I'm Walking Back My TikTok-Induced Self-Righteousness and Other Dispatches From the Culture War

thought 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 our credit cards, the 19^th 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 many quiet parts of the Culture Wars. While 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 just lead to common sense positions being falsely labeled as “reactionary.” It also means some of these people to end up promoting lifestyles or positions they have no direct 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 waded 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. 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. 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 and needed to work hard to suppress our natural reaction.

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. “Becoming attached” was treated as a personal failure. Many of these women would go on to self-identify as “terminally” undesirable, rejection after rejection, not realizing it wasn’t them, it was the environment.

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, is 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 had become 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 suffered 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 free to say anything, consequence free.

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, inappropriately groping a woman was, in 2017, often discussed in the same breath as rape.

A more esoteric theory I had at the time was that these social changes were at least partially due to how digitized our lives had become. Had our thinking started to mimic the digital world, too?

Could the influx of identity labels be because 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; we started tagging ourselves, too.