00:04:49.700The princess is kept away from others at all times.
00:04:52.920You know, she describes this complicated rigmarole that her and her husband will do to avoid
00:04:58.100her having to manage anything directly with a staff member at a restaurant.
00:05:02.100Like her husband will drive her up to the restaurant, get out of the car, go inside,
00:05:06.720talk to the staff come out open the door walk her into the restaurant and then he goes to park the
00:05:13.040car while she waits inside he comes back out opens my car door walks me into the restaurant opens the
00:05:19.380door and I stand and wait I did not make eye contact with the hostess I did not talk to her
00:05:23.900I waited until my husband came back he comes back does the exchange with her and then we went and
00:05:29.000sat down it's not in any sense like you're better than the hostess you're just letting your husband
00:05:34.180lead and be masculine. He made the reservation. He's taking you out. Let him do the logistics.
00:05:42.040You're just being a princess. It's not because you're being hoity-toity.0.99
00:05:45.240You're just letting your husband lead and letting him take care of it.
00:05:49.420She says that while her husband is parking in the car, she doesn't really make eye contact or speak
00:05:53.520with the staff while she's waiting in the restaurant because she's just waiting for her
00:05:56.780husband to come back and do all the talking and managing everything. You know, the princess does
00:06:00.340not conduct business the princess does not make decisions the princess's job is to be silent and1.00
00:06:05.340pretty and basically just do what she's told the over need to like talk and fill space like you0.98
00:06:10.820don't need to talk unless you are spoken to and then if you are spoken to and ask you to say oh1.00
00:06:15.580i'm just waiting for my husband and then he'll be able to give the reservation
00:06:18.880or you say oh i'm so sorry i'm not sure i might wait my husband will be back and then you can ask
00:06:23.400him you can say in a very soft and feminine way i know this is going to be ripped apart people
00:06:29.320will just take things seriously such the wrong way, but that's how I would handle it. And then
00:06:33.880let's just go further into, so if you're sitting down and you're ordering in New York, for the
00:06:38.860most part that the waiter would come up, they would ask, you know, whatever my husband would
00:06:42.900start to speak. And then the waiter would address them and he would kind of, the waiter would get
00:06:46.240the hint and only then interact with my husband here in Salt Lake. They don't quite get it. I
00:06:51.440think, I think they think that I'm like being, you know, oppressed or I don't know. They will,
00:06:59.560they'll be like, what can I get you to eat? And I will just look at my husband. Like if they
00:07:02.880address me first, I will just look at my husband and let my husband order. He'll say, oh, she's
00:07:07.680and then if they have a follow-up question, like, oh, do you want it like this? Sometimes I will
00:07:12.480answer. Let's say I'm, I think maybe my husband doesn't know what I would want. I will then
00:07:16.900address the waiter, but it's almost like they keep trying to like get me to speak. And I'm like,
00:07:22.540no, I want him to order for me. I like when he orders for me. It's not that I'm not capable of
00:07:27.060ordering for myself. It's just fun. It's just a fun princess treatment thing. It makes me feel
00:07:30.860special. It makes me just feel like over the top taking care of. So if the waiter addresses you
00:07:36.180first, I will simply just look at my husband and then my husband will order. Again, you don't need
00:07:41.540to over speak over exert yourself you can be feminine and soft and quiet tell me are these
00:07:50.460not the same things so people on tiktok basically started calling this creator princess treatment
00:07:56.560lady because of how she makes these videos about how you know she gets this princess treatment when1.00
00:08:01.520she goes out she doesn't speak when she goes to restaurants she doesn't make eye contact with the0.99
00:08:05.460staff or the hostess does not verbally order because she waits for her husband to do that1.00
00:08:09.240she has some other videos which we'll get to in a minute but this one video about how she behaves
00:08:15.960when she goes out to restaurants with her husband really hit a nerve with me but not for the reason
00:08:21.260that you might be thinking yes this video plays into all the kinds of gendered tropes that we
00:08:27.180talk about on there are no girls on the internet which we'll absolutely get into in a moment
00:08:30.440but the reason why i was like essentially deeply triggered from this video is something different
00:08:36.920Because probably like a lot of y'all listening, my career trajectory has involved a lot of working in the service industry.
