to women in actual bad relationships with bad boyfriends in real life. And we feel so justified in isolating these women in terrible relationships when the very thing they need is a strong support system to gather the courage to leave these terrible relationships.

So yeah, I’m so over all the ragebait. We can do so much better.

why we love to hate

Negative emotions tend to hit harder than positive ones. Psychologists call this the negativity bias: we feel losses more intensely than gains, criticism more sharply than positive feedback. One negative review can eclipse a hundred kind comments. We replay it, dissect it, analyze it, overanalyze it, and let it burrow into our deepest thoughts and feelings. Our brains are wired to scan for negativity, which is exactly why ragebait content almost always works. It hooks into the part of us that is hyper-attuned to what feels wrong, to what elicits extreme negative emotion.

And I used to fall into this trap every single time. I would get upset by bad boyfriend content so I would make a video about it because I know the girlies would want to talk about it, and these videos would do pretty well. It was a tried and true formula but after doing that for our first season, even I got tired of it. Even I got the bad boyfriend fatigue. Don’t we have other better things to do than talk about men all day?

And I know we can’t help it because we literally live under patriarchy but I at least want to try not centering our conversations around them and instead center our conversations around each other.

Recently, butter dish lady went viral on Tiktok.

Her video is captioned: “day 5 of silence in this household because I bought my fiancé an xbox and for Christmas this is what he got me” (he got her a butter dish)

And obviously the post goes viral (as does every single bad boyfriend video), and she gets a ton of engagement, likes, comments, followers. She comes out and says it’s a joke, he actually got me other stuff, everyone lighten up.

And the girlies have been growing increasingly impatient with women making content about their “bad boyfriends” to farm engagement.

This video is titled “if you’re going to stay with your horrible partner, leave us alone we are tired.”

Someone said:

This. And this comment sums up everyone’s beef with bad boyfriend content

Someone even made a bingo card because every time someone complains about their bad boyfriend online, they always respond with some variation of these things.

So why exactly are we seeing so much ragebait content?

Well, it’s because social media democratized fame.

And I am actually all for this democratization, but an unintended consequence of this is ragebait content. Now that the barrier to entry for social media fame is less gatekept, we are seeing women aspiring to be content creators engage in humiliation rituals as a bid for engagement, following, and all the benefits associated with social media fame.

I’ve written about the “humiliation ritual of it all” here btw.

In this article, I covered another ragebait video of a woman saying her fiancé will buy her a coach bag if her video gets 50k likes and if another famous content creator comments on it. And the famous content creator not only liked the video but bought her the bag as well. And it lit up Tiktok at the time because yeah, if he wanted to and he could, then he absolutely would. Why are you out here asking other women to support this behavior?

And I get that it’s a trend but I can’t not read deeply into them. To me, it seems like these women’s partners don’t really want to get them whatever item they were asking for and that’s why they have these outrageous demands like 50k likes, 100k likes, a comment from this celebrity like what on god’s green earth? I can’t. Just say you don’t want to or it’s not in the budget, like, communicate with your words.

Anyway, I do feel bad for women who want to make content creation into their career and feel like they have to humiliate themselves online in this way just to get engagement. I get it that the cost of showing up online, trying in public is embracing the cringe, but content creation in itself is already cringy. You don’t have to make it more so.

I do think there’s something deeply patriarchal about the idea that you must submit to humiliation in order to earn success. That you have to be “humbled” publicly, mocked, hated, stitched to oblivion, disciplined, stripped of dignity, and only then are you worthy of achievement. It mirrors old initiation rites built on dominance and endurance: that you must prove yourself by surviving degradation.

It’s giving hazing.

But that is not the only model of change.

When you seek the divine feminine, transformation does not come from humiliation, from degradation. It comes from descent. It is not about being shamed in front of everyone; it is about going inward, shedding every pretention you have about yourself, entering the dark, and emerging anew.

Will you feel naked? Yes. Will you feel ashamed? No. Because there is nothing shameful about your existence. So why are you manufacturing shame at all?

Food for thought.

Now, while the collective sentiment now is to be impatient with women who post their bad boyfriends, and tell them to leave their man or leave us out of it, I would say that we need to give women with bad boyfriends a little bit more grace. Less so for these content creators but when it comes to women we know in real life, we cannot confuse them with aspiring content creators who are farming engagement. Because I fear that this “strictness” we have developed for women who are less into their deconstruction than we are is leading us to callousness to the plight of other women—women who need a support system the most.

the problem

One of my favorite writers on this here platform, Paris Mwendwa made a video on Tiktok covering this butter dish lady incident, and in her comments, I found this comment.

I have been getting the ick recently with the “leave him or leave us out of it” sentiment and I couldn’t pinpoint why until I read this comment.

And obviously, with nuance. There are certain situations in which you do have to remove yourself from the equation. Sometimes you have to love and support other women from afar especially if they are bringing harm into your life. So we are not talking about these situations.

We talked about running a strict program in a past class, and how revolutionary that would be if we all did that, but not every single woman is ready to do that yet. There are so many reasons why women don’t want to or are not able to leave their “bad” boyfriends—codependence, finances, scarcity mindset, and a bunch of other reasons. And you know the cure to many of these excuses? Community.

We can show women interdependence instead of codependence. We can open up our homes, our wallets to women who are leaving bad relationships. We can show them love doesn’t only have to come in one font. Some women hang on to their “bad” boyfriends to prove a point, to prove people wrong. Okay, let’s stop hating. There’s nothing to prove. All we care about is your safety and happiness.

Did you know it takes women multiple times to leave their unsafe partners?

And yet we are cultivating a culture that has zero patience for these women. And right now, it’s a niche sentiment, next it’ll be dominant culture, and next it’ll be policy. If we keep going like this, when do we start withdrawing public support for these women who need resources and shelter when leaving harmful relationships?

So if you are on this leave him or leave us out of it vibe in real life, I’m asking you to reconsider. I used to agree with it because I was so fatigued by bad boyfriend ragebait content, but I’ve since then learned to separate my annoyance with these people making ragebait content who are not thinking about the real harm they are doing to people in real life.

As long as our brains favor negative content, as long as algorithms reflect our human behavior, ragebait content is here to stay. And our fatigue will only ever increase. Maybe the goal is submission. Maybe the goal is for us to finally lose all compassion. Maybe the goal is to turn us into can-never-do-no-wrong, literally-could-never, always-right and fully deconstructed beings who lack empathy for others. Increasingly, I feel that is the goal and I absolutely refuse to succumb.

We can do so much better. We can be strict yet kind and empathetic. When we refuse to be these things out of fatigue, out of spite, out of feeling superior to others, I fear we have been gotten.

That’s all I have for you today. I just wanted to let you know that you have so much inherent worth and value in a world that is hellbent on devaluing you.

Now get that bag, bestie!

-Elle

how it all began

I saw this meme while scrolling on this here app:

And you know what? Yeah, I vibe with that.

I have been accused of being a lucky girl, manifesting my way through life, and you know what? The allegations are true because I’m literally insane. And I don’t say that in a clinical way obviously, but in a more out of the ordinary way.

I’ve always been taught that to get extraordinary results, you have to do extraordinary things. And extraordinary literally means going a little bit above the average or a lot above the average.

There are a lot of people I look up to and they have accomplished amazing things and even when you account for the privilege disparity because it is definitely easier to achieve things when you have a certain amount of privilege, even accounting for that, I’ve noticed one thing they all share in common: insanity—or should I say, an insane amount of obsession, of focus, of fixation.

And this observation is what a lot of manifestation content is based off of. Think about something deeply and frequently, and eventually it will be reality. You don’t have to believe in the woowoo aspects of manifestation to see that intense focus tends to yield the results of what is focused on.

I’ll use myself as an example. I started consistently posting on Youtube in 2023. I was pumping out at least 3 videos a week. Most of them were badly made but I pushed through the cringe. It was an era of experimentation for me. I was genuinely having fun making these videos.

The whole experience was very humbling because there was so much I didn’t know I didn’t know. It was also frustrating because I would work so hard on a video—multiple videos, actually—and they would flop. But every time I published a video, I learned something. After all, negative data is still data.

And many people will say growing on Youtube now is impossible, and this and that, but okay. Had I believed that, we wouldn’t be here now. To take on a task deemed impossible by so many is insane behavior. And yet here we are now. And I will never claim to be the smartest, the prettiest (because that’s apparently important in social media), even the most hardworking because I’m none of those things. But I will say I can be the most obsessed if I wanted to.

I was hyperfocused. I ate, lived, and breathed Youtube. I started in July and got my plaque in the mail in November.

Now, I’m on to another hyperfixation, another secret project, and I couldn’t feel more alive.

When Alyssa Liu said “struggling makes me feel alive,” I felt that to my core.

Obviously, I don’t subscribe to struggle bus anything, but when I’m struggling with a new project, a new personal curriculum I have imposed on myself, something that actually teaches me more when I fail versus when I succeed, I am sat.

I saw this Tiktok and it reads:

“being alone means doing research on Alyssa Liu’s quote “struggling makes me feel alive” and finding that scientifically when someone is hit with a struggle and they have a growth mindset they have a higher life satisfaction. I personally feel this way, I love struggling in yoga poses, while writing and while learning about new things. AI makes everything so easy, don’t let it make you a pet, struggle sometimes!

—@jayy.soares on Tiktok

In the age of AI and us consumers having access to this wide variety and amount of information online, it feels so easy to be a generalist. We’re almost paralyzed by all the choices we could possibly take so we take them all. We become decent at most of them and extraordinary at none. We are masters of nothing.

See this substack article:

All Over the Place

I want to do everything, so I do nothing

Five tabs sit open in my browser: an article from The New Yorker, an episode of Superstore, a video essay on YouTube about the resurgence of trad wives, a PDF I have to summarize, and a draft for my …

Read more

2 years ago · 124393 likes · 1816 comments · Luisa

And that’s also me! I love my hobbies. I take up one hobby to take a break from another hobby. Like, I am writing this from my hobby room right now.

Remember when Virginia Woolf said “A woman needs a room of her own?” Yeah, you need a hobby room or a corner point blank period because I feel so happy and grateful to be a woman when I get to create. I literally get cranky when I feel my creativity is suppressed like it’s legitimately lowering my quality of life when I don’t get to have my girl creativity time.

