There Are No Girls on the Internet - Princess Treatment is Going Viral on TikTok, But at What Cost!? (A rant)

Episode Date: July 4, 2025

TikTok’s “Princess Treatment”  trend has gone viral, and so has Bridget's response. It started with creator Courtney Joelle, whose videos depict how she sits silently at restaurants while her husband orders for her, speaks for her, and calls it “being a princess.” Millions of views later, Bridget wonders: is this soft girl femininity… or something more dangerous? Check out Bridget’s viral TikTok response, which got SO MANY MORE VIEWS than her other videos, even though those other videos take WAY longer to produce. It's clear what the algorithm wants! https://www.tiktok.com/@bridgetmarieindc/video/7520108357177330975 If you’re listening on Spotify, you can leave a comment there or email us at [e-mail] Follow Bridget and TANGOTI on social media! Many vids each week. instagram.com/bridgetmarieindc/ tiktok.com/@bridgetmarieindc youtube.com/@ThereAreNoGirlsOnTheInternetSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hi, everyone. I'm Cheryl Stray, author of Wild and Tiny Beautiful Things. I'm excited to share that I have a new podcast called Mind Over Mountain. In each episode, I interview athletes, adventurers, and adrenaline seekers to discuss the inner landscapes that informed and inspired their extraordinary feats. So we, too, can better understand how to face our own seemingly insurmountable challenges. Listen to Mind Over Mountain every Thursday on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There Are No Girls on the Internet is a production of IHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative. I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet.

So right off the bat, this is not going to be a typical, there are no girls on the internet episode. I'm trying out something a little bit new because honestly, I just wanted to come on here and yap about something that I inadvertently found myself mixed up in recently. We did an episode this week about Skinny Talk, this corner of TikTok that really pushes and glorifies disordered eating and obsession with body image and weight.

And in this episode, we talked about how this is not really a new ideology, but the way that it is taking off online for women pushes this idea that in addition to being thin, women should be making themselves as small as possible and as quiet as possible. And the entire thing really seems like it's telling women, the best way to be a woman is to be one that does not take up too much space and does not speak too much. And while I was editing this episode and putting it together, this TikTok creator named Courtney Joelle went mega viral for her advice about how women should do exactly that. Only she called her version getting princess treatment from her husband.

And the funny thing is, is that to me, what we described in that episode and what this TikTok creator, Courtney Joelle, described how she's treated by her husband, sounded exactly identical. They sounded like the same thing to me. So if you've not listened to that episode yet, here is what journalist Kat Tanbarge had to say about how the obsession with thinness is also related to this dynamic that tells women, in addition to being thin, women should also be very quiet to be prioritized. Because the ultimate goal of these sort of conservative, very misogynistic spaces is that they want women to be small. They want women to take up less space. They want them to be frail, unable to help themselves.

And they want them to be very preoccupied with their own appearance because it becomes an obsession that distracts from you being able to participate in democracy to the fullest extent. It's a distraction that prevents women from being able to occupy the same positions that men do. So this sort of pro-eating disorder content is part of this larger picture of women's oppression. And it's just no coincidence that the influencers in the all right spaces and the influencers in the skinny spaces are using the exact same types of strategies. It got me thinking about what Kat describes as women being kind of unable to help themselves and unable to do things for themselves. And honestly, this sounded to me as exactly what. what that TikTok creator, Courtney Joelle, described. Part of her princess treatment is not having to do things for herself

and rather having her husband do things for her. Here's how she describes the princess treatment that she gets from her husband when she's out at a restaurant. And we did edit this a bit for clarity. Let's talk about princess treatment if you're at a restaurant and how you interact with the wait staff and the hostess. If I am at a restaurant with my husband, I do not talk to the hostess,

I do not open any doors, and I do not order my own food. Having to talk to the hostess, never. The princess is kept away from others at all time. You know, she describes this complicated rigmarole that her and her husband will do to avoid her having to manage anything directly with a staff member at a restaurant. Like her husband will drive her up to the restaurant, get out of the car, go inside, talk to the staff, come out, open the door, walk her into the restaurant, and then he goes to park the car while she waits inside.