00:08:43.540You know, I was a hostess at a restaurant.
00:08:45.740I worked as a cashier for multiple different retail establishments in my life.
00:08:50.660Jobs where you have to interact with the public.
00:08:53.100Now, these jobs are not inherently bad on their own.
00:08:56.540Some of them were like actually quite good for me.
00:08:59.600But the thing that can make these jobs bad is that when you have to interact with people who treat you badly.
00:09:06.420So it's not even like the job itself is that bad. It's the customers 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.
00:09:30.400That is definitely a gendered situation. However, my experiences personally were mostly fine. I don't really have any over-the-top gross or horrible stories of customers being horrible to me, luckily, but I have had some weird ones.
00:09:47.420Like one time I was working as a hostess for a fancy restaurant, sort of 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.
00:10:17.420stolen while she was inside of our restaurant having lunch with her girlfriends. So that was
00:10:21.560funny. And I think that experience really typifies the kind of weird experiences that I had when I
00:10:28.340was working in the service industry. For me, mostly it was really entitled or rude behavior
00:10:33.940from people who didn't seem to clock the staff at where they were eating as like human beings there
00:10:39.160to do a job. So when I saw this TikTok video taking off, I really hated the idea that the
00:10:45.860advice that she was giving to women on how to look classy and refined and feminine in public0.92
00:10:50.600was basically boiling down to be a weird rude dick to the waitstaff at restaurants for no1.00
00:10:56.840clear reason. Staff who is probably likely being treated badly in some capacity already.0.96
00:11:03.100So I hated that she was saying that this behavior is what makes a woman seem feminine and classy1.00
00:11:08.020when real class is showing respect for the people who are there to provide you with a service. It0.99
00:11:13.300is looking them in the eye. It is acknowledging them when they're speaking and saying thank you
00:11:17.380when they do their jobs. And listen, I don't even really hate the idea of somebody else ordering.
00:11:23.420I actually love when somebody else at the table kind of takes charge and orders for me or orders
00:11:28.900for the table. But you don't have to do this in such a weird, rude way where you are refusing to
00:11:34.680make eye contact with the staff. Like that is not classy. That is just rude. And we need to not
00:13:06.980Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable.
00:13:11.540I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me.
00:13:16.100I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming.
00:13:23.520They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.
00:13:27.500But these aren't stories about what's taken from them.
00:13:30.940They're stories about what it takes to make it out alive.
00:13:34.080Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:13:43.020If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:13:48.960This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:14:01.440I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and
00:21:12.540I'm kind of calling myself out a little bit here.
00:21:14.520If 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.0.98
00:21:41.240So if she is a conflict entrepreneur, I kind of fucked up.
00:21:44.520This 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 being a little bit more visible on these platforms.0.97
00:22:02.120And so I've been intentionally trying to make content about the podcast on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, all of that.
00:22:09.860And 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.
00:23:19.240But 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.
00:23:39.100And 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.0.99
00:23:54.580And I just really wanted to bring the conversation back down to that.
00:23:58.440Also, what's funny is that once I woke up and saw that video had almost 10 million views, I was like, oh, my God, what happens next?
00:24:04.900You know, am I like, what should I do?
00:24:07.640if you're angling to go viral on social media let me tell you nothing happens next that's it
00:24:12.800there's nothing nobody sends you a check nobody does anything everything is the same
00:31:02.840And 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.0.52
00:31:16.000I know that anti-feminists love to say that feminism scammed white women into thinking that working and paying taxes and paying bills was liberation.
00:31:24.480I say white women because non-white women like me were really never included in this.1.00
00:31:29.140Like, we had to work outside of the home.
00:31:30.760This was a totally different conversation for us that we were not really involved in.
00:31:35.020And, like, when anti-feminists say this, I get it.
00:31:39.880Because I feel like, as women, there is genuinely so much on us that I can understand how saying,
00:31:46.780wouldn'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?
00:31:53.720And staying at home, if you are a parent, is work and is stress.
