Would You Hire a Hot Nanny?

A Many Such Takes Deep Dive into this week's top unhinged discourse topic

Today, I’m doing something I don’t normally do: a free Many Such Takes Deep Dive.

I’ve covered some hot discourse topics before, such as Ballerina Farm and the Sun Dress Scandal of Right Wing Twitter. Usually, these discourse deep dives are paid because the regular weekly Twitter discourse segment Many Such Takes, is free. That said, I didn’t post Many Such Takes this past Sunday, so I feel like I owe it to my free subscribers to do something else.

It also feels like a good time to remind anyone who is not yet a subscriber that I post content nearly every day, and I aim for 1-2 free articles a week, and at least 3 paid. That’s a lot, for $5 a month (or $40 annually.) Paid subscribers also get full access to my book, with one chapter released each week. Free subscribers can access Chapter 1. Subscribe any way you want here!

This week, a video hit Twitter which felt like it was more or less designed to shit-stir. It was a video of a drop-dead gorgeous Colombian nanny playing with a Caucasian toddler and teaching him Spanish. For a person who isn’t terminally online, perhaps the video would have been cute (their relationship is very sweet, and it’s nice when kids learn new languages when they have the easiest time doing so!) For other people, however, it stirred up….other emotions.

Overwhelmingly, the response was that a woman would be crazy to hire a nanny this attractive because her husband was “bound to cheat.” Even women who said they weren’t worried about their husbands cheating still felt it was playing with fire to hire a nanny this attractive. My initial feelings were negative too, but I think it had more to do with the fact that I’d be livid if I hired a nanny who proceeded to post my children on TikTok. But that’s a personal preference; supposedly the parents of the child were OK with him being posted.

Before I had kids, I was confident that if I were ever to hire a nanny, she would have to be an old, jolly Mrs. Claus type. I now have two children. I have never hired a full time or live-in nanny, but when it came time to hire part-time babysitters for occasional date nights or a few hours here and there, I no longer felt threatened by the idea of a pretty, young nanny. In fact, all the babysitters we’ve hired have been attractive young women, and it hasn’t made me feel insecure. But at the same time, there’s normal-girl attractive and then there’s 2011 Victoria’s Secret Model attractive.

After watching the video I had to reconcile something within myself: I wouldn’t be comfortable hiring a nanny who was a complete smokeshow, even if I am comfortable with hiring a young, normal-pretty nanny. And yet, at the same time, I don’t actually think my husband is at risk of having an affair with a nanny. I also think it’s presumptuous to assume that any young woman off the street is absolutely dying to get my husband into bed (I have a hard time believing anyone wouldn’t want to sleep with him, but I’m admittedly biased!) I think many women feel the same way.

One of the things I found striking from the comments on the video were how many people thought that nannies and dads frequently had affairs, although none could really back it up beyond *Trump voice* “many people are saying:”

Feels like there’s a little bit of fan fiction going on. My theory is that nanny-father affairs are really uncommon, mostly because nobody involved actually wants them to happen (I would say if I had to guess, the nanny is typically the less interested one, but the lack of interest probably goes both ways.) Yes, a young nanny can be attractive (many of them are!) but even then, most fathers are decent enough people not to pursue something that would obliterate their families, or at the very least cause a great deal of embarrassment. You can’t in good faith say that women constantly initiate frivolous divorces and then also admit that any man who is allowed within a fifty foot radius of an attractive woman will be compelled to bone her (the consent of the attractive woman is, for some reason, assumed.)

Now, these affairs do happen (notoriously in some highly publicized Hollywood scandals) but lots of things happen. I mean, every now and then some man tries to assassinate Trump. I still think it’s (generally) safe for Trump to interact with men.

Infidelity is common; this type of infidelity is not. Infidelity is most likely to happen at parties, via social media, or at work. (Long live WFH!) And this makes sense. What do all those things have in common? They exist outside your home. Having an affair with your nanny (or pool boy) is incredibly risky. This is a person who is regularly at your house, who knows your spouse, and may even know your children. If things go badly, they could blow up your entire life quite easily. Compare that with a married coworker, who might have their own incentive to stay discreet. Nanny affairs may do numbers in the goon caves, but it’s not happening in any meaningful way in real life because it’s just way too risky. People have fanciful, elaborate and scandalous ideas about what rich parents get up to, but most of the time it’s just boring everyday life. You wake up at 6 AM to have breakfast with your kids, work at Citadel from 7 AM to 9 PM, go on the Peloton while listening to one third of an Ezra Klein show episode, and go to bed. Maybe every few weekends you go to Tahoe with your family. Rinse and repeat.

