Are you looking for a man in finance?

“Did I just write the song of the summer?” twenty-seven-year-old Megan Boni, an aspiring New York-based singer-actress known on social media as “Girl on Couch,” asked her public a few weeks ago. Days before, she suggested that her TikTok followers set to music a thirteen-word satirical musing she had improvised about her undersexed Gen Z peeresses’ lofty romantic expectations. Known simply as “Man in Finance,” the song’s lyrics easily divide into four short verses that unfold like shallow ads in the “Personals” section of an old newspaper: “I’m looking for a man in finance/Trust fund/Six-five/Blue eyes.”

Adaptations have gone viral on social media, gathering more than 80 million hits and earning Boni more than $300,000 in revenue. She has reportedly landed brand promotion deals, received a contract offer from Universal Music and quit her 9-5 corporate sales job. Variations of the song are thumping in DJ sets all over the world. Mainstream electronic music superstar David Guetta remixed it to the 2010 anthem “Like a G-6” in a recording with more than16 million plays on Spotify alone. Parody videos have already appeared, using the basic beat to list purported characteristics of traditionally minded wives (“Trad wife/Sourdough/Eats meat/Wants kids”), less appealing New York romantic prospects (“Freelance/Five-six/Tattoos/Bushwick”) and other types who fall outside the desired milieu.

At first hearing, the song comes across as a toxic artefact of a debased society and a misandrist objectification of men. Boni delivers the lyrics in the slack-jawed vocal fry of a narcissistic female who is obviously only interested in men with lucrative careers, independent resources and two superficial physical characteristics. All other traits are unspecified and presumably unimportant. She sounds like the type of woman wise parents warn their sons to avoid, giving off a Meghan Markle-ish “ick” and willing to trade whatever she imagines love is for otherwise unobtainable financial security provided by a reasonably good-looking man.

Boni has, however, clarified that her intent was to mock unrealistic romantic expectations among young urban American women, telling the Today show, “I was trying to make fun of those girls who say that they’re not high-maintenance or that they want a boyfriend, but then they have a long-ass list of needs that are insane.”

“I didn’t think a man with these criteria existed,” she told the BBC.

Research bears her out. Demographers who have filtered Boni’s lyrics through hard data have found that while there may be millions of marriageable men employed in finance, they come from a general population in which only 27 percent of people have blue eyes, a scant 2 percent have trust funds and a marginal 0.0017 percent of men reach six-feet, five-inches in height. The actual pool of males described in the song may thus figure in the low dozens or fewer, with one calculation estimating that there are only two such individuals. Even that degree of improbability appears to ignore that people usually bestow trust funds on their progeny precisely so that they do not have to work in finance, if at all, and that high-earning trust fund holders will almost certainly insist on ironclad prenups and have learned to winnow out women who are after them for money.

In perhaps the greatest irony of all, Boni has repeatedly maintained that she herself is uninterested in finance guys of any description. And as she said after realizing her recent success in a new medium, “I am my own man in finance.” Good for her.