During and following the pandemic, reading has been on the rise. This has been evident among online communities, like and including TikTok’s “BookTok.” There, readers share book reviews, talk about their reading habits and recommend books to other TikTok users.
TikTok, which started as a platform to share dance and lip-sync videos, has now become a hotbed for political and social movements, subcultures and ideologies — one of which is the “tradwife” movement. Tradwife videos often show conventionally attractive white women in picture-perfect homes (or aesthetically “messy” farmhouses) wearing ironed sundresses covered with an apron, tending to their brood of children, making food from scratch and speaking in a feminine lilt.
From animal print to baby tees and low-rise jeans, fashion styles from the early 2000s are trending amongst Gen Z. Many people know this as “Y2K” style, giving new meaning to the shorthand term for “the year 2000” which was used to describe a number of potential programming errors that were anticipated when computer systems switched from the year 1999 to 2000.
As we scroll through TikTok, our screen is littered with the words “mob wife,” “coquette,” “office siren,” “clean girl,” “quiet luxury,” “rockstar girlfriend” — just to name a few. I think I can ask the question that we are all wondering: What do any of these words even mean? What do they look like? Why can I not escape them?