The Rise Of Stay-At-Home Girlfriends And Sleepy Memes Suggests The Era Of The Sleepytime Girlfriend Is Upon Us

The day-to-day life of Kendel Kay, one of TikTok’s maligned “stay-at-home girlfriends,” appears in her viral videos to be, well, fairly dull. We’re jealous.

Her glamorous nonemployment doesn’t seem to entail much more than journaling, preparing healthy snacks, and seeing an occasional butterfly. On Twitter, people say that she seems like she had been lobotomized, highly medicated, or generally unfulfilled. Her meticulous self-care and fitness routines, a symptom of the spreading “that girl” aesthetic, have been compared to that of American Psycho’s serial killer Patrick Bateman. Parody videos abound.

But her “slow, soft life” resonated with many — instead of criticizing her lack of a 9-to-5, they related to the dream of one day being rich enough to have a “do-nothing” job. We’ve long been on the verge of a hustle culture reckoning, and Kay is one post away from leading the revolution. Is it possible some of those critics were just jealous, too?