She’s not the only one. “Otome,” which roughly translates to “maiden,” refers to a genre of story-based romance role-playing video games targeted toward women that originated in Japan in 1994, and have exploded in popularity since then.

As the political, educational and financial gap between women and men continues to grow, it’s affected how women feel about the possibility of finding lasting love and partnership. Terms like “heteropessimism,” describing the nihilism that women feel about their prospects in the dating pool, have entered modern parlance.

But Love and Deepspace, a sci-fi and action mobile game released from Infold Games in 2024, offers a reprieve from that bleak reality for many of its female players. It’s taken off in both the United States and globally, accruing over half a billion dollars in global revenue from app store downloads alone as of March 2025, and surpassing $1 billion in total user spend, according to data from market research platform AppMagic. Fans feel exceptionally strong ties to their love interests — they’ll even throw parties and drone light shows for their fictional boyfriends’ birthdays.

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“The premise is that you’re a Hunter in a place called Linkon City, which I think is based off Shanghai,” Lea explained, swiping around the interface. “So you’re basically fighting these monsters that have superpowers, but you also have superpowers — you’re the center of the universe, you’re made of stars and the cosmos, and when you were younger, you were experimented on. There’s a ton of lore. But as you’re growing up and becoming a Hunter, you come across these different love interests, you fight monsters and you find out why you were experimented on by this company entity who wants to make the world worse.”

Most of the top-played otome games have similarly rich storylines propelling them, whether sci-fi or action. Tokyo Debunker involves solving supernatural cases (while meeting good-looking ghouls along the way); A Date With Death revolves around a weeklong barter you make with the Grim Reaper to keep your soul — but wait, why is the Grim Reaper kind of sexy? A compelling game is not just about some floppy protagonist who’s waiting around for a guy to show up, but one who is actively doing something useful and important most of the time.

Video games are designed to tap into the core feelings we all want to have in our lives: achievement, motivation, pride and joy. Otome games mine these emotions, alongside intimacy, lust and connection. And for a generation of people who feel disconnected and overwhelmed by the world around them, it’s a deeply rewarding form of entertainment.

Would your flesh-and-bone boyfriend do this?

In Love and Deepspace, you play under your own name, and there are five main love interests: Xavier, Zayne, Rafayel, Sylus and Caleb. They all have specific relationships with the protagonist, whether it be a childhood friend, a coworker or an enemy who turns into a lover. Going on dates with the different love interests gives you more support in battle, and if you pay to use their gashapon (a claw machine-esque minigame), you can unlock more moments with them.

The boundaries between reality and fantasy can easily start to blur when you’re spending hours in this world. There’s a function within the game through which the men can send you texts and even call you, which usually funnels you into dates and adventures with the five different characters. There’s a photo booth where you can take silly pictures together. There’s even a menstrual cycle tracker on the app, which triggers the characters to share caring messages and information about periods, as well as offer to pick up pads or tampons.

Lea shows me a memory she unlocked in the game, a video of Zayne, with long hair and tinsel extensions, heavily breathing all over the protagonist as you have implied intercourse in a flower-littered pool, while tied together with a golden rope. It’s essentially soft-core porn. There’s seemingly little that your virtual boyfriend can’t do for you.

Kris, 28, has been playing Love and Deepspace since its launch in 2024. “Usually, I get really into them in between serious relationships,” she told Yahoo. “After a big breakup during college was the first time I started playing one.”

In the past, Kris said, she’s experienced communication issues with her partner, but in Love and Deepspace, disagreements always get resolved. “For me, usually how I communicated would bother my partner or not be sufficient, so in a way I think otome games were a safer way for me to explore conversations with a romantic interest since there were options and no real-life ramifications,” she said. “I could also see what kinds of personalities I was better able to communicate with. Most of my real-life partners had been pretty extroverted since I find it hard to approach people. But in otome games, I found myself drawn to characters that were a bit more standoffish, that I would need to work harder to pursue.”

The affections she has for the characters aren’t really personal, but more parasocial. It’s “like being a fan of a K-pop idol or musician,” she said. There are a lot of activities within the fandom that stem from the K-pop world: gamers throw café birthday parties, get together in person and even book billboards to express their devotion to their favored love interests.

To anyone who has ever dated a corporeal man before, it’s easy to see why these games are so compelling. None of the love interests ever talk ad nauseam about doing farmer’s walks at the gym, get inexplicably angry because they’re sad, or subscribe to the labels of “avoidant attachment” or “emotionally unavailable.” The precision of the dialogue is almost bone-chilling. “Do you want to go for a walk after work?” asks the love interest Rafayel from inside the liminal space where Lea can dress him up in the different clothing and hair options (yes, shirtless is also a possibility).

When fictional romance raises expectations

Ari, 28, is in a long-term relationship but is deeply invested in the otome game Tokyo Debunker. They’ve been playing the game for over 10 years, since they were in high school.

Ari said that being immersed in their otome game doesn’t necessarily affect their relationship with their partner. “ More so, I think it offers different flavors of romance that maybe we might not encounter in our real relationship,” they said. “But we’re also both aware these are excellent writers, or maybe sometimes delusional ones. And it’s just fun to be kinda immersed in that type of romance, or at least observe it.”

Still, it’s easy to fall into the trap of believing that these characters are more real than they really are. “Someone I met via [the Tokyo Debunker] Discord, who’s actually a fully grown woman with a husband and two kids, said in a shared server she wished her romantic life was similar to some of the games she plays, like Love and Deepspace,” they said. “I think otome games can sometimes skew how we create and build relationships, since these games are often programmed with specific endings, which is to fall in love.”

Ari said the suggested dialogue, primarily used to propel the plot, isn’t always the “healthiest” form of communication. “ It does help you kind of give examples of certain encounters you might have while dating, or an example of a conflict, but not necessarily the best choices to deal with them,” they said. When playing A Date With Death, Ari added: “ I think it helps for setting your mind up for a potential scenario, but again, you’re like, ‘You’re never gonna meet a Grim Reaper in real life.’”

There’s a perception that this new economy targeting women’s romantic loneliness — the market of otome games, collectible dolls and earlier versions of pocket boyfriends — would make them only more reclusive from love and society in general. But for Kris and Lea, it’s not necessarily the case. Lea said she’s learned to become flirtier when she’s meeting people she’s interested in, and more forthcoming when acting on a crush.

“Nothing could replace real-life love for me,” Lea said. “I’m never on a date and thinking, oh, I just want to go back and play this game. Sometimes I just want to play it because it’s a video game. It also makes me excited to date because it’s like, I could have this with other people.”

Kris, meanwhile, says it’s raised her romantic standards. “They definitely have given me a better idea of what kind of relationship I picture for myself. They also scratch an itch when I’m feeling like being chaotic in my personal life.”

Ari has found community through the fan Discord channels, where players talk about gameplay and new game updates. They’ve met up in person over the years, had arguments and gone through all the very real, human obstacles of getting to know people. Though everyone I interviewed said that they know other players who very much feel as though they are deeply, truly in love with the otome characters, none of them see it that way. Lea sometimes brings her “boyfriend” Zayne around with her, as kind of a sardonic joke, but it hasn’t stopped her from wanting to date. The animated 3D ideal on her screen does set a high bar, though.

“ In the end they’re just pixels,” Lea said. “They’re just people in a game, and I could also go out and meet people who are like this as well. But it’s also, like, why would I?”

All sources request to go by their first name for privacy reasons. This article was originally reported and written by me for Yahoo News.

All this to say last month, I traveled alone for the first time to Milan, for Milan Design Week. Everyone says Milan is mid. That there’s nothing to do or see or anything particularly interesting to sink your teeth into. I don’t know, maybe it’s because my expectations were low, or because I was just kind of gallivanting around by myself, but I found it all to be untrue. I had a great time in Milan, and I cannot wait to go back. And while this was kind of a cop-out solo trip — this was a press trip, paid for by IKEA, and I had to attend several work engagements — I had a great amount of fun. If you’re looking for a little getaway by yourself, that involves nothing but ease and quiet, go to Milan and have a coffee. It’s lovely. You can read my review of the IKEA collection now, and here’s my full itinerary:

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Pre-Trip Notes

This trip was scheduled for five days after my Prague trip. I would’ve stayed in Europe for the intermittent week in between, but I thought it would be too annoying to ask the IKEA to book me one-way flights, so I just sucked it up and went home. This ended up being a good idea, because I got fucking sick as soon as I landed back in New York. It was some kind of horrendous cold that I no doubt caught while hiking in the Black Forest. I tested negative for COVID, slept for a week straight, and felt mostly better by the time I checked in for my Milan flight, but I masked up on the plane just in case (here are the masks I use).

I still had some leftover Eskimo global data from my trip last week, which was helpful. I tend to be a Plan B traveler, so I didn’t think about how to get around on the subway before I got to Milan, but it turns out, it was totally fine. Milan’s tram and subway system accept Apple Pay, so if your travel card is linked up to your Apple Wallet, you don’t even pay foreign transaction fees on anything. It’s a pretty small and intuitive city, so you tend to feel your way around pretty quickly. I only ended up taking the tram and subway once, because the city is incredibly walkable.

On safety: In every city I have traveled to Italy in the past (Rome, Venice, Florence), I have experienced the craziest racism of my life. One time in 2016, a monk pointed at me and laughed at me for like, two minutes straight, because…Asian? This is a pretty known fact about Italy, I think — their racism is wildly impolite and old-school, and I know plenty of people who have similar stories from their trips. I am pleased to report that I did not experience even a little bit of overt racism in Milan. There are pickpockets to watch out for in some areas, but I think as long as you are not a stunningly obvious bozo, you will be fine.

The weather was perfect for Fuorisalone. It was seventy to eighty degrees Fahrenheit and sunny the entire time. At nights it cooled down the fifties, and there was thunder one night, but the rain never came. I brought a light trench coat that my friend Isabel gifted me from her label, Miss Circle (which is currently sold out probably because PinkPantheress wore it at Coachella), and that was the perfect layer for walking around at night. Do not pack anything other than walking shoes. Fuorisalone (which is just like Fashion Weeks, but for interior design) takes over the whole city, so there’s a chance you’ll have to hop from Brera to Navigli to Porta Venezia in the same day, depending on what installations you want to see.

The Flights

I managed to get my preferred Europe flight time again — 4 p.m., the most elite time to do the 8-hour voyage across the Atlantic. I like it because you land at around midnight Eastern, so it’s only a little past my bedtime, and I’m lucid enough to travel into the city from the airport. From Milapensa to the city center is about an hour by train, but the brand sent me a nice chauffeur named Henri who took me to the hotel in a BMW.

For this flight, I caved and bought the fancy Turtl sleeping pillow that looks like a neck brace, after my dear friend , said it was the one travel accessory she actually thinks is worth the money (I trust a food and travel journalist to know what they’re talking about). It was on sale when I bought it, and it actually was far more supportive than the average neck pillow, but a little annoying to maneuver around in if you’re also wearing over-ear headphones.

It turns out that Fuorisalone actually starts at Terminal 4 in JFK. Everyone on this plane was chic down. I was squashed next to a man in a sleek platinum-blonde bob and thick black glasses, and an older couple dressed in crisply-ironed dress shirts and suede shoes. I was wearing a lumpy cardigan and my neck brace. If you care about being brutally fit-mogged, I would make a mental note to dress up a little more for the plane. However I was feeling too exhausted and discombobulated to care, so I finished Madeline Miller’s Circe and promptly knocked the fuck out for the rest of the flight.