And I understand that by having so many hobbies, I have turned myself into a generalist and that’s okay because I still have my hyperfixations where I get to be extraordinary. And extraordinarily challenged and pushed and humbled and awed at the same time. All these are feelings we simply don’t feel when we commit to being generalists.

Now circling back to my thesis statement—all my dreams come true bc I’m literally insane:

All my dreams come true and all your dreams come true because there’s no other outcome given the inputs we have loaded into the system.

There’s this popular idea right now on Tiktok and it’s all about “engineering your own luck” by “increasing your surface area for opportunities” and I really am so glad that the girlies are getting more scientific with manifestation. Because as a science girlie who understands the power of prayer, the power of the unknown, it’s about time.

Anyway, whatever it is you desire in your life, whatever you dream of, within reason and the realm of possibility, it is within your grasp. All your dreams will literally come true if you are insane enough to make them come true.

I understand there’s physical limitations to our dreams. Like I also dream I could fly but I can’t because physics… but there’s also much to be said about being the type of person who ebbs and flows with the seasons of life. I used to have this dream which didn’t come true. And now I’m glad it didn’t because I wouldn’t have the life I have now if it did. I asked God and the universe to give me the life of my dreams and I didn’t know at the time that it looked nothing like what I was pining for. And to this day, I still wake up and say wow. This is a dream. This cannot be real and yet it is.

This life wasn’t my original dream but it still feels like a dream come true. Now, looking back, my original dream looks nothing less than a nightmare and I’m glad it didn’t come true. So on the flip side of making all your dreams come true, you can also be insane enough to believe that an alternate outcome is actually your true dream made true.

I made a graph to explain this:

Here’s the statement:

All my dreams come true because I’m literally insane.

And there’s two ways to get there:

1. Become “insanely” hyperfocused and sufficiently exposed to opportunity

2. Embrace the alternate outcome = “insane outcome plasticity”

Literally all your dreams come true because no matter what happens, you will find joy in any outcome. Hence, any outcome will be your dream made true.

I’ve always talked about being an optimistic girlie and I cannot talk about it enough. Optimism is a practice, a sort of discipline. It’s not this frame of mind exclusive only to people with a certain amount of privilege, oh, you can be optimistic because you can afford to be. And that could be true. But what I find a greater flex is to be optimistic despite having literally zero reasons to be.

All your dreams come true because you’re literally insane. And by insane, I mean you have decided that no outcome gets to rob you of your devotion to living your life. That is the insanity of it all: You will keep finding something or someone to love, something to learn, something to become, no matter what happens. You are delulu enough to believe that there is joy on the other side of nearly everything, and your obsessed enough to go find it.

So yes, all my dreams come true and all your dreams come true not because life is perfect. Not because you will always get your way. But because you have trained yourself to meet every version of life with openness, imagination, audacity, and delusion to keep calling it good and amazing and to tell yourself you know what? Yeah this is actually the life of my dreams.

And if that’s insanity, then I don’t want to be normal.1

That’s all I have for you today. I just wanted to let you know that you have so much inherent worth and value in a world that is hellbent on devaluing you.

Now get that bag, bestie!

-Elle

Every time I go on Al Gore’s internet, I learn something new. And recently, I came across the term “WWW.” The acronym stands for “White Whiny Women.” The term is also quite versatile in a way that “WW” can be added on to women of different identifications. But one core truth remains: women whose ailments seem to elude health professionals get labeled “whiny.”

See Katie Couric’s interview with Dr. Mary Claire Haver here. In the video, Dr. Haver describes how while in residency, she was told to be wary of “WWs” (whiny women).

Now, I’ve worked in healthcare settings in the past, and I feel blessed to report that I worked with amazing professional individuals who cared about their patients. I never came across the “whiny woman” term out in the field but I’m not surprised that this is a thing because being dismissed in medical settings is quite a common experience for women.

Read more

six-seven!!!

Brain rot started as an inside joke—a collection of trending audio we keep replaying in our heads and in conversation, a way to self-deprecate and explain why our vocabularies have gotten smaller and our attention spans shorter. We pass it off as funny but nothing about brain rot is funny.

There is nothing funny about our attention being hijacked, our focus fragmented, and our interior life eroded by mindless fluff.

We were not meant to live like this.

No wonder many of us are sensorially overstimulated yet intellectually understimulated.

our intellectual decomposition

We are consuming more information than any other generation in human history but much of it is flattened, fragmented, and stripped of context. And this is a feature, not a bug. Short form content rewards inflammatory reductive content because there really isn’t time for nuance. The human preference for negative content aka the “negativity bias” informs the algorithm so only the most egregious, most heinous, most heart-palpitating content go viral.

If your media diet is all short form content, I fear you have been feeding yourself the junk food of all media. And just like junk food, this type of media consumption may make you feel good in the moment but it has detrimental effects to not only your mental health but also your physical health.

Your nervous system was not designed for perpetual micro-threats.

Ragebait, which is a product of outrage marketing spikes your cortisol levels. Novelty spikes dopamine. Each swipe on these social media platforms is like pulling the slot machine in a casino. You don’t know what you’re going to get but you’re excited either way. You get your cheap thrills but what do you have to show for it?

Nothing!

I fully realize this article is about analog tools, but do need to make a case that in 2026 it’s less black and white toss all tech in the bin and more-so, intentionally deciding to repurpose our screen time for something more beneficial to our overall wellness, giving our phones a job that isn’t pure distraction

Tell me I’m not alone in this:

I’m winding down at night, I pick up my phone to scroll on social media. The algorithm is algorithming, I’m watching girl vlogs, knitting-tok, booktok, I’m vibing… and then the next video is a sad animal video and next thing I know, I’m bawling my eyes out because it’s so sad 😭.

“In the arms of an angel [sob] far away from here [more sobbing 😭]”

And now I’m too wound up to go to bed. I’ve honestly given up on scrolling at night because it just messes with my sleep.

But you know what i started doing more recently to change this? I’m doing meditations on Headspace. p.s. use my link for a 60-day free trial.

I have always struggled with anxiety and it doesn’t help that the things I’m anxious about actually do happen. I really feel like I’m psychic in that way. I don’t want to be, but I can’t help but foresee things. And it’s great when I predict good things, but it’s bad when I have a bad premonition about things.

Worrying all the time has been a common theme in my life, and I’ve been really trying to let things go and allow things to happen however they are supposed to happen. And my meditation practice on Headspace has played a huge part in helping me with my emotional regulation.

Headspace is a mindfulness and meditation app designed to make mental health tools feel simple and usable, even if you’re brand new to meditation.

Whenever I’m feeling anxious, I go on the Headspace app and play a meditation. My favorite is the Calming Everyday Anxiety collection. Just a few minutes a day really helps me stay grounded and not worry so much. Two weeks of Headspace has been proven to help reduce anxiety, and I totally feel that. I also love their Sleepcasts which put me to sleep no matter how wound up I am. And when I need to focus, I put on their Soundscapes which not only help me focus but also relaxes me so I can sit still and do what I need to do.

I really feel like Headspace is my personal life coach. It keeps me grounded, regulated, focused, and puts me to sleep so I wake up refreshed and ready to take on my day.

If you want to reset or build more support into your year, you can try Headspace entirely for free for 60 days by using my link . It’s two full months of free access - compared to the standard two-week trial available on their site.

Headspace has worked beautifully for me and I know it will for you too.

Now back to the topic!

our intellectual decomposition part 2

Over time, I’ve noticed this doomscrolling habit has done something to me... I’ve started getting, for a lack of a better word, dumber.

Especially on these short form platforms such as Tiktok and Instagram where outrage marketing does best, influencers will make actual mistakes to gain engagement. I don’t think I have ever seen “your” and “you’re” misused more than I have on social media, and I know these creators know better. It’s always done on purpose because they guarantee comments. Someone will always want to correct your grammar so what do you do if you’re a content creator? You use wrong grammar!

And this grinds my gears because isolated, it’s somewhat benign. Let’s misspell things on purpose, we’re not hurting anyone. I mean, I misspell, misuse, mis-say words all the time. I also make up words all the time. I’m human. I’m not a machine. But I would say that racing to the bottom whatever reading level is a collective L for all of us.

Not everyone knows that influencers are misspelling things on purpose for engagement. And as a regular consumer, if you get exposed to the dumbification of short-form content enough, you start to identify with it. And this isn’t theoretical. It’s actually happening.

Social media users are increasingly becoming FUNCTIONALLY ILLITERATE.

And we see this functional illiteracy manifest as no nuance nellie activities and bean soup-ism. Bean soup theory went viral on tiktok after a creator made a video detailing a bean soup recipe and someone commented “what if I don’t like beans?”

Our algorithms have grown so personalized and so specific that when individual people get content that doesn’t include them or cater to them to such an extent, they get so disoriented. Like how dare my algorithm serve me a bean soup recipe when I don’t like beans?

And this behavior doesn’t just emerge on soup recipe videos. They also come about when creators are talking about important things that affect people’s lives. The bean soup people, the no nuance nellies, the people who literally can’t do anything, they derail important conversations so instead of getting deeper into the material, we are stuck placating people who refuse to understand. And I’m all for accessibility and inclusivity, but everyone involved has to be well-meaning.

Nicholas Carr, in his book The Shallows argues that the internet rewards constant skimming and multitasking, weakening the capacity for deep, sustained thought once fostered by reading books.

I absolutely blame short form content for the rise of functionally illiterate adults, and we’re all worse for it, which is why I’m so glad that the year of the analog has come.

the year of the analog – analog bags, analog hobbies, analog everything!

Again, “going analog” isn’t about being anti-technology. It’s a response to feeling like our attention is being siphoned off, our nervous systems cooked, and our days are disappearing into content we barely even remember.

So when the analog bag trend started popping up, it felt less like a micro-trend or aesthetic, it felt like a breath of fresh air.

Siece Campbell on Tiktok popularized the analog bag—a tote you keep stocked with non-digital things you can reach for when you feel the itch to scroll. A book, a notebook, a pen, knitting, crossword puzzles, a watercolor kit, something tactile, something slow.

