Every New Year’s Eve, a concentration of the global elite migrates to the tiny Caribbean island of St. Barts, arriving by yacht or disappearing into beachfront villas with infinity pools and very little furniture. Billionaires, celebrities, heirs, and men whose relationship to crypto is best described as “legally unclear” descend upon the island, or float just offshore on vessels the size of municipal libraries. Champagne flows. Drugs circulate. Instagram Stories multiply. And right on schedule, so does the discourse. Enter: the yacht girl.
Suddenly, across Instagram, Reddit threads, and the more conspiratorial corners of celebrity gossip sites, speculation erupts about which beautiful women on which boats are there “legitimately,” and which are—according to the internet’s most trusted anthropological resource, Urban Dictionary—“attractive young women who gain access to luxurious surroundings by being available to wealthy men.”
It’s a definition that manages to sound both sinister and vague, like a warning label written by a Reddit user who’s never been invited anywhere.
Let’s be clear: sex work exists. Transactional relationships exist. Women exchanging beauty, charm, or companionship for access or money is not exactly a new concept (see: pretty much all of history). Are there yacht-based sex workers in the wild? Of course there are. Boats, like hotels and private jets, are merely venues for what moneyed individuals want to do within them.
It’s true, of course, that some men invite women onto yachts with the hope of sleeping with them. This is simply how a certain kind of heterosexual desire functions. But wanting something does not make it a foregone conclusion, nor a paid-for transaction. Sometimes people hook up; sometimes they don’t. But no one is clocking in. No one is being handed an envelope.
But the internet’s current obsession isn’t truly with sex work—it’s with women who are visible, attractive, and unapologetic.
The women being derisively called “yacht girls” online are not, for the most part, anonymous or economically precarious. They are well-known models, actresses, influencers, and socialites—women who grace the covers of Vogue, who earn seven or eight figures a year or come from family money, and for whom proximity to wealth is a professional constant rather than a payday. I myself have been confidently identified as a “yacht girl” on Reddit, despite having never stepped foot on a mega-yacht. (If someone reading this would like to rectify that oversight, thank you in advance.) Regrettably, I seem to have missed both the boat and the envelope of cash I’m allegedly collecting.
Tellingly, what those same internet commentators tend to take a lot less interest in is what the men on the yachts are up to. No think-piece emerges titled The Mysterious Case of the Middle-Aged Man on the Supersized Boat. No one suggests he’s being exploited for his personality. His presence is accepted as natural, deserved, even inevitable. Wealth grants him neutrality. Female beauty in the presence of wealth, on the other hand, requires justification.
The yacht–girl discourse is less about economics and more about discomfort. It’s the lingering belief that a woman cannot simply enjoy luxury, leisure, or proximity to power without owing something for it. That her presence must be transactional and her bikini is a receipt.
One of my close friends was in St. Barts for New Year’s and happened to wake up on a mega-yacht. I asked her, jokingly, if this meant she was now officially a yacht girl. The truth was far less scandalous: she had dinner on the island with a (gay) guest of the boat, drank too much, and was put to bed on the boat like a small Victorian child. She woke up safe and well-rested, in thousand-thread-count sheets and with her phone charging on the bedside table.