‘Princess treatment’ became an online fad just 5 months following conservative election wins in the United States. It began with a woman named Courtney Joelle, whose viral 6 minute TikTok video caused a stir when she stated that, to feel like a ‘princess’, she’d let her man do everything for her, including opening doors, ordering her food, and managing her money. She described it as, “letting your husband lead and be masculine.” Her tips and tricks epitomised Tradwife aspirations, veiling weaponised incompetency, infantilisation and dependency as “femininity.” She recommends communication cut-offs, quietness and feigned helplessness to ensure that he stays interested and “obsessed”.
On the other side of the radicalised dating spectrum, misandrists mocked the trend by setting their partners up to answer ‘bare minimum’ or ‘princess treatment’ to a selection of high-value services. If he answered wrong, he’d be pushed into a pool or sprayed in the face with a high-pressure garden hose. The more I clicked, the more I saw a concerning amount of prejudice and resentment reveal itself. Examples started with nasty but potentially harmless ‘Short King’ hatred, and finally devolved into some pretty outrageous Machiavellian strategies on ‘How To Make Him Obsessed With You’ (basically, how to neg someone) using your ‘Dark Feminine’ aura.
Indoctrinations on both sides of the political extreme see women either suppressing their independence to allow masculine control, or using their femininity to gain their own. ‘Princesses’ are well-resourced, and unashamed of using manipulative tactics to get their Soft Life. We’re a long way away from the 1950s kitchen appliance advertisements that once mediated a woman’s role as nurturer, mother and wife. Yet, at their core, these trends function on similar assumptions– and although I know some of them are only satirising heterosexual dating, they leave me up at night, anxious with ideology. I find myself asking, what do women want? Or more specifically, what do feminists want, and what did we get instead?
During the first-wave movement, we asked for the right to vote (but failed to account for intersectional oppressions in class and race). During the second-wave movement, De Beauvoir and Friedan inspired wider emancipation: a radical reformation of gendered conditioning, not only in our state, workplaces and economy, but in our homes. Some more radical thinkers like Firestone proposed that a complete renunciation of biologically-defined reproductive roles were the only solution for centuries of subjugation. To save myself from a life of conformity, I must reject the role of the nurturer. To prove my independence, I must equally refrain from needing. Tough ask. Today, we’re more tempered. Thinkers like Butler speak of gender as a cultural performance, distinct from sex, which we can put on and take off.
Among each school, one critical downfall is increasingly clear. As Didion so controversially stated in her short story, Women’s Movement: “The have‐nots, it turned out, aspired mainly to having”. Behind the veil of reform and empowerment, some women are taking their newfound choice, and using it to reinforce the same oppressive systems in new, insidious ways. These paradoxes find embodiment in schools of thought such as choice feminism, which often ignores the structural, capital realities of patriarchy that keep many from benefitting in the same ways.
The regurgitation of women’s empowerment, embodied by fads like Princess Treatment, prove that beyond historic ambitions to dissolve gender, the dismantling of class might remain more difficult. The pull of capitalism and the soft life appear stronger than hopes for equal opportunity. As Celine Song said, “capitalism is trying to colonise our hearts”.
As harmless as it may seem, Princess Treatment glorifies everything we once contested: the imbalance of effort in a relationship, the materialist and transactional nature of domesticity, and the classist underpinnings of gender performativity. Somehow, somewhere, we managed to turn a resistance effort into a new, hybridised power play where the woman gets it all and the man should consider himself lucky enough, privileged enough, to give. What does this misguided attempt at gendered redress imply? Ana Akana answers, “The idea that empowerment involves appropriating the techniques by which you yourself were oppressed.”
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