What I love about the analog bag trend is it reframes hobbies as portable and immediate, not a thing you do “someday when you have time,” but a thing you reach for in the exact moments you’d normally give away to your phone. If you have a couple hours a day to devote to doomscrolling, you have the time to engage in a hobby that will give you a finished product and thus be a more rewarding and fulfilling use of your time.

Okay, was this article just an excuse for me to share my analog bag? Maybe, yes. But nonetheless, here it is.

My analog bag holds my analog hobbies:

I would say that embracing analog hobbies has cured me of doomscrolling. I simply don’t have the time, the energy, or the desire to doomscroll. I get so happy when I make progress on my analog hobbies, and seeing finished projects makes my heart so full.

I’ve also started doing Work in Progress Wednesdays (aka “WIP Wednesdays”). I don’t always film it but I check in with myself about the projects I’m working on. I also love Finished Object Fridays (aka “FO Fridays”). With my content creation, I usually release an episode on Fridays so that’s like my “finished object.” Obviously, with knitting, it’s hard to finish projects in a week so I’m really looking forward to when I can do a FO Friday with this sweater.

And most of all, going analog with my hobbies has been a never-ending learning experience. For example, I have been knitting for a couple years now, and there is still so much to learn. I don’t think I will ever learn everything there is to know about knitting in this lifetime, and that’s what I love about it. I’m constantly challenged and I have to be lean on practicality and creativity to finish a project. Same goes with all my other analog hobbies. I’m constantly humbled by what I do not know, and I love that feeling. I get so excited about learning and I get to do so much of it.

Overall, going analog has given me so much to look forward to and get excited about, and that’s way more than I can say about doomscrolling on social media. I’ve always had a ton of hobbies, but there were moments when I’m like I don’t have the time to engage in these hobbies or learn something new. When in reality, I did! I was just prioritizing things that brought me zero joy.

Like why would I do myself dirty like that?

I was settling for mindless consumption when I really should have been mindful.

So if you’re watching this and you also feel scattered, overstimulated, or intellectually hungry, I invite you to pick up an analog hobby.

Start imperfect but start today. Put together your own little analog bag. Literally touch grass and give yourself some hearty mind food to chew on. You don’t need to quit the internet but you do need to create a pocket of your life that doesn’t belong to it.

That’s all I have for you today. I just wanted to let you know that you have so much inherent value and worth in a world that is hell bent on devaluing you.✨

And a big thank you to today’s sponsor, Headspace, for sponsoring today’s article.

If you want to reset or build more support into your year, and maximize your analog activities by pairing them with some mindfulness audio, you can try Headspace entirely for free for 60 days by using my link. It’s two full months of free access - compared to the standard two-week trial available on their site.

tysm. bye :)

-Elle

hey bestie!

Welcome back to another edition of Powerhouse of the Celle. This newsletter is a defense of girl dinner + other “girl” concepts. Girl dinner, particularly, I think is a secretly genius trend (as are the other “girl” trends). Enjoy!

what even is girl dinner?

At the most literal level, girl dinner is a meal that doesn’t try to be a meal. It’s snacks, leftovers, things eaten directly out of the fridge, cheese and crackers, a sweet potato, microgreens, radishes, toast with something on it, fruit, pickles, chocolate, some sort of protein if it sounds good. It’s often no-cook and low-effort. It can be balanced, sweet, savory, and sometimes weird.

The term really took off on TikTok, where women started posting casual videos of what they were eating for dinner. There was the viral “girllll dinerrrr” audio which really took this term to the mainstream.

I am a girl dinner stan, I’m trying to be a “savoury girl” but the sodium is way too much for me, but I love all the girl dinner creators—Allison plates, Courtney cook, the og savoury girl. Am I recreating every single plate they are making? No. Will I be heaping kewpie mayo on my onion cups? Also no. Did I bake a sweet potato and stick chunks of butterkase cheese in there? Yes. And it was delicious.

What I think made the trend stick as well wasn’t just the novelty but also the resonance. So many women saw these videos and thought, Oh, I eat like that too. And this format of eating wasn’t really how a lot of us grew up eating. For me, it was usually a cup of rice, a meat, a vegetable, a soup, and maybe a dessert. It was never a little bit of this, a little bit of that, allotta bit of this, allota bit of that like it is with girl dinner.

Girl dinner resonated with a lot of women because it named something that we were already doing but didn’t have cultural representation. For many women, dinner isn’t just eating—it’s a project. Planning, shopping, cooking, cleaning, and often feeding other people. Even when women live alone, they’ve internalized the idea that a “proper” dinner should involve a certain format—a labor intensive meat-forward meal format, and that there’s a proper way to “adult right.”

Girl dinner strips all of that away.

Girl dinner shows what happens when women feed themselves without planning for others, without incorporating so much meat (like we need to talk about how much men need to eat meat) and that’s why girl dinner became popular during a period of widespread burnout. Women are overworked, overextended, and mentally exhausted.

The decision fatigue is so real. That’s why when they ask us “where do you want to eat?” we can’t decide! By the time dinner rolls around, the idea of orchestrating a whole meal production just to eat can feel unbearable.

Amidst all of this, girl dinner says: you don’t have to.

I can never hate on the girl dinner trend because it’s quite transgressive.

girl dinner as rebellion

Girl dinner is rebellion because there is this cultural pressure placed on women to cook “real” meals especially if there are other people in the household. But as we are seeing a rise in women living alone as self-sufficient adults, there is no longer a need for these elaborate meals served to a husband or children or extended family and friends.

There’s this creator on Tiktok who goes by @whodoibecome and she made a video titled “Your culture is known for its hospitality because that hospitality is afforded by women’s unpaid labor.” And she goes on to say that many lament the erosion of these hospitality practices without realizing that these practices were built on the unpaid and undervalued labor of women. To prepare these elaborate feasts that lasts for days, women have to do the work of preparing, cooking, serving, cleaning up, not to mention the planning as well.

If everyone pitched in, then these practices would still be in motion, but women are no longer willing parties to their own labor exploitation in the name of “culture.”

Someone said:

And that’s on the social reproduction work of women.

Here’s another interesting comment:

This. And I say this as someone who actually loves to cook. Hosting and cooking are my love languages. My sourdough bread has reached so many people. I love to cook. And I’m so blessed to have developed a positive relationship with cooking and I think it’s because it’s always been framed as a self-sufficiency thing, not a woman thing. I also grew up seeing boys and men cook so I never felt like it was my duty as a woman to cook.

And whenever we get into these conversations of oh, women do so much and if men don’t put in the same effort, we should stop doing so much and just be low effort as well, be below bare minimum low effort just like them… uh, how about no?

We’re better than that. Food is such a great way to show you care and to share your culture as well, and to erase that part of our social life to spite others is only doing ourselves a disservice. So if you love to cook, more power to you. Keep making the elaborate meals. Keep baking from scratch. Keep doing the thing that brings you joy. Don’t let anyone dull your shine.

BUT

We do live in a dominant culture where, within many family units, women are expected to cook and are judged not just on how the food tastes, but also on the perceived complexity and the amount of labor behind it. And the more you do, the better woman you’re perceived to be.

You can see this really clearly in Japanese bento culture.

Bentos are often presented as these cute, colorful, carefully arranged lunches especially those made by mothers for their children. And while there’s beauty and creativity there, there’s also the darker reality that bento lunches have long functioned as a way to compare and judge mothers. These mothers are evaluated by other parents, teachers, even their own children, based on how elaborate the lunch looks. So if you send your child to school with a PB&J sandwich, a bowl of fried rice without decorations, people could be judging you.

And this pressure isn’t unique to Japan. It just happens to be especially explicit there. Across cultures, women are taught that food is one of the primary ways they demonstrate effort and consequently, worth.

Which brings us to… boxed cake mix.

When cake mixes were first introduced, they were too easy. Just add water, mix, and bake. And women were not buying it because it felt too easy… to0 lazy. So manufacturers added a step: add an egg. And then the cake mixes flew off the shelves.

And I saw this history lesson on TV a while ago, and it shows how deeply ingrained this idea is: that we cannot make our lives too easy without guilt.

And girl dinner goes against all of that.

“The idea of cooking dinner was historically women’s work in the home,” said Ms. Rao, 49. “What I like about girl dinner is it takes away the idea that you have to cook anything: You just literally put it together. So you go from a position where the production of the food is what makes it good and makes you a valid woman, to the idea that *having* food is what makes you a valid woman.”

—Seema Rao in Jessica Roy’s “Is It a Meal? A Snack? No, It’s ‘Girl Dinner.’” The New York Times. 2023.

Girl dinner is a big FU to these expectations that women have to slave in the kitchen all day just to be perceived as a “good woman.”

That number one: that we have to cook for others—girl dinner is often eaten alone or eaten with other “girls.” And number two: that dinner must be a time-intensive, labor-intensive meat-forward ordeal—girl dinner is often a charcuterie board of whatever is left in the fridge or the pantry, minimal cooking involved. And last: that a woman’s joy from the meal derives from the pleasure and approval of others—girl dinner delights its creator and that’s all that matters.

in defense of girl dinner

Any time women start doing something collectively and enjoying it, there’s backlash. And girl dinner is no exception.

The main critiques tend to fall into three buckets:

1. Girl dinner may promote an unhealthy relationship with food

2. Girl dinner is nutritionally inadequate.

3. And third: girl dinner as a term and concept is unserious, infantilizing, regressive, or irresponsible.

On the surface, these sound like concerns about health. And while these concerns are valid, underneath them is something deeper: discomfort with women choosing ease, intuition, and pleasure without external validation.

Let’s start with the most serious accusations: an unhealthy relationship with food and that girl dinner is nutritionally inadequate. And this is characterized by rigidity, fear, control, obsession, and shame. It’s about these super strict rules: what you can eat, when you can eat, how much you’re allowed to want. It’s driven by a cycle of anxiety and punishment.

Girl dinner, in contrast, is defined by flexibility, pleasure, and ✨whimsy✨.

My two favorite girl dinner creators: Allison and Courtney, I love watching them eat because they’re just so joyful. I do think I have such a positive relationship with girl dinner because I watch positive representations of girl dinner. They choose food that brings them joy, there’s variety in texture, flavors, colors, and I’ve taken some classes in nutrition, and from the looks of it (especially Allison’s plates), they look pretty nutritionally balanced.