Sightseeing

I arrived to Hotel Cristoforo Colombo at 6:45 a.m., but was far too full of adrenaline to go to sleep, so I dropped off my suitcase, sipped a cappuccino at San Pietro Café, and then walked straight to the Duomo. Early in the morning, the crowds were thin and sleepy, which meant that I got to really take in the façade. Say what you want about Milan having nothing to do, and Europe being too full of old churches, but the Duomo rips. I spent a full hour just meandering around the cathedral, looking at all the stone carvings along the perimeter. I truly still cannot believe that it exists. People made that with their hands, and now we have Shein clothes and Capcut edits. Life is different now.

Outside of the obvious landmark, I got to see many other wonderful things in Milan. Right after the Duomo, I walked through the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, which is cool but not that exciting. On my way to the modern design museum Triennale di Milano, I got the special treat of wandering through Parco Sempione and Castello Sforzesco, where a man played Billie Eilish on the piano and the sun warmed my hair. I tried to find the flea market along the Naviglio Grande to no avail, but I did get to enjoy a beautiful long walk with plenty of great people-watching. On my way to Peck for cheese, I got to see the overgrown ivy on Viale Luigi Majno 20, and the romantic graffiti adorning Casa Galimberti. Every night I also got to walk back to the hotel through the Giardini Indro Montanelli, which was idyllic and a perfect reminder that life is worth living.

Fuorisalone

While Milan may not be filled with the most monuments in the world, Fuorisalone makes it so that you have infinite things to see. The difference between Fuorisalone and Fashion Month is that Fuorisalone is open to the public, and any kind of brand can participate, as long as they showcase some kind of design. That means everyone from Bugatti to Louis Vuitton did interior installations, to varying degrees of pushiness. At Dolce & Gabbana, they armed the highly lazy exhibition with at least five salespeople, who followed you around the store to unabashedly tell you the price of everything. I would be prepared for a pretty heavy sales pitch at half of them.

This does mean that there is an Epcot Ballian quality to Milan Design Week, which you can probably attribute to the chicken-and-egg problem of it becoming more of a gigantic tourist trap. The Dior exhibit wrapped around the block; I didn’t even get into Jil Sander because they were tapped out of registrations every single day. Right now, it seems that most of the visitors coming in are predominantly interested in the trendiest brands that activate for Fuorisalone, but to be honest, they rarely showcased anything interesting. Perhaps most egregiously, Gucci showed vending machines, where you could get a soda, take a photo, and then…leave. For any design lover, you have to wonder what that has to do with design. Because if design is by definition “the concept or proposal for an object, process, or system” for real human problems, if design is synonymous with intention, how do these social media-bait installations attempt to engage in this conversation at all?

Having attended ten seasons of New York Fashion Week, I heard a similar frustration running rampant among longstanding Fuorisalone veterans: the whole point of these weeks is for business, and also to ask questions about industry and questions about craft. The Instagrammable quality of it should not be at the forefront of our priorities (though of course, it is). It’s not to say those conversations are dead, they just have to be sought out more. Speaking to Raffaella Mangiarotti, the brain behind all of the Smeg product designs, who was at IKEA to debut her new natural-material lamp, I got to hear about all the reasons she chose to design the toaster with a silver ball knob instead of a lever or push button, which was intended to slow down the user and add some level of romance to their morning. There’s a more tactile experience in the silver ball, because it’s not as efficient to use. It forces you to take in what you’re doing for just a few seconds longer. You are making toast in the morning, you are going to feed yourself, and that’s nice.

Anyhow, some of my favorites: the Frederica exhibition this year was basically softcore porn for Danish mid-century lovers, just a room stuffed full of bentwood furniture; the Eames installation included James Eames’ own prefabricated house that you could walk through, and inspired a lot of good questions about cost of living crisis, shrinking space, and making how to make suburban space attractive for young people. IKEA’s offering, a true-to-form walkthrough of five different interior setups inspired by food and dining at home, was a fun installation to spot their exalted vintage pieces. Stepevi in Brera did a great live demonstration of hand-tufting carpets. My personal favorite was Ai Weiwei’s collaboration with Rubelli, a floor-to-ceiling embroidered Venetian silk motif commenting on social media censorship, surveillance and freedom of speech in China. Silk is obviously a very charged medium, a direct link between China and Italy, and using the material to make commentary on things happening in both nations made me deeply emotional. There was also no line outside, which I was surprised by. Do Europeans not know about Ai Weiwei like that?

Shopping

Because of all these aforementioned factors (not many landmarks, a lot of design), Milan is pretty much exclusively known for its commerce game. But I went into the trip with fairly tempered expectations. I was only going to be there for a few days, and wandering around for most of it, how much could I really shop? I wasn’t interested in spending hours at Bottega just to get the VAT refund off on a bag when I could go on TheRealReal and get one for a fraction of the price. I’m also not particularly swayed by the various newly-popular European souvenirs which somehow always involve spending €100 and getting something monogrammed. And yet, given my preexisting cynicism, someone explain to me how I still ended up unloading the clip. Milan is a city that makes you want to spend money. I literally doubled my luggage weight on the way home. The Emirates check-in desk attendant looked at me like I was an idiot.

For Americans, I think the easiest access point into the vast shopping pool in Milan is to start with all the European chain stores that refuse to branch out to the US. It’s important to hit these cornerstones before you really get lost in the abyss. They’re all mostly consolidated near the Duomo, so it’s really convenient to bounce around.

My first stop was Boots. Not to buy anything, just to stand in there and remember that it exists. It’s just nice being in there, it makes me think of 2010s YouTube. If you’re looking for discounted Sabre Paris cutlery, Arket ended up being a sleeper hit — I picked up two butter knives for €22. I was extremely tickled by the store interior of the Kave Home near the Duomo, and ended up buying salt-and-pepper shakers for a friend. I also stopped into Intimissimi to finally get the boat neck top every hot girl seems to own, but without the Trump-tariffed price tag. It’s €33 there, and $65 here.

As for the Milan-specific establishments, I enjoyed that the shopkeepers in Chapters called me “darling” and brushed my hair with five different hairbrushes. It’s too expensive for me, but it’s fun to be there. Pettinaroli does indeed have beautiful leather goods, however I am not entirely convinced all of them are worth the money (I ended up finding Buga Bags in the eleventh hour before my car picked me up for the airport, and I think their leather is way more worth it). My favorite purchase, though, were three ice cream bowls I got from Zafferano, a home store in the Brera district that focuses on lighting and handmade tableware from local craftspeople. They were €12 apiece and I love them so much. I eat grapes out of them. If you go to Milan, please buy something from Zafferano. I need to ensure that they will remain in business until I can go back and buy more kitchenware.

This is really specific, but if you hate the chalky aftertaste of Emergen-C, I highly recommend going to a Medi-Market and stocking up on some ZetaVit (it tastes like drinking orange soda, and it’s also significantly cheaper). I was also tempted to pick up the viral Marvis toothpaste, but the price wasn’t actually that different from the US. Generally, I like to buy salt whenever I’m in a country that touches the Mediterranean, so I bought a kilogram of Gemma di Mare sale marino fino (I couldn’t find sale marino grosso). I repackaged most of it into various jars to give away to friends. Portioning all this white substance felt really suspect, but salt is always a well-received souvenir.

Food

I ate many wonderful things in Milan. IKEA hosted a very beautiful dinner with balay where everything down to the menus was edible; we also stumbled into Eppol, where I did enjoy the texture of the porcini tagliolini. In my longstanding suspicion of restaurants that advertise homemade pasta as their thing, I got the tagliatelle from Ristorante Da Oscar and it was just okay (it is, and I mean this completely neutrally, the kind of food that you could easily blend vegetables in for a picky child to eat). But I mostly loved walking around the city with a baked olive-mozzarella-tomato panzerotti in hand, or stopping in for a coffee and pastry at cafés like Orsonero Coffee, Naëve, and The Coffee. I spent all my available change on chiffaro crema and pistachio gelato. I ate some great strawberries, and an heirloom tomato, from a produce stall. We made friends one night and drank negronis at Bar Basso, a famed Milan Design Week watering hole.

Final Stats

Milan was a wonderful place to be around people but ultimately be alone. Perhaps it’s the most corporate city of Italy, but it’s still ultimately infected with the Mediterranean sensibility of having a drink at the end of the day instead of optimizing your time for the next thing. There’s no rush to be anywhere, so it doesn’t matter where you go! The excitement is just about following your nose around and letting yourself be surprised. I will return again, if just to spend a day wandering around the streets with a baked good in my bag. Fuck the haters! Go to Milano.

• Average step count: 21,000

• Total flight time (including layover): 8 hours

• Longest commute time within the city: 30 minutes

• Airport-to-city time: 45 minutes

See you in Korea next,

-s

There was never any doubt that what Braden Peters is doing online is probably incredibly dangerous. His entire platform, dedicated to the art of getting hot, first went viral for its unapproved and extreme tactics: yearslong exposure to testosterone supplements, microdosing meth as an appetite suppressant, and “bone smashing,” which involves hitting your jawline with a hammer “so the bone grows back stronger.” But it was taken very unseriously for a long time, because looksmaxxing — especially at the Clavicular stratosphere — is wrapped up in so much unserious nonsense. “Clavicular ran into a frat leader at ASU and got brutally frame mogged by him,” and “Clavicular just cracked the code: JESTERMAXXING at the club is officially the new meta,” are two earnest sentences said by looksmaxxers that have gone viral online. So it’s easy to see why no one took this content genre seriously for a long time. In the same way that the monkeys from Madagascar have British accents and also blackmailed the penguins during their union negotiations, it’s easy to fixate on the surface rather than try to examine what’s lying underneath (which is, by the way, that the penguins exploited their labor force across three movies and the British monkeys benefitted greatly from the unfair system).

What is lying underneath? Clavicular’s entire career has been linked to extremist figures, whether it’s white supremacist Nick Fuentes, human trafficker Andrew Tate and his War Room co-conspirator Justin Waller, controversial streamer Sneako, or Hai Waknine, Clavicular’s business partner whose history of extortion and affiliation with Israeli crime groups has, until now, seemed to fly under the radar of the whole bone-smashing and looksmaxxing gobbledygook thing. You can see Waknine with Clavicular at the launch of their Miami nightclub Bacara (which Clavicular said he already cashed out on). You can see him behind Clavicular at F1 weekend, where the streamer hosted a race week party for McLaren at a Waknine-owned rooftop bar, and sat in a $2 million McLaren supercar that was supposedly a gift from the Waknines. You can, of course, see all the aforementioned streamers partying to Kanye West’s “Heil Hitler” together at Vendôme nightclub in Miami (after a brief scrape online, it appears Vendôme’s co-owner Adel Bourka also co-owns Bacara with, you guessed it, Waknine).

Note: Clavicular actually left the hospital because he had to attend the opening of Bacara. Clavicular’s father, though invited, did not attend, and then we got to see these weird shots of Clavicular closed-mouth kissing two women and then scrolling on alone his phone for a while).

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It’s never been more obvious that beauty content has become a gaping waterslide into fascist ideology on the internet. Everyone wants to be hot, and in the age of Instagram, we all want to be hot enough to be voraciously, enviously, admirably consumed online. It’s not just about being beautiful anymore, but about being perceived as beautiful, by everyone, from every possible angle. Most critically, the onus is always on the individual to shape up to society’s standards, rather than society allowing the person to be beautiful as they are, because it’s easier to sell stuff when the problem is the consumer. Three years ago, I wrote an essay called “white women want their power back,” which looked at the rise of Pilates princess content and the “vanilla girl”-type TikTok trends that I felt were inherently exclusive and racist. The ideology is the same as Clavicular’s: beauty is meritocratic, beauty is bootstrap theory, beauty is simply an equation of who has the most points, and that can always change, as long as you put in the work. You can get hot with this glow-up guide. You can become that girl in two weeks. You don’t need motivation, you need discipline. If you buy enough Lululemon and protein powder and lagree membership classes, you can unlock a different kind of life. If you smash your own jawline and do a six-day workout split, you can be treated with that much more care.

