Episode Details

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