00:31:58.060ask anybody who stays at home to parent their kids. It's not like they're living the high,
00:32:02.360not stressful life. So that's not even really true. I truly, truly do get that. But I also
00:32:08.220think that we are not talking to our mothers, to our grandmothers, to our aunties about what
00:32:13.100life truly looked like and felt like when that was the norm for women. Women could only have
00:32:18.980our own bank accounts without a man in 1974 after the Equal Credit Opportunity Act kicked in.1.00
00:32:24.660right? And so imagine what that would have been like to be so out of control of your own finances
00:32:29.880that you would have to have your husband be on your own bank account to have access to money.
00:32:33.980And so I don't think this is something that we should be normalizing or glorifying. I don't
00:32:38.580think we should be normalizing or glorifying grown adult women bragging about how they're0.93
00:32:43.940not in control of their own lives. And I say all this to say that her video on its face is about0.91
00:32:50.820how it's cool and feminine to not tie your own shoes and not make eye contact and order at a0.99
00:32:56.700restaurant and how it's good for women to be quiet, I think it normalizes women not being0.97
00:33:02.080able to show up on their own in public and civic life, which we know is connected to women not0.92
00:33:07.860being able to show up in democratic or political life as well. I know it's very trite to compare0.58
00:33:13.580what we're seeing happening today with Handmaid's Tale, especially since everything that happened
00:33:17.180in Handmaid's Tale, while it may seem like a dystopian fiction for white women, a lot of what
00:33:22.480happens to the women in Handmaid's Tale actually happen to enslaved Black women. So it's not like
00:33:26.820dystopian, faraway fiction for us. But if you've seen the Hulu series, The Handmaid's Tale,
00:33:32.340one of the first clues that something is up is how women on their own are treated in public.
00:33:37.540Like a man screams at these two women who are jogging in athletic clothing and makes them
00:33:42.040leave a cafe. There's a scene early on where Offred goes to the bank and she finds out that
00:33:46.460her bank account has been closed and her assets have been taken because she's on that account by
00:33:51.000herself and not with her husband. Before everything goes straight to hell in that universe, it first
00:33:56.980just becomes normal for women not to be able to do any of the errands or business in public life0.99
00:34:02.540that they need to do on their own without a man. So I think glamorizing all of this and trying to0.99
00:34:07.800rebrand all of this as being good for women and a way to live that is pampered and safe and
00:34:13.940protected is very dangerous. We are not children. We can work jobs if we've got to work jobs. We can
00:34:21.260certainly tie our own shoes. We can talk to the staff. We can sort out the bill. All of the things
00:34:25.960that adults have to navigate to be part of society, we can do as women. And it is not cute to me to
00:34:31.980act like it's desirable to be treated otherwise. And so even if this is a skit or this is a character
00:34:38.480she's playing or she's trolling or just a low-level conflict entrepreneur, I just don't0.97
00:34:43.260think it's cool to get on an app where there are so many young women and girls who are very
00:34:47.160impressionable and facing a lot of different conflicting information about who they should
00:34:51.840be right now and say that all of this is indicative of a woman who has a good life.
00:34:56.960So after this video went super viral, the creator, Courtney Joelle, took her account
00:35:02.080down for a little while. Everybody was like, oh, where'd she go? Where'd she go? Then she popped
00:35:06.160back up with a couple of thousand new followers. And when I last checked, she was at like sitting0.92
00:35:10.660like 37k new followers and she was pretty excited about all of this she continued to sort of lean
00:35:16.100into this she made a video about how to maintain what she calls princess feet um i actually kind
00:35:21.400of weirdly like love that she is like yeah i'm just gonna make the best of this i'm gonna lean
00:35:26.320into this is my this is the kind of content i make now and i think it is a good reminder that
00:35:31.160when one person becomes the internet's main character as they say for something that is
00:35:35.560maybe a little bit suspect when we give them a ton of attention yes i am fully including myself
00:35:40.380in this uh it just allows them to grow and like solidifies them as somebody with a voice that
00:35:45.500people should be listening to and so what makes me sort of sad about this whole thing is that
00:35:50.480she's really sort of pivoting into being this kind of boring bland lifestyle influencer like
00:35:56.440i watched a video that she made after the princess treatment video that was just her doing her trader0.96
00:36:01.220joe's haul and it was like literally the most boring thing like yeah you go to trader joe's