It comes back out, opens my car door, walks me into the restaurant, opens the door, and I stand in wait. I did not make my contact with the hostess. I did not talk to her. I waited until my husband came back. He comes back, does the exchange with her, and then we went and sat down. It's not in any sense like you're better than the hostess. You're just letting your husband lead and be masculine. He made the reservation. He's taking you out. Let him do the logistics. You're just being a princess. It's not because you're being whole. you're just letting your husband lead and letting him take care of it. She says that while her husband is parking in the car,

she doesn't really make eye contact or speak with the staff while she's waiting in the restaurant because she's just waiting for her husband to come back and do all the talking and managing everything. You know, the princess does not conduct business. The princess does not make decisions. The princess's job is to be silent and pretty and basically just do what she's told. The over need to, like, talk and fill space. Like, you don't need to talk unless you are spoken to.

and then if you are spoken to, I ask, you could just say, oh, I'm just waiting for my husband, and then he'll be able to give the reservation. Or you can say, oh, I'm so sorry, I'm not sure. My husband will be back, and then you can ask him. If you can say it in a very soft and feminine way, I know this is going to be ripped apart. People will just take things seriously such the wrong way, but that's why I would handle it. And then let's just go further into. So if you're sitting down, you're ordering in New York, for the most part, the way you would come up,

they would ask, you know, whatever my husband would start to speak. and then the waiter would address them, and he would kind of, the waiter would get the hint, and only then interact with my husband. Here on Salt Lake, they don't quite get it. I think, I think they think that I'm, like, being, you know, oppressed or, I don't know. They will, they'll be like, what can I get you to eat? And I will just look at my husband. Like, if they address me first, I will just look at my husband and let my husband order.

He'll say, oh, she's da-da-da-da. And then if they have a follow-up question, like, oh, do you want it like this? sometimes I will answer. Let's say I think maybe my husband doesn't know what I would want. I will then address the waiter. But it's almost like they keep trying to like get me to speak. And I'm like, no, I want him to order for me. I like when he orders for me. It's not that I'm not capable of ordering for myself. It's just fun. It's just a fun princess treatment thing. It makes me feel special. It makes me just feel like over the top taking care of. So if the waiter addresses you first, I will simply just look at my husband and then my husband will order. Again, you don't need to

over-speak, over-exert yourself. You can be feminine and soft and quiet. Tell me, are these not the same things? So people on TikTok basically started calling this creator Princess Treatment Lady because of how she makes these videos about how she gets this princess treatment when she goes out, she doesn't speak when she goes to restaurants. She doesn't make eye contact with the staff or the hostess.

Does not verbally order because she waits for her husband to do that. She has some other videos, which we'll get to in a minute, but this one video about how she behaves when she goes at to restaurants with her husband really hit a nerve with me, but not for the reason that you might be thinking. Yes, this video plays into all the kinds of gendered tropes that we talk about on there are no girls on the internet, which will absolutely get into in a moment. But the reason why I was like essentially deeply triggered from this video is something different because probably like a lot of y'all listening, my career trajectory has involved a lot of working in the service industry. You know, I was a hostess at a restaurant. I worked as a cashier for multiple different retail establishments in my life. Jobs where you have to interact with the public. Now, these jobs are not inherently bad on their own. Some of them were, like, actually quite good for me.

But the thing that can make these jobs bad is that when you have to interact with people who treat you badly. So it's not even like the job itself is that bad. is the customer sometimes who make that job bad. And this is not totally unconnected to some of the gender stuff that I do want to talk about, at least in my opinion, because there absolutely is something about being a young woman or a young girl who is basically a sitting duck behind a cash register or at a hostess booth, just sort of waiting for any kind of interaction that anybody wants to have with her, really. Like, that is definitely a gendered situation. However, my experiences personally were mostly fine. Like, I don't really.

really have any over-the-top gross or horrible stories of customers being horrible to me, luckily, but I have had some weird ones. Like one time I was working as a hostess for a fancy restaurant, sort of in an upscale shopping plaza, and a very fancy lady who had been out shopping all day at the nearby stores came into the restaurant, and she really expected me to come outside from behind the hostess booth, go out to the parking lot to her car, carry all of her shopping bags from her car, to the restaurant and hold them at the hostess stand because she was very worried that her car was going to get broken into and all the bags that she just bought were going to get stolen while she

was inside of our restaurant having lunch with her girlfriends. So that was funny. And I think that experience really typifies the kind of weird experiences that I had when I was working in the service industry. For me, mostly it was really entitled or rude behavior from people who didn't seem to cloth the staff at where they were eating as like human beings. there to do a job. So when I saw this TikTok video taking off, I really hated the idea that the advice that she was giving to women on how to look classy and refined and feminine and public was basically boiling down to be a weird rude dick to the waitstaff at restaurants for no clear reason. Staff who is probably likely being treated badly in some capacity already. So I hated that she