But don’t just take my word for it:

“At least one nutritionist has [given her seal of approval to the trend. Kathrine Kofoed, 27, a nutritionist and health coach in Portland, Ore., suggested that part of the reason girl dinner was being so widely embraced was its affirmation of the way women already eat: “It’s a pleasant departure from diet culture, and from all these rigid expectations of what food should be.”

—Jessica Roy. “Is It a Meal? A Snack? No, It’s ‘Girl Dinner.’” The New York Times. 2023.

Now, the final critique: that girl dinner is childish or unserious.

“Girl dinner” follows a long line of girl trends celebrating girlhood. Girl math, girl this, girl that. We were slapping a bow on everything and cute-sifying and meme-fying our way through culture because “I’m just a girl.”

Spoiled girlie support group? We have been on girl culture since day one.

I see the celebration of girlhood and “girl” culture as a reclamation of sorts. We are leading with joy, we are creating insider culture, a shared language, we are also creating an aesthetic.

And aesthetics or visuals are an important driver of culture.

There has been a common theme tying our episodes: Together, we will create a whole new world.

Girl dinner and all these other girl trends are our attempt at reshaping culture—a culture that does not exploit our labor and resources, a culture that respects our contributions, a culture that allows us to lead with joy—our joy that in the end, contributes to the joy of others.

Women dominate social media and so we are already poised to create and proliferate new values via aestheticization. In the case of “girl dinner,” women are pushing back on gendered expectations of cooking and creating a healthy joy-led relationship with food all while making the whole concept easy to understand and adopt. It’s quite literally genius!

But are we minimizing our cultural power by turning our new values packaged into these concepts into diminutively-named trends? Girl math, girl dinner, girl this, girl that?

One thing I’ve noticed is men tend to gatekeep certain concepts or fields of study as “complicated” or difficult when they really are not that complicated or difficult. This is especially prevalent in the male-dominated finance spaces where female creators have begun to “translate” jargon into more easily understood lay terms.

Contrast this with how women tend to brand certain concepts as diminutive to make them more inclusive and accessible. We are so obsessed with inclusivity and accessibility in ways that men are not. And why is that?

We could easily have branded “girl dinner” as a “intuitive modular macro plate” but we didn’t. Instead, by branding an intuitive way of eating that is modular (aka you can sub things in and out depending on your personal stock so you can hit your macros with mostly whole unprocessed food) as “girl dinner,” this way of eating was made inclusive and accessible. It doesn’t sound complicated at all. It sounds like something you would want to try as a “girl.”

So I actually don’t think it’s a bad thing that we do this, but it is a thing. I do however think we can make things more inclusive and accessible without making them diminutive, but how can we spread our ideas via aestheticization without being reductive? I don’t know.

I still love “girl-ifying” everything. I still love our spoiled girlie support group. And this 2023 article from The Cut may explain why:

“… while there are countless ways to be a woman, girlhood just feels more universal, full of legible markers. It makes sense that only a few broadly painted depictions of girlhood would resonate with so many on the level of mass culture. But maybe the compulsion to “girlify” something in order to anoint it as worthy will go away. Maybe, in 2024, we might be able to find some joy and lightness in growing up as well. Maybe we don’t need to put a bow on everything.”

—Isabel Cristo. Woman In Retrograde. The Cut. 2023.

Well, it’s 2026 and we still put a bow on everything and we still girlify everything and maybe in the future that will change. But you know what? Why does it have to? What’s wrong with being a girl? I love being a girl. I also love being a woman. And maybe we can all be both.

Maybe knowing that girlifying our way through culture as a means to aestheticize and proliferate woman-loving values is the way forward. And even if it isn’t, at least we tried.

That’s all I have for you today. I just wanted to let you know that your power lies in you knowing yourself, accepting yourself, and embodying yourself.

tysm. bye :)

-Elle

As we’re coming into the new year, I’ve been really reflecting on the woman I want to be not just for the upcoming year but also for the rest of my life. And that got me thinking about the women I admire most. When I grow up, I want to be exactly like them. And in the beginning, I couldn’t articulate why I want to be like them, just that I want to be like them.

I actually found the common theme in their lives that I want for myself. And that common theme is: community.

Of the women I admire most, they have the strongest communities. They have a bunch of girlfriends, family members who always celebrate them—birthdays, holidays, just because days, they’re always taking phone calls and facetimes, they always receive mail, they are so interconnected with the people around them. And I look at that, and I’m like,“I want to be exactly like them when I grow up!”

There’s been a lot of talk recently about community and how many young people or people in general nowadays, lack the skill to build community. Many a tiktoker has said that “Everyone wants community until it’s time to be a community member.” Meaning, everyone wants the benefit of community without putting in the work of building said community.

And mind that I said “building community.” Community is built, not found. It takes effort, practice, and repetition. It also takes a lot of being inconvenienced, which in our convenience economy is a big ask for a lot of people. This also ties in with the rise of loneliness in young people. It seems like we have lost the art of community because we no longer put in the work of belonging.

So today, we are going to bring back this lost art. Yes, there are rules, but the rules are worth it. Community affects so much of our experience of life, and I would love nothing more than for you to live your best life, unencumbered, maybe a little inconvenienced but nonetheless a life full of joy, love, and good memories with your loved ones.

the 8 habits of highly-connected women

First, I want to define the highly-connected women: They don’t necessarily have super large communities but what they do have is a solid tightknit community of friends and family who they are in constant contact and have meaningful relationships with.

The habits we are talking about in this episode mostly apply to one’s inner circle—the 3-15 people you interact with daily or weekly.

You don’t do all of this for every single person you’ve ever come into contact with. Because there is a limit to how many relationships—however small—you can meaningfully sustain. To understand that limit, we need to talk about Dunbar’s Number.

Anthropologist Robin Dunbar famously proposed that humans can maintain stable social relationships with roughly 150 people at any given time, a constraint shaped by cognitive capacity and time investment.

—Dunbar, R. I. M. Coevolution of neocortical size, group size and language in humans. Behav Brain Sci 16, 681–694 (1993).

Importantly, these relationships are not equal. Human social networks are structured in layers, with emotional closeness decreasing as group size increases.

Research finds an inner core of about 3-5 intimate relationships (aka your “support clique,” followed by 9-15 close emotional ties aka your “sympathy group,” then ~50 meaningful but less intimate relationships, and finally the broader circle of ~150 social contacts.

Each layer outwards demands progressively less emotional and physical labor but still requires some attention, recognition, and care. And knowing this and accepting this makes building community so much less daunting. Maintaining ties with 150 or more people feels like a full time job because it is. Kinkeeping is labor!

But 3-5 daily touchpoints and 9-15 weekly or monthly touchpoints? Absolutely doable. Anyway, let’s get into the habits.

1. penguin pebbling

This is a popular term in neurodivergent communities. It’s basically you reaching out to a person when you see something that reminds you of them. It could be as simple as taking a picture of a flower and sending that to your friend because that’s your friend’s favorite flower. Or you picking up an extra matcha at the café because you’re passing by your friend’s workplace and you wanted to drop it off because you’ll be running errands in the area. Penguin pebbling is about the little things.

— “What Are the 5 Neurodivergent Love Languages?” Verywellmind. 2025.

This works because it’s such a low stakes way to reach out to someone. You’re not expecting more than a “Wow. That’s so cool!” or an “OMG, thank you!” You do your good deed and you disappear. There’s no implied obligation, no emotional debt, no follow-up required.

So if you want to try penguin pebbling, I highly highly recommend. I’ve been doing this for forever and people have been doing this to me as well, and we never had a name for it, and now we learn that it actually has a name. And it’s such a cute visual, you know? I’m imagining Happy Feet penguins giving each other pebbles. Like, we’re not that different.

Moving on, the next habit of highly connected women is that they rarely ever ever cancel plans.

2. they rarely cancel (unless it’s literal life or death or sickness)

I don’t know who started this trend of telling people yes I’ll show up and then canceling last minute because of “boundaries” or you’re not feeling it so you should honor that, but I call BS. Because I’m a boundaries stan. I’ve never met a boundary I didn’t want to honor. But I fear that the therapization of rude behavior has gotten to a lot of girlies and it’s causing us to miss out on the wonders of community. It’s causing us to be so blatantly selfish at the expense of others.

And this habit of never canceling unless it’s sickness or life or death situation is one of the biggest habits of highly-connected women. They are very dependable, reliable, you can count on them showing up when they say they will show up, and often, with snacks!

And I understand that you can’t say yes to everything, but saying yes then canceling last minute literally a couple minutes before the event is 10 times worse than just saying “No, I can’t” or “No, I’d literally do anything else than whatever you’re proposing.” And I’ve been trying to get good at saying no, so I’ll share some things that work for me.

• “It doesn’t really sound like my thing. I think I’ll pass this time.”

• “That’s way too far of a drive. I think I’ll just stay home.”

• (The SoCal girlies will get this one) “It says it’ll rain that day so I’m just staying home.”

• “That’s not really my vibe. Thank you for thinking of me though!”

• “I think it’ll be a weird dynamic if I go. Just catch me up later?”

• Or simply, “Unfortunately, I won’t be available that time. Thank you for thinking of me though.”

Literally any variation of these is so much better than saying yes then flaking.

And let’s say that you did cancel after saying yes for a reason that wasn’t really life or death. It is now up to you to invite the other person you cancelled on to something you have planned because if you don’t then that can be construed as your way of breaking up with them. And maybe it is, but if it isn’t, then you have some making up to do.

3. they treat birthdays as sacred

Birthdays are so special. Even the people who say they don’t care about their birthdays, uh, yeah, they care—a lot. Not to generalize, but generalizing, they’ve experienced some really bad birthdays that taught them they shouldn’t care so much. And how do I know that? It’s because I’ve been that person. But let me tell you: ignoring a person’s birthday is like ignoring their existence.

The most highly-connected women are awesome at birthdays.

We are talking cards, phone calls, emails, texts, gifts, the works. For their most immediate relationships, they plan birthdays weeks out. What are we doing? What’s on your wishlist? How do you want this to go?

And a lot of it is ritual as well. When you have gotten into the habit of doing things for others on their birthday, it gets easier over time.