00:36:05.260just like everybody else you do your shopping for the week just like everybody else you buy
00:36:08.720kale at Trader Joe, just like everybody else. It just seemed very, very boring. It was the kind of
00:36:12.840lifestyle influencer content that is a dime a dozen on social media. But I want to be clear,
00:36:18.560there is nothing wrong with wanting to be an influencer. But I don't know, women are so vast1.00
00:36:23.720and interesting and complicated and challenging that I was a little disappointed, I have to say,
00:36:28.680when I checked back in with her content and it was just the same boring influencer shtick that
00:36:33.120all over social media. There doesn't seem to be any joy or passion or authenticity to it. It's
00:36:38.900just a sort of muted, boring, here's my Trader Joe's haul. And it reminded me of something else
00:36:46.140that she said in her initial princess treatment restaurant video, which is that one of the things0.98
00:36:51.020that she avoids in public space to avoid taking up too much space is laughing too loudly when she0.76
00:36:58.660goes at to eat at restaurants. She says, I don't really laugh. I don't talk too loud. I don't want
00:37:04.060to take up too much space, so I don't laugh very loudly. The most elegant, lovely women are often1.00
00:37:09.140soft-spoken and don't over-speak. They're not loud. Maybe let's also talk about that. You're1.00
00:37:14.960not going to be laughing loudly, speaking loudly, demanding the attention of the room when you're
00:37:19.320at a restaurant. You're with your husband, your boyfriend, whoever, fiance. You're speaking to
00:37:23.980him, eye contact with him, the attention is kind of on him. You're not laughing so loudly that
00:37:29.840everyone in the room is looking at you or speaking so loudly that everyone in the room is looking
00:37:34.680towards you. And this is honestly the thing that just made me very sad because if she is indeed
00:37:40.560cashing in on her viral moment to become a lifestyle influencer, which like good for her,
00:37:45.300no shade, I would do the same thing. Being an influencer is about making your life look
00:37:50.060aspirational, making you seem like someone that other people would want to be themselves? Who
00:37:55.920would want to have a life where they're not able to laugh loudly? Who would aspire to that kind of
00:38:01.500passionless, joyless existence? Because a good, deep, loud belly laugh over wine and plates at
00:38:09.340a restaurant with all of your friends and family at the table is truly, truly one of life's pure
00:38:14.960joys. All of my best memories of being out with my family sound like that, just like my mom
00:38:20.820sucking in a bunch of air and giving us a big, deep, guttural belly laugh. Who would deny
00:38:26.880themselves this in service of wanting to seem classy or refined or feminine to others? When I
00:38:33.340think about the kind of life that I aspire to have, it is a full life. It is a big life. It is
00:38:37.960a life where I take up a lot of space. And you know what? If there's one thing this life has in
00:38:42.440it. It is big, deep, loud belly laughs in abundance. Anyway, I just wanted to come on here and yap
00:38:49.960about this for a little bit. Let me know what you think. If you're listening on Spotify, you can
00:38:53.620tell me in the comments. I love reading the Spotify comments. It's the best thing Spotify ever did is
00:38:57.860turning on those episode comments because I love to read them. Yeah, tell me what you think. Did
00:39:02.060you see this video? You can check out my kind of cringe, embarrassing response to her in the show
00:39:07.480notes. And if you all like this vibe of episode where I'm just sort of getting on here and
00:39:13.360giving you a little unstructured Bridget takes and opinions about digital culture,
00:39:19.200let me know because I have a lot of takes that I currently shout at my friends and family.
00:39:23.600And if you'd rather me shout them at you into this microphone, I will be happy to do that.
00:39:31.600If you're looking for ways to support the show, check out our merch store at tangoti.com
00:39:35.860slash store. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech or just want to say hi? You can
00:39:41.360reach us at hello at tangody.com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tangody.com.
00:39:46.780There Are No Girls on the Internet was created by me, Bridget Todd. It's a production of iHeart
00:39:50.480Radio and Unbossed Creative. Edited by Joey Pat. Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer.
00:39:56.180Tari Harrison is our producer and sound engineer. Michael Amato is our contributing producer.
00:40:00.820I'm your host, Bridget Todd. If you want to help us grow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts.
00:40:05.860For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, check out the iHeartRadio app,
00:40:08.820Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:40:16.600If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality,