Girlies, our content feeds are getting conservative too.
Homesteading on a farm is not the answer.
“I’m just a girl.” Girl math. Girl dinner. “I don’t want to work, I just want to live on a farm and bake bread and raise chickens.” Cortisol face. Ozempic. “Ashley Graham is too big to be walking the runway at the Victoria’s Secret fashion show.” “Tap into your divine feminine to appeal to his masculine.” “Ladies, if you want to be in a relationship you gotta start looking for the ones who are looking for you.” Blueberry nails are the new trend for the week. “Hormonal birth control is so dangerous and you shouldn’t be on it.” SHEIN hauls. “Hey big girl! You need to be eating low carb, high protein. The main ingredient is, you guessed it, cottage cheese.” “Millennials, THIS is the retinoid cream that will have you looking like a fresh baby with no wrinkles in only two months.”
What do all of these things have in common? They’re all shit that has popped up on my TikTok For You Page in the past year or so, if I’ve seen it once or I’ve seen it multiple times. When I first got a TikTok account four years ago in the beginning of the pandemic, the user experience was fun—I’d get comedy sketches, silly dance trends, relatable funny content, and got clocked as a bisexual with a lean towards a preference of men within 45 minutes of using the app, and it was all in good fun. As time went on, like any other popular thing on the internet, the experience got both worse and more commercial—a term called “enshittification.” The videos got longer, they added a feature called TikTok shop (which is just a marketplace to get low-quality junk at the click of a button), and everyone was making the exact same content to get views and get money. It’s part of the life cycle of any internet platform, but the scale has increased way more than Instagram or even Facebook in 2016, in my opinion.
Once things started opening up after the pandemic, I still used TikTok and stuff, but my attention was not grabbed by it. I had enough self-control to open the app, watch one to three videos, close the app and get on with my day. I was having fun with my friends out in the real world, I didn’t need entertainment on my phone! Then, my mom got diagnosed with brain cancer and I was back. My usage didn’t increase too much until my mom passed away a year later (I was too busy taking care of her to be on my phone all the time), when the grief was overpowering.
On the outside, I looked and felt fine. I’d go out with my friends, I started doing standup again, I enjoyed long walks by the lake. I started going to therapy after my dad put himself in the hospital (again), and things felt better. But looking back on my habits of the past year, things absolutely were not better. I think with the loss of my mom and the loss of the life I had before (young, attractive, energetic, etc.) I just felt lost, and I started turning into my phone to find answers.
After my mom passed away, I was older and more tired and had gained 40 pounds. My clothes didn’t fit and my dating apps were drier than they ever had been, and I was looking for companionship outside of my friends (sorry guys, none of you have volunteered to eat me out so I gotta try something). I had spent the last year sacrificing my own dreams and well-being in order to take care of someone else, something that my family just kind of…expected of me as the the only daughter who also is unmarried without her own kids. That experience was awful and also felt like a peek into a future of what motherhood would probably look like for me—something I wanted to avoid with my whole heart. I barely could survive a year of putting myself on the back burner, how could I handle decades of this self-sacrificing? I couldn’t.
And then I came back into my own life, my own apartment once again. I thought I could just start where I left off before my mom got sick, but that was impossible. The world around me changed, and I had also changed. My friends, as much as they wanted to be supportive, had no fucking idea how to relate to me anymore. It’s not their fault, they just haven’t experienced anything like this (few people do this young), and they’ll have to just wait to experience it themselves before they can understand. Young people inherently have an intolerance of discomfort that can only be changed by experiencing discomfort themselves (who would’ve thought!). But I felt completely, utterly alone. So I turned to the internet to try and search for someone, anyone, who knew what it was like, to give me any guidance of what to do next.
Instead, what I mostly got was the same kind of slop that the algorithm was throwing at any late twenties/early thirties, single women who were also feeling bogged down by the failures of late-stage capital. It was a teetertot of messaging, ranging from “become small and hot and braindead in order for a man to take care of you” and “if you haven’t found someone by now be prepared to never fuck again.” Less targeted but also pretty conservative were posts idolizing the pasture, and conspiracies about how hormonal birth control is so dangerous for women’s health and “nobody’s talking about it” (people do have bad side effects sometimes, but the net good it’s done is extremely high). Tradwife content became so popular that the regular population is very invested in the lives of those women, if they find it aspirational or not. Let’s not even get into “skincare” and how you somehow need 10 different products—and always a new one to add into the rotation—just to have skin that is “acceptable” by people online. Let’s also not get into people making comments about people’s appearances absolutely unprompted.
It’s hard to see all this stuff for what it is at first, since it’s mixed in with a lot of regular content from people with the same leftist ideals as I did. The feed just seemed normal, but it started making me feel worse than it used to at the same time that Target stopped having a good plus size section when I needed it most. I have enough media literacy and community in my life to not fall into the death trap that is believing conservative talking points, but I do still have to see it, which does inherently feel bad. And because I already felt bad from grief and loneliness, I then become a victim of the endless algorithmic feed, and I can’t be the only one.
The results of Trump winning once again in the 2024 presidential election sparked a larger conversation of the far-right radicalization of young men helped out by conservative content creators and podcasters like Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan. Young men historically don’t vote, but they did show up pretty hard to this one, letting their voices be heard that they do NOT like social progress. This is a very simplified explanation but for centuries, if not millennia, men were given a wife to do sex on them and clean house and cook dinner even if they were a nasty piece of shit without much to offer because women needed to be married to, like survive.
Then we got more rights in the last 100 years or so, and we were like, “If this guy is stinky doo-doo and I can get my own bank account and work a job for money why the fuck would I live with someone who can’t wash his own ass?” And women went to school and got to do all the things their grandmas didn’t get to do because they didn’t have to raise seven ungrateful kids. But young men are still just kind of sitting around, not going to school, still having their moms make their doctor’s appointments, angry that they don’t have wife yet and complaining about the “male loneliness epidemic” while simultaneously not trying to put any effort into fixing their loneliness themselves by things like, oh I don’t know, friendship. Instead they had the guy who used to host Fear Factor tell them to vote for a fascist whose buddies he appoints want nothing more than to take away rights so that we’re back in the 1950’s but without the Quaaludes. Give us the Quaaludes you cowards!
I think about the way that the conservative men in my family talk about the women in their lives. My dad always called it “admirable” that my grandma only ever volunteered and quit whatever job was going to pay her. The real story was that my grandpa made her quit any time she was too involved in her side jobs because she wasn’t at the house doing Wife Stuff to his liking while he spent all his money at the racetrack. When my mom died, it was all “she did so much for us” and was “so kind” but they didn’t really try to delve deep into the complexities of her as a human being outside of being a mother who does motherly stuff.
Even myself, when I took on the role as a caregiver, was applauded for being a “devoted daughter” but was told I was being a “brat” when I was upset of all that I was giving up for myself. Because being born a woman means I’m inherently maternal and self-sacrificing, right? It was so bad that being told I am nice and caring gives me body dysmorphia now. Their hearts are not in an inherently evil place, but, like everything else I’ve been talking about in this piece, it does make me feel really bad!
I think about what male loneliness looks like compared to female loneliness, or queer loneliness, or any other kind of loneliness. Men are not special in that they feel disconnected from the world. Even my friends and I, who have a pretty extensive and supportive community, feel lonely when we all pack up and go home. I’ve personally struggled for spending my entire young adult (and now regularly aged adult) life not being sexually attractive to anyone who isn’t a freak weirdo and feeling like I have missed a great part of the human experience (you can’t have sex with good eyebrows and friendship, so do not come for me friends).
The messaging for those of us who are lonely and touch-starved who aren’t straight white men is that we’re lonely because we must be flawed in some way, and to fix that loneliness we have to change something—or everything about ourselves. OR, we must just remove the horny parts of us, put it in a box and lock away the key, and just be so good at girlbossing and networking that you start to become so busy that you feel like you don’t crave the touch of another person anymore. Neither of these are actually good or correct, as we as human beings inherently crave connection—but it’s a bit more healthy than “remove rights for half the population of the county and enact violence because I don’t get what I think I deserve even though I am not entitled to a whole human being.” They could learn a thing or two from the rest of us lonely folk. That, and they could probably buy better fitting pants.
Dating is hard, authentic human connection is hard, and capitalism is making everything harder. The pandemic made everything harder (don’t forget about that major world event, it’s more influential to our present culture than even high gas prices are). It’s easy to fall into rabbit holes that explain to you why you feel that way.
Even if we as left-leaning women aren’t getting fed hard right-wing Christian content on the daily, we’re getting fed content that’s encouraging us to socialize ourselves back into a conservative ideal of what women “should be.” Regulation and control becoming fun little trends is really just an indicator that fascism is on the rise and society is ready to punish anyone who can’t fit into the mold fast enough. Consumerism and convenience culture encourages us to not think and to be even less tolerable of discomfort than we previously were. Anti-intellectualism is on the rise, with even seemingly harmless things like, “I’m too busy/too tired/too whatever to read a book!” is contributing to complacency. Thinking is hard, but it’s one of the only things we have that is free.
And with the reaction to the orange man’s second win, there has been a new influx of content from women talking about how all men are inherently evil and how we need to start our own movement of celibacy here in the United States like they’re doing the 4B movement in South Korea. It’s a bunch of hogwash that will one, never work here and two, the 4B movement is inherently transphobic and in these trying times the last thing we want to do is fall for transphobic talking points that lead us straight to the alt-right pipeline right as we’re trying to avoid it. Things like gender essentialism and sexual puritanism are only going to hurt us as a society, not help us at all. Not one gender is inherently bad and sex isn’t just a Thing that’s done to women—it’s a pleasurable experience that should be celebrated. We got here as a country not because of some inherent way that men are born, but how we are socialized as the genders we are assumed to be, and the backlash of people saying, “Hey, it doesn’t have to be like this.” Also, this country was founded on slavery and is still inherently racist to its core.
This post, now that I’m done writing it, is very much white women-focused I’ve realized. That’s probably because I am a white woman and those algorithms and my family is trying to get my ass to their side. I’m fortunate enough to have the education and life experience in order to see through the bullshit and have a community that isn’t just all white, cis, hetero women. I’m not an expert on organizing or anything but I encourage everyone to find some kind of cause they want to help (doesn’t even have to be big, you could do the local food bank), talk to people who live near you, read books from trusted sources, don’t be too trustful of authority, and be very, very wary of what you watch online. We are in a time of collective grieving, and grief is a monster which needs to be handled with care.
This piece is a jumbled mess, so thank you for reading. I guess I’ll go out with this to all my ladies (or any gender that feels seen by me): you don’t have to be a girlboss, but you do have to do something.
I’m doing a bunch of performances this week! My CiC class team Dr. Coke is doing the Tuesday Good Show on Tuesday 11/12, 7:00pm at the Gallery Cabaret and then also the CiC Wednesday show, 8:00pm at Finley Dunne’s. Both shows are FREE! Then on Thursday, Ghost Rats is opening for Duluth: an Improvised Midwest Murder, 7:30pm at the iO Theater. Get tickets here.