Fascism is highly interested in beauty. Always has been. The Roman statue ideal of a man has long been a weapon for power and oppression; it’s not just that these actual statues were often shows of might and strength of the Roman empire, but then throughout history, you see plenty of fascist movements take particular interest in looksmaxxing. Nazi Germany, of course, were interested in the blonde-hair-blue-eyes of it all, but the idea of the frame-mogged man was particularly persistent throughout their propaganda. Sporting skills — which they focused on to increase nationalism as well as “Aryan physical superiority” — were mandatory for school graduation, plus a necessary qualification for certain jobs and university admissions. In Italy, Mussolini also wanted to embody the notion of the “Italian Superman,” symbolizing athletic dynamism and other attributes that were championed by fascism. Of course, none other than bodybuilding.com was one of the first great alt-right radicalizers at the dawn of the internet, and widely used until its shutdown in 2024.

On the internet, this quest for beauty began to get wrapped in goofy vernacular, and iterated upon until the end of time, which is why it becomes so difficult to spot these pulsating heartbeats of fascism within them. Clavicular and the other looksmaxxing creators that whisper secrets to men about how to improve their looks are simply another reincarnation of all of this. This style of content has been around on the internet for years now, just shedding and re-coining the kinds of gobbledygook that all communicate the same thing. Take the 2012 ulzzang resurgence, the first time that we began to see the Hallyu wave really take hold on the West. Any ulzzang veteran would immediately recognize a looksmaxxer’s playbook. If you weren’t there, “ulzzang” is a Korean term quite literally meaning “best face,” and in the dawn of social media, ulzzang influencers rose to prominence by winning online votes where people would rank contestants’ faces for “natural” and “pure” beauty, which was at that point characterized by gigantic doe eyes, cherubic faces, and other childlike features like bangs, rosy cheeks, and some bullshit like bows, ruffles, and kaomojis. If you were there, you remember when Bubzbeauty was recommending jaw straps on her YouTube channel in 2012, when that fuckass “Gwiyomi” song accelerated the usage of unnecessary peace signs, and when K-pop idols started appearing with so many shaved mandible surgeries that the look became known as the “SM jaw,” for talent agency SM Entertainment.

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All of the elements from this cultural bubble bear the same markings as the Clavicular brand of looksmaxxers: an internal world of idols renowned solely for their adherence to an ironclad beauty standard, a language that may sound totally nonsensical to the unsuspecting onlooker, and a strong belief that beauty is something that can be highly regimented, voted up or down, the ranking shifted by your own perseverance, dedication and hard work. Even the news clips about ulzzang influencers and Clavicular have a familiar ring: in 2012, Yahoo Singapore illustrated the former as “elfin-looking”; fourteen years later, for the same publication, Kelsey Weekman would describe the latter as “a 20-year-old with the face of an elf prince.”

For the average user, inundated with so much beauty content, it becomes difficult to know when a line is being crossed. Yeah, we can laugh about the fact that men are paying to attend Mogwarts Academy to be told to drink water and lift a kettleball, but is it really so different from buying a weighted walking vest off of TikTok Shop because everyone’s telling you to get 10,000 steps a day? Women therapy-speak their way into justifying their eating disorders while men search for an answer to their loneliness on Reddit and find a community of men who support them, who also happen to believe that the reason for their collective sadness is because women wear makeup to lie to them. Looksmaxxing is everywhere, and because we accept it more readily online, are so quick to moralize beauty to the highest degree, these pulsating undercurrents of individualistic, right-wing ideology persist through the posts.

At the very heart of it all, we all wonder whether we are beautiful, whether we are beautiful enough for someone else, if other people can see the things we think make us less beautiful. We have all wondered if there is something we can do to make us more beautiful in the eyes of society. These are deeply personal questions, ones that focus solely on your body and mind and soul. But now, we ask them on highly public forums. Today, you can fold the inside of your brain out and dump it onto Reddit dot com, and within hours read a chorus of voices — who you do not know, who do not identify themselves, and who all sound like you — lobby answers back. Chat, any advice on how I can level up? Selfie attached. There are plenty of these posts, all across the internet, of people standing in the privacy of their own rooms, holding the phone close to their faces as they write the caption by themselves, inviting the world to comment on their bodies and faces.

I don’t think it’s wrong to desire beauty. To even quest for it. Or find joy in feeling it. So no, I am not here to say that your Crest whitening strips are evil (but you should probably stop using them so much or else you’re going to get really bad enamel sensitivity). But it is important to come up for air. To wonder, even occasionally, why you think certain things are beautiful and why certain things are ugly. Where that comes from. Who it hurts when you punish your face and body for not adhering to a certain ideal. And who sold you that idea, and what other ways they might be influencing your worldview. Your midface, your positive canthal tilt, your InBody results, these things are not the things that determine if you are beautiful or not. If you want a beautiful life, go live one. It’s truly not that hard.

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More from Steffi:

• I am now Slate’s dating advice columnist — you can read my reporting talking to men who ghost on why they do that and my thoughts for women who are scared by their friends who are settling down with mediocre men.

• For Fast Company, I interviewed people who bought property in the metaverse, and what happened to their money amidst the shutdown.

• I’m back from Milan and reviewed IKEA’s latest collection for Highsnobiety. My travel guide shall be coming soon.

• Earlier this year, I spent a month dating exclusively IRL for Yahoo, to try and find out if people actually still meet in person. I went everywhere — a climbing gym, an Australian sports bar, the Heated Rivalry lookalike contest. I did it all for, well, content.

My first stop earlier this month was a four-day trip to Prague (I also went hiking in Germany’s Black Forest for a week, but we’ll focus on the cuntier part for now). I know everyone talks about Santorini or Barcelona for their #eurosummer, but Prague is highly slept on. If you love vintage shopping, Instagram-bait food spots, and the works of Franz Kafka and Rainer Maria Rilke, you will adore this romantic city. It’s idyllic and intuitive; everywhere you look, there’s something for your senses to chew on. One more thing! None of these recommendations are sponsored or paywalled; this is just for the love of the game, and (just being so honest here) a 2026 tax write-off. Okay, that’s all! Let’s do it:

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Pre-Trip Notes

I have traveled almost every year to Europe for the past 18 years (cue booing), and after a while, I stopped flying anywhere with check-in luggage. In my opinion, check-ins are a massive waste of time. I hate carrying it around, especially on the old cobblestone streets. I hate hauling it up flights of stairs. I hate the constant fear that the airline is going to lose it (and the moment you decide to ignore your fear is always the moment they lose it). But I needed to pack a lot of clothes, since spring in Prague means anywhere from 40 to 70 degrees Fahrenheit. My compromise was to only bring two pairs of shoes (Sambas, Tabi flats) and instead pack two coats, which did in fact fit into one carry-on. This ended up being the correct move — it was not warm enough at any point to leave the coat at home. I switched between both my long wool coat and a puffer, though the latter doesn’t really seem to be a widespread sartorial choice in Prague. I feel like European women are always wearing cropped brown leather bomber jackets that have the gigantic lapels. However puffers are mostly air so they pack really well; just fold it in half, on top of everything, and then sit on your suitcase to push all the air out. We have vacuum suction at home.

Some more tips: I bought data on Eskimo (I have trips to both Asia and Europe on the calendar, so I got 3GB on the global plan). Buy transit tickets on the Pražská integrovaná doprava (PID) app ahead of time; it’s very easy to use and applies to both the subway and tram. The Czech Republic also uses korunas, not euros, and I roughly estimated the USD to CZK conversion by dividing by 22. If you don’t want to carry cash on you, get a travel credit card that has no foreign transaction fees. “Dobrý den” is “hello” in Czech, and “děkuju” is “thank you.” There are more non-white people than you might expect (more on this later). Prague is also obviously a major tourism hub, so you will more often than not hear Americans talking really loudly at any given moment (comforting). Walking around at night in Prague II and III, as a woman, felt incredibly safe. The waiter gave us free shots one night and I drunkenly meandered around the Kostel Panny Marie Sněžné sometime past midnight and it was entirely fine.

Logistics

The total flight time was seven and a half hours, with a three-hour layover in Dublin. Aer Lingus is such an unserious flight experience: there are always, respectfully, a critical mass of redheaded travelers in the security line, and the last time I flew with them, they put me at the back of the plane and then served beans for dinner. The plane is like, always a little grimy, and Dublin Airpot has to be one of the most ridiculous airports I’ve ever been in. It doesn’t even feel committed to being an airport — there’s no food anywhere except Tayto crisp packets and Tesco meal deals at the W.H. Smith stands (which are actually just like, random store shelves put up in the middle of the terminal), and my connecting gate was in one of those outhouse terminals that I had to take a bus to. It’s all a deeply unserious business. I binged all of Normal People, slept on the second leg, and landed at Prague at nine in the morning feeling horrendous. Can’t complain, though. We ball.

Another unserious thing to note is the hotel we stayed at, MOOo Downtown, which is in fact cow-themed, but is really, really nice. The serviced, gut-renovated apartments still have the building’s old crown molding, and there’s little charming details like a balcony overlooking the street. The statue, Man with an Umbrella, was also literally hanging right outside the doorstep when we were there, which felt serendipitous.

Sightseeing

Prague is divided into 22 districts, but most of the touristy stuff is located in the first 7. Most of our time was divided between Prague II and Prague III, with a day spent in Prague VII. I went to the Grotta Umělá jeskyně twice, and the second time there was a dance class happening near the fountain. The Mucha Foundation Art Museum, which focused on the life and work of Alphonse Mucha, was a great explainer to all the public Mucha works you can find in the city, including at the Municipal House and this post office. Charles Bridge is so crowded at any point in the day but you can’t deny that they went off on the architecture. The clock tower is beautiful but underwhelming. Of course, for the Kafkaesque girls, there’s Franz’s rotating head, the museum, and the many other monuments in his name. I feel like most of the monuments in Prague are the kind where you kind of poke around for a few seconds and look, but the fun of it is serendipitously running into them on the way to something else, so I wouldn’t stress about making destinations of these places. It’s more fun to bookmark them and then see what’s up when you’re already nearby.

Food

My destinations, when exploring Prague, were restaurants. I basically spent four days just walking around to the next place to eat. A lot of these spots I’m about to recommend are newer establishments that all kind of look like Apple Stores which serve matcha (the cultural homogenization of it all), but a great omelette is a great omelette, and that must be recommended. I ate great eggs at may cafe (which reformed bullet journal girls will love — get the French toast, too) and ô-mai (brunch food served by obscenely hot Viet-Czech baddies) in Prague II.

There’s also the entire reason I was in Prague to begin with: the tiramisu at Matilda, which my sister first advertised to me as the best tiramisu she’s ever eaten in the entire world, ever. I actually don’t really even think that’s an undersell. They also make pasta in-house, but my specific opinion is that in-house pasta is largely kind of gimmicky, and to charge anything over fifteen dollars for pasta is a Caucasian grift. What is neither Caucasian nor a grift, though, is Li Chun, who also makes homemade noodles, but is actually very worth the visit, especially if you are cold and in desperate need of soup. There are a lot of Asian-owned businesses in Prague, and it felt very notable to speak Mandarin to someone in the middle of the Czech Republic. Unfortunately, I was forced to watch two people hover-squat over their seats as they made out across the table at Bee’s Tapas, but fortunately, the sea bass was so good, I didn’t care.

