The toxic female influencers who will ruin your life

Chopra’s supposed message is just the latest salvo in a trend that some are calling high-value womanhood and others see as the pursuit of hypergamy, or “marrying up”. I would call it toxic femininity. 

In the last few years, more and more young women online are sharing, liking and engaging with the idea that romantic or sexual relationships with men have exactly one purpose: persuading them to financially provide for, or at the very least, spoil you. 

Relationship coaches like YouTuber Leticia Padua, known as the “Sprinkle Sprinkle lady” after her catchphrase, tell us that real men show love through financial support, and give women advice on how to get a rich man. 

Other Instagram accounts, such as London-based “dating coach” Abigail Blair’s softnegotiation, teach (for a fee) young girls “how to get men to spend money on you” via an “emotional orgasm”: “It’s about creating a pleasurable emotional experience for him after he’s swiped his Amex for you.” 

And then you have influencers such as Ella Freimann, who recently went viral for declaring that women should expect men to pay for everything – including their Ubers – and that if they don’t, then “the bar is in hell”. 

Cut to normalised Instagram and TikTok content about how the bare minimum of what a boyfriend should provide in a relationship is paying for your beauty treatments, letting you run up his credit card bill, and transferring you money at will; because “if he wanted to, he would”, and if he doesn’t, then he is a “broke boy”. 

This might just be recycled 1950s engagement ring advert talking points, but it’s dangerous for a multitude of reasons. 

Firstly, as many online critics point out, this is basically just reinventing prostitution from first principles. Telling young girls that the only reason they should share their company or be intimate with men is for monetary gain draws a very clear connection of: your body = item to be purchased. Which, in the era of OnlyFans, feels like a slippery slope. 

Suggested Reading

How Trump warped the minds of the world’s young men

Eleanor Longman-Rood

But there is also a darker side to a lot of these conversations. It is perfectly fine, they reason, to view relationships with men as transactional, because that’s what men do in reverse. They only want to use you for your body, are incapable of real love, and will eventually deceive and cheat you – so don’t let them make a mug of you, and make sure you use them for their money.

It’s a dead ringer for the arguments used by the manosphere. They latch onto young men’s insecurities around sex and relationships by telling them that women are incapable of real love, will only use you for your money, and will eventually deceive and cheat on you – so it is paramount that you only use them for their bodies. 

This is why it is toxic femininity. It preys on young women’s anxieties, demonises the opposite sex and invents bullshit definitions of what “feminine energy” and “a woman’s role” are. 

And just as with manosphere influencers, this content serves only to line the pockets of the creators pushing these harmful delusions: “Take my course on how YOU can get hotter and score a rich businessman/Take my course on how YOU can own a Lamborghini and bang hot women.”

Most depressingly of all, this ideology will only end up making young women and girls miserably lonely. One TikTok user, named Bree, made a video talking about how following the advice of ‘Sprinkle Sprinkle’ lady made her a “very unhappy person”. 

“Not every guy is a liar, a cheat, or a terrible person…” she now realises, admitting the “as he should” mindset made her reject romantic opportunities because she thought she should only be accepting “princess treatment”. 

It’s obvious to anyone that the average man in his early twenties working an entry-level job probably won’t have hordes of disposable income to spend on romancing women he doesn’t even know – my male friends certainly don’t. But according to Abigail Blair, “if a man asked you for a coffee, tell him you’ve got your own Nespresso machine at home. Men should buy you things that you can’t make at home, such as a Chanel bag”. 

So if a nice bloke who you fancy can only afford to go for a coffee, not buy designer clothes, then you should not for one second give him a chance. Imagine how many potentially loving relationships this has strangled in infancy?

Suggested Reading

Are you over 45 and female? Sorry, you’re not getting a job

Jamie Klingler

And what’s more, the type of men that “sprinkle sprinkle” mindset will push you towards are an utter twat-festival of red flags. Think about it, if the “bare minimum” has to be men who can afford this, then in all likelihood the only ones who can afford it will be a fair bit older. I’m no puritan when it comes to age gaps, but I’m sure no father likes to picture his 20-year-old daughter being picked up in a Beemer by a balding 47-year-old insurance broker. 

Plus, I’ve always thought that the type of men who are very much of the insistence that “my woman is my trophy, I pay for everything and treat her like a prize stallion” are insecure wankers. Remember girls, the hand that giveth can taketh away. If you ditch your degree to run off on a yacht to pose in the background of some Andrew Tate wannabe’s Instagram pictures, what leverage will you have when he turns around and decides to stop paying your bills because he’s found someone fitter?

Just as the manosphere is destroying many young men’s chances of finding a healthy relationship by injecting their already porn-addled brains with false conspiracies about femoids (incels’ derogatory term for women), toxic femininity too will create a generation of young girls who either end up with creeps or reject all possibility of a happy, healthy relationship because TikTok told them to.

These ‘high value women’ would have you believe what they preach is the ultimate end point of feminism. But that’s bollocks. For centuries, millions of women have endured at worst abuse and at best loveless marriages, all because their only option in life was to marry for financial security. 

In a world where we can make our own careers and success, surely being able to be with someone purely because there’s no one you’d rather go to the pub with is the ultimate freedom?