admin “Ladies, if your man wears his wife pleaser but doesn’t tuck it into the vintage 501s, then he’s for the streets—he’s a slut,” creator @matt0haverty declared on TikTok earlier this summer.
Just a few years ago, this sentence would have confused the average reader; in the Victorian era, it would’ve sent them into a coma. Let’s start with the term “wife pleaser.” On TikTok, where users routinely replace words that might trigger viewers (or get flagged as inappropriate) with twee coinages like “unalive” (for “kill”), Gen Z women and men have landed on “wife pleaser” or “wife respecter” as an alternative to “wife beater,” the once-ubiquitous term for the ribbed white tank tops that have recently come back into fashion.
There’s no way to spin the sinister origins of “wife beater.” In 1947, a man wearing one of these undershirts—originally called the “A-shirt” when it was introduced alongside “Jockey briefs” by Cooper’s in the 1930s—was arrested for murdering his wife. His mugshot, which was captioned “The Wife Beater,” is where the term is thought to have originated.
The reputation of the white tank top was not, as this history argues, helped by its portrayals in pop culture, including as a garment of choice for the abusive Stanley Kowalski (played by Marlon Brando) in 1951’s A Streetcar Named Desire and, decades later, Tony Soprano. The Simpsons was, as it has so often been, prescient when it had Ned Flanders refer to his tank as a “wife blesser” in 2011, but “wife beater” stubbornly hung on as late as 2018, when The New York Times called out its continued usage. If you wanted to avoid using the phrase, then “white tank top” was your only alternative—until the kids came up with “wife pleaser.”
It’s hard to pinpoint who exactly coined the phrase, but it began appearing on TikTok, along with with “wife respecter,” in early 2022; before that, versions popped up on Twitter and the menswear podcast Throwing Fits. It is not, obviously, an attempt to erase “wife beater.” Instead, Gen Z has trapped the term in amber, wrapping it in a critique that keeps the original in view, for the younger generations to judge.
It’s possible, of course, that rather than replace “wife beater,” “wife pleaser” will quietly fade away like so many other TikTok trends. The fits that incorporate the tank, however, are timeless, whether it’s tucked into vintage jeans or layered under open button-up shirts. And on TikTok, you can find as many women rocking the looks as men.
