Recently, during a late-night doom scroll of the Daily Mail, I came across an article about a 22-year-old British OnlyFans model who calls herself “Devil Baby.” The model, whose real name is Orla Sloan, was recently sentenced to twelve weeks in prison for stalking Mason Mount, an English soccer player with whom she had a one-night stand after a party. She pled guilty to harassing not just Mount, whom she repeatedly called from 21 different phone numbers threatening to “destroy” him, but also two fellow Premier League stars, one of whom she claimed had gotten her pregnant and forced her to have an abortion, though they’d never been intimate.

The circumstances preceding the stalking are standard for dating and hookups in the digital age. Sloan had an Instagram with 80,000 followers and a lot of bikini shots in Mykonos and Bali. She attracted the attention of one of the footballers, who in turn invited her via Instagram DM to the house party where she hooked up with Mount. Their relationship did not progress after the party, save for some sporadic messaging until Mount cut things off six months later. 

That last bit is what the Devil Baby was ill-equipped to handle. In a statement during her trial, Sloan’s lawyer said she was “dazzled” upon meeting Mount, but “he never intended it to be a lasting relationship… She felt somewhat discarded and she wanted to know why. She thought there was something there in circumstances where everyone else knew there was nothing. She had been sucked into a world of instant gratification achieved only by being seen with other people more successful than herself.”

When I read that statement, I could not help but sympathize. To be clear, this woman’s behavior is clearly deranged. But her behavior reads to me like the pure unadulterated id of a young woman who got involved with a man she was not prepared to handle, and then hated how she felt the next morning. In those feelings, she is far from alone. The circumstances of today’s dating scene — the ever-more-open world, the mirage of the Internet, the unquestioned celebration of casual sex as empowerment — make for a dangerous combination of idealism and masochism, in which a lot of women sign themselves up for situations where they’ll inevitably get hurt. Women are encouraged to find power in embracing and wielding our sexuality, but often we are only wielding it to gain access to men and their power, making ourselves intensely vulnerable by merging our self-worth with sex and opportunity and placing it in the hands of someone much more powerful and accomplished than we are — and who is impulsive enough to be attracted to a photo of a stranger he saw on Instagram.  

It has never been easier for a young woman to attract the attention of a famous man. The digital dating age has removed nearly all barriers to entry except one: Being hot online. The best way in is to join Raya, the so-called “celebrity” dating app that is 2 percent esteemed actors and musicians, 8 percent athletes, and 90 percent “entrepreneurs” and “creative directors” paying rent on Venice bungalows with their dad’s credit card. Raya has an application process, requiring you to exhibit a vague level of clout by linking your social media and soliciting referrals from your phone contacts. If you can’t make it past Raya’s admissions committee, but you’re still hot and looking to mingle, an alternative method is simply to have a sexy Instagram, full of alluring shots that algorithmically land on mass-displayed explore pages or catch the eye of lonely men perusing their inboxes at 2 AM. 

Together, these two routes are facilitating countless normie-bigshot encounters in cities across the globe. I would know; last year I was seeing an NHL player I matched with on Raya. I met him during a debauched night out in Los Angeles while his team was there partying after beating the Kings. On paper there was no reason for us to get along — I am a magazine editor with an Ivy League degree in creative writing who grew up in a small town in upstate New York; he is a five-times-concussed professional athlete who dropped out of high school and asked me what multiple words meant ten minutes into our first conversation. 

But, unlike the rest of my Manhattanite college friends, I enjoy sports and have no interest in romancing an aspiring poet from the Lower East Side. I’ve dated athletes before, and I have a real soft spot for them — they’re composed, they’re disciplined, and they spend so much time joking around with their teammates that they have great banter and usually don’t take themselves too seriously, which is more than most of the men in New York can say. Also, they have great thighs. 

Athletes like me, too — in the sort of entertainingly alien way an English tourist enjoys a holiday in Thailand after spending his whole life in Bristol. These men encounter a lot of girls who would chop off their left ears to become a WAG (the acronym for Wives and Girlfriends, first coined by British tabloids to describe the well-coiffed significant others of high-profile footballers). This is not my style, and they find that refreshing. So, over a vat of Mai Tais at Tao West Hollywood, the hockey player and I hit it off. I proceeded to spend weeks over the next year in his team’s second-tier city, attending his games, editing on the couch as he got at-home orthopedic massages, and pretending to enjoy the city’s Korean fusion restaurants and swamp-like humidity.

Don’t let the Instagram carousels fool you: The life of a WAG is not that interesting. When you’re not sitting around waiting for him to get back from a road trip in Winnipeg, you’re supporting him in a Groundhog Day-esque series of 7 PM home games, occasionally punctuated by appearances on road trips to “fun cities” like LA or Chicago, or special event games where all the WAGs wear custom jackets with their man’s name and number and take videos in the “family room” doing cheers with plastic cups of merlot. Even when he’s home, quality time is hard to come by. Professional baseball players (who I have also dated) play nearly every day, and they go to the field at 1 PM before 7 PM games and don’t get back until nearly midnight. Hockey players alternate between practice days and game days, in which they go to the rink in the morning, come home to nap, and then head right back at four. On top of that, while athletes have a reputation for slutty malfeasance, the flip side is that they’ve built their professional careers off incredible dedication, often starting when they were in Little League. For every sporty lothario there are ten “family men” who marry their high school sweetheart (generally a nurse, realtor, or “interior designer” who then becomes a stay-at-home mom) and spend their off-days playing golf, driving their kids to soccer games, going to church, and leading otherwise faultlessly generic suburban lives. 