One thing I’ve gotten good at is planning special birthday days. And it’s basically a full day of local activities that we can do together 1 on 1 or as a small group that’s tailored to the person having their birthday. And these have been a hit. Every time I ask someone what they want to do for their birthday, it’s always can you plan activities for us? Like idk, it’s just a talent. I don’t like to brag but I’m pretty good at planning the perfect date.

So, really lean into your strengths and your talents and share that with others. You can be good at baking so you can bake them a cake or treats or if they have a hobby that they’re passionate about, you can take them to a festival for that h0bby. The sky really is the limit.

And once again, you’re probably only going to do this for about 3-5 people, maybe a little over if you have a big family, but really, it’s just as enjoyable celebrating others as it is being celebrated on your birthday.

4. they keep their word

This is tying into number two (not canceling last minute). When you say you’re going to do something, either do it or tell the person you can’t do it. The absolute worst thing is you saying you’re going to do something and then you don’t. And I’ve spent enough time as an adult to learn that when people do that to you, it’s because they don’t find you worth keeping a promise to. And that’s okay but you don’t have to let them into your world.

The most highly-connected women are dependable and reliable. They do things when they say they will do it and they are upfront about when they can’t follow through. It’s way better to say you don’t want to or can’t do something versus saying you will do something and then ghosting. It’s giving low credibility.

5. they are wary of triangulation

One surefire way to end all your friendships and dismantle your community that you’ve built in one fell swoop is triangulating people. Because when people wake up to how you have been pitting them against each other, they will both leave you. Unfortunately, I’ve experienced this with multiple people, and those people doing the triangulating ultimately are the ones who lose friends or family members. They’re the ones who constantly have to look for new friend groups or social groups because they’ve alienated everyone around them.

And I’m thankful to be in this mindset to point out when triangulation happens and so thankful to be around grown well-adjusted adults who don’t play into it and actually point it out, but when you’re younger, you’re not that awake to it so you let it fly over your head and feed into it.

Part of this as well is being able to recognize triangulation when it happens. Because if someone does this to you, it can really harm your social bonds with others. When someone is pitting you against someone you care about, spreading lies about you or whatnot, it can be very harmful. So it’s so important to keep lines of communication open with your close relationships.

Community can be inconvenient and uncomfortable but with the right people, it’s so worth it. And you don’t want anyone coming in and wrecking all that hard work.

6. they accept people for who they are

If one person is chronically late or they live far and there’s traffic, you’re making reservations 1-2 hours after the call time. If one person is sensitive to the cold, you don’t plan anything outdoors in the winter.

Do you get what I mean?

Having a decent-size community means you can have different people for different vibes. There is no such thing as an all-purpose person. So accept people for who they are and maximize your enjoyment with them. You also need to set your expectations realistically for how and how much they can show up for you. It really is the key to preventing resentment from building up.

7. they make concrete plans

The most highly-connected women do this: instead of saying “let’s get together some time,” they whip out their calendar and start planning right then and there. You are getting that calendar invite before the conversation is over. This is for the close relationships, btw. If you’re not that close and their calendar is full, it’s understandable that people may put off seeing you again.

But in general, for their inner circle, the highly-connected women make concrete plans with dates, times, and places. They will always ask what to bring or how they can help make the magic happen.

And one dilemma I keep seeing on social media is people saying no one invites them out, but when’s the last time you invited someone out? With plans? Activities? Food ideas? A date, a time, and a place?

Sometimes, if you want to be invited, you must first invite.

8. they understand community as mutual aid, not aesthetic

Maybe it’s the Filipino Catholic in me, but we have been on this community vibe since forever. It’s definitely not perfect when you run into the enmeshed collectivism of it all, but we do have a lot to learn from communities who are so unapologetically collectivist.

There’s all this talk about community online and a lot of it so vague and abstract. What does community care even mean? Well, it just means showing up for those around you. Not only the people you already care about a lot but also the people who are physically around you—your neighbors, some kids walking down the street, whoever is in front of you at the café.

The “I don’t owe anyone anything” mentality, it’s got to go. It’s giving first day on earth. It’s giving majority of my socialization occurred on Tiktok (derogatory).

We owe each other something. Not everything, but something. If it doesn’t cost us anything or much, why not? Why not help? Why not act like a community member and actually lend a hand? You never know how small acts of your kindness can touch others and change their lives.

There’s a reason why there’s a genre of content called “people restoring my faith in humanity” and it’s people acting like good community members and helping others. Sometimes restoring faith in humanity isn’t about grand gestures at all.

It’s just about acting like we belong to each other because we do.

That’s all I have for you today. I just wanted to let you know that you have so much inherent worth and value in a world hell bent on devaluing you.

Now get that bag, bestie!

What if I told you that manifestation has less to do with crystals and wishful thinking and way more to do with how your brain, body, and behavior actually work?

Because here’s the quiet part that no one says out loud: manifestation only gets mocked, diminished, and delegitimized because women love it. The moment manifestation enters the conversation, it’s labeled “woo woo,” unserious, or embarrassing. Not because it doesn’t work, but because it’s female-coded.

But neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral science have been quietly backing us up this whole time! Visualization changes neural pathways. Future-oriented thinking predicts better life outcomes. Identity-based behavior reshapes habits, choices, and opportunity. That’s not magic. That’s science.

So in this edition, we’re not manifesting by “just believing” by just having an “intense desire.” We are manifesting by understanding how the mind actually works and then using that knowledge intentionally. Consider this your personal guide to engineering your new year: with evidence, embodiment, and a little audacity (okay, maybe a lot).

Today, we are covering 3 key concepts to science-based manifestation

• Vision boards as neural training tools,

• Dream Girl Days^TM as practice in future self-continuity, and

• Dressing like your Venus as enclothed cognition and identity-based motivation

I have been wanting to make this episode for the longest time but obviously something like this takes a bit of work so I’m so happy I can share it with you just as we’re coming into the new year. With our channel name being “Manifestelle,” one would think we would make a lot of explicit manifestation content, but I’m growing in my relationship with manifestation and I see every act of good and love as inherent forms of manifestation.

We are literally creating the change we want to see by waking up, waking others up, and choosing to walk in light and love, to descend into ourselves, to participate in the life/death/life cycle of womanhood through which we are born anew. All these are heroic acts women participate in daily, and I warrant, are our own forms of manifestation. The way we care for ourselves and others is devotion, is prayer, is manifestation. The way we speak life to ourselves and others is also manifestation.

I also want to emphasize that you can’t manifest your way into or out of everything. And I always say that whether you get the love or the life that you have always dreamed of says nothing about how worthy you are of that love or life. You are no better or worse than others for being able or not being able to manifest the life of your dreams. Sometimes, most of the time, life is less a meritocracy and more a matter of timing, context, and chance. Sometimes, that’s just how the cookie crumbles.

But also, it doesn’t hurt to tilt the scales of probability in your favor—and that’s why we manifest according to science.

vision boards as neural training tools

When you look at images that represent your desired future, your brain doesn’t neatly separate imagined experience from real experience. Decades of neuroscience research show that mental imagery activates many of the same neural networks as actual perception and action. In other words: your brain rehearses the future as if it’s already happening. In short: your brain is by default, a little delulu (or a lot delulu).

One of the most foundational findings comes from cognitive neuroscience research on visual imagery. Studies demonstrate that imagining an object activates the visual cortex, particularly the occipital lobe, in patterns strikingly similar to actually seeing that object. In short and possibly quite reductive terms, in terms of brain activation, there’s not much difference between imagining something and actually seeing something.

And there may be a reason for this.

Karl Friston’s “The Free-Energy Principle: A Unified Brain Theory?” proposes that the brain’s core function is to minimize “free energy,” a measure of uncertainty or surprise about the world. Rather than passively reacting to stimuli—any and all stimuli—the brain continuously builds and updates internal models that predict sensory input, and it acts—through perception, learning, and behavior—to reduce the gap between what it expects and what it experiences. This means that the brain is constantly trying to minimize uncertainty by predicting the world and then acting to make those predictions come true.1

A vision board then functions as a deliberate and meticulously curated input into the brain’s predictive model. By repeatedly exposing yourself to images that you copied from Pinterest, magazine clippings, symbols, and narratives of a desired future, you give your brain concrete data about what kind of world it should expect to inhabit.

And once those expectations are encoded, the brain works to reduce “prediction error” between the expected future and present reality. It does this not by magic, but by adjusting attention, motivation, and action. You start noticing relevant opportunities, making choices that align with the predicted identity, and avoiding paths that contradict it. In Friston’s terms, you are either updating your internal model (beliefs about who you are and where you’re going) or taking action in the world to bring reality closer to that model.

In this way, a vision board doesn’t magically “attract” outcomes—it stabilizes a future self in the brain’s internal model, making behaviors that move you toward that future feel more coherent and less effortful. The board reduces uncertainty about who you are becoming, and the brain, doing what it always does, works to make that future feel predictable—and therefore achievable.

All this to say: vision boards are not “delusional” in a derogatory sense. It’s rehearsal. It’s priming. It’s identity conditioning. And the reason it’s dismissed as silly has far more to do with who uses it than with whether it works.

Vision boards work so well that we all think it’s magic.

Anyway, another girly concept, actually, spoiled girlie concept that actually has scientific basis is The Dream Girl Day^TM.

Dream Girl Days^TM as practice in future self-continuity

I introduced the concept of a Dream Girl Day^TM in a past class, and to this day, I still get comments about it. So let me tell you about The Dream Girl Day^TM.

The Dream Girl Day^TM is one day of the week in which you do everything your own dream girl who is living her dream life would do. For example, what time does future you wake up in the morning? What will she have for breakfast? Does she go for a walk or take a workout class? Does she call her mom to start off her day? What does she wear? How would she react to minor inconveniences? Really build a character profile for this person you are trying to be.

And it may feel performative because it is! But over time, it will feel less so because you will slowly start being her. And this isn’t some off-the-wall delulu concept, okay? It’s future-oriented cognition.

Future orientation is broadly defined as “the extent to which an individual thinks about the future, anticipates future consequences, and plans ahead before acting.”

The Dream Girl Day^TM is a more tangible version of this concept. Rather than keeping the future self abstract or distant, it brings her into the present through embodied action—dress, routine, choices, and standards—making the future feel psychologically real. And to our brains, imagining and actually seeing are very very similar.

