By Suchita Thepkanjana
“Worst things about being with a millionaire in Dubai” is one of the video series featured on the instagram account @soudiofarabia. In case you were wondering, the worst things about being married to an Emirati millionaire include having too much good food to eat, always being driven in a Porsche (or is it a Ferrari? I wouldn’t know), and being given so many gifts you run out of storage (oh, the sheer horror).
When I ran into this video on my Reels feed, I assumed it was the work of a satirical account. I personally thought the sheer ludicrosity and shamelessness displayed here could only be part of some elaborate social critique of capitalism, consumerism, and traditional gender roles.
But a deeper look at her Instagram page revealed that I actually hadn’t come across clever social criticism, but rather, the culmination of the millionaire trophy wife subculture itself, a subculture in which the wives of wealthy men proudly and emphatically preach marrying rich as the ultimate goal for all of womankind.
Through miasmas of images of shopping sprees at Louis Vuitton, Michelin-starred restaurants, gold bracelets, and husbands thumbing through wads of cash, these self-proclaimed “status symbols” promote to their followers an alluring and glamorous life. Yet they fail to acknowledge that the life of a trophy wife, no matter how enviably lavish, revolves around her husband. In this subculture, we witness not only the romanticization but the active promotion of the return to the archaic and, most of all, grossly unequal power dynamic between men and women.
Instagram and Tiktok accounts with followings ranging from 23K to over 300K have been promoting the same type of content: designer handbags, sports cars, and most importantly, immensely wealthy husbands. For example, the Instagram account @datetherich compiles viral videos teaching young women how to meet and charm rich men, such as dressing conservatively, acting like a “damsel in distress”, and being “lost” in the financial district of the city. Other videos propagate the idea that “a woman is a status symbol requiring genuine investment” from a rich man, that “rich men do not care about [your] job, money, or degrees”, and that instead, they just want “a beautiful trophy wife”.
Linda Andrade, who has 1.1 million Tiktok followers, has appeared on major publications such as The Daily Mail and The Post, proudly promoting her status as a “Dubai Housewife”. She, like many other trophy wives, married young (at the age of 19) to a much older, grossly rich man, and are now full-time wives and spenders of money, ironically, without their own source of income. Andrade notoriously spends about $2 million per week, over $50,000 of which she calls “fun money”, and proclaims that she “[doesn’t] have any shame in flaunting a gold-digger aesthetic”.
John Stuart Mill famously claimed, in his essay On the Subjection of Women, that even after liberation, women would still actively choose to regress into the domestic spheres and assume their traditional roles as wives and status symbols. At first, this sounds ridiculous. But isn’t that what’s actually happening in this social media trend? Is the huge popularity and glorification of being an unemployed, financially-dependent trophy wife an indication that women are regressing? Are we going right back to where we started?
This subculture essentially conveys to young women that the pinnacle of womanhood is, as mentioned in one of the posts, not getting a degree or a career, but being the pretty trophy wife of a millionaire husband. It is easy, they claim, to live lavishly if you forego university education, make yourself appealing to rich men, marry young, and let your wealthy husband buy you all the Dior and Chanel bags you want. This corner of the internet convinces women that education, employment, and financial independence are outdated, and that being a status symbol is somehow empowerment, not objectification.
Is milking your millionaire husband for designer goods really the new form of “women empowerment”?
Simply put, no. Being a rich trophy wife is not the “women empowerment” it is portrayed to be. In reality, it is putting yourself at risk for financial abuse. Gift-giving and depending on each other are legitimate elements of a healthy romantic relationship, but to center your life around another person while abandoning any possibility to cultivate yourself becomes hazardous. When your entire livelihood, identity, and sense of self are completely dependent on someone else’s finances, you are no different from a child whose life is sustained only by their parents’ money – as many international students at LSE will know. To encourage women to go straight to a husband’s home (or, in this case, a fin-tech millionaire’s luxurious Emirati mansion in Dubai) is to discourage them from ever becoming self-sufficient, fully-mature adults in control of their own lives. The young, unemployed wife of a billionaire (often an older man with more life experience) is at the financial and social mercy of her husband. The diamonds, manicures, and private jets fully-funded by a rich man look desirable, but as soon as that rich man’s sympathy and desire disappears, so probably does the extravagant life and the identity that has been built on it.
To forego an education, a career, and an income of your own is to forego creating a safety net for your life – to have someone else pay for your entire life is to place it in their hands. Regrettably and ironically, the trophy-wife status that so many women are aspiring to today is the same one women were fighting so hard to escape just a couple decades ago.