My NHL love interest existed somewhere in the middle of that slutty-to-strait-laced spectrum. He’d previously played in Canada, where he’d generously availed himself of all the options that this mega-spotlight afforded him, but he grew weary of the bottle girls and Insta baddies and looked to settle down with someone more down-to-earth. That was not going to be me — we got along, and we taught each other a lot (he helped my friends select vitamins over FaceTime and coached me in the proper stretches to do a split; I explained vocabulary words and sent him links to documentaries) but our worlds were simply too far apart to build anything serious, as fun as it was to cosplay for a while. We parted ways, and now he’s dating a nurse from Minnesota whose sister is married to his teammate, who was her childhood next-door neighbor. 

As the case of Devil Baby testifies, it is in the parting of ways where the real difficulties arise. Sure, the practical realities of WAGhood are monotonous, but these men are also rich, famous, and desirable. They’ll fly you into town (although these “flyouts” are less common than you might think; lots of guys will test girls by making them finance their own flights), you’ll spend a few days at their glassy modern house without touching your credit card, and you’ll go to their games at an arena where their face stares down at you from the walls as thirty thousand people chant their name. Flying home to New York after my inevitable split with the hockey player, I was waiting to board the plane when the middle-aged men in front of me pulled up a highlight video and began gushing amongst themselves about how my now-former lover was a “stud” who the team was “lucky to have.” It’s easy to get caught up in the fantasy, and it’s hard to come back down to earth when that goes away. 

But it's not just the social media-reinforced allure that makes these men desirable. These days, being a WAG is an actual career stepping-stone. You can build a name for yourself in the influencing world by having a famous boyfriend; girls do it all the time. The most amusing part of my recent WAG era was my recurring appearances on the hockey gossip blogs, where teenage girls debated how serious we were (mildly), whether my boobs were real (yup), and whether I was a Republican (not just yet). On top of those actual sports fans, there are also legions of girls who follow the WAGs and religiously watch their content in an aspirational effort to emulate their lifestyles by scoring an athlete boyfriend of their own. 

WAGs are cashing-in big-time on this ready-made market. It seems like every day an NFL player’s wife is starting a TikTok account with videos like “A Day in the Life: Training Camp Edition,” an MLB wife is vlogging her “Travel Day to the Rockies Versus Diamondbacks Series,” or a tennis girlfriend is filming her Miu Miu hauls during the off days at Wimbledon. These women have hundreds of thousands — sometimes millions — of followers. They’re racking up brand deals with Capital One (“We travel a lot, but Capital One lets me sit back and watch my money grow”) and Cascade dish soap (“Come with us to dada’s baseball game while we save water by running our dishwasher”); they’re sent a lot of free swag, and they’re making a lot of money. 

While my friends in Manhattan might not wish to pursue an athlete (preferring to enter the same validation cycle over scrawny restaurateurs or Williamsburg DJs), some of my old upstate classmates certainly do. A few weeks ago, we were at a bar when one of them told me she’d been DM-ing with a minor league baseball player and wanted some advice. We walked through the well-worn basics: the social calendar, the boring routine, the etiquette of not mentioning sports so you don’t seem like a desperate fan, the warning that in order to sustain the relationship your life will need to revolve around his schedule. My friend found none of this in the least bit discouraging. Her eyes lit up. Fame, fortune, or at least the proximity to someone else’s fame and fortune, were only a touchscreen-swipe away. 

A girl who has spent any time on the Internet (which is a near-prerequisite to securing one of these men) knows that all of this — the games, the glitz, the content — is eminently possible. Once you’ve caught their eye, it becomes a possibility close enough to touch. The more realistic outcome, of course, is that things will end in disappointment, even if you score. You might not hear from him the next day, or the next week, or ever again. You won’t have access to his inner world, which takes trust and time that you don’t have, so when things end it will feel doubly painful, because even though you spent a night in his bed, you know as much about him as any other fan.

Instead, you’re left grasping for the remnants of your connection by leaning on your sex appeal, which is the only compelling shot you have. If he still follows you on Instagram, you might have a last-ditch chance of luring him back with a hot mirror selfie or a strategically-deployed DM. I coaxed a story from my ex-flame about a girl from his team’s city; they’d hooked up a few times because, in his words, “she was actually kind of hot and this place is a small town.” Because he had no romantic interest in her, and no interest in her life, he never followed her on Instagram. His unwillingness to publicly affiliate with her in as minor a way as social media drove her insane; she refused to keep hooking up with him unless he followed her back. “I didn’t at first, but I was drunk at like 3 AM once, so I just followed her and she drove over like ten minutes later,” he said. When we started seeing each other, he unfollowed her. She then began writing into the hockey gossip blogs — her one final route of association — with her Instagram handle and “anonymous tips” that they’d “been in touch.” I noticed that she followed a lot of WAGs on Instagram, consuming their content from afar.

I might not have wanted the “professional opportunities,” but I was hardly exempt from the same insecurity that drove my would-be rival. I’ve wasted endless time staring at my phone at 2 AM, scrolling through all the beautiful women a man follows on social media, comparing our waistlines and our lips and hoping he would choose me because it is validating to be chosen. The best advice I could give an aspiring WAG — and any other girl looking to be with a powerful man — comes from a 2005 country song, which my TikTok algorithm delivered to me last year, before it got washed away in a sea of hockey content. The lyrics go as follows: “If you’re gonna be dumb, you gotta be tough.”