was saying that this behavior is what makes a woman seem feminine and classy when real class is showing respect for the people who are there to provide you with a service. It is looking them in the eye. It is acknowledging them when they're speaking and saying thank you when they do their jobs. And listen, I don't even really hate the idea of somebody else ordering. I actually love when somebody else at the table kind of takes charge and orders for me or orders for the table, but you don't have to do this in such a weird, rude way where you are refusing to make eye contact with the staff. Like, that is not classy.

That is just rude. And we need to not rebrand being rude as this marker of status or class for women. Stop it. Let's take a quick break. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guide, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygle and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier.

This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and headwriter, Streeter, Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. There's that worst singer in the group? The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because

you're from Harvard, uh, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group. The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard yard, but they're open. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open.

Since you guys are middle aged. Uh, one erection. Listen to Humor Me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Humor me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined.

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It's Isaiah Thomas. And I'm C.J. Toledano, and our podcast Point Game is about defying the odds. Like LeBron heading into the playoffs without Luca and Austin Reed. And finding ways to win no matter what. He's the smartest player to ever play the game. His IQ is out of last. that we've never seen before. And he knows.

Without Luca and Austin Reeves, I got to manipulate the game. We get a player's perspective on the challenges of the playoffs. I think Joker's going to be exhausted this series because when they don't have Rudy in the lineup, he has to really guard guys like Nas Reid. He has to guard Julius Randall.

And then he has to give us everything he gives us on the night-to-night basis on offense. And when IT's friends stop by, like Quentin Richardson, we dive into some playoff history too. Steve Nass would get that, thing. That man, hell get the flying. He running the court, licking his fingers why he got the ball. Like, after you go through a training camp with that, Isaiah, you figure it out real quick.

Get your ass up and down the court, and you're going to get the ball. So listen to Point Game on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can have opinions. You can have like a strong stance. And then there's your body having its own program. I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. We share stories and scientific insights to help us all better navigate these periods of turbulence and transformation. There is one finding that is consistent, and that is that our resilience rests on our

relationships. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. The princess lady does not want to have to deal with the staff when she's out at her restaurant and not having to do so as part of her princess treatment. And I guess like do whatever you want, do you? Like if you want the entire front of house of a restaurant to be in agreement that you're being.

being weird and rude, I guess that's fine. I guess that's your prerogative. But what I absolutely do resent is getting on TikTok and preaching to women and girls that this is what makes you feminine and classy because it's not. And so I resent that she's bringing other women into it. TikTok is an app that we know is pretty popular with younger folks. Young women and girls, I think especially right now, are getting a lot of information about how they are meant to be in the world. Like should they be feminist? Should they be conservative? What will make them the most happy? What should they be a aspiring tour? What kind of value do they have? And we know that a lot of young women and girls are using social media to help them understand all of that. So I really resent it when a grown woman

gets on an app like TikTok that is so popular with young women and girls and basically tells them that being a classy woman means being kind of rude to people in service industry positions at restaurants and not taking up too much space and being really quiet all the time. And honestly, it does not surprise me that this video struck a nerve with so many people on TikTok. Because TikTok had a ton of opinions about it. I want to talk through the sort of different buckets of opinions that I saw about this video on TikTok. So the first one that people really were sharing is that this was some sort of sexual kink

behavior between her and her husband, that her husband has some sort of a sexual interest in making her as his wife live this very, quiet in public life, that it's like a sexual gratification kink that when they go out to restaurants, she's not permitted to speak to other people and that he does all the talking. I cannot confirm or deny this is true. A lot of people in my comments were like, oh, that's absolutely what this is. Trust me. And I'll just say this. I, you know, here at Tangoti, we're very kink positive and very sex positive. However, if that actually is the case, non-consensually involving other people in this is like not cool to me. Like if you're a hostess or a server at a restaurant and you're really just