What about the local cuisine! No offense, but I’m pescatarian and also not white, so I took one look at what Czech cuisine had to offer and decided that most of this would not be in the cards for me. However, I did love eating tart cherry makový from any Pekárna Kabát, which tastes like sour jam spread over egg-washed bolo bao, poppy seed kolaches, and sesame-dotted loupák, which is like a citrusy precursor to the croissant. And of course, I loved drinking Czech beer: dark Kozel, honey lager, Pilsner on tap. I thought Bohemia paprika chips were fine. I was confused why all the grocery stories are British ones.

I really appreciated that there was a critical mass of Asian Czech people living in Prague. I think when you are not white, seeing people who look like you is comforting, even if you walk very different paths of life. Still, I found myself regularly but pleasantly confused by the fact that every Asian Czech young person I met looked like they were from Irvine, California: perms and oversized gray sweatshirts with the wire-rimmed glasses, or false lashes and almond-shaped Gel X nails with a chrome finish. The internet is an incredible cultural equalizer! Maybe they’re Czech, and I’m American, but we’re both Asian and scroll a lot on TikTok. That’s beautiful to me.

Shopping

As for shopping, I have few souvenirs to show for it, but many links for your future travels. The interior of Lula Vintage is everything a curated collection lover could ask for. I’m incredibly cheap and think $100 for Galliano pants is still not a good deal, but I greatly enjoyed the experience of ringing a buzzer and walking six flights of a residential apartment building to enter this store. Stationery shop Papelote obchod Spálená is a highly curated modern storefront tucked onto a main street — I liked the pen selection a lot and bought two highlighters there. Graphite heads are also probably already familiar with the renowned Czech pencil maker, Koh-i-Noor Hardtmuth, which Papírnictví AKM locations carry all over the city, but I dropped a piece of sketching charcoal in one and the shopkeeper was really mean about it even after I paid my 50 cents to buy it, so I am loath to recommend out of sheer spite.

I wish I had bought something from Salon — Koncept Letná, a tiny subbasement studio in Prague VII which housed a really, really well-priced collection of small artists’ work in different mediums. But when I went, I intruded on an exhibition that was really just a group of artist friends drinking red wine, so I think I got social anxiety and kind of awkwardly rushed through the gallery. Antique store Lax around the corner has a packed collection of hypebeast modern interior pieces, and as you can expect, there were no less than five male manipulators pressed up against the vintage USM as soon as I walked in. There was also no way anything from Komodi Vintage would fit into my suitcase, but the aforementioned sister previously brought a pair of mid-century Bohemian martini glasses back to the States for me from Komodi, and they are still one of my most treasured possessions. I saw a beautiful orange glass pitcher with a spiral handle there, so if you bought that pitcher, just know that I will be inside your air vents imminently.

Final Stats

In my opinion, four to five days is a perfect amount of time. Prague isn’t one of those places were you feel like there are infinite things to see and you are actively losing time by meandering; the best strategy, in my opinion, is just to focus on curating the vibe as much as possible. Have a beer! Have a pastry! Walk around and feel the sun thaw your wizened face. See something old and cool. Don’t stress yourself out too much.

• Average step count: 15,000

• Total flight time (including layover): 10.5 hours

• Longest commute time within the city: 30 minutes

• Airport-to-city time: 1 hour

The next stops: Milan, Tokyo, Kyoto, Shanghai, and Seoul.

I’ll talk to you in Milan next,

-s

I’m looking for recommendations.

Not really any specific genre or type of recommendations, I’m just looking for new stuff to try out. I’m trying to change it all up. It’s lucky for me, then, that I know some of the coolest people around who can impart their great taste: food to try, skincare to attempt, habits that make their busy lives as easy and fun as possible. So I’m talking with them, and sharing their suggestions with you.

If you’re a fan of K-pop, you’ve heard of Billlie. The seven-member girl group had fans even before they debuted together — they were on just about every major competition show (real ones would remember Moon Sua from Unpretty Rap Star, Suhyeon from Produce 101 and Mix Nine, Siyoon from K-Pop Star and Sheon from the show that took over my life, Girls Planet 999). They’ve released songs in Korean and Japanese, performed on Apple TV’s KPOPPED with Megan thee Stallion, and just last month dropped a pre-release single, “cloud palace ~ false awakening,” a jazzy, dreamy pop soundscape that also came with a very fun live recording (that I’ve linked, of course). They’re performing in Yokohama, Japan next week, so I’m very glad that I got to sit down with them and ask for a few of their recommendations before their upcoming show. Here’s all the suggestions they have for it’s steffi:

Moon Sua recommends…

💅 Not biting your nails: One habit I really wanted to fix before was biting my nails without realizing it, and now I hardly do it anymore. Once I became more conscious of it, that habit naturally went away.

🎩 Hats: I’ve been into comfortable outfits in neutral colors lately. Rather than dressing up too much, I like a natural, effortless style, and sometimes I add a hat as a little touch to my fashion.

💻 YouTube talk shows: I really like watching OTT platforms and YouTube content. I enjoy talk shows like Pinggyego and Salon Drip, and I sometimes imagine what kinds of stories we’d talk about if we were on the show. I prefer dramas over movies, and recently I’ve been enjoying the drama Taxi Driver 3.

Siyoon recommends…

🍪 Dubai chocolate cookie: I’ve been really into the ‘Dubai chewy cookie’ that’s been trending on social media. In Korea, people call it ‘dujjonku.’ The texture is super unique, and once you try it, it just keeps popping into your head. I see it all the time on social media, which honestly just makes me crave it more. It’s way more addictive than you think.

🧠 Not overthinking stuff: I used to spend a long time overthinking even small things. But these days, I’m trying to trust myself more. Instead of pressuring myself, I try to acknowledge who I am right now, and that’s made my mind feel much lighter.

💧Moisturizing a lot: These days, I’ve realized how important skincare is. Just moisturizing well before makeup makes such a big difference. No matter how busy I am, I always try to focus on hydration. I think this foundational care is really the most effective and important.

Haruna is looking for recommendations on:

“I’ve been wanting to find a new hobby lately, but it’s harder than I thought. I’d love to get recommendations from [our fans], if there are any hobbies you enjoy or activities you can do for a long time, even small ones?”

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Haram recommends…

👩‍🍳 Culinary Class Wars: Lately, I’ve been watching all kinds of genres. I really enjoyed Can This Love Be Translated? and Culinary Class Wars, and I also rewatched Reply 1988 not long ago. That drama always leaves a warm feeling that lasts, which is why I love it so much. It also makes me think that I’d like to try singing original soundtracks someday.

🌭 Sausage: The snack I’d recommend is sausage. It’s easy to snack on before or after practice or while traveling, and you can easily get it at convenience stores. It’s a simple snack to refill your energy, so I really like it.

💄 YouTube Shorts makeup tutorials: I’m really interested in makeup, so I’ve been watching a lot of makeup tutorials on YouTube Shorts that are trending lately. They pack so many tips and trends into such short clips, so they’re fun to watch, and sometimes I even try them out myself.

Steffi asks: “Do you watch fan edits of yourself?”

Suhyeon: I actually look up fan-made videos pretty often. I watch videos, photos, drawings, and even clips from stages. While watching, I think about what parts fans enjoy the most and what I could improve on stage. More than anything, every post, photo, and video that fans upload means so much to me and gives me a lot of strength.

Moon Sua: I totally watch them! I’ve always liked surfing the internet, and fan edits are filled with so much love that they’re honestly incomparable to anything else. I can’t stop smiling while watching them, and later my cheeks actually start to hurt. I’m just so grateful and happy.

Sheon recommends…

🥑 Avocado smoothie: I often drink avocado-banana or avocado-yogurt smoothies, and just one glass of this smoothie is really filling. It’s tasty and healthy, which is why I’m especially into it these days.

Tsuki recommends…

🍋 Lemon water: I start my mornings by drinking lemon water these days. It’s my own little routine to start the day feeling refreshed. I recommend it to Belllie’ve too!

🫶 Hand care: The beauty tip I’ve been paying the most attention to lately is hand care. I’ve been consistently taking care of my cuticles, and although it’s a small detail, it really makes my overall look feel cleaner.

📸 Bringing a camera on your trip: My travel tip is to always bring a camera. You can take photos with your phone, but using a camera captures the atmosphere and emotions of a place more vividly. I also make sure to try the local food wherever I go. Experiencing the local flavors of that city is one of the best parts of traveling for me.

Sheon’s average weekly screen time is: 5-6 hours

“My average weekly screen time is probably around five to six hours. I mostly use social media or watch video content, and during breaks, I tend to look for lighter content to enjoy. I also like checking what kind of content our fans like.”

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Haruna recommends…

🐆 Animal print: Leopard prints have been catching my eye a lot. I want to try using leopard-pattern items as statement pieces in different styles. I think it’d also be fun to use leopard print in stage outfits.

🥩 Yukhoe as a struggle meal: When I have zero energy, the first foods I think of are salmon or yukhoe (Korean raw beef), which are my favorites. They’re mild and simple but high in protein, so I feel energized after eating them. Belllie’ve, if you need energy, think of me and try salmon or yukhoe!

Suhyeon recommends…

💊 Supplements: These days, when I feel low on energy, I try to make sure I take my supplements. Eating proper meals is the most important, of course, but when I’m busy with schedules, supplements help fill in those gaps. I used to reach for sweets like ice cream or chocolate, but now I’m trying to make healthier choices for my body.

📓 Actually planning your vacation: I usually plan my trips to some extent. For example, I organize the foods I want to try and places I want to go, then plan the overall route. That makes traveling more efficient, saves time and energy, and allows me to enjoy the trip more comfortably.

In 2025, I did many things that I am proud of. I wrote my first cover story for Highsnobiety featuring my fellow Michigan hometown girl, Chase Sui Wonders (The Studio, Bodies Bodies Bodies). I also flew to Los Angeles for Highsnob to interview girl group KATSEYE on the set of their GAP campaign; somewhere in my journal, there is an entry where I write, “I guess I am here to cover this jeans ad?” If only I knew then what that jeans ad would become. For the second year in a row, I joined the Rolling Stone team to decide and interview the Top Creators of 2025, and we ended up sparking some discourse between Caleb Hearon and MrBeast. This time last year I was busy with internet culture news, appearing on Vox’s Today, Explained and WNYC among other radio spots to share my reporting on the temporary shuttering of TikTok and exodus to Xiaohongshu that I did for the Stone, The Atlantic, and Slate. Speaking of Slate, my final byline of 2025 was a giant profile on the business of Starbucks, which I have heard from several friends is being brought up independently by older relatives at holiday gatherings (always a career goal of mine).

In between, I taught a social writing workshop at Meta. I did live readings for Digital Void and Empty Set Magazine. I wrote for The Guardian, Teen Vogue, Bustle, Yahoo News, Fast Company and The Daily Beast. I hit 600 published articles over my entire career thus far. If you want to hear about my work, I talked about it this summer on Kelsey Kruss’ podcast, Kronikled.

Meanwhile, it’s steffi has continued to grow, which I am the most grateful for. Here, I wrote my whimsy war manifesto, my argument against the current-day “I don’t dream of labor” mentality, and of course my question about if skinnytok got Michelle Obama. Thank you for reading and sharing and subscribing. And thank you especially to all my haters, who will be my waiters when I dine at the table of success. See you very soon.

XOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOX

2026 Ins/Outs

In:

• Jeffrey Campbell Lita boots

• Making reservations on the phone

• Ragebaiting for fun

• Copy-pasting ChatGPT outputs without editing at all (and all other forms of telling people, candidly and earnestly, that you are an idiot)

• Venting at your local representative’s office on a regular basis

• Big ass sandwich

• Shared photo albums

• Making Molotov cocktails inside the Wicked x Target Stanley cup

• Wearing goggles

• Insubordination

• Now You See Me (all of them). Can you believe there are seven Horsemen now?