And as we discussed in the earlier section, the brain does not like feeling prediction error. It does not like predicting events and being wrong about those predictions, so what will your brain do to prevent encountering this error? You either change your perception or you take action to reinforce the original perception.

Studies consistently find that individuals who experience stronger continuity with their future selves are more likely to save money, delay gratification, pursue education, and engage in health-protective behaviors. In one study, participants who vividly imagined their future selves—or viewed age-progressed renderings of themselves—were significantly more likely to allocate money toward long-term savings rather than immediate consumption. The implication is simple but profound: when the future self feels real, the present self behaves differently.

This is precisely what The Dream Girl Day is designed to do. By temporarily collapsing the psychological distance between “who I am now” and “who I am becoming,” the practice strengthens future self-continuity. You are no longer making decisions for a vague, hypothetical version of yourself—you are making them with her in mind. Research suggests that this sense of continuity is associated not only with improved financial decision-making, but with greater life satisfaction and long-term goal attainment.

Longitudinal research reinforces this pattern. Studies on delay of gratification, most famously the Marshmallow Experiments, found that children who demonstrated greater future-oriented thinking tended to have better outcomes later in life.2

While modern interpretations emphasize the role of environmental stability and trust in the future, the broader conclusion remains that the ability to orient toward the future allows advantages to compound over time.3

When you imagine, embody, and care for your Dream Girl—even for one day—you strengthen your emotional connection to her outcomes. You start caring about her. In short, The Dream Girl Day^TM It is about cultivating the mental conditions that make patience, discipline, and self-investment possible. Future orientation predicts positive life outcomes not because the future magically arrives, but because people who can feel the future in the present consistently behave in ways that build that same imagined future.

And one powerful way to tap into the future is dressing like your Venus.

dressing like your venus as unclothed cognition

Venus, the planet traditionally associated with beauty, pleasure, taste, and attraction, has become shorthand for aesthetic identity. To “dress like your Venus” means choosing silhouettes, colors, textures, and moods that align with how you desire to feel and be perceived—not simply what’s trending.

I came across this concept of “dressing like your Venus” on Tiktok a long time ago, and while researching for this episode, I found this one creator who used Sabrina Carpenter and Zara Larsson as examples of how your aesthetic propels you to new heights if you start basing it on your Venus sign. For example, Sabrina Carpenter’s Venus is allegedly in Capricorn so she thrives with an aesthetic informed by tradition and values. Meanwhile Zara Larsson’s Venus is in Pisces so it makes sense that her brand is thriving when she starts dressing more beachy, watery, siren-inspired.

And I keep seeing this online, right? And I’m like okay what the heck, I’ll bite. I’ll look mine up and start dressing like my Venus—which is in Sagittarius. And from my research, dressing for a Sagittarius Venus is more boho chic, loose flowy materials, Isabel Marant, Chloe vibe.

Okay. Tell me why… I’m also flamboyant natural so these flowy loose silhouettes also work amazing for me. So I actually didn’t need to overhaul my closet at all. I was already dressing kind of like my Venus already. And I do feel like it’s my vibe. I thrive in it. It fits my lifestyle. It’s laidback, it’s comfortable, I feel one with myself when I dress like it, so I can attest to how this system of dressing would work for women.

And I’m not alone in this. The practice works not only maybe because Venus exerts a causal force on clothing choices, but because we humans rely on symbolic systems to understand ourselves—and clothing is one of the most powerful tools for enacting that self-understanding. And through that self-understanding, we can in theory change the trajectory of our lives through a concept called enclothed cognition.

Now, on the topic of dressing like your Venus, research in sociology and psychology show that astrology functions less as a predictive belief system and more as a meaning-making and identity-verification framework, particularly in modern, secular societies. Studies on contemporary astrology—especially on social media—find that users engage with astrological language to narrate the self, establish intimacy, and affirm internal traits in a culturally legible way. In this sense, astrology provides a shared symbolic vocabulary for self-concept.4

And this does resonate with me because when I say my Venus is in Sagittarius, my Sun is in Scorpio, my moon is in this, and my rising is in that, the astrology girlies get it. I don’t have to explain anymore. And the more that I learn about myself through Astrology, I am given language—articulation—as to why I am the way that I am or why others are the way that they are. And it also helps with decision making because Astrology provides patterns which may inform how these decisions are made.

So whether you believe in Astrology or not, the articulation and feelings of being understood it provides women are very much real benefits.

Now let’s get into clothes.

Research in social psychology and dress studies demonstrate that what we wear plays a central role in self-presentation and person perception. Clothing acts as a rapid social signal. It shapes judgments about competence, status, warmth, and personality before one even speaks.5

Beyond how others perceive us, clothing also affects how we experience ourselves. Research on enclothed cognition shows that attire can influence confidence, attention, and identity alignment, reinforcing internal states through external cues.6

Now, when these studies are read together, the Venus-sign styling phenomenon starts making more sense. Dressing like your Venus sign is a form of identity-based styling: astrology supplies the archetype (“this is the kind of beauty and pleasure I resonate with”), and clothing becomes the behavioral expression of that identity in daily life. So it’s not simply magic or superstition or astrology (derogatory). It’s psychological coherence. It’s alignment.

Women feel more confident and authentic when dressing like their Venus because their external presentation aligns with an internal narrative that they already identify with.

In this way, Venus dressing operates much like other evidence-backed identity tools—personality frameworks, aesthetic archetypes, even personal branding. And the beauty of it is that it makes self-definition feel intuitive rather than prescriptive. The vibe is: if it brings you joy and pleasure and you think it’s beautiful, then that’s how you’re going to dress.

So while the dressing like your Venus trend sounds so far-off, so weird, so chronically online, it really is not. It’s simply, science—and also, human.

The desire to make the self understood—to ourselves first, and then to the world—through symbols, stories, and style is profoundly human.7

We all want to be seen and understood. And sometimes, dressing like your Venus accomplishes exactly that.

in closing

If you take nothing else from this episode, let it be this: believing in manifestation does not make you naïve, unserious, or delusional (derogatory). It makes you future-oriented. It means you are willing to imagine a future that does not yet exist—and to care for it anyway.

As purr Hamilton the musical: (my roman empire!!!)

You are allowed to want a beautiful life—your dream life. You are allowed to rehearse it, dress for it, plan for it, and move toward it with intention. And you are also allowed to grieve the versions of life that do not come to pass. Whether you get to live your dream life or not says nothing about how worthy you are of said dream life.

Manifestation, when practiced honestly, is not about controlling reality or bypassing pain. It is about aligning your mind, body, and choices in a way that honors the future you hope to inhabit. It is about tilting the odds in your favor where you can, holding yourself with compassion where you can’t, and continuing to act with care and love through it all.

Whether your dream life arrives exactly as imagined, differently than expected, or not at all, your devotion to yourself was never wasted. The way you show up, the way you choose love, the way you envision more for yourself and others—those are already heroic acts of creation. And that, in itself, is prayer, is manifestation.

That’s all I have for you today.

Happy manifesting, besties!

-Elle

hey bestie!

On today’s episode, we are talking about the myth of women’s overconsumption. Obviously, overconsumption is a real problem. It harms the planet and it drains personal finances. This part is true. What’s not true is the cultural myth that women are uniquely or inherently the problem—that women are these frivolous, impulsive over-consumers destroying the world one manic haul at a time.

The myth of women’s overconsumption:

1. overconsumption is driven only by women

2. women’s normal and necessary purchasing behavior is by default overconsumption.

This moral panic is so blatant in the countless overconsumption think-pieces centered on women’s consumer behavior. And I get it. I try to be an underconsumer myself. I too am irked by overconsumption but where do we draw the line between rightfully calling out overconsumptive behavior and misogyny?

This tiktok video by @.asiology articulated for me exactly why the constant criticisms of women’s consumer behavior irked me—and were starting to give me the ick. And as we talked about in a past class, women’s icks are valid and may be rooted in something we are perceiving and cannot yet fully articulate. This was the articulation I was waiting for. Asiology ends the video with this:

One of the incidents that really pushed me over the edge was seeing this video by this journaling or stationery tiktoker. I did not save this video which I fully regret and now I can’t find it but they’re a big-ish journaling or stationery tiktoker. Anyway, this tiktoker made this video and she was upset because a youtuber made a video featuring her, and the video was about overconsumption. The tiktoker was really upset by it and really saddened because journaling and engaging with stationery was her form of self-care, and why can’t she have that? Why does she have to be featured on an overconsumption video when all she’s doing is following her joy? She’s a mom and journaling and stationery were the few things she had for herself. Those weren’t the exact words she used but that’s how I recalled her sentiment was. She was so sad… and I was watching her and it made me sad too!

Imagine: you’re so excited about your hobby and you’re sharing it with the internet and all your online besties think it’s cute and the vibes are vibing… and then a youtuber makes an overconsumption video on you. It’s heartbreaking!

In my own personal life, I know many women who collect things as their hobby—explicitly women-coded things like purses or labubus or shoes. Also, books! Is having a library now overconsumption too? Where do we draw the line? And I would hate to yuck these women’s yum and tell them that they’re overconsuming when they are simply following their joy. Why can’t we have nice things? And for a lot of collectors, these purchases are emotional. They mean something. To paint a wide brush on all these women as braindead overconsumers like a lot of these think-pieces paint them to be, I think is a practice laden with misogyny—misogyny that we willingly internalize because it is under the guise of something generally reasonable—the premise that overconsumption is bad.

So on today’s episode, we will address the myth of women’s overconsumption—that only we women are guilty of it and that our normal purchasing behavior due to us anticipating others’ needs as a form of care work is by default overconsumptive behavior. It is important to dispel these myths because they leave women feeling like they can’t engage in their joy, like they can’t do anything right, and like the very habits that keep families, communities, and entire economies functioning are somehow shameful.

These myths punish women for selfcare, family care, and community care, for foresight. And they trick us into believing that our economic influence is a liability instead of what it truly is: one of the most powerful levers women have to shape culture, markets, innovation, and the future.

Today, I will show you how through your purchasing power, you embody exactly how you are the source, you are creation, and you are the future.

