eva

my latest tiktok guilty pleasure

One of my guilty pleasures is watching slightly unhinged girls overshare their lives on TikTok, talking to the camera as though they were FaceTiming their best friend.

My favorite recently has been this Hot NYC Girl named Eva. By Hot NYC Girl I mean that she is a semi-professional at the job of being a hot girl at exclusive nightclubs and parties with billionaires and celebrities. She doesn’t get paid in cash for it, but she’s always getting free things: free hotel room in Miami during Art Basel; free trip to Brazil next week; numerous free upscale dinners and yacht parties around the South of France.

I’m always at a baseline intrigued by these girls, because I brush shoulders with them every time I manage to drag my ass to Solidcore¹ or (more often) indulge in a latte at Cafe Lyria in SoHo: wearing designer silk dresses in summer, Moncler puffers in winter, sunglasses, nails manicured, somehow both thinner and healthier-looking than me, and radiating some aura of confidence that I don’t know how to attain. Most days I’m fairly content with how I look, but whenever I catch sight of one of these girls, I recognize them instantly as a being higher in feminine status than me. Even if I got a dozen compliments on my outfit from my plebeian friends earlier in the day, next to one of these girls I feel like an instant poser, my Reformation top thinly concealing my humble origins as a public school nerd. I’m sure if I ran into Eva at Solidcore and struck up a conversation, I’d be paralyzed with social anxiety. But on TikTok, I can listen to her regale me with her tales, without any of the pressure of responding to her. And let me tell you, this girl does not hold back.

In one TikTok, she’s sitting in an Uber telling us about a night out. After some glamorous party, she goes home with a guy, but decides she doesn’t want to sleep with him. He calls her a stupid b*tch, she runs out of his apartment into the street; too late she realizes she has neither shoes nor her keys. Barefoot she makes her way to a hotel; they won’t check her in; none of her friends are picking up her calls; it is 4am. She decides to wait it out at a McDonalds, but it’s cash only and she has no cash. A homeless person comes over and insists on buying her some fries—“he probably thought I was homeless too”. Then he starts chasing her down the sidewalk trying to inject her with a needle; she barely escapes into a taxi. In another TikTok, she’s in the countryside in some random country, her phone is dead, and her Uber driver asks her on a date. Everyone in the comments is like, bro don’t do it, you’ll get kidnapped, but she goes on the date and survives unscathed; in fact, she has a lovely afternoon. 

Maybe I’m being overly judgmental, but this is just a level of chaotic that I just personally, constitutionally, could never see myself caught in. If you don’t wanna sleep with a guy, why would you go home with him? How do you literally forget your shoes? Why would you go to a NYC McDonald’s alone at 4am? I think what blows my mind is how, at each step of the way, she makes a reckless decision and just blindly trusts that she’s going to be ok. It’s a very optimistic, trusting, abundant mindset. (Or just nihilistically adrenaline-chasing, I guess). Whereas I very much clutch my cards close to my chest, constantly, convinced that catastrophe is lurking around every corner, and that my life is way too precious to risk derailing. So I look upon people like Eva with a combination of awe, envy, horror, and a weird desire to live vicariously through them.

In another TikTok, she talks about how one night she stepped out of the shower to find her (now ex) boyfriend going through her phone. Immediately she makes a grab for the phone, because “for the life of her she could not be faithful to this man” and there were some SPICY texts on there. (Which… I guess makes sense because she gets SO many of the things she values from her sex appeal, so I can see how it’d be hard to stay loyal to any one man.) Anyway, they end up chasing each other all around the apartment, and at some point he squishes her out the door and locks it. So now she’s butt naked in the hallway of this Upper East Side luxury apartment building, pounding on the door, screaming at him to let her back in. The neighbor, a rich old lady, comes over and threatens to call the police. So finally the guy lets her back in. He’s so angry about it all that he takes all the belongings she’s left at his place over the last eight months—clothes, jewelry, makeup—and he throws it out the window in fistfuls. It’s raining outside, and I can just picture these beautiful silk gowns and gold bracelets raining down from the tenth floor window, past the doorman at his post, landing in a muddy mangled heap on the sidewalk, rolling toward the gutter. She gets in an Uber and leaves it all behind. A week together they’re back together. To make him prove his love she makes him eat pieces of her peeling sunburned skin off her chest, and he obediently goes “gobble gobble.”

Ok so clearly this is next-level unhinged, but I do think to some extent, she illuminates the devil that lurks within us all. Have I ever been so desperate for validation and control that I’ve made my partner eat the dead skin off my body? Absolutely not. But sure, I’ve definitely felt that sort of impulse — though it usually comes out more in the form of sending my boyfriend off to get me water or tea.

It’s also interesting that all the girls in the comments are like, oh my god, you are so toxic and I love it; you’re a queen; I want to be you. Her comments sections are actually chock full of teen girls who want to be her when they grow up. On some level, I’m like, guys, please stop; this girl is clearly mentally unwell and I for one do not aspire to that. On another level, though, I get it! There’s something glamorous and powerful to being so appealingly feminine that you can be literally feral running around the streets barefoot at 4am and still be invited to party with Jeff Bezos the next day; cheat on a man horribly and have him eating the skin off your body the next week. It almost reminds me of how some religious people talk about Jesus: as Jesus forgives, so rich men seem to forgive you all sins, if you are hot enough. Also, I mean, her outfits are simply iconic.

And then of course there are the TikToks that incite only a semi-morbid fascination in me, and remind me that none of this comes for free. Like the one where she describe how she plans to get bikini-ready for a trip in seven days: days one and two, eat one Sweetgreen harvest bowl a day. Days three through seven, eat nothing but apples. Day seven, board the flight and “eat NOTHING. I don’t care if you’re flying first class and they’re serving an amazing meal; eat none of it.” Also, every single day she will be going to either Barry’s Bootcamp or Solidcore. (I think I would literally crumple and die on the Barry’s treadmill if I attempted this.) She also talks about how she had a terribly botched nose job last year and now looks a lot worse than she did before; her grandma almost fainted when she saw her, and it’s all been incredibly humbling. And about her frustrations with her Asian mother, who nags her to stop dressing “like an anime character” and attract a proper “husband material” man. (Sometimes I fantasize about having parents who would subsidize Soho shopping sprees for me, but certainly not if it comes at this price.)

At the end of the day… I don’t want to be her, and I don’t think I want to be friends with her either. Honestly, I don’t even think she’s unattainably gorgeous — like if I set aside a couple tens of thousands for nicer clothes and lip fillers and such, and obviously went to Solidcore a lot more, I don’t think I’d be completely out of her league. I think what does make her unattainably attractive is her utter confidence—the kind of confidence that lets her overshare these stories to millions of strangers, with no TikTok filters, no editing, no concern even for how her hair looks on camera (and I mean this in the best way possible). The kind of confidence that lets her say yes to all these unhinged adventures. She’s really taken her God-given femininity and maxed it out and milked it for all it’s worth. Good for her.

1. Solidcore is a popular and extremely tough Pilates class in NYC. Every time I’ve gone, I’ve had sore abs for almost a week afterwards.