trying to do your job, I don't love the idea of somebody non-consensually engaging you in their, you know, power kink play while you're just trying to do your job. Again, cannot confirm or deny that is the case, but that was one of the big buckets of responses that this video did elicit. Another is that she was just doing the old school tradwife thing, that her husband treats her in this way that she maybe feels is demeaning or disrespectful and that how she is responding to it is coming on the TikTok and trying to honestly convince us as the viewer, but maybe even convince herself a little bit, that this kind of treatment isn't demeaning, that it's good treatment, that it's princess treatment, that she's, that's how he is showing that she's prized and valued

as a feminine woman. Again, I can't confirm or deny that that is the case, but I thought that was a really interesting response. Another sort of bucket of response I want to be careful on how I talk about. And it honestly did not feel appropriate to include in the episode that we did about Skinny Talk. But I did just want to share that a lot of people in the eating disorder of recovery space reached out to me and said that her behavior could have something to do with body image. You know, the creator presents as very thin. In the video, she has a very prominent collarbone. And viewers even wondered if she was sort of flexing her neck and shoulders while she spoke. in this video to make it more prominent, to do what they call body checking, which is essentially

using social media to demonstrate that you're thin or fit or demonstrate a specific thing about your body. Honestly, it is not surprising to me that so many people felt this way. So obviously, I can't speak to whether or not this is explicitly a body image thing, but it does seem to be connected to the idea of being small and that smallness having virtue for women, like smallness being something to aspire to for women. Another kind of bucket of response that I saw was that she's sort of trying to cosplay a certain kind of old money wealth, that whether she actually is personally

wealthy or not, but she definitely is, I think, trying to demonstrate, like, this is how you live an aspirational, wealthy lifestyle. And I think that is sort of another part of this that makes me kind of sad in all this, that the idea of connecting behavior in restaurants and in public spaces that I think is like pretty demeaning and pretty sad, connecting that was something to aspire to that's like, oh, this is how wealthy women behave, this is how you can signal to people that you are wealthy and moneyed. I really don't love that. So I want to talk about my first instincts when I saw this video. Initially, I thought, this woman is a conflict entrepreneur. If you don't know what a

conflict entrepreneur is, when I first learned about that concept, it blew my mind. And I started seeing them everywhere online. I started being able to use that conflict entrepreneur lens to clock the kind of content that people were making on social media. So a conflict entrepreneur is somebody who profits, whether it's financially, politically, or socially from creating, fueling, or sustaining conflict. The term usually is meant to call out people who intentionally inflame division to gain power, attention, or influence, or are trying to monetize outrage or polarization, especially on social media platforms or exploit existing tensions

for personal or institutional gain. Conflict entrepreneurs are everywhere on social media. They're everywhere in our political landscape right now. We kind of cannot resist it. And I actually went back and looked at some of this creator's earlier content. And honestly, I don't even want to really make this conversation too much about this one specific creator because it's really not about her.

It's about a culture that she's stepping into. But it did seem to me that initially she wanted to be, be some sort of an influencer, like a fashion influencer, and it perhaps did not really take off. And then she sort of switched up her content to talking about all this weird princess stuff, princess treatment stuff. And I think it hit precisely because it is so off-putting and weird. So I have to say this, I'm kind of calling myself out a little bit here. If indeed this creator is kind of doing a low-level conflict entrepreneur thing, then I am a little bit guilty here because I did exactly.

what you should not do when you encounter a conflict entrepreneur in the wild, which is that I made a response to her on TikTok, which is absolutely the wrong thing to do because people who are conflict entrepreneurs are intentionally trying to get a lot of attention and get a lot of engagement from what they're saying. So she is a conflict entrepreneur. I kind of fucked up. And I don't, this is a little bit embarrassing to admit, but in the last few months, I've really been trying to step up my own social media game. I kind of went dark on all platforms for a while and I'm just sort of coming out of that. And so I'm like, oh yeah, I really need to start, you know, being a little bit more visible on these platforms. And so I've been intentionally trying to make content about the

podcast on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, all of that. And what's so funny to me, and I think really says a lot about our social media climate right now, is that I make these videos where I put so much time and effort into them. I'm scripting them. I'm researching them. I'm recording them multiple times. Like, don't ever let somebody tell you that making videos on social media is easy because it's absolutely not. It's like why I'm a podcaster. It's because making videos is actually hard as fuck. And all of those videos that I made with so much care and intention and research and framing and da-da-da-da, all of them flopped. Like, it is so hard to get anything to go to do numbers on social media. Until I, like, three cocktails deep, just,

screwing around in my kitchen made this response to Princess Talk Lady. I'll link the video that I made on TikTok in the comments, but I just turned on my front facing camera and had a little fun. Boom, it gets almost 10 million views. And again, the reason why I wanted to make this video was because I just thought the whole thing was ridiculous. Like, as somebody who worked in restaurants, it just seemed rude. And I thought the conversation was about like the gendered aspect of it, which I absolutely think is an important conversation. But I just wanted to bring things back down and say like, this behavior is just rude and weird. If you saw somebody doing this in real life, you would think they were a weirdo. You wouldn't think they were refined or moneyed or cultured or a princess or pampered or any of the things that she's trying to say that this behavior is indicative of.