After this class, you can now stop hiding your shopping bags from your husband.

overconsumption content as the gateway to internalizing misogyny

This where we all get gotten. We are primed to hate on each other and hate each other and internalize misogyny through seemingly innocuous and reasonably hate-able concepts. In this case, overconsumption content is used as a gateway to misogyny. Because who is the main target of overconsumption criticism??? Women.

I am not the only one who has observed this pattern. This commenter said:

If you look up “overconsumption” on social media, go on the creators’ profiles who make these types of videos, who is the subject of all their content? Women. Women and their female-coded consumption—purses, shoes, labubus, blind boxes, Stanley cups, that Starbucks bear cup. This type of content others these “overconsumptive” women and teaches us to distance ourselves from them. “Oh, cannot be me.” “I’m not like these women.”

If this is not a reflection of how patriarchy has gotten us, then I don’t know what is.

And listen, I am an underconsumption stan. I support the underconsumption queens. But at the same time, I am so icked out by the constant barrage of overconsumption criticism directed at women. It makes me really sad that I at some point, was consuming these videos and really internalizing how overconsumptive women are and I vowed to not be like them.

But one day, one of my girlfriends showed me her collection of things and was so passionate about it—you could see the joy in her eyes. She explained the meaning behind every little piece of the collection. Where she got it, why she got it, who got it for her and why, what milestones were signified by each purchase. How could I ever hate on that?

And then it hit me: I have been gotten by misogynist messaging that women’s purchasing behavior by default is overconsumption. That collecting items and having more than one of one thing is bad behavior and should be called out and shamed. In reality, I was ashamed of myself. Before this encounter with my girlfriend, I thought that collecting anything was shame-worthy overconsumption. I internalized the misogyny I consumed on social media.

I internalized this messaging so much that I donated all of my physical books save for like 10 books. I donated all my fiction books, my nonfiction books, books I loved, annotated, cried on. I have my kindle and since I read so much, I thought it was better to only have digital copies so I wouldn’t take up too much space.

And after having this come to Jesus moment that oh my god I am shrinking myself. This underconsumption rabbit hole I have allowed myself to sink into is teaching me that I don’t deserve to take up space. That my normal joy-led and very reasonable purchasing behavior is something to be ashamed of. Now that I’m healing from that, I vowed to allow myself to take up space again. So I’m rebuilding my physical book collection again. And that’s why I started showing physical books on this channel. That was the beginning of my healing era and you were there for it.

So yeah, that happened to me. Now imagine how many other women this is happening to because I cannot be the only one who was affected negatively by consuming overconsumption criticism media that are solely targeting women.

Another tiktok creator made a similar video pointing out how we don’t call men’s overconsumptive behavior “overconsumption” when they are essentially doing the same thing.

Don’t even get me started on the rise of microgambling as a result of the popularity of sports betting which men—young men—are more likely to engage in and it is costing them so much money, ruining their credit scores, providing a gateway to dysfunctional addictive behavior. According to CNN:

But yeah, let’s talk about women and their labubus.

And this comment really stuck with me:

Exactly. Where do we draw the line?

I honestly don’t know.

We can all agree that overconsumption is a problem. And that if men are overconsuming, that’s not a good thing. And that if women are overconsuming, that’s not a good thing either. But where does the criticism cross the line from reasonable to good old misogyny?

And I think I learned the hard way that when you internalize all the overconsumption criticism content largely directed at women to the point that you find yourself not worthy of taking up space and engaging in your joy, that’s where we have crossed the line. That’s where we have internalized the misogyny fed to us.

All this to say: the myth that women purchasing multiple versions of one thing is by default overconsumption is rooted in the misogynistic belief that women are not allowed to take up space. Obviously, with nuance. And only you can tell when you have gone too far—maybe you are running out of space, the collection is becoming a biohazard, your collecting behavior is no longer allowing you to save money and fund your retirement and work towards financial goals. Only you know when you get to that point. Otherwise, don’t let the haters get you down!

And since I have experienced it firsthand, I can think of other behaviors that a lot of women think are normal and funny and kooky—I’m talking about women hiding their shopping from their partners.

women’s consumption as needs anticipation

If you ever find me hiding my purchases from a man, save me.

Because what do you mean??? I drove all the way to the store, took my time picking out supplies for the house which I have researched extensively to suit my household’s needs, hauled all these items from the shopping cart into my car, drove home, and now I have to hide the results of that labor? Even online shopping and ordering things is labor! And then I have to make these items magically appear in the home to suit everyone’s needs? Like we are not Santa. Our labor must be seen and made visible. Everyone needs to know how much we put into these items appearing in our homes.

If you have ever done any shopping for the household, that is nothing to be ashamed of. It is a lot of work. It is not frivolous. It is not irresponsible. It is literally a form of care work—the work of keeping everyone alive, comfortable, fed, and functioning.

And research backs this up. Sociologist Allison Daminger identifies four components of the cognitive labor that runs households:

And here’s where consumption comes in:

If you are the one responsible for anticipating everyone’s needs, you become the one responsible for purchasing to meet those needs. That is not overconsumption—it is duty. It is holding the household together because if you don’t buy the toilet paper—the right kind of toilet paper—no one else magically will. It’s knowing that winter is coming so the kids may need new sweaters. It’s buying extras of stuff on sale so when you need them, you don’t have to buy at regular prices.

Women aren’t “over-consuming.” Women are operating the household supply chain—checking inventory and calculating when things may run out and predicting when things will be needed and adjusting for seasonal sales and taking advantage of savings as they present themselves.

The problem isn’t women’s purchasing behavior—the problem is a culture that demands we do this unpaid labor and then shames us for the evidence of it. It’s yet another example of the damned if you do damned if you don’t positions women are cornered into within patriarchy. You are mandated to perform care work but when you do the tasks that are part of that care work, then you are doing it wrong and need to be shamed, and actually, you will learn to be embarrassed by it and make jokes at your own expense all while still doing the care work!

It irks me to no end seeing these “hiding my shopping from my husband” videos. Like, no. If you have to hide your shopping from your husband, and it’s literally just groceries, a sweet little treat, a couple of little trinkets. Like can we not?

And what is really insidious about this general sentiment that it’s cute (and necessary) to hide your shopping from your husband is this notion that women should be ashamed of driving the national retail economy. That’s power—purchasing power. And we should own it, not hide it in our trunks.

women’s purchasing POWER

This not so cutesy cultural meme/behavior/shared understanding of hiding your shopping from your husband teaches women to feel ashamed of driving the national retail economy. It frames women’s economic influence as something sneaky, embarrassing, or childish when, in reality, it is one of the most powerful forms of social and cultural leverage women have.

In other words: the economy moves where women move. Brand empires rise and fall based on women’s preferences (see Rhode, Skims, Poppi, Touchland, etc.,). Innovation happens when women demand better. The entire consumer marketplace orients itself around the needs women anticipate. And instead of being embarrassed by that, women should be owning it.

Women’s purchasing power can: shape product development; reward ethical companies; direct funding toward female founders; push industries toward accessibility, safety, and quality; influence which cultural values thrive and which ones die out.

Women have been trained to think our consumption is the problem. But consumption is not the problem—unquestioned consumption is. And shame around consumption keeps women from seeing their economic behavior as a tool for collective good.

Imagine if women saw themselves not as “over-consumers,” but as market architects, as taste-makers, as drivers of national demand who can push companies to innovate in ways that materially improve people’s lives.

Because that is what we already are.

So no. Please don’t hide your purchases in your trunk.

Understand them. Own them. And direct them with intention because women are not just participating in the economy. We are steering it.

And when women recognize this power, we can use it to create a world that actually serves us—and everyone else who relies on our vision, our planning, and our ability to see what’s needed long before anyone else notices.

Your joy matters. Your intuition matters. Your ability to see what others need before they see it themselves is not a flaw—it is a skill honed by duty.

And when you pair that skill with intention, you become a force that moves markets, rewrites norms, and quietly makes life better for everyone around you. So why would you be embarrassed? If anything, this shaming of women’s normal purchasing behavior which is part of our care work is in itself, embarrassing. This shaming of women’s normal joy-directed purchasing behavior is also in itself embarrassing. That is so embarrassing for them, not for you.

Even through your purchasing behavior, your economic power, it is very clear that you are creation, you are the source, and you are the future. And it’s time you wake up to that.

That’s all I have for you today. I just wanted to let you know that you have so much inherent value and worth in a world that his hellbent on devaluing you.

Now get that bag, bestie.

Also, bestie wake up.

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is this feminist?

I’m the last person to preach about feminism and what is “feminist” because I think of feminism like faith—I’m a believer. I am Christian (cradle Catholic) but I’m uncomfortable saying that in a moral sense because I don’t think I’m good enough to proclaim my Christian-ness,1 but every day I try to be a good one. Same with feminism. I am uneasy saying I am one (because I don’t think I’m good enough to adopt the label) or that all my thoughts and actions are feminist, but every day, I try to be a good one.

There’s also something that comes with saying you are x label. I think it invites people to scrutinize your every move, casting stones as if they have never sinned.

I’ve spoken about my beef with “feminists” in a video way back when all while quoting feminist writers. It left some of my audience confused. Do I side with feminism? What is going on? But in the same vein, I also talk about my beefs with Abrahamic religions (or rather their interpretations driven by malicious actors) all while being open with my faith as a Filipino Catholic2. Same with feminism—I don’t agree with some of its interpretations driven by malicious (? maybe just passionate but misguided) actors but I agree with everything pro-women.

One of my largest beefs was with the 2010s girlboss feminism that shaped my early adult life—to be equal with men is to be exactly like them. Equality trumped equity every single time. I felt like I had to abandon myself, my values of prioritizing my comfort, my rest, my wellbeing, to shape myself into this high-achieving girlboss Athena archetype. It took a lot of healing to recover from that, and maybe I am salty.

Yes, I’m still ambitious and going after my goals but I’ve since learned to detach my worth from my production and achievements. Yay me!

All this to say, my beef isn’t with feminism. It was its interpretation that equality trumps equity. There’s a lot of disagreements between the multiple feminisms women subscribe to, but I think we can all agree that anything that supports the wellbeing of women as individuals and as a collective is a good thing.

In short: this edition will not be an indictment on what is and isn’t feminist. This is simply my humble spoiled girlie opinion. I guess my goal here is to open our eyes to see how equitable, and therefore feminist, certain concepts can be—concepts that are largely perceived as “traditional.”

