I'm Walking Back My TikTok-Induced Self-Righteousness, Among Other Dispatches From the Culture Warthought digest, 06.08.2024
It's been a while since I did one of these. Here's what's been on my mind lately: It's easy to forget this blog wasn't always about the internet. Recently, I audited everything I've posted here and realized a lot of my 2020 and 2021 content was about dating. Obviously, I remember the advice column, that was a staple with around 50 installments, but I was struck by how many posts were about sex and relationships. I can't even put myself back in that headspace. Most of my relationship advice was just common sense, the kind of thing you probably heard from your mom provided you weren’t raised by someone exceptionally progressive. But somehow, in the digital environment I was writing in, I was briefly considered conservative. I remember one journalist, when asking me about “trads,” off-handedly referred to me as “reactionary.” This was as absurd then as it is now. She wasn’t alone in thinking this, though. My views were liberal, if not in-fashion (not to mention a little obnoxious). Re-introduce a little bit of stigma, but let the ladies keep their credit cards, the 19th amendment, and our no-fault divorce, please. Being labeled as “reactionary” by my some of my online peers reinforced the idea that these ideas were more controversial than they were. I recognized at the time that they weren’t extreme, but didn’t it say something that they were considered extreme? The missing detail in all of this, of course, was I was blogging and tweeting from the Bay Area to other people in the Bay Area. This seems to be one of the unspoken details, of which there are many, in the Culture Wars. While many people are correctly diagnosing certain excesses, it’s also true that the social media space around it attracts people who are the most conservative person in an overwhelmingly liberal environment, be it industries like publishing, or cities like San Francisco, Portland, or New York. This doesn’t always lead to common sense positions being falsely labeled as “reactionary,” but the tendency for some of these people to promote lifestyles they have no experience with. It’s worth noting that the reverse is also true: there are also plenty of people in the Culture War space who grew up in restrictive conservative environments, who become ultra-liberal as a reaction to their upbringing. Anyway, I digress. I kept upsetting people with lukewarm takes. The first time was when I made the mistake of wading into the body count question. Does it matter how many people you’ve slept with? My opinion was, and still is, that not everyone has the disposition to sleep around, and what “sleep around” even means is different from person to person, especially in a culture with very few shared norms around sex. Everyone has a personal limit on how many sexual partners they can have, and we should all lean slightly more conservative than we think we can handle. In an early podcast (sadly wiped from the web, now) a friend and I discussed just how many articles had been published about “how not to catch feelings” in the late 2000s and early 2010s. I observed that this was either cautioning women about “limerence” in the language of the time, or more likely, we were denying that sex was meaningful to some of us. I certainly had more than one friend when I was in my late teens and early 20s who claimed to be able to have “sex like a man,” only to routinely catch feelings, get those feelings hurt, and feel deeply disappointed when short-term encounters didn’t develop into fully-fledged relationships. Developing feelings was treated as a personal failure and many of these women would go on to self-identify as “terminally” undesirable. Today, we have new language to help navigate what I believe is still a simple situation, that transactional sex does not and cannot come naturally to all people. “Narcissism,” “love bombing,” “situationship,” and so on, as is now well-trodden ground, an attempt to rationalize and occasionally pathologize what we all already knew about “fuck boys.” Love bombing is real, but lying to a woman over the course of a week to get into her pants isn’t it. The other argument I made often—which wasn’t received particularly well—was that boundaries were floppy. They weren’t completely absent, but it did seem like many of us were walking around with our own idea of what “boundaries” were and no shared idea of how to respect them. One area this was most visible was the (primarily white collar) workplace, but friendships and family relationships suffer as well. Age group boundaries also weakened in these conditions, notably between life stages, and with them, social roles became both nebulous and optional. In hindsight, I wasn’t right when I described people as perpetually stuck: women as forever maidens, men as forever boys, and all of us eternal teenagers, the prime marketing demographic. The answer is much simpler: this is all a product of being physically and emotionally distant from one another. You can’t have a defined social role if you’re alone. If there are no shared social rules and no shared social roles, you’re both free to say anything and have no responsibility for anyone. But this forces us to overcompensate when lines are crossed—each person’s line in a slightly different place. The co-worker who’s your best friend but for whom you can’t pick up a shift. The Tinder match who knows your most intimate sexual fantasies but whose own admissions feel like a bridge too far. One of the many reasons, but not the only one, groping a woman at an inappropriate time was, in 2017, often discussed in the same breath as rape. A more esoteric theory I had at the time was that this was at least partially because of how digitized our lives had become. Had our thinking started to mimic the digital world, too? Could the confluence of identity labels be that many of us, particularly those most likely to read think pieces, lived in a virtual world? Objects get tagged so AI can understand them; posts are tagged for better organization; so we started tagging ourselves, too... Subscribe to Default Wisdom to read the rest.Become a paying subscriber of Default Wisdom to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content. A subscription gets you:
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2024/06/08
I'm Walking Back My TikTok-Induced Self-Righteousness, Among Other Dispatches From the Culture War
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