• Just going to sleep

• The Detroit Institute of Arts

• Stretching a LOT

• Drugstore makeup

• Lowballing

• Theremins

Out:

• Cigarettes

• “Chronically online.” Yes?

• Signature scents

• Dimes Square, whatever the fuck that means

• Titling YouTube workout videos “10 MINUTE ITTY BITTY TEENY TINY WAIST GIGANTIC SHOCKING DUMP TRUCK ASS (NO JUMPING)”

• Being bad with money

• Having professional Peter Pan syndrome. Just get old!

• Dairy products

• Japan obsession

• Cigarettes…

• Solidcore

• Not knowing how to ask follow-up questions

• Performative reading. I know some people argue that “they’re at least reading something.” Well over the past few years I have met many men who have read the works of bell hooks and Charlotte Brontë and even stan specific pop divas and they have ALL acted confused when the women in their lives asked for them to communicate their feelings even a little bit. It is a RUSE! It is FALSE ADVERTISING! A form of CULTURAL APPROPRIATION! And I will NOT STAND FOR IT!

• “Finding your style”

Michelle Obama has dropped a lot of weight — so much weight that the Ozempic accusations have already begun. You would think that being on the Mount Rushmore of objectively coolest First Ladies would exempt you from the cesspool hard-wired diet culture and its watchdogs, but here she is, on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert looking noticeably, well, different. Am I naive to think that I never thought this would happen? A public figure like Michelle Obama just seemed above a dramatic body change. I guess she was trying to put more fruit in the lunchroom way back when, but I didn’t think that there was anything more to it, like when a First Lady announces her big mission will be anti-cyberbullying efforts when it’s very clear that the only social media she has ever used is Pinterest. It just sounds nice, you know? I genuinely believed that Michelle Obama’s status exempted her from the panopticon of feminine consumption; that is to say, I thought that her sitting in one of the nation’s most prevalent political seats for almost a decade and also holding several Ivy League degrees forever separated her from the world of CoolSculpting and Rejuvacare Ozempatches. Like, when Michelle Obama was our First Lady, Miley Cyrus was wearing “space buns” (“space buns”) on the seminal appropriation album Bangerz while twerking on Robin Thicke in a latex swimsuit, yet somehow these two women have gone through the same body transformation over the past few years. That thread is spooky to me.

Before we continue, here’s my preempted Notes app disclaimer that will allow me to continue speaking, since you have to do this on our chatroom-ass internet now: no, I do not have a personal window into the life of Michelle Obama, nor do I have Meghan Trainor’s phone number! I was not on set to witness whatever the hell Warner Bros. Studios did to the Wicked cast. I understand that it is perhaps unfair to cast passing judgment about peoples’ changing bodies, so if you’d like to digitally stone me for this, it is entirely within your right, though I will in return call you chopped and unc, and that is entirely within my right. I bring this up because I do think we should critically examine this sweeping trend towards thinness, particularly among celebrity at levels that we have historically divorced from the body — politicians, billionaires and their partners, anyone who sits at the throne of power rather than stands in the court as entertainer.

Anyone who has picked up a book (even performatively) in the last two years understands that beauty standards are amorphous, and this level of cultural stock in thinness is not really good for us. Father_Karine aptly wrote the great anti-cosmetic surgery essay that tied the phenonema of feminine narcissism and inferiorized woman as perfect consumer to the great wave of young women stapling their skin to the backs of their heads (Bella Hadid), and the great wave of middle-aged women getting yassified into anonymity (Lauren Sanchez). There is a lot of theory written over the past 60 years that very succinctly describes how shitty it feels to pursue the prescribed feminine under false feminist conditions: the pressure to lose weight, but in a coded way that performs to others as an act of health rather than vanity; and feeding back into this, the reciprocal inability to express hesitation, scrunity or any vague critical thought towards our larger pursuit of beauty without being basically bludgeoned to death by the women who will call you a mean girl or “not a girl’s girl.” It is an endless lie, one that tires us and takes our money and, at its most extreme, makes soup of our faces and bodies as we hope we become acceptable enough to earn visibility, access and favorability. Refer to The Substance, Nightbitch, and Babygirl (please note that all of these films were released in the past year). I know Simone de Beauvoir gets heavy airtime on this godforsaken platform, yet her writing remains true: “One is not born, but, rather, becomes a woman.”

So I guess I am more interested in why this age of Wafering is returning, as opposed to how it makes us feel, because the answer I have to that is just, “like shit.” The why is trickier ground to parse. People gain and lose weight all the time, and celebrities publicly gain and lose weight all the time, so the why is difficult to keep clean without some assumption of intent. It is in this maze that the conversation tends to diverge. Here, I will do my best to keep this tied to my perspective in order to navigate this contentious ground:

I am not as shocked by Ariana Grande getting really, really skinny because her looks have always been commodity for consumption. The same can be said of any other entertainer. These people are also products of the entertainment industry, and that standing is ripe ground for both pity and envy. Celebrity is a leg of power, a class of social power, which entitles them to hold more cards than the average person. Yet their body and face do not belong to just them anymore. That is very sad, which often leads me to humanize them more than treat them as a jurisdiction. But I am stunned by the Serena Williams and Michelle Obama of it all. In my head, I have lived under the assumption that there is some unspoken point where you can earn your way out of the hamster wheel, and maybe there used to be a time where that was true. Williams’ and Obama’s power was never explicitly tied to their beauty, even though, yes, their beauty was unfairly scrutinized and judged over and over again. But at the end of the day, Michelle Obama was still the First Lady, and Serena Williams was still the GOAT, and the haters could, as they say, stay mad. At a personal level, I think I was working hard with the hope that if I am smart or skilled enough, I could hold power in the way they did, without my access being weighed in part by the Eurocentrism and symmetry of my face or my actual literal weight. Watching them bend the knee kind of scares me. In this revelation, I am rediscovering the illusion of choice feminism. I think this is why it feels insidious when people say that skinny is back. I think it’s why we’re so spooked and unsettled by it. We are admitting to losing (maybe giving up on) a long and hard-fought battle.

Looking through the other end of the telescope, this trend seems to indicate that internet culture and the maintenance of power are being bound closer together, perhaps more than ever. Now, when our resources are plentiful, discourse is bottomless, and the bar must be constantly raised (sorry for using your language, Michelle) in order to guarding some semblance of elitism, the internet’s vision of beauty is important to access power, and power is maintained by playing into the internet’s vision of beauty. Be beautiful one fateful time and the algorithm will seem to sweep you straight into millions of dollars. Be beautiful and appealing many times and you can become a monstrous alt-right radicalizer, just like Ballerina Farm. Yes, internet culture journalists have often talked about how those dictating the top–down wave of internet culture are holding more political chips than ever (the Nelk Boys interviewing Donald Trump and Kamala Harris on Call Her Daddy of it all); here, this feels like the inverse, where public figures are trying to keep up with whatever the internet is deeming aspirational, which includes the wide-reaching and sly evangelism of SkinnyTok (I’ll say it again, you don’t actually want to get Botox “for yourself,” and preemptive anti-aging just makes you sound like a flop magician who is trying and failing to stop time). Of course, here, this assumes that weight loss is an intentional decision rather than one of circumstance, and while I am obliged to say that I don’t actually know why everyone’s dropping weight, I think the argument remains true. Also, Serena Williams is literally selling Ozempic, so I think this is all fair enough.

Yes, the “skinny is back” alarm bells are being sounded off across all corners of the internet, but any its steffi reader could tell you that the pursuit of beauty is actually the pursuit of power, which buys you liberty, and these two things are deeply tied together. You don’t even think these celebrities look good — you miss their old faces. So if skinny is back, and you think it’s ugly, then who the fuck is flying the plane right now?

It’s obvious why “I don’t dream of labor” has become such a widespread mantra on social media. Wages are not rising at the same level as the ballooning cost of living, layoffs are widespread with no hope of new jobs on the horizon, and with the dawning realization that tariffs and AI will wipe out a huge percentage of white collar jobs, we’re looking at each other and thinking, so what’s the point of trying to work hard? Girlboss culture was a scam. Nobody actually gives a fuck if you’re Leaning In or not. It becomes easier to dream of quiet quitting. Of a soft life. A routine where you don’t have to work so hard for such meager results—in fact, how about one where the relationship is totally reversed! How about little work for abundant results? A low-effort, high-paying, totally remote job? That is the life you deserve to live after years of putting your nose to the grindstone. That’s the reward that you really want. What kind of idiot looked out at the great expanse of the Pacific Ocean and decided to create Microsoft Teams?

There is such heartbreak in this, even if we don’t want to admit it. There’s heartbreak in your tedious job, your quietly humiliating routine where it always seems like you give more than you get. Nothing feels good about being disappointed, about being told you can be important before being shown how truly dispensable you are. Promises of meritocratic reward were made to us before we could internalize the weight of them and shattered over and over again, often before we had the chance to understand why and how they were broken.

The phrase was first said by James Baldwin to Nikki Giovanni in 1971 as a critique of this exploitative capitalist system (“I have no dream job”), but since it’s become a TikTok soundbite in 2022, it now feels more like a rebranding of people’s heartbreak, an escape exit out of having to grapple with existential rage. The rinse-and-repeat dissemination method of digital activism has always been to boil down a concept to its SEO bones and throw this term back out to the masses for their own interpretation. In its virality, “labor” has been redefined from a job to work in its entirety. Its application now feels more like work is the bad boyfriend who embarrassed you and then dumped you, and the statement is the thing that you tell me in an effort to make it seem like you’re less floppy and pathetic than you actually feel. No, no, no, you didn’t get dumped. It was mutual. I don’t dream of it. I don’t even fucking want it. Any of this. I have agency. No, really.

The discrepancy here, of course, is that instead of redirecting this energy towards other pursuits, people have decided that it is socially acceptable to give up dreaming entirely. Look no further than the rise of tradwife videos, of hypergamy influencers push dating rich men as a feminist act, of the many facets of girlhood content that are really more about fear of womanhood than any love for childhood. All these things are about ceding individual agency to some external life manager, and soon after, offer consumption as a salve (what’s TikTok without TikTok Shop, you know). Barbara Kruger said “I shop, therefore I am,” and we see this still here. Get a sweet treat for your sadness, get a trinket for your inner child. You can dream of an apartment filled with things, of an iced latte every morning, of a snatched waist that you build in Lagree classes. That’s much easier, and so much more within your control.

It’s not to say that these little things aren’t important. Evidence of survival is meaningful in so many ways. But none of these things are solutions to the core issue. You’re still sad, even in all your worldly comforts, because you make nothing. In this spiral, you feel unfulfilled because your life is entirely centered around extraction and consumption.

I think there is something romantic about having a dream for yourself and your community that can exist away from the extractive, sad work that you must do in order to pay rent every month. There is great love in labor. It’s why people still try and do good at jobs that they feel dispassionate about; it feels like at least you’re not totally throwing your time down the drain. bell hooks said working with love renews the spirit and all that. My friend wrote (personally, in an email to their friends, not in an article) about going to the Labor Notes conference where one of the speakers said that a successful labor movement requires organizers to be good at their jobs. People believe in an organizer’s abilities more when they have accumulated respect and trust among their colleagues as a figure people can turn to with their problems. Love and labor.

