A month ago, I decided to wrap up work early and have a little treat. I took myself out to a hotel bar and sat alone reading in the sun, while people socialised in twos and threes around me. Someone bought me a drink, and a little while later, a woman leaned over to me on her way out and said: “Sprinkle sprinkle.”
She was quoting the catchphrase of the YouTuber SheraSeven, the viral sensation and self-styled “financial adviser” whose advice I had inadvertently followed. The way to get wealthy men to buy you drinks, Shera says, is to go to high-end bars alone before the after-work rush.
Over the past few months, a number of straight-talking, self-help gurus for women (often described half-jokingly in the comment section as “the female Andrew Tate”) have been blowing up on TikTok. SheraSeven (real name Leticia Padua) has been attracting a large audience of young women. Despite not even having a TikTok account herself, clips that have cross-pollinated from her YouTube have racked up almost 20bn views and counting. The phrase “sprinkle sprinkle”, which she uses to bookend her most sage advice, has now taken on a life of its own.
Shera advises women over the age of 25 to seek out and date older, affluent men and to actively play games to get them. This includes hiding your insecurities from potential partners and using reverse psychology to manipulate men, so you can imitate intimacy without the risk that comes with true vulnerability. For example, if you’re feeling jealous because a man you’re dating doesn’t pick up his phone, you should pretend you were calling for help with a flat tyre – but then had to get another man to step in. Once they’ve locked a man down, she argues, women should push for them to pay for all of their household bills and expenses. Men without money are “dusties” and not to be entertained.
But veering away from the stereotype of the 1950s housewife, and its modern iteration, the tradwife, SheraSeven doesn’t suggest women must take on domestic responsibilities such as cooking, cleaning and child-rearing in exchange for financial support. A man of means can hire people to help with that. You are there to look beautiful and be worshipped. This is presumably what makes her gospel so attractive – so much so that other women have started documenting their own sprinkle sprinkle journeys, updating their audience as they follow Shera’s advice.
As extreme as it sounds, I can understand the popularity of Shera’s mantras among young women. I was recently signed off work by a GP for the ghastly triumvirate of low mood, burnout and exhaustion. The thought of a wealthy man coming over the horizon to save me from overwork and a dirty flat, however regressive that thought is, was more tempting than the long-term solutions I really needed: rest, therapy and, failing that, antidepressants.
Meanwhile, dating within patriarchy can open women and femmes who date men up to disappointment, even harm. The comment sections under these TikTok videos are full of women who are fed up with modern heterosexual dating to the point that they don’t believe men have anything to offer them emotionally. SheraSeven’s advice teaches women to game patriarchy and turn their pain into power.
Shera has been making YouTube videos for at least nine years. Her content very much mirrors the message of the pop-feminist influencer the Slumflower (real name Chidera Eggerue), who initially implored millennial women to fight patriarchy by indulging in “dump him feminism” via viral tweets and cute Instagram graphics that escalated into telling women to only date affluent men – and to take everything from them that they can.
In his book on influencer culture, Get Rich or Lie Trying, the journalist Symeon Brown describes the audience reception of the Slumflower at one of her pre-pandemic live shows as “like the second coming of Christ”. She even said she was “in the mood to have a church-style environment and share some testimonies”. One of the largest SheraSeven fan accounts, before it recently went offline, was Sheralations (in other words, Shera’s gospel), with nearly 400,000 followers. Each video was captioned in the style of Bible chapters and verses such as Sheralations 13:12.
The growing popularity of these influencers is surely linked to economic stagnation, sky-high bills and precarious work. In May, the Office for National Statistics revealed that more adults in England and Wales were living with their parents. Most people in their early 20s, and more than one in 10 of those in their early 30s, are yet to move out. The real value of take-home pay has been falling since May 2022, with the youngest employees experiencing the largest falls in real wages.
SheraSeven describes herself as giving overridingly financial, rather than romantic, advice: in response to a comment from a woman who said she doesn’t want to date an older man even if he’s rich, SheraSeven retorts that she “couldn’t be standing up for eight hours all day at work punching the clock … pick a struggle”. In one clip, she tells the audience she will never start a YouTube channel to give people advice on “real relationships” that aren’t based on money, because all relationships are ultimately based on power.
It’s a bleak picture. So many of the ways women are being encouraged to live online, whether it’s #softlife (which denounces hustle culture), #Tradwives or #SprinkleSprinkle, call for a re-evaluation of our relationship to work, rest and leisure. We need a collective vision for improving our lives. Without it, women will continue looking for answers elsewhere.
Kimberly McIntosh is the author of black girl, no magic: essays and reflections on living whilst black
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