You would actually think they were like a maladjusted weird person. And I think it's so easy to log on to social media and essentially lie to people and sell them really a false bill of goods and say, oh, if you behave this way in public, people are going to think all this great stuff about you when in reality you are setting people up to look weird as shit. And I just really wanted to bring the conversation back down to that. Also, what's funny is that once I woke up and saw that video had almost 10 million views, I was like, oh my God, like, what happens next? You know, am I like, what should I do? If you're angling, to go viral on social media. Let me tell you. Nothing happens next. That's it. There's nothing. Nobody sends you a check. Nobody does anything. Everything is the same. More after a quick break. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guide, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter.

There's that worst singer in the group. The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group. The yard birds, right?

That's the name. The Harvard yard, but they're open to change. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle aged. One erection. Listen to you. Humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

Humor me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business.

Think IHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Let us show you at iHeartadvertising.com. That's iHeartadvertising.com. What's up, fam? It's Isaiah Thomas. And I'm C.J. Toledano, and our podcast's point game is about defining the odds. Like LeBron heading into the playoffs without Luca and Austin Reed.

And finding ways to win no matter what. He's the smartest player to ever play the game. His IQ is at a level that we've never seen before. And he knows without Luca and Austin Reeves, I got to manipulate the game. We get a player's perspective on the challenges of the playoffs. I think Joker's going to be exhausted this series because when they don't have Rudy in the lineup,

he has to really guard guys like Nas Reid. He has to guard Julius Randall. And then he has to give us everything he gives us on the night-to-night basis on offense. And when IT's friends stop by, like Quentin Richardson, we dive into some playoff history too. Steve Nash would get that thing. That man, hell get the flying.

He running up the court, licking his fingers why he got the ball. Like, you go through a training camp with that Isaiah, you figure it out real quick. Get your ass up and down the court, and you're going to get the ball. So listen to Point Game on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can have opinions. You can have like a strong stance. And then there's your body. having its own program.

I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. We share stories and scientific insights to help us all better navigate these periods of turbulence and transformation. There is one finding that is consistent, and that is that our resilience rests on our relationships. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Let's get right back into it. I wanted to get into my personal take on this video, why she made it, what it says about our culture. So I do think that this is about womanhood and sort of being a person. version of a woman, also meaning being small and quiet. And I really just don't like it. It kind of became a visualization for me of how regressive some of our conversation around gender has become. Because if you go to that video, a lot of women in her comments were agreeing with her. A lot of women in her comments were saying, this is how my husband treats me. You know, I love being pampered. I love being a princess. I love when it lets me turn off my brain and handles everything.

I don't even know anything about where we are right now. I want to be clear, Women should be themselves. Like if you are a quiet person or an anxious person or an introverted person, that's cool. If you want to go to restaurants and not have to talk that much, you should do you. You should do you. Like, do what makes you feel comfortable.

Do what makes you feel right and safe. But I simply do not like the idea that why a woman should be doing this is to mold themselves into what they think will make men think that they're moneyed or pampered or prized or, you know, the right type of woman. Like, we should be doing things because they feel. feel right to us, not because we're trying to signal to other people about what kind of person we actually are. And I also think it's really related to this trend that I honestly don't love, and I've seen it on social media a lot, about babying and babifying grown women. You know, she has another video where she talks about how her husband ties her shoes.

Like she doesn't even really tie her own shoes. She has her husband do it for her. You just let him have control. You let him take care of you. So that's baseline. I don't really tie my shoes. He does that for me. like if there's any sort of like weather predicament like it's raining like he's gonna you know cover me and make sure I get in the door first he's gonna pull around so that I can hop into the building and then he's going to go park the car like any kind of like minor inconvenience he's going to take care of like he does certain chores around the house that I don't want to do he does those for me um basically you can get as silly and ridiculous as you want he brings me lemon tea every single night that's a part of my princess treatment he like tucks me in and make sure that my blanket's on the bed

and that I have all my like little things. If I need anything in the house, you know, let's say I'm sitting and watching a show and I want a cookie or a treat or an orange, whatever it is. Like, can you peel me in orange? She's gonna peel me in orange. I think it's fun to be the princess when I'm with him and turn my brain off.