If you’re going to worry about a cheating husband, you should be more concerned about his coworker or women he knows at the gym. Most married women, especially women who actually hire nannies, know this. But there is an elaborate Sims storyline being played out by men who have neither children who need childcare, nor the money to hire a nanny to care for them.

But I can’t deny that I still wouldn’t feel great hiring a model-tier nanny. Maybe because I feel like it would simply make me feel a bit insecure, and that insecurity wouldn’t be worth it. After all, I would never cheat on my husband but it would seem a bit weird to hire a male personal trainer who looks like Henry Cavill to come over to our house to help me with my squats. Like, why do it? Nothing will happen, but if you think it might make your spouse feel a little weird, there are a million other people to hire who don’t make them feel weird. Either way, I’m struggling with a bit of cognitive dissonance (hey, at least I’m self aware.) I exist in a world in which I know my husband wouldn’t cheat on me, and yet, some things just feel unnecessarily fraught.

By far the funniest part of the entire discourse, however, was the assumption that a young nanny who is nearly a perfect 10 is completely DTF with any guy, especially some paunchy 42-year-old dad. Yes, I’m sure such a pairing has happened, but I actually knew a lot of Brazilian au pairs when I lived in San Francisco. They all dated, but their boyfriends were attractive young men. One girl had experience with infidelity, but that infidelity was that she married some old guy for citizenship, and then proceeded to cheat on him and later divorce him. Of course, that’s anecdata, but there’s no actual data to back up the “common” nanny/father pairing either. The belief that it’s “inevitable” that an affair will happen between a father and a nanny is akin to the belief that a teenage boy should never be left alone with his sexy, betitted stepmom.

Anyway, I noticed a pretty interesting pattern. Being on Parent Twitter, I follow a decent amount of upper middle class dads, and almost all of them had the below take (granted, most of them do not engage with this type of content at all, lmao) while men who aren’t dads at all, and probably aren’t upper middle class, felt certain that any attractive young woman is DTF with some random accountant named Jason.

I said before that I don’t think most married fathers are itching to tear apart their families for some hot sex (see? I don’t hate men!) but I think the biggest obstacle to the nanny-dad pairing is that the nannies are simply not interested. The oddest part of the discourse (to me) was that the hot nanny was objectified so deeply that her willingness to have an affair wasn’t even brought into question. Real-life women are not your Sims maids! Even a foreign nanny who is eager for a green card is unlikely to gamble that opportunity by having an affair that is unlikely to actually result in a green card (I have heard of exactly zero high-earning men who cheated with the nanny and married her) and is far more likely to result in getting fired. What a sweet deal!

This is what you guys sound like.

And yet—many women (myself included) feel a bit weird about hiring a nanny who looks like a supermodel. I’m just going to chalk this up to lizard brain. When I go on a 300 foot high roller coaster, I know I’m not going to die. I’m probably safer on that roller coaster than I am in a car. But it’s scary because it activates the part of my brain that’s too stupid to realize I’m not in danger. A total smokeshow nanny (or a Chad personal trainer) probably activates our lizard brains that respond to intrasexual competition. It is what it is. We are animals. Might as well not do something that makes our lizard brains go berserk if it’s easy to avoid.

Of course, this discourse wouldn’t be complete without filling out the bingo card, and one of the key squares is “the hiring of any nanny is actually bad because it means women are working and leaving the house.” There are two funny things about this take:

1.) They express sadness for the child who is “missing out” on time with his mother, but don’t stop to wonder why the child is missing out on time with his father.

2.) These takes are (I assume) being made by people who are not men who hire nannies (high-earning professional middle class men with working wives.) These families are typically in agreement about both parents working. You can say you disagree and that you wouldn’t want that arrangement for yourself (which is fine!) but it’s a misnomer to assume that high-earning software engineers with children are sitting around moping about the fact that their wives work too, and yearning for a tradwife. Maybe some are, but most are happy to enjoy the extra income.

Now, I do think tension between moms and nannies is common, but it has a lot less to do with intrasexual competition and a lot more to do with other factors. Check out that article below:

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