If you haven’t already encountered Sanders — if five friends haven’t texted you “OMG THIS IS ME!!!” — stop right here, listen to her say the word “care,” in an accent that’s been described as “zero f’s,” and then resume reading.
It would be an understatement to say that Sanders’ audience has been waiting for her. In the two months since that cri de coeur, she’s gained 2.5 million new followers; landed a talent manager; started paid collaborations with Mattress Firm and Dove; and has either begun a movement, or given name to one that’s been silently, angrily, building since, well, probably since forever.
“I love her so much,” said Lauren Beckham Falcone, the WROR radio host. “I needed permission to let stuff go, and this woman, whose name I don’t know, who’s wearing 17 pairs of reading glasses and has her hair in a net, is giving it to me. I don’t care if I’m wearing the same outfit every day. Finally, someone understands me.”
On social media, the millions of likes and comments on her posts are a window into an exhausted and resentful stew of emotions.
“We do not care if our coworkers think we are passive-aggressive,” read a comment on Instagram. “The only other option I can offer at this time is aggressive-aggressive.”
“We do not care that we just got home from the grocery store and order pizza,” read another. “We do not feel like cooking. We are tired from the grocery shopping.”
“We do not care if we’re out of band aids.” a Facebook fan wrote. “Use a maxi pad. We no longer need them.”
Sanders, who is a mother and a wife, and who often appears on camera rocking a neck pillow, a sleep mask around her neck, and a napkin tucked into her shirt, takes aim at a range of antagonists.
“We do not care if we said we wanted to hang out soon, that probably was said when we was happy; we are no longer in a happy mood,” Sanders says in one post. “We do not care if we don’t show up for the family cookout. Most of y’all have undiagnosed trauma that we honestly just don’t want to deal with right now.”
Many women repeat Sanders “we do not care” tagline to themselves in almost a self-soothing way, and the mantra has been compared to Mel Robbins’s “Let Them” theory. But with a sharper edge.
“It’s ‘Let Them’,” said WROR’s Falcone, but behind their back, “you’re flipping them the bird.”
The We Do Not Care Club has arrived at a time when many women feel under particular attack, with the rise of the manosphere, cutbacks to women’s health care, and conservatives encouraging women to have more babies and drop out of the workforce.
Even so, the unapologetic behavior Sanders describes sounds so radical that one club member called it “aspirational.”
As extreme as the not-caring sounds, the behavior, at its core, is simply about “setting boundaries, and having compassion for yourself,” said psychiatrist Pooja Lakshmin, the author of “Real Self Care.”
The videos are resonating with women in middle age and beyond, she said, because they have “lived the full cost” of putting their own needs last. “They’ve seen that wearing the heels, or whatever they are doing, because they think it will make people like them, or they’ll get the promotion, doesn’t necessarily work. It just makes life harder for them.”
Margie Lachman, a psychology professor at Brandeis University, says Sanders’s We Do Not Care Club has gone viral not only because she’s found a catchy way to describe how millions of women feel, but because it makes women feel like they are part of something.
“The fact that it’s a ‘club’ is really meaningful,” she said, “because this is a time when people are looking for support and validation.”
Indeed, Sanders’s talent manager, Taryn Granados of Monday One Day, says that “brands of all shapes and sizes are knocking down her door” and “celebrities are also in touch.”
“She also has a super exciting project in the works,” said Granados, who didn’t provide details, but did share that she and Sanders had such an instant connection that on their first call they ended up professing their love for each other through tears.
So ingrained are societal messages that sometimes, or maybe it’s often, the judgment is coming from inside your own brain.
Consider Kristina Tsipouras Miller, the founder of the Boston Business Women networking group. She recently dropped her son off at soccer camp while she was wearing slides with socks and a stained sweatshirt. Who cares! she thought joyfully.
Until she remembered.
“I said to my husband, ’20-year-old Kristina would not have wanted to be seen with me’,” she recalled.
But now, to channel Sanders, if you do not like that we are comfortable, we do not care.
Beth Teitell can be reached at beth.teitell@globe.com. Follow her @bethteitell.
