The Girl is a Living Currency - How Womanhood Has Always Been its Own Economy

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It pays to be a girl online. Alongside Tradwives and NPC streamers, there are stay-at-home girlfriends online shopping, girls lip-synching to Kaliii’s Area Codes, and girls searching for sugar daddies while styled as Ariel from the Little Mermaid. Forget Girl Bossing: Some girls romanticise the security of financial dependence on a male partner, others gamify the business of being ‘treated’ by men on the internet. Girls trade on the ambiguous nature of women’s work - care, affect, sex – as well as the invisible nature of women’s money – often coming in the form of gifts, treats, girl dinners, or ‘little somethings’. 

Right now, my favourites are the ‘asking my boyfriend for money’ challenges on TikTok, where girls ask men they’re dating for cash transfers and record their reactions. Most take the form of screen-grabbed messages. There’s usually lots of pet names in these exchanges, including multiple ways of spelling Babe? Baby? Babyy? Babee? If asked what the money's for, ‘nails’ is a popular answer. To get my nails done, for my hair. For shoes. I need a dress for my uncle’s party. The money is for frivolous, cute, girlish things that the men can appreciate too. The exchanges are mostly cute - never desperate. They finish with a screen grab of a transfer: The receipts.

Aside from the mention of new payments platforms - “He said ‘Cash App or Zelle?” - the concept of being ‘treated’ – an economy at work in the grey areas of marriage and romance and sex work - isn’t a new one. Throughout history, women often relied on invisible dollars, allowances, tokens and treats in lieu of real financial independence. Throughout the early 20th century men habitually ‘treated’ working class women to gifts in the form of rent, deposits and ration coupons in indirect exchange for sexual favours. These treats hovered somewhere between a transaction and a gift. Not quite a payment, not quite a bribe, not quite a contract, a tacit agreement, something you couldn’t quite say aloud - to do so would spoil the fantasy. 

___STEADY_PAYWALL___

Today, a whole internet economy runs on maintaining – and monetising – this fantasy, the economy of the girl online. Asking my boyfriend for money sits next to clips where a girl called Pinkydoll cosplays an AI NPC, cooking popcorn with a hair straightener and throwing out phrases in response to virtual tokens. Pinkydoll is a virtual puppet, animated by money, sharing space with virtual streamers on Twitch whose breasts can be enlarged with virtual coins. “Hee haw, you got me feeling like a cowgirl!” she responds to the virtual gift of a cowboy hat, while “yes yes yes” acknowledges the gift of a virtual rose. Larger donations are usually acknowledged by name: “Oh thank you Joel. I love you.”

Today, a whole internet economy runs on maintaining – and monetising – this fantasy, the economy of the girl online.

“The girl is a living currency”, the anonymous collective Tiqqun wrote in their theory take on being a girl in late capitalism. Men might be interested in her use value, Tiqqun wrote, but she measures her worth in the exchange – her market rate. The money is everywhere, but it comes wrapped in a feminine aesthetic, from girl maths to loungewear, virtual ice-creams and Amazon wishlists. The money is everywhere, but at all times, there is a complex negotiation at play between people and things, markets and intimacy. This contradiction is reconciled in the figure of the girl online, the girl in the anxiety video shilling mental health products, or the moaning girl with a vibrator between her legs linked to virtual tips. The girl is a token, the place where people and products co-exist in an apparently non-contradictory manner. She continually has to ask what she is worth but she is also asked to pretend that she is free. 

Nowhere is this negotiation more visible than in the economy of the ‘tradwife’. Estee C Williams is a former bodybuilder turned tradwife influencer. Alongside a series of tutorials on maintaining a conventional Christian marriage, there are recipes for oatmeal cookies and potpourri, makeup tutorials with names like ‘doll yourself up for your husband!’ and advice on something called ‘Christian veiling’. On TikTok she outlines the importance of financial dependence on her husband Conner, larping domesticity until he returns from work each evening. 

Despite - or maybe because of - the emphasis on financial dependence on a male partner, tradwives take a calculated approach to their romantic lives. Relationships are discussed in purely economic terms. Lurk for long enough on the RedPillWomen forum (a Subreddit for women who want to embrace traditional gender roles in their marriages) and you will find metrics like n-count (the number of sexual partners a woman has had), SMV (sexual market value) and RMV (relationship market value). The final metric of significance is a woman’s status re: “The Wall” i.e. how near or far she is judged to be from her peak SMV.  

On the one hand, the tradwife rejects girl bossing and financial independence, and yet, she also knows her own value only in terms of the market. The money is everywhere if you know where to look for it. Each act is an ongoing calculation on her worth, but in order for the calculation to be successful, it must be hidden, wrapped in a Shein housedress and linen apron.

And this is what the internet does so well. Instead of cold hard transactions, we have virtual ice-creams, gifts and Amazon Wishlists. The girl is a living currency and online culture has allowed her to monetise her worth in new, covert ways. 

Women have always traded on invisible work for invisible money. Before TikTok - before Facebook even - some of the first people monetising online content weren’t ad men, they were female. Moms on the early internet sharing their day-to-day lives. Teenage girls in their bedrooms talking about anxiety, Jennifer Ringley life-casting her every mundane act, from masturbating to drinking coffee. The girl. #Thatgirl. The OG influencer. Making this work look natural is her whole MO. The girl is a living currency. A whole empire, built on feigned gratis.

Words: Rachel O’Dwyer