Spend enough time watching girly content these days, and you’ll see a commenter or creator cite “the Girl with the List.” This batman of Lady Internet is literally summoned in content across tiktok and instagram. Her bat signal: “Where’s the girl with the list?”

Her purpose? Cure baby fever. Remind you to take your birth control.

Today, we explore the work of the Girl (actually girls) with the List, the unique genre of choice-based horror stories (be they pregnancy, parenting, or entirely-non-family-related activities, such as cosmetic surgery and travel), and whether this genre helps or harms. Enjoy!

Show Notes

There’s a young woman named Abigail Porter (goes by Zoomie) with 1.6M followers on Tiktok who is famous for “curing baby fever” by creating abundant shorts on pregnancy and delivery body horror and frustrating experiences parents have while lactating and raising young kids.

Just this week I’ve heard two mentions of her in the wild “She changed my life” said one. “I literally owe her everything”

Suffice it to say she is, at best, feeding into women’s feelings of justification for not having kids, and at worst, generating fear about having kids where it didn’t exist before.

Abigail is not alone in creating viral content of this genre—there’s also “the girl with the list” with whom Abigail is often confused and that list is called “YUNI’S PROS AND CONS LIST OF HAVING CHILDREN”), so we should probably talk about it!

So… Why avoid pregnancies?

Some highlights:

* A woman whose insides needed stitches after her baby scratched her from the inside on the way out

* A woman whose baby began to choke on her nipple after it literally fell off

* A woman who grew a tumor on her lip the size of her pinky

* Women losing their hair, their teeth, all their eyelashes

* A woman who developed a mutation during pregnancy that made her insensitive to pain meds who had to endure a c-section with no pain meds

* A woman who went deaf after her kid kissed her on the ear, causing what’s called “the kiss of death”

* BTW, this is also known as cochlear ear‑kiss injury / Reiter’s Ear Kiss Syndrome (REKS)

* It happens when someone kisses directly over the ear canal (the opening of the ear), especially using a strong suction/“air kiss.” and it can cause permanent hearing loss

* A woman whose retinas detached because she pushed so hard in labor

* Women whose bodies have become both temporarily and permanently deformed or uglified (swollen hands and feet, swollen legs, varicose veins, popped blood vessels in eyes, toe nails falling off, etc.)

There are basically four themes:

* Relatively unusual medical complications from pregnancy and lactation (like uterine prolapse, various forms of body horror)

* The expenses of labor and delivery

* Poop and pee horror

* Pretty common parenting, pregnancy, and postpartum stuff, e.g.:

* Fussy babies who are only calm when being bounced

* The rectus abdominus being separated

* Swelling

* Using a nosfrida to suck snot out of a baby’s nose

* Having strangers on the internet jump down your throat for really innocuous things, such as mentioning breastfeeding

* Kids making messes around the house (flooding, vandalism, etc.)

The Psychology of it All

Availability Heuristic

Creators like Abigail and Yuni make pregnancy and parenting look heuristic by making their hazards extremely visible and available, but it’s extremely easy to do the exact same thing Abigail does with other life choices, and that includes life choices

Known genres:

* Hiking (e.g., Mr. Ballen videos)

* Cosmetic surgery (e.g., Wonny)

* Buying homes (e.g., videos and tiktoks by home inspectors)

* Eating out at restaurants (e.g. dirty restaurant audits)

You can effectively develop an aversion to—even phobia of—pretty much anything by giving yourself sufficient exposure to its hazards.

This genre is a form of opt-in brainwashing, though it could also be a form of unintentional, algorithmic brainwashing.

Loss Aversion

Humans generally weigh potential losses about 1.5–2.5 times as strongly as equal-sized gains in typical risky choices, though the exact ratio and even the presence of loss aversion depend on context and measurement method (there’s a lot of research on this)

See:

* https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/prospect-theory

* https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/loss-aversion

* https://www.behavioraleconomics.com/resources/mini-encyclopedia-of-be/loss-aversion/

* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167487024000485

* https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/prospect-theory

This means that people will be far more influenced by downsides of parenting than by upsides.

It’s worse than that, though, because creators like Abigail and Yuri can’t even wrap their heads around the rewards of parenting. Abigail’s most commonly cited argument is “kids are cute” whereas Yuri’s list includes:

* “Child?”

* “Tax return benefits”

* “Tiny everything”

* “You can’t get drafted while pregnant”

* “You can bribe them with candy”

* No you can’t

* “If you raise them right people praise you for it”

Overthinking & tokophobia

* Overthinking things is why mental health is plummeting

* Abigail fundamentally gets people to overthink pregnancy and childrearing

* Robert Sepulsky talks about how the system we’ve evolved to deal with stress wasn’t really designed for animals capable of metacognition, who can literally trigger that system by THINKING

Overthinking about pregnancy may be contributing to a rise in phobia about pregnancy (known as tokophobia).

A 2017 systematic review of 33 studies (≈854,000 pregnant women worldwide) estimated a pooled prevalence of tokophobia around 14%, with individual study estimates ranging from about 3.7% to 43%.

* The researches concluded that the prevalence of tokophobia “appears to have increased in recent years (2000 onwards)”, although they cautioned that this finding is complicated by changing definitions and heterogeneous methods.

More moderate but still clinically relevant “fear of childbirth” (not always labeled tokophobia) is common, with estimates in some European samples of about 5% with severe fear and over a third with high fear.

About Abigail

Her content creation journey

* Started in 2021

She’s very much a product of the urban monoculture

* Lives in downtown Los Angeles

Her standards for hardship are quite low:

* She says that getting an IUD was the most painful thing she has experienced.

* She hates cleaning up after cooking

She also does love caring little things:

* She says she would protect her cats, Bub and Willow, with her life

She has merch!

* $60 “divorce your republican husband” XL crewneck sweatshirt with a wolf on it (sold out)

* $50 “dump your republican boyfriend” M/L hunting camo crewneck sweatshirt (sold out)

* $68 “dump your republican boyfriend” XL green crewneck

* $58 “dump your republican boyfriend” XL pink hoodie

* $68 “dump your republican boyfriend” L green/blue crewneck sweatshirt

* $54 “dump your republican / story of my life” XL running-away-deer black crewneck sweatshirt

* $60 “dump your republican boyfriend” L cameo hoodie (sold out)

* $58 “dump your republican boyfriend” M navy zip-up

Wait why are most of these for larger people?

How do we feel about this?

What Abigail is doing is fine. She’s pretty clear in her content to not shame parents; she’s really empathetic toward parents (can’t say the same of many parents online!).

She’s also WAAAAY more ethical and polite than your typical content creator about the clips she uses: She told NBC: ““If I’m going to do a video about bodies in particular and show somebody’s body, I’m going to make sure that I have consent from that mother first — like if she posted a video and she made this...