I was already glad about the upcoming TikTok ban, but now I have one more reason to be happy about it: the site's minitrend of women "pranking" their husbands by saying, "I can't pay the mortgage this month." The "joke" is that the husband reacts with confusion because his wife doesn't contribute to the house payment. The goal isn't humor, though, but bragging. A woman who posts this content wants us to believe she's such a sexual dynamo she's snagged a man who is willing to pay all her bills. What's ignored is the entire history of women's financial dependence on men, which is actually about men's domination over women, not women's sexual power over men. Or the ways that women who don't have money of their own are so often trapped, abused or abandoned into poverty.
The "can't pay the mortgage" meme is just the latest in a series of social media trends that romanticize female submission to men. There are also "soft girls" and "stay-at-home girlfriends," working the same "too sexy to work" schtick. (The old term for this role, of course, is "kept woman," especially if your sugar daddy has a wife he goes home to after visiting you in his sidepiece apartment.) The biggest of all are the "tradwives": influencers who peddle idyllic images of housewifery, where women's equality is rejected in favor of obsequiousness and exaggerated domesticity. Some tradwives, like Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm, avoid explicit denunciations of feminism, simply presenting their lifestyle as a "choice" among many. Others are more overtly political, putting out rants about how feminists must all be miserable cat ladies. But they all are based on the false promise that self-abasement before men is a woman's happiness.