And one such concept is men proposing to women.

the horrors of begging someone to marry you

Just last week, this Tiktok creator went viral for proposing to her boyfriend after 14 years and four children together. And the internet did what it does. The comments were a mix of concern and disgust and bewilderment. Literally what is happening?

I mean, this is the spoiled girlie support group. Many of us spoiled girlies recoil at the thought of proposing to a man… but why?

If there is anything I have learned from my adult years on earth is that women’s icks are valid.

A woman’s ick is indicative of her lived truths even when one cannot articulate these truths, and by giving language to what is difficult to articulate, we can either validate our original stance on certain issues or we can introduce nuance so we can make better decisions for ourselves.

women’s ick is indicative of truths - verbalization and giving language to icks = validation/nuance = protection

We covered a Tell the Bees Substack article in a past class, the one about the sociology of begging someone to marry you, and I am telling you, there is something in the water around the holidays because everyone is getting engaged… Even the men who didn’t want to get engaged. So once again, we are talking about engagements.

Anyway, I saw this comment on a Tiktok video by Josh Lora, the writer behind Tell the Bees. He was explaining the societal forces behind why men should propose and why it is still important in today’s society for men to do the one thing that is asked of them in exchange for a lifetime access to women’s domestic and biological labor.

This compulsion to articulate—to explain, justify, and present our feelings in a neatly reasoned package—is central to why so many women struggle to trust themselves. We’ve been conditioned to doubt our own instincts so we hesitate to act until every emotion has been translated into a language that is easily understood and consumed by others. Even in our thought processes, we still have to perform the labor of packaging our thoughts to be more easily understood. But sometimes our feelings are enough. Sometimes the consensus of women—so many of us feeling the same thing—is enough.

In fact, this cultural mandate that women must articulate and defend every gut feeling is a subtle form of misogyny. It delegitimizes women’s intuition, which is its own kind of intelligence. It severs women from their internal signals. A population that has, for generations, honed pattern recognition as a survival skill is told that their patterns are imaginary, their patterns irrational, their anxiety or desire for distance from something or someone so over the top. And yet, again and again, women’s intuition has pointed to the truth.

This theme of always challenging women to articulate exactly why they feel the way they do is a way to invalidate women’s lived experiences and observed truths. I was reading Daisy Alpert Florin’s My Last Innocent Year, and the antagonist in this novel drove me nuts because he was so unlikeable and he’s just a horrible person overall.

I saved this passage because I keep seeing this theme crop up not just in literature but also in real life. Women, because they’re not used to debating or don’t have facts and statistics on hand (because who does?) are bullied into submission by people who demand great articulation from women. And I’ve wrestled with this because I love analyzing norms and shared beliefs but I also believe that people hold the beliefs they do because of their experiences and the spaces they occupy in society—their habitus.

As purr Pierre Bourdieu, habitus refers to the system of dispositions—patterns of perception, thought, taste, and behavior—that individuals develop based on their social position and lived experiences. It’s essentially the internalized social world that shapes how people understand and navigate their environment.

In a way, learning about someone’s habitus may point the way to learning why they hold certain beliefs.

In saying all this, what I’m really trying to get at is this phenomenon of demanding that women intellectualize every instinct before it’s counted as valid. It creates a world where women’s lived experience is never considered evidence, where intuition is dismissed as unserious, where feelings must be debated before they are permitted to exist.

But women’s perceptions don’t come from nowhere. They come from a lifetime of navigating power imbalances, reading social cues, absorbing unspoken rules, and surviving environments that required finely tuned pattern recognition. Their beliefs arise from their habitus—from the social world that has shaped their instincts and their boundaries.

So when a woman “can’t articulate” why something feels off, it isn’t because it’s untrue that something feels off. Sometimes, when you smell a rat, it really is a rat.

In The First Witch of Boston by Andrea Catalano, Maggie, who ends up getting executed for witchcraft tells her husband:

Well, he did indeed question her and downplayed her premonition and it spelled disaster for their family.

In many families that I know in real life, mine included, a woman’s intuition is bible. If a wife, a mother, doesn’t like someone, they feel that particular someone is slimy, that person will no longer be in contact with the family. No questions asked. And you know why no one asks questions? It’s because these women are never wrong!!! When your accuracy is good, there’s a level of credibility that comes with that.

And I really don’t think it’s magic even though it seems like it is. I think it’s just a more sensitive version of pattern recognition. Many of us see things others don’t simply because we have always had to.

All this to say: women’s gut feeling, women’s intuition, even if we cannot explain it, if we all share this feeling, it’s most likely valid because we believe what we believe for a reason and it has served us well.

And writers like Josh Lora and other amazing amazing writers who cover these topics do such important work in articulating what so many women have been feeling.

Articulation is validation. And in a world hell bent on devaluing women, it is much needed.

So today, I want to help all the girlies articulate why we are so anti-women proposing to their boyfriends and why it is so important even in today’s times that men propose.

And the first reason is it’s because “we’re equal now” is a myth.

the myth of “we’re equal now”

One of the biggest reasons women recoil at the idea of proposing to men is because the premise that “we’re equal now, so it shouldn’t matter who proposes” is simply not true. The data is unambiguous: heterosexual relationships are still profoundly unequal, especially in the areas that matter most for long-term partnership—domestic labor, emotional labor, and caregiving.

“In egalitarian and breadwinner wife marriages, husbands spend considerably more time on leisure activities than wives. Husbands in egalitarian marriages spend about 3.5 hours more per week on leisure activities than wives do. Wives in these marriages spend roughly 2 hours more per week on caregiving than husbands do and about 2.5 hours more on housework.”

“In a Growing Share of U.S. Marriages, Husbands and Wives Earn About the Same.” Pew Research Center (2023)

And I don’t want to be pedantic but an “egalitarian marriage” where both spouses earn the same and work the same paid hours yet one comes home to do even more work unpaid compared to the other is not at all egalitarian to me. It’s an unequal oppressive marriage in a different font. It’s the here, damn version of marriage given to women who have fought for the right to work and own bank accounts.

And this reality of the labor imposed on women within a marriage is one of the biggest reasons why women find it unacceptable to propose to a man. Knowing that we already live in such an unequal world, why would a woman give up the ability to observe if her potential husband can work to make this world a little more equal, more equitable for her? If he can’t plan a proposal, then how is he supposed to carry the weight of partnership?

A man proposing is a symbolic indicator of whether he is willing to take on responsibility in a world where women already do almost everything else… including dying.

the biological factor

A large part of why relationships with men are so unequal is the biological factor. Marriage means potential pregnancy and childbirth and all the dangers that come with it. Search up the girl with the list on Tiktok. There’s a huge list of risks and dangers women face during this stage that makes partner choice so crucial. Do you really want to grant a nonchalant man eternity? Because that’s what you’re doing when you bear his children—you are granting him eternity.

At your own cost—figuratively, literally, financially, biologically.

Did you know that the US has one of the highest rates of maternal mortality among high-income countries? And that rate increases for black women.

The United States continues to have the highest rate of maternal deaths of any high-income nation, despite a decline since the panini. And within the U.S., the rate is by far the highest for Black women.

—“Insights into the U.S. Maternal Mortality Crisis: An International Comparison.” The Commonwealth Fund (2024).

You’re telling me that you are proposing to a nonchalant man so you can grant him eternity at the cost of you possibly dying? Yes, the probability is small but it remains non-zero.

And okay that was intense but only because it’s true but let me get to my next point which is really at the root of this issue:

A man has to propose because his proposal signals the successful completion of the dating stage.

dating as observation

Dating is the observation stage. Especially for women, it is a very important observation stage. I think we have absolutely lost the plot when it comes to dating. Yes, it can be such a nice feeling dating someone especially if you can see a future with them but please do not fall for seeing only what you want to see.

I know we are lover girlies, but we are hot smart lover girlies. On top of checking in with yourself and your feelings which can be valid, you also need to check in with reality. Getting married is not this last minute surprise that is sprung onto you or one that you spring on another person. It takes multiple serious conversations.

You have to tell yourself that your desires are valid especially when it comes to relationship timelines. If your partner isn’t in agreement with your timeline, that’s okay. You don’t have to delay yours to fit theirs because that will just lead to resentment. And you shouldn’t rush them to fit your timeline because that is also unfair to them. Set them free and set yourself free. Find someone who is on your same exact timeline.

Marriage is one of the biggest joint project you will ever take on in your life. So why would you want a nonchalant partner who makes you do all the work but takes half the credit?

And this is what dating is for: observation. It’s not an automatic pipeline to marriage. Sometimes, it leads to a lot of lessons learned, and that’s okay.

If you’re listening to this, you probably don’t want a nonchalant man. So why would you remove the opportunity for a man to prove that he is, in fact, very chalant, very mindful, and very aligned to your timeline?

Proposals are a measure of a man’s readiness and willingness. If you have to drag him into an engagement, what makes you think you won’t have to drag him into the next stage of life as well?

Another big idea I wanted to share with you today is the importance of shared values.

At the core of this question of why is it bad for women to propose? Or why should a man propose? Is the subject of shared values.

On an individual level, it doesn’t matter why we find it repulsive for a woman to propose and why we 100% with our chests require a man to propose. We simply feel these things and that’s valid. And that’s enough.

And if you feel these things as well, you are then mandated to only be in relationships with people who feel the exact same way. I am an advocate for shared values in dating. You don’t have to share the same religion or denomination, but you must share core values. This way, you don’t have to debate the very things that are most important to you—the very things you feel within your heart. This way, you don’t have to compromise on things that will lead to deep resentment over time. They will just get it. They will understand the assignment.

When you say “women should never propose to men,” they’ll look at you funny because why would you say something that is such a given?

And to find such person, you need to solidify your own value system before you start dating so you don’t get railroaded by another person’s incompatible value system.

As this substack article says, “to find your soulmate, you must first find your soul.”

In the early stages, you can pretend that you don’t mind or that it’s not a big deal, but you can only play the cool girl for so long.

You are worthy of a full unwavering love, and whether you receive it in this lifetime is not a measure of your worthiness of said full unwavering love.

Bestie, GET UP!!! No, seriously. Get up.