The candid girlfriend isn’t real

The concept behind the Subway Takes TikTok account is simple: Kareem Rahma, a comedian based in New York, offers viewers a fascinating glimpse into the inner worlds of strangers as he asks random people on the subway for their hottest take. The takes wildly oscillate between inoffensive (“more public bathrooms would be nice”), to the nonsensical (“cigarettes are good for you, actually”), and downright unhinged (“a little bit of racism is OK”).

Occasionally, spicier takes will go viral – notably, one video posted last week has now amassed over 2 million likes and 13 million views. In the video, comedian Stef Dag shares her take on the dating scene. “My take is that all guys think they want to date the cool, hot, artsy, baddie girlfriend,” she says. “But that’s actually not the case at all. What all guys in New York want is to date the ‘candid girlfriend’”.

According to Dag, a candid girlfriend is a type of woman who is often around 5’5” and naturally thin, with mousy brown hair “no longer than shoulder length”. She studied art history, loves pomegranate, and her boyfriend exclusively posts film photographs of her in carefully curated Instagram photo dumps. She’s essentially a pretty but vapid blank canvas that men are drawn to because “they can make a muse out of her”.

It’s easy to see why the video has sparked debate. On the surface, Dag comes across as an exemplar of internalised misogyny or the ‘pick me’ final boss. Her criticisms of this female archetype are a little too pointed, with most of her ire directed at the so-called candid girlfriend as opposed to the men who project their fantasies onto her. But while her delivery is clumsy, many viewers have noticed that her take does hit on a very real phenomenon: what men say they desire and what men actually desire are often very different.

Specifically, while straight men often say they desire intelligent, interesting, successful women (“the baddie girlfriend”), research shows that in reality they pursue women they perceive to be less intelligent than them (“the candid girlfriend”). Notably, in one study published in 2015, researchers found that men were more likely to declare their attraction to women who had outperformed them in an intelligence test. But when men actually met women who had outperformed them, they “distanced themselves more from her, tended to rate her as less attractive, and showed less desire to exchange contact information or plan a date with her.”

This also chimes with a slew of other studies that show men don’t want to date women they perceive to be more intelligent than them. Findings published in 2006 by researchers at Columbia University found that men valued women’s intelligence only until it matched their own, and they actually found women whose ambition exceeded theirs to be off-putting. Another study published in 2013 found that men’s self-esteem falls when their female partners succeed. A third published in 2019 found that as men become “increasingly uncomfortable” the more their female partners outearn them.

@subwaytakes Episode 104: All guys think that they wanna date the cool, hot, artsy, baddie girl with like baby bangs and a bad father but that’s actually not the case at all. What all guys in New York want to date is the “candid girlfriend.” You can trademark that. feat @Stef Dag Comedy 🎤 @KAREEM RAHMA 🎥 @Anthony DiMieri @Willem Holzer #nyc #newyorkcity #podcast #subway #hottakes #interview #conversations #subwaytakes #dating ♬ original sound - Subway Takes

“Gender equality is something most people aspire to, however heterosexual relationships are often predicated on traditional roles, with women still taking on most emotional and domestic labour,” explains Dr Jenny van Hooff, a sociologist at Manchester Metropolitan University. “Normative masculinity is also based on men being more professionally successful than their partners.”

Essentially, the reason why straight men and women so often develop this unfulfilling dynamic in their relationships is depressingly simple: gender roles are so ingrained that many men still feel pressure to be ‘providers’ or ‘breadwinners’, and as a result feel threatened by intelligent and successful women. “Heteronormative frameworks continue to inform relationships, despite ideals about equality,” Dr van Hooff adds. While this was an issue for our mothers’ generation too, it’s a problem which is only growing more and more urgent as growing numbers of women enter the workforce and higher education. For example, in the UK, the percentage of female students in higher education rose from 45 per cent in 1985, to 51 per cent in 1995, to 57 per cent today.

But what men (and Stef Dag) should realise is that the “candid girlfriend” is just a fantasy, just like the Cool Girl or the Manic Pixie Dream Girl before her. The candid girlfriend’s love of pomegranates isn’t really the “biggest part of her personality”, nor does she have “nothing going on in her brain”. That’s just how men perceive her or want her to be.

the gag is that by explaining to a man how you’re better than another type of woman and labeling her a “pick me” you are in fact engaging in your own beautiful and unique pick me behavior. like a pick-me snowflake pic.twitter.com/1g1hN2750I

— ellie schnitt (@holy_schnitt) April 2, 2024

Granted, women can participate in the fantasy too: as Gillian Flynn wrote in Gone Girl, maybe “men actually think this girl exists [...] because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl.” After all, how many of us honestly say we’ve never dialled down our passion or feigned a little ignorance or just kept quiet, all to spare a fragile man’s ego? (According to dating app Pure, just 1 in 2 of us). “I think what’s really interesting is that women are also slightly complicit in this, as most straight women want a partner who earns more than them,” says Dr van Hooff. “So basically, although this male breadwinner model is no longer viable, it still informs dating practices.” 

But who can blame us, given that we’re constantly encouraged to pander to the male voyeur in our minds – to ‘watch ourselves being looked at’, as John Berger put it? “Women are discursively sited in the patriarchy to be what men want – it is difficult to break away from this, and to resist,” adds Dr Stacy Gillis, Senior Lecturer in 20th-Century Literature and Culture at the University of Newcastle. “See the whole #TradWife space on social media, for example – who benefits from this?” She explains that as “men benefit from how power operates in the patriarchy”, they have a vested interest in maintaining control and power.

What Dag should have said is that we all have it in us to be “candid girlfriends”. We’ve probably all been candid girls before – whether that’s because a man has projected his fantasy onto you or because you’ve consciously bitten your tongue on a date in a bid to live up to these fantasies. As Margaret Atwood put it in The Robber Bride: “Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies?”