Like in the airport, I turn my brain off. I turn my brain off like, I don't know where we are. I don't know what time we have to be there. You're taking care of that. I'm just here to be pretty. And I said I had another video on people like, take it so literally, but you kind of have to think of it as like fun and silly to get yourself

into that princess treatment mode. because we've been so trained to be like, no, I'm a girl boss. I can do everything for myself. I can do everything for myself. But really, like, remove that and let him take care of it. And I know that you're probably thinking that sounds very extreme, but if you are on TikTok or on social media, you've probably seen less extreme offshoots of this that I think are kind of the same thing, right?

I saw a girl wearing a shirt on TikTok that said, I'm too hot to work, which I think is the same kind of dynamic. Or this idea of like, oh, I don't dream of labor, which initially I really liked that slogan because it kind of seemed like an anti-capitalistic anti-work slogan, and I liked it. But now I think it's sort of being turned into a way to not just glorify the idea of women not working, but glorify the idea of like women not aspiring to live adult lives where they are in control of their lives. Women saying things like, I'm literally just a girl. You're not a girl. You're a grown adult woman. And I think

it's not a coincidence that we are seeing this rebrand of women not being in control of their finances or their lives being rebranded as cool and fun and sexy at a time where our rights are literally being rolled back. I know that anti-feminists love to say that feminism scammed white women into thinking that working and paying taxes and paying bills was liberation. I say white women because non-white women like me were really never included in this. Like we had to work outside of the home. This is a totally different conversation for us that we were not really involved in. And like, when anti-feminists say this, I get it. I truly really do get it. Because I feel like as women, there is genuinely so much on us that I can understand how saying,

wouldn't it feel like liberation to not have all of this stress, to not have all of these bills and jobs to worry about, but just stay home and not work. And staying at home, if you are a parent, is work and is stress. Ask anybody who stays at home to parent their kids. It's not like they're living the high, not stressful life. So that's not even really true. I truly, truly do get that. But I also think that we are not talking to our mothers, to our grandmothers, to our aunties about what life truly looked like and felt like when that was the norm for women. Like, women could only have our own bank accounts without a man in 1974 after the Equal Credit Opportunity Act kicked in, right? And so imagine what that would have been like to be so out of control of your own finances that

you would have to have your husband be on your own bank account to have access to money. And so I don't think this is something that we should be normalizing or glorifying. I don't think we should be normalizing or glorifying grown adult women bragging about how they're not in control of their own lives. And I say all this to say that her video on its face is about how it's cool and feminine to not tie your own shoes and not make eye contact and order at a restaurant and how it's good for women to be quiet, I think it normalizes women not being able to show up on their own in public and civic life, which we know is connected to women not being able to show up in democratic or

political life as well. I know it's very trite to compare what we're seeing happening today with Handmaid's Tale, especially since everything that happened in Handmaid's Tale, while it may seem like a dystopian fiction for white women, a lot of what happens to the women in Handmaid's Tale actually happen to enslaved Black women. So it's not like dystopian faraway fiction. for us. But if you've seen the Hulu series, The Handmaid's Tale, one of the first clues that something is up is how women on their own are treated in public. Like a man screams at these two women who are jogging and athletic clothing and makes them leave a cafe. There's a scene early on where Offrad goes to the bank and she finds out that her bank account has been closed and her assets

has been taken because she's on that account by herself and not with her husband. Before everything goes straight to hell in that universe, it first just becomes normal. for women not to be able to do any of the errands or business in public life that they need to do on their own without a man. So I think glamorizing all of this and trying to rebrand all of this as being good for women and a way to live that is pampered and safe and protected is very dangerous. We are not children. We can work jobs if you've got to work jobs. We can certainly tie our own shoes. We can talk to the staff.

