The WAGs of the Internet
Words: Becca Young
Make it stand out
Pookie stares vacantly, eyes slicked wide with thick mascara. She is wearing tight leather pants, or a tight lace corset, or both; she is carrying her Kelly Hermès bag, and she has on a pair of stilettos. Pookie, née Campbell, opens each video explaining the event — date night, party, dinner with friends — and husband Jett follows up as a sort of aggressively heterosexual hype man: “Good Lord, Pookie, you’re looking fire.” He asks her to tell him more about the outfit; she details what she’s wearing and where it’s from (House of CB, JLo’s heel line, Revolve). The video ends with a shared kiss.
Pookie, or Campbell Puckett, is an aspiring influencer who’s earned equal shares of scorn and celebrity for her collaborative fit checks with her husband Jett. The two are the prototypical white, wealthy Southern pair: complete with Dyson-blowout hair, southern twangs, designer clothes, and an Internet history scandal involving a Confederate flag. At first glance, Puckett’s posts echo countless other influencers that produce the same mirror-like content. But her content is unique in its ability to provoke both rage and desire. Comments land anywhere from “Is this satire? I can’t tell” to “Love how much he loves you! Get me a Jett” to “These people look like the beginning of the purge.” The oscillation between hate and envy feels, in many ways, like a crisis of heterosexuality being played out in real time, with TikTok as the front row seats.
This era of Internet wives-and-girlfriends, our love for and resistance to them, speaks to the way that women are still trapped by their relationships; this kind of powerful woman still needs to be beautiful, and still feels like she’s winning if a man loves her. As Jett stands next to Puckett, uttering words a straight man almost never will — “tell me about your fit, Pookie” — a pattern begins to reveal itself. Puckett’s outfits are fun if largely unremarkable, but the brilliance of her fit checks is that she’s made physical the gaze that’s always implied in these videos, the gaze that makes women long for an influencer’s hair, her clothes, her body: the gaze of the husband, or boyfriend, or man on the street that will adore you on sight.
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“This era of Internet wives-and-girlfriends, our love for and resistance to them, speaks to the way that women are still trapped by their relationships.”
We’re supposed to be liberated from a dependence on men; we’re supposed to be choosing to love, rather than being coerced by need. But lately, it feels like we can’t escape the Wives and Girlfriends of the Internet. There’s Taylor Swift, kissing her Super Bowl-winning boyfriend as confetti falls around them; there’s Pookie swanning vacantly while khaki-clad Jett praises her “fire” fits. The latest online “It Girl” Nara Smith has managed to transform the Mormon tradwife lifestyle into a fashion-crowd-friendly fantasy, and even the debate around the mob wife aesthetic — is it playful? Is it reductive? — speaks to an obsession with the women whose lives are inexorably shaped by their attachment to a powerful man.
These women aren’t always financially dependent on their partners — certainly not in Swift’s case, whose mega-fame has put her partner in the limelight rather than the reverse. And just as much as it’s implied that Jett is the financier behind Pookie’s designer clothes and lash extensions, Pookie’s the one with 270k followers on Instagram. These women have built power, prestige, and wealth through their labour; but intrinsic to their labour is their performance of doting girlfriend.
Nara Smith, model and influencer, has managed to build a platform by virtue of being a beautiful, fashionable cool girl who spends her day cooking elaborate homemade meals for her husband, Mormon model Lucky Blue, and their beautiful children. Unlike other tradwife influencers, whose aspirational world tends toward the white-midwest-fundamentalist ethos, Smith has eked her way into It Girl status via her chic, multinational vibe. Smith is a model, Smith speaks German, Smith lives in an all-white contemporary LA build. And unlike other tradwife influencers, whose comment sections are full of feminist critiques of their lifestyle, Smith’s comments are almost entirely positive: “entering my Nara Smith era ASAP.” Yet underneath the aesthetic mask, Smith’s content is almost a precise echo of other tradwives: rollicking children, homemade cereal, a blooming pregnant belly, and a doting husband that makes her lifestyle possible.
Why do we celebrate Smith and decry Pookie? Why do we look at these women at all? It doesn’t strike me as a coincidence that this obsession with wives-and-girlfriends comes on the coattails of the summer’s Barbie explosion when the central tension of the Barbie movie was her relationship with Ken. This particular brand of successful womanhood is one that depends on a boyfriend – on having one, existing in relation to one or eschewing one on her own terms. Barbie always has her Ken, even if Barbie is the main character and Ken is her doting sidekick.
Taylor Swift’s songs wouldn’t have the same impact without the hypothetical men they’re about; Pookie’s fit checks would be unremarkable without Jett’s adlibs. Nara Smith’s brood, around whom she’s built both a life and a platform, wouldn’t exist without Lucky Blue. While Ken, Kelce, Jett and Lucky may be the “golden retriever boyfriends” and the “wife guys” who love their partners; these women’s power becomes reliant on her ability to make a man obsessed with her. Ken might think Barbie is “everything,” but everything is still a gorgeous, leggy blonde.