I also find the TikTok-era usage of “I don’t dream of labor” to be quite untrue. I see people everywhere who do dream of making things, of building something better, but they say they don’t dream of labor when the real problem is that they fear articulating their actual dreams. They do not know, or perhaps are frightened to admit, the work involved in moving closer to these dreams. I don’t think you have to have a dream job. But I think some of you itch to work. I think it’s why you are flocking to craft-based activities like pottery and crocheting, propelled by TikToks about the importance of finding hobbies, why you are still so outraged by the state of the world.

You really don’t dream of labor? Any labor? I kind of think you do. I think you dream of creating something with your own two hands and cradling it with the satisfaction that it belongs to you alone, even if it is as small as making a meal for yourself and a friend. I think you quietly dream of making something that you can be proud of, so that the time spent in your flesh bag of a body isn’t solely remembered by digital transmissions of Excel charts and emails that legally belong to a corporation. I believe you dream of a life where you don’t have to work so hard for nothing, of a world where everyone can enjoy peace and safety, but you feel as though there is nothing you can do in the face of powers-that-be, and it scares you to admit that you dream this at all, because this is an uphill battle with promised sorrow along the way.

I think this and feel the same despair you do. I believe things will get worse before they get better. But I think I will dream of better anyways. I want to get up and work these days. And to be honest, I think it’s the only thing that matters.

Most of this is because of politics. Politics, we say, tearing our hair out once more! Steve Bannon’s “flood the zone” strategy, intended to make news outlets and the public alike feel like we’re being whiplashed with news while explicitly and covertly executing fascist policy, has entered in full force in the first eight months of Donald Trump’s second term. Every day feels like you’re being bashed in the face like a birthday piñata: No more Department of Education! The Gulf of Mexico is now the Gulf of America! Tariffs! No tariffs! We’re gutting USAID and the CFPB—you didn’t know what they did for you as an America? No one taught you that in school? You didn’t read about it in the news that was paywalled because Marc Benioff bought TIME and Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post? That’s your own fault! Fuck you! Tariffs again! Mass deportations! AI is gutting white collar jobs! They’re bombing Iran for fun! World War III! And now, here’s Elon Musk being ugly.

It is difficult to be online, to read the news, to open up your phone without your brain activating your fight-or-flight response because all of your synapses lit up like a Christmas tree. The future seems to be at a crossroads, every decision unsure and halting about what is really coming next. On the bad days, we are all just grasping to the last life raft of a boat being blown up by a bunch of the un-funniest losers you’ve ever seen in your life. Rent is skyrocketing, people are asking ChatGPT to make them weekly grocery lists, the rich are only getting richer. It’s enough to make anyone’s head spin. Yet we scroll onto the next post anyway.

Nihilism and doomerism run rampant as a result. Trust in the government, in media and in society is at an all-time low. Everyone asks, are we cooked? For the first time in a long time, it really seems that way.

Most of this job, where you observe and report on this abyss of the internet, is about screaming at people that the internet is a funhouse that you need to navigate with caution. A lot of this shit is not real, but a lot of the effects are. Sure, reporters and academics are bound to the onerous ethics of corroboration and accountability, but just under their feet is a trapdoor where names are traded in for screen handles, facts are traded in for takes, and fault is assigned to whoever got cancelled most recently or gets ratio’ed the hardest. The vast majority of influencers who stand to make a dollar off of your view can be thrown into this bucket of grifters (nothing made that point clearer than when we thought TikTok was being shuttered and many creators admitted to lying on camera for engagement…another video made for engagement).

There has never been a greater optical illusion than the phantasmagoria of your own algorithm. So it’s more important than ever to recognize that this shit is not real, but the effects are. And that’s a reminder for everyone, not just Boomers. It’s our most base desire to chase the shiniest thing, and the internet is a cesspool for us to give into those inclinations, to commit all seven sins at once, just by hitting the like and repost and reply buttons. Nobody wants to listen anymore, because it’s so much more profitable, so much more rewarding, to get the tea and add to the discourse. So much faster and more fun, too! Perhaps you think you are immune to it, but you are not. Every post you engage with is another point creating the constellation of stars in the digital sky above your head. Newspapers used to hem and haw over what story goes on the front page is because they recognized that it’s their responsibility to ground everyone in a common sense of reality and urgency; now, with the For You page, that sense of shared truth has been revoked entirely, so that your reality is now different from your partner’s, your family’s, and the people sitting next to you on the train. There is no shared sense of priority or perspective beyond the self. Look no further than the recent refrain: I built this FYP brick by brick. You are the architect for your own reality now, where everything is entirely catered to you and dependent on your constant ability to be a critical thinker and have your wits about you, even when you are scrolling while half-asleep in bed. It’s why you feel so seasick after scrolling for too long.

I have a long time pondering this question. Are we cooked? Is it really, really Joever? I can understand why it feels that way. We’ve lost sight of solid ground, and the waters we are entering are treacherous. But really? I don’t think we are.

We are in a whimsy drought. We are in a joie de vivre recession. No one wants to believe anymore, because they haven’t seen their manifestations become reality in so long. There is nothing tangible, let alone something tangible to believe in. But I have never felt more compelled that we are responsible for bringing whimsy back. This is an urgent message. It is incredibly time-sensitive.

People feel as though the world is not in their corner, and they don’t know who actually is. Grifters online only stand to gain from this. They tell you that everyone who disagrees with you is fake news, that there are snakes everywhere in the water, that you cannot trust anyone, because they are all out for themselves, and you should be, too. You have a counterpoint? Show us your name, age, location, username, job background, parent’s names—you know what, any of this can be faked anyway. Sic ‘em! And that’s how you get people like my doorman, who one day decided that my public reporting on the internet was enough common ground between the two of us to tell me that he cheated on his wife because of Dan Bilzerian’s podcasts. He would rather trust Dan Bilzerian’s self-proclaimed statements about getting tons of bitches in planes to reaffirm his manhood than just learn to trust himself.

I’m not here to tell you to log off, though. I think saying that is the same kind of energy as telling someone who is depressed to take a walk. The tentacles of the internet are too far-reaching for the problem to just be your screen time, because there’s also your uncle’s Facebook conspiracy theories that come up at dinner, your boyfriend’s sudden and obsessive interest in weightlifting creators, your best friend’s desire to buy boxes and boxes of bullshit on Temu.

What you need to do is get smarter about the internet. A lot of this shit is not real, and the moment you start treating it like it is, is when you lose the game entirely! You become the Boomer, working under a totally antiquated understanding of reality, where everything is determined by corporeal world first and then reflected online. You can’t let the rotating wheel of discourse determine your focus, or else you will get seasick along with the rest of the bozos who couldn’t hack their own algorithms. Internalize the fact that even the creators you love stand something to gain when they make a post online. Before, on television, you could separate out the channels of information: news, scripted shows, reality television, ad breaks, Martha Stewart Living, cooking channels, infomercials. Now, it’s up to you to figure it out. Not to say that everything on the internet is dangerous—I love a dense bean salad recipe, and I would be nowhere if it were not for the efforts of the Douyin makeup evangelists—but you have to make these distinctions of content yourself now.

Yes, you are correct, it is annoying and exhausting! So you also need to get delusional. More delusional than ever. I’m talking like, mantras in Post-It notes on your door, manifestation chakras, confirmation bias astrology delusional. Real lovers and yearners must come back in every sense of the word. A better future was never built because people were lethargically creeping their way towards what they thought was the next-safest option. A better future was always built because people held fast to an unending belief that things could and would be turned around by sheer will. And that hope is something which is made every day, of course.

It is hard to remember, because you have only lived so many years, and the world has entirely been this long for you. But your reality is one grain of sand among billions of realities that have trod uncertain paths before you. I recommend reading for this. It’s like James Baldwin said: “You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important.” You have to be willing to open your mind beyond your own fear so you can safeguard your future.

All of this requires you. In a world of intangibility, it’s up to you to create something that you can hold onto. Something that reminds you that it’s only really over when you say it’s over. I think it is better to approach the day with delusion than a perpetual fear. The former will protect you much better than the latter; it will remind you of what can still be done to get you to solid ground. I don’t think delusion is a bad thing in times like these. I think it is entirely necessary to get to tomorrow.

More like this:

• The it’s steffi guide on how to read the news.

• What to do when you feel angry at the world.

• On the McCarthyism of girl’s girl feminism.

More from Steffi:

Note: Usually, I operate under the assumption that no one really cares if this newsletter lives or dies, so it is very nice to hear that people are interested in reading it again. Here’s what I’ve been working on this year, if you want to read some of my reporting.

• Is she a girl’s girl—or just playing one? The great Love Island debate. — Yahoo

• Chase Sui Wonders is Crushing—Just Not How She Expected — Highsnobiety

• Here’s How Gen Z and Gen Alpha Are Using ChatGPT in Schools — Teen Vogue

• Why Steroids Are Turning Young Men Into Incels — Daily Beast

• It’s the One Thing Holding Many People Together. Trump’s Tariffs May Just Take It Away. — Slate

There is a strong idea of fraternity here, not because of a shared commonality between individuals, but rather the compulsion that you are nothings beating within the same fleshy walls, so there must be inherent community within it. It must be true. The men sitting atop this system, who hide their sexual hunger and bloodthirst and baldness, spread their pink legs wide across leather seats and rhapsodize about how everyone here is part of a family, a community, a team. They wax lyrical about it like they are preparing to make everyone jerk off over a cookie. Of course, they have no qualms about turning on these idealisms in the face of a dangling carrot. Money is the siren’s call; greed, a Hydra. True sustenance is slim. They want people who are hungry, they say. They want people who are insatiable.

I do not think fondly of the limited time I spent on the waterfront in Jersey City last year. I think about the months I felt disrespected, belittled, objectified. I think about the Mexican restaurant where blazered ciphers would gather for company tab margaritas and I felt a self-disgust so deep in my bones I thought I might be having some kind of deathly allergic reaction to cotija cheese. I think about the route I would take along the water in the moments I had alone, walking past the starchy shirts, the hungover interns, the brassy highlights and misshapen executives, staring at my hollowing reflection in the Hudson River, wondering if it would please get eaten by the water: Drown drown drown drown drown.

All throughout my life, I have been told that I must learn to keep these thoughts to myself. I have been called, no less than a dozen times by the same genre of crystal-wearing brunette woman: callous, rude, vulgar, brusque. Teachers said I must learn to think before I speak. Guidance counselors said, over and over: rise above and keep rage at bay, leave it as some gnarled, rotted thing that must be treated and sedated. I get why you’re mad, but you have to learn to channel it into something else. Rage is, they said, the thing that will cost you jobs and love and other people’s respect. Of course. The world is most unkind to young girls—no one wants a young girl who is unkind back. As you get older, you hear endless adages from any number of “professional development” resources about how ugliness and success live in separate universes. Life is tough, I was told. If you are angry about it, no one will admire you. No one will believe you. No one will listen to you. No one will love you.

When I began the year without dictation of job or money or general life direction once again, I told myself that time-worn mantra: my rage will get me nowhere. If you’re angry, no one will take you seriously, I told myself in a voice that sounded like an echo. Nobody wants to hear about how angry you are. But I’d never felt so much rage at once before. It spilled from me, like syrup dribbling through my orifices, so delicious and tempting to taste. I would spend mornings vibrating in a red haze, repeating mantras in my head as I pulled myself from bed: Drown the bad and everything with it. Drown the bad and everything with it. Drown the bad and everything with it. I wrote down lists of shit I hated: Zionists, polyester fabric, ChatGPT, industry lobbyists, weak-willed people. Jersey City. Jersey City. The friends who chose it over me. The people who said they cared but didn’t. Liberty Mutual ads. “Pilates body.” French bistros. The profession of consulting. Vodka waters. Pronouncing it “ah-loo-min-um.”

I was afraid of how angry I was, too. Everything around me already felt like it was falling apart—I didn’t want to crumble internally, too. I sternly asked myself if I was going to sink or swim. Drown the bad and everything with it.

So I forced myself to answer emails instead of repeat mantras. I crossed out my rage lists with to-do ones instead. I told everyone I was fine. Doing well, even. I didn’t want to be caught out in my unbecoming wrath, exposed and vulnerable, all my unattractive dangly bits hanging out for anyone to see. It was better to be fine. So I carried on. I made a list of publications I wanted to write for and published article after article in a kind of possessed madness, neatly checking off each new byline I thought would really prove to everyone just how fine and great I was. The people who watched my life fall apart in real time let me know how impressed they were. They told me I was killing it and doing great. I willed it to be true. I hid the shameful secret of my anger. I called its suppression a success. As long as they thought I was treading above water, that’s all that really mattered.

To be fair, there were a handful of moments where I could step back and admire how much I achieved. Most days, though, I did not feel proud of myself. Instead, I danced somewhere between fear and entrancement of the locked rage inside me. It was impossible to rein her in. I felt her clawing at my insides, lashing out when I least expected it: walking past a salad bar, scrolling on Instagram, coming face-to-face with old coworkers. I don’t even think I realized how much it was weighing on me until CT looked at me under fluorescent lights and told me that I needed to take a break. “It’s okay to be angry, you know,” they said. “I think you’re exhausted from trying not to be.” I burst into tears on the 6 train.

The day I allowed myself to feast on my fury felt like I was gorging. I made myself a banana split sundae of rage, smothering hot fudge onto strawberry-vanilla ice cream and spraying snowy trees of whipped cream on top. I made myself a Crispy Chicken Poblano of anger, shoveling bitter chicken-kale-lettuce-avocado into my mouth, delighting in the sourness and creaminess of this hate that had been brewing inside me, letting the flavor coat the walls of my oesophagus. I licked the syrup from my eyes and poured it into hot tea. I wrote more lists. I started adding to my email templates with raw, hand-written notes about the growing list of shit I hated: the G train, the overblown military budget, misappropriation of taxes to pay for genocide overseas, Eric Adams’ stupid fucking bracelets. I stopped worrying about what would happen if I got found out in my unsightliness. I imagined that part of me sinking to the bottom of the Hudson River.

I welcomed the new intimate space between my rage and me. I appreciated the spaces she filled in my heart, the way she made me feel truly full for the first time in a long time. We watched the oppressive humidity of summer ebb into the tepid rain of autumn, gamboling through the seasons hand-in-hand, brushing each others’ hair, dancing under moonlight. I felt her sugar-spun silhouette against mine and realized we were the same. The brunette women were wrong! My rage has been protecting me all along. I realized I would like to protect her, too. One day, I swam to shore and found hope waiting inside a bed of forget-me-nots.

We have coalesced in a Hesperidian way, my rage and me. We sing sweet song together in Hera’s garden of golden apples that could start a war. My rage is the only thing that compels me to wake up and see another day, the only thing that comforts me through a world that would rather be indifferent than angry. Earlier this year a cipher told me that something didn’t deserve his anger—it was beneath him. I think I find that to be the pinnacle of arrogance and entirely ignorant. Everything deserves my rage. Everything deserves my joy. Everything deserves my care. I am above no one, after all. Only a fool could believe that they live in a world where extraction without consequence is forever possible. Only a liar could believe that deprivation from the self could lead to some kind of enlightenment.

They tell me I will have a short life this way, being so angry. But I would much rather live a short life feeling intensely rather than a long and cold one thinking I am above feeling at all. I’ll be an emotional glutton if it means I can be something. What’s composure to the bloody organ that demands your hunger?

“when i die i hope no one who ever hurt me cries
and if they cry i hope their eyes fall out
and a million maggots that had made up their brains
crawl from the empty holes and devour the flesh
that covered the evil that passed itself off as a person
that i probably tried
to love” — Nikki Giovanni, “When I Die”

This corner of it’s steffi aims to address life within the social media age, and offer a little advice about how to deal with our most online quandaries. Once a month, I’ll answer a question you have, and invite some other internet culture friends to share their thoughts, too. If you’d like to submit a question, you can submit through this form.

This month’s question is answered by one of the coolest stars on the internet right now, Lucy Blakiston. You might recognize Luce as the CEO and chief shitposter behind the beloved media company shit you should care about, which boasts 3.4 million followers on Instagram and 97,000 subscribers on Substack (none of these numbers are in the official bio she sent me, I just need to hype her up because she’s the best). Luce is also the author of the book on the bedside table of every hottie you know, Make It Make Sense. As a fellow worn-out-woman who will probs never own a house, Luce gets you.

Submit a Question Here!

Dear Luce,

i'm going home for my high school reunion soon and to be honest, i'm kind of nervous. I left my hometown a while ago and from social media, our lives could not be more different. they all post the big homes they bought in the suburbs, engagements and weddings, even their babies. i'm single and focused on my career in a big city, so my feed is literally everything else but that. i'm a little worried people will judge me, if that makes sense? it's like we're working under two different social media currencies!

— Ryan (she/her)

Leave a comment

OK babe,

As a girl who’s famously single, famously focused on my career, and famously doesn’t actually give a shit about what other people think of me, I think I might be the perfect gal to answer this for you.

First of all: high school reunions to me kinda feel like walking into a real-life LinkedIn feed. Everyone there is trying to put forward their hottest, braggiest, most successful self, and you don’t really show up there unless you’ve got something you want to highlight. Harsh, but true, IMO. But I promise you, just as we can all see through the fakeness of that LinkedIn broetry, we can see through it in real life too.

Another few things that aren’t real (ice cold takes incoming):

1. Social media (I know we all know this) and being online so much stops us from being content with what we have. Social media is always making us feel behind in some way, and it can be helpful to think about who profits from that. If you’re seeing people in happy relationships on your feed, is Tinder going to profit from you downloading the app? If someone is always wearing beautiful clothes, is ASOS gonna be making a quick buck out of you? Always a good idea to keep these things in the back of your mind.

2. The idea that there is an “ideal” timeline for how you should live your life. I know you know this, but when you’re seeing the highlights of your normie friends’ lives (no hate, but you know, the ones that have taken the tradish route), you aren’t seeing the screaming kids, mortgage repayments, or the constant yearning for a life like…oh, yours!! And it works the other way too—they aren’t seeing the loneliness, the hustle or the expense of living in this life as a solo woman. No one is living their life wrong. It’s just that the grass is always greener, huh?

What I do want to say is: if in your heart of hearts, you’re happy with the decisions you’ve made and the life you’re living, then who cares if people judge you? Like, genuinely, the only people you need to “impress” with your life is you, so if you’re living your truth, then that’s all that matters!!!

But, if you still find yourself feeling envious of what you’re seeing online, I do have some actual advice. Turn that jealousy into your best mate, and let it show you what your life is missing. This is something I’m very passionate about (so passionate that I wrote about it in our debut book, Make It Make Sense)—LETTING JEALOUSY BECOME YOUR NORTH STAR. Becoming friends with jealousy will change your life. I feel like we were taught, as young impressionable women, that jealousy is an ugly emotion and one that we should push away. But what if, instead, we let it show us what we wanted? This is just a helpful little tool to keep in your belt if you ever feel like you’re comparing yourself to people you see online. It’s like, “am I jealous of this? Or do I actually want to work towards some aspect of what I’m seeing?”

I trust that you’ll figure it out, and for what it’s worth, you seem like someone I want to hang out with.

Happy reunioning!!!!

Luce xxxxx

More from Ask Steffi:

• Ask Steffi returns to Slate’s ICYMI to answer four very special holiday-specific social media etiquette questions.

• Steffi offers advice on what to do when you keep seeing your enemies get re-posted and tagged onto your feeds.

• Steffi tackles the problem of when your friend shades you via TikTok repost.

This corner of it’s steffi aims to address life within the social media age, and offer a little advice about how to deal with our most online quandaries. Once a month, I’ll answer a question you have, and invite some other internet culture friends to share their thoughts, too. If you’d like to submit a question, you can submit through this form.

Earlier this month, I returned to Slate’s ICYMI to answer four questions from our Ask Steffi readers about holiday-specific etiquette. The questions spanned from how to deal with your family members who keep sharing Facebook conspiracy theories at the dinner table, to buying your best friend a Secret Santa gift when you think all of her wishlist items are TikTok brainrot garbage. Host Candice Lim and I had the most fun sharing our solutions for surviving the social media waters of the holiday season.

Submit a Question Here!

Dear Steffi,

My (28) boyfriend (30)'s aunt followed me on Instagram a couple months back, and reacts or responds to every story I post. My bf and I have been dating for 2.5 years and I see his aunt at family gatherings ~3 to 4 times a year. She's kind, but she's the only one from my family or my boyfriend's family who follows my Instagram, it seems that the other older relatives understand that there's a boundary there. But now that she's here, she would notice if I blocked her. She's even reached out to me via DM for advice on gifts for him, et cetera. I really don't want to self-censor online, so I've challenged myself to post what I would anyway, regardless of her interaction, but whenever I'm about to post something I definitely think "Hmm, what will [aunt name] think about this?" And I wish I didn't have to do that. For now, I've landed on just accepting her existence in my digital space, and that she chose to subscribe to whatever gay nonsense content I'm posting! but I would love any advice you have here, or any thoughts on the invisible rules I thought existed around this.

— Family Ties

Leave a comment

Candice: Ooh, okay. Steffi, start us off—what do you think?

Steffi: Well, my golden rule is that you should never, under any circumstances, allow your family members or coworkers to follow you on Instagram. I think if you can avoid this situation to begin with, you should. You should be allowed the seven cardinal sins to keep your family members off your social media for this very reason specifically. I don’t care if you have to lie that you don’t check Instagram anymore, or that it’s a work account, or whatever, if you can avoid this altogether, you absolutely should. But now we are here. So I would implement the same rule. I grant you all seven cardinal sins to lie and scam your way into your aunt believing she is watching your content, when you in fact have a boundary.

Candice: Okay, this is interesting. I agree with you about family members. I just think that even if you are literally a pastor, your family just doesn’t need to know that side of you. For instance, my father has LinkedIn requested me four times, I have accepted it zero. And he still does, and we’re fine. But, coworkers! I didn’t realize coworkers was also kind of a boundary for you. Why is that?

Steffi: Well, I think it depends on your workplace. I think because we work in media, it’s a bit different, but when I hear about my friends who work in finance or hospitals, there’s not only a bit more of an age gap sometimes, but also very much a cultural gap in terms of how online people are. Because let’s be real, it’s our job to be online, so if you follow me on Twitter and you see my posts that are like, “she equals Nicki equals Clairo, ate equals burgers equals shade,” you’d get that—but if you work in a bank, maybe it’s different. So that’s why I say coworkers. From what I understand of peoples’ work cultures, the boundary is drawn in a very clear-cut way that may not always translate well to the persona you’re projecting or building on your Instagram, especially.

Candice: What’s interesting is that I read this letter and unfortunately kind of sided with the aunt, but I want you to tell me if I’m missing something. My whole deal is that I read the part where this reader said she “chose to subscribe to whatever gay nonsense content I’m posting,” and maybe she just really loves her gay nephew, or supporting what you do? It doesn’t sound like she’s being negative in your space, she’s just kind of liking and hee-hee, ha-haing. I gotta admit, I do that to my friends sometimes, so I’m kind of like, is the action or the person that is causing the tension or the stress? In my head, it sounds like this is just an aunt who wants to support her boyfriend’s love—you’ve been together for 2.5 years, so you’re a bit serious. Maybe she just really likes you and wants to be a part of your lives. But what am I missing, Steffi? What is the boundary I’m not seeing?