We can sort out the bill. All of the things that adults have to navigate to be part of society. we can do as women. And it is not cute to me to act like it's desirable to be treated otherwise. And so even if this is a skit or this is a character she's playing or she's trolling or just a low-level conflict entrepreneur, I just don't think it's cool to get on an app where there are so many young women and girls who are very impressionable and facing a lot of different conflicting information about who they

should be right now and say that all of this is indicative of a woman who has a good life. So after this video went super viral, the creator, Courtney, Joelle, took her account down for a little while. Everybody was like, oh, where'd she go? Where'd she go? Then she popped back up with a couple of thousand new followers. When I last checked, she was sitting at like 37K new followers and she was pretty excited about all of this. She continued to sort of lean into this. She made a video about how to maintain what she calls Princess Feet. I actually kind of weirdly love that she is like, yeah, I'm just going to make the best of this.

I'm going to lean into this is the kind of content I make now. And I think it is a good reminder that when one person becomes the internet's main character, as they say, for something that is maybe a little bit suspect, when we give them a ton of attention, yes, I am fully including myself in this, it just allows them to grow and like solidifies them as somebody with a voice that people should be listening to. And so what makes me sort of sad about this whole thing is that she's really sort of pivoting into being this kind of boring, bland lifestyle.

I watched a video that she made after the princess treatment video that was just her doing her Trader Joe's hall. And it was like literally the most boring thing. Like, yeah, you go to Trader Joe's just like everybody else. You're shopping for the week just like everybody else. You buy kale at Trader Joe just like everybody else. Like it just seemed very, very boring. It was the kind of lifestyle influencer content that is a dime a dozen on social media. But I want to be clear, there is nothing wrong with wanting to be an influencer.

But I don't know, women are so vast and interesting and complicated and chat. that I was a little disappointed, I have to say, when I checked back in with her content, and it was just the same boring influencer stick that is all over social media. There doesn't seem to be any joy or passion or authenticity to it. It's just a sort of muted, boring. Here's my Trader Joe's Hall. And it reminded me of something else that she said in her initial princess treatment restaurant video, which is that one of the things that she avoids in public space to avoid taking up too much space,

is laughing too loudly when she goes at to eat at restaurants. Like she says, I don't really laugh. I don't talk too loud. I don't want to take up too much today, so I don't laugh very loudly. The most elegant, lovely women are often soft-spoken and don't overspeak. They're not loud. Maybe let's also talk about that. You're not going to be laughing loudly, speaking loudly, demanding the intention of the room when you're out of a restaurant.

You're with your husband, your boyfriend, whoever, fiancé, you're speaking to him, eye contact with him. the attention is kind of on him. You're not laughing so loudly that everyone in the room is looking at you or speaking so loudly that everyone in the room is looking towards you. And this is honestly the thing that just made me very sad because if she is indeed cashing in on her viral moment to become a lifestyle influencer, which like good for her, no shade, I would do the same thing.

Being an influencer is about making your life look aspirational, making you seem like someone that other people would want to be themselves, who would want to have a life where they're not able to laugh loudly? Who would aspire to that kind of passionless, joyless existence? Because a good, deep, loud belly laugh over wine and plates at a restaurant with all of your friends and family at the table is truly, truly one of life's pure joys. All of my best memories of being out with my family sound like that, just like my mom sucking at a bunch of air and giving us a big, deep, guttural best.

belly laugh. Who would deny themselves this in service of wanting to seem classy or refined or feminine to others? When I think about the kind of life that I aspire to have, it is a full life. It is a big life. It is a life where I take up a lot of space. And you know what? If there's one thing this life has in it, it is big, deep, loud, belly laughs in abundance. Anyway, I just wanted to come on here and yap about this for a little bit. Let me know what you think. If you're listening on Spotify, you can tell me in the comments. I love reading this. Spotify comments. It's the best thing Spotify ever did is turning on those episode comments because I love to read them. Yeah, tell me what you think. Did you see this video? You can check out

my kind of cringe, embarrassing response to her in the show notes. And if you all like this vibe of episode where I'm just sort of getting on here and giving you a little unstructured takes and opinions about digital culture, let me know because I have a lot of takes that I currently shout at my friends and family. And if you'd rather me shout them, at you into this microphone, I will be happy to do that. If you're looking for ways to support the show, check out our merch store at tangoody.com slash store. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech or just want to say hi?

You can reach us at hello at tangoody.com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tangoity.com. There are no girls on the internet was created by me, Bridget Todd. It's a production of IHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative. Edited by Joey Pat. Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Tari Harrison is our producer and sound engineer. Michael Amato is our contributing producer.

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