The Soft Girls are Working!
In the 2010s, the millennials were girl bosses. They were all about the grind and hustling to get the bag. The ‘girl boss culture’ was so ingrained in them that they were wearing business casual to the club! We’re talking blouses, pencil skirts, and four-inch heels minimum on the dance floor. Now, we find ourselves in the 2020s; the internet is flooded with ‘soft girl’ content. From my observation, there are two types of soft girls. You have the wellness girlies, then you have the stay-at-home girlies. They both play into the soft girl aesthetic of slow, effortless, feminine, and soft living.
The wellness girlies are usually in their 20s and 30s with no kids, maybe a partner. Their life seems like a walking Pinterest board. They have a perfectly curated morning and skincare routine, lifestyle vlogs of them going to Pilates, grabbing matcha, and going to a pottery class in cute sets. It makes you begin to wonder how they fund their luxurious lifestyle. Their job is to look effortlessly put together. It’s how they get PR packages and brand deals from beauty brands. Others have degrees in fields like marketing and communication, and use their degrees in remote work. They avoid showing it due to work-related causes, like not wanting to break social media rules, while others don’t share it because it doesn’t fit the aesthetic they are going for.
You then have the creators with the ‘trad-wife content’, a.k.a. traditional housewife. They dress in ultra-feminine clothing with gingham patterns, aprons, and modestly, all while baking everything entirely from scratch. While their content may show them doing homemaking work, they themselves are not really ‘trad-wives’. What traditional wife sits front row for fashion week?
Cough, Cough, Nara Smith.
Many of these ‘trad-wives’ become the breadwinners in their families from the sponsorships and other sources of income. A prime example is the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, a group of wives who made TikToks and now have a hit Hulu show. Some of the wives' husbands are now full-time stay-at-home dads as their wives are bringing in the big bucks. To be a real trad-wife, you’d have to solely depend on your husband for financial support, which is not the case here.
In today’s internet culture, softness sells amongst the girlies. They are getting cosmetic and beauty treatments done and heading straight to their laptops to complete some work. I’m not saying all of this to discredit soft life. Soft life is real, but so is work. In this economy, two adults can’t easily rely on a paycheck; mama’s gotta work too.
Strike Out,
Johann Jonassaint
Boca Raton
Johann Jonassaint is a content writer for Strike Magazine Boca. A true Venusian who can never get enough of being wrapped in cozy sheets, listening to video essays or daydreaming. When she finally leaves her sheets, you can catch her writing at the library, the only place she can actually get work done. Feel free to contact her at jjonassaint2023@gmail.com or @jojoeva_ on Instagram.
Cover Image Courtesy: Instagram / @naraaziza