Steffi: I think you’re totally right—this has nothing to do with the aunt at all, this has everything to do with an internal struggle. But in that same vein, it’s okay to be like, okay, I’m not fully comfortable with this, so I’m just going to keep that boundary for my own sake while I’m still trying to wrap [my head around] the feeling of someone seeing me and my gay nonsense. Just because nothing necessarily wrong is happening doesn’t mean you have to learn how to be okay with a partner’s family member following you in such a way, even if the intention is totally innocent.

Editing Steffi Note: I was trying to word this in a more professional way on air, but basically I understand that if the only time you see your aunt is in a Christmas sweater, it can feel more than humiliating to post your bulge silhouette thirst trap knowing she’s going to swipe up with a “so proud of you, sweetie!” comment.

Submit a Question Here!

Candice: Okay, I have two ideas of where we can go. First one: would Close Friends help in this situation?

Steffi: I think it would, yeah.

Candice: So you basically would add all the people you would want to show your ass to in Close Friends, but you don’t add the aunt, so she only sees the sanctioned content. Would that help?

Steffi: Yeah, Close Friends is a good solution here. Especially because people will put like, 300 people on their Close Friends stories these days—like, it gets wild. Like, we’re not close friends. So at least you’re giving yourself the option to post the content you want while managing the bigger webs of people that will inevitably happen on most of our social medias. Even if you just muted her from your Stories for specific Stories you don’t want her to see. It’s a bit of a heavier lift, but if it works for you, it works for you.

Candice: Here’s my second idea, which is that I think this person should start a couples’ account. Hear me out! I want you to start a couples’ account with your boyfriend, and I want you to put all stuff you know is so lame, so cringe, so 2012—I want you to put everything on that Instagram, and I want you to only have one follower, and that follower is your boyfriend’s aunt, because she will be so distracted by the oatmeal and doggie walks and “coffees with boyf,” she will be so distracted at how much content you’re putting on the couple’s Instagram, she won’t even realize you blocked her main. And therefore, she’ll kind of think like, oh my God, I’m getting to know my nephew and his boyfriend, I’m getting to see their daily lives. And I know what you’re thinking: hey queen, is that not a second job? I know, but it sounds like we’re looking to avoid instead of contain, so I’m just going to say it—couple’s account. And guess what, if you really enjoy it, you become an influencer. Just a thought!

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Steffi: That’s actually such a good idea. Because obviously this person’s thought about it enough where the energy is not the problem, it’s figuring out where to go now from here. That’s so genius.

Candice: Yeah. You guys get married, guess where that content’s gonna go? “Hey guys, we’re picking napkins today!” Your friends at work don’t want to see that, right, but put that on the couple’s Instagram, let her vote, and know that one person is voting—but what if she has really good taste, okay? I think this is a win-win. You start the Instagram in 2025 and we only go up.

You can listen to the full episode here, including what to do when you’re the only friend in a group left off a friend’s wedding guest list, how to handle your family member’s Facebook conspiracy beliefs, and what to do when you don’t want to buy your best friend’s TikTok Shop-pilled Secret Santa wishlist:

More from Ask Steffi:

• Slate’s Nadira Goffe offers some perspective on what to do when you keep stalking your ex-friends online.

• NBC’s Daysia Tolentino recommends when you can start revealing your weird humor on dating apps.

• Steffi and Candice Lim talk about if it’s appropriate to have political arguments with people on Instagram DM, and when you think your in-law is having an affair based on their Facebook posts for the first installment of Ask Steffi x ICYMI.

“Here’s what you need to find your personal style—”

Personal style is to social media what arsenic was to the Victorian era beauty industry: an ingredient claiming to make you more beautiful, purchased and swallowed by the mass market, only later to realize that it was dangerously toxic to the blood and brain. There are so many rules to finding your style, according to the self-proclaimed TikTok fashion girlies: seasonal color palette, Kibbe body types, high visual weight versus low visual weight. Hair theory, wrong shoe theory, red nail theory, sundress theory. Or the more recent symptomatic slew of memes that aim to make self-deprecating jokes about style before the era of TikTok fashion rules: eyebrow blindness, blush blindness, outfits you wore on your way to finding your personal style set to sad clown music. Content creators like Mina Le and Emma Chamberlain, known for breaking through the swarm of content partially due to their unique sartorial choices, have recently posted about abandoning the character they built on their feed in favor of a new stripped-back “uniform” in order to get more in touch with their personal style.

It’s become an increasing part of our lexicon, with searches for the term tripling after the rise of TikTok, peaking in April 2022. Women tell each other over plates of omelettes and almond croissants, I’m on my personal style journey. I’m trying to level up this year. I want to become that girl. I’m going to revamp my wardrobe. I’m getting a whole new productive girl routine. I need to buy basics. I need to buy quiet luxury pieces. I want the coquette look but I’m not sure if it’s timeless.

I hate this crusade of lifestyle TikTok’s search for personal style. I wish I could reach through the screen and vacuum all these creators straight to the warehouse where they keep all the offensive Target Pride collections. I hate the way the keyword phrase engagement farming of the app inspires a new so-called “timeless hack” every few months, with capsule closets and outfit formulas and promises of unlocking some trend-resistant way of life. I hate that they all wear slick back buns that they probably have to crack off their heads at the end of the night like a Kinder egg. And most of all, I hate the way they treat the idea of taste, as if it’s one singular journey solely concerning clothes that fall into the binary buckets of “good” or “bad” dressing.

Of course, “style” usually invokes thoughts of clothes, the way we all express ourselves every single day. Getting dressed in America has been difficult for a very long time. American individualistic ethos and Western consumerism have constructed a unique web that has led us to walk into our overflowing closets and wonder why we have nothing to wear: meaning, nothing that fits us right, feels like a reflection of our emotional state, reflects the cultural trends and contexts around us. The problem of “what to wear, what to wear” has fed decades of television, runway, magazine, blog, and Instagram Reels fodder, and will continue to as long as it makes money (read: forever—we will always need something to wear). Even Mark Zuckerberg’s hoodie-and-jeans combo has become a status outfit in Silicon Valley, the kind of outfit that men wear in order to project the message that they’re just so smart and so busy that they have been forced to dress like teenagers at band camp (and let’s be real, even Zuckerberg doesn’t want those ugly clothes anymore).

But the formulaic step-by-step manual to find style is so antithetical to what it is. Every fashion figurehead that has become iconized as an architect of modern style philosophy—Lynn Yaeger, Iris Apfel, Robin Givhan, Oscar de la Renta, John Galliano, Yves Saint Laurent, Alexa Chung—have all beat the well-worn drum that style cannot be taught or learned. “You can’t try to be somebody you’re not; that’s not style,” Apfel later said. “If someone says, ‘Buy this—you'll be stylish,’ you won’t be stylish because you won’t be you. You have to learn who you are first, and that’s painful.”

Identity is a bitch to find, especially when it’s in the digital rabbit hole. There are so many people trying to create so many boxes for who you can be so they can get over 100,000 views on their short-form vertical video content. The circus of SEO has been well-covered in the world of fashion and satirized into oblivion, so new terms like “mob wife aesthetic” and “cherry mocha girl” rise and quickly become laughed into the dark corner where the microtrend final boss lives. The algorithm rewards something new, something fresh, and many of us are not immune to the desire to feed the content beast. There’s a new identity to chase every time you open your phone, so a sense of strong one in the midst of it all feels more covetable than ever. It’s why Joan Didion has evolved from a 1960s journalist to a 2024 Pinterest girl, or why photos of artists in the 1980s wearing plain knit sweaters continue to go viral.

We are all expected to broadcast some unique sense of self in order to be seen online, so many have become far more interested in the performance of identity before they are concerned with the actual discovery of it. To the fully awake mind, the cream is easy to sort from the milk. But to the mind that is scrolling late at night, fuzzily attempting to stave off sleep, it’s easy to get caught in its abyss. People post flat-lays of books they haven’t read, travel to places or achieve specific milestones partially to flex on the timeline, scramble for hobbies that haven’t been gobbled up by the mainstream in order to affirm or protect the uniqueness we all swear we have. It’s like finding toddlers who have broken into their mothers’ closets—lipstick smeared across the cheeks, tampons strung around the earlobes, stropping around in too-big high heels, playacting some trickled-down idea of personality because they’re too naive to realize that they already have one.

When Yaeger was asked about the best advice she’s ever been given, she said: “If you’re interested in fashion, learn about everything except fashion […] Politics, art, painting. Anything except fashion.”

Style, like anything else, does not exist in a vacuum. It’s directly informed by your lived experience and the world around you. That’s what makes fashion art, what makes self-expression important, and what makes some people’s individuality seem aspirational in the face of none. All of this boils down to the truth that a sense of personal style will never be realized with attempting, but rather with being. Take a walk, read a newspaper, see the world, kiss a stranger. You cannot, and frankly should not, feel limited by color or the many guidelines that say who you can and can’t be. The hard part that will save you money is figuring out who the fuck you already are and what it is you’re trying to find out about yourself.

Frankly, I think the reflection of major influencers turning away from maximalism is a reflection of another trend. Between the recession and impending tariffs that will hike up prices even further—especially for fashion, which is highly reliant on imports—affordable utilitarian dressing always finds a way back to the cultural forefront. Maximalism has thrived in an economy when people have optimism and cash to spend, and neither of those things are around right now, so it only makes sense that content creators are switching up to advocating for paring down. I don’t even think it’s a bad thing. I just think that believing there’s a correct route to find your personal style is the kind of task akin to a dog chasing its own tail, thinking it will open its third eye.

No amount of basic t-shirts will give you a moral compass, and no amount of seasonal color palettes will give you a sense of peace with your own body. And the fact is, all of it might change, because you will change. “Connecting with your taste means accepting its fluidity,” culture writer and it’s steffi friend Tess Garcia wrote for Mixed Feelings. “Your desires for your own appearance can, and should, change over time … It won’t always be picture-perfect, but you’ll be surprised how quickly you view your own world through a lens of beauty, one you might usually reserve for people online.”

There’s nothing wrong with caring about how you want to carry yourself in this world. The great thing about this is that our care is not some scarce, finite resource that must be rationed to specific things—we can care about whatever we want, simultaneously, perpetually. But as our self-perception becomes more entangled with the reflections in our screens, it’s important to remember which ghosts live solely in your phone, and which bleed out into the somatic world.

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More from Steffi:

• In my advice column in Fast Company, I made a holiday social media etiquette guide, and answered a question about how to use Instagram to date when your coworkers follow you. and I also talked about what to do when you hate your favorite influencer’s politics.

• I spoke with women in South Korea about the 4B movement for Rolling Stone.

• In my Australian debut, I reported on the vibe among young women pre-election for investigative publication Crikey.

• Chat, is this real? My first for Slate covered the rise of the slang term among Gen Alpha.

• For The Daily Beast, I called AI Santa Claus and he hung up on me.

This corner of it’s steffi aims to address life within the social media age, and offer a little advice about how to deal with our most online quandaries. Once a month, I’ll answer a question you have, and invite some other internet culture friends to share their thoughts, too. If you’d like to submit a question, you can submit through this form.

This week’s question is answered by your favorite and mine, Nadira Goffe, a podcaster and culture writer at Slate Magazine. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram @calllmenadira.

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Dear Nadira,

I constantly stalk people who've wronged me and with whom I've had friendship breakups on social media. I love keeping tabs on random people in my life, but I can't stop checking some of their Instagram profiles (sometimes even habitually if I'm bored). I'm fairly sure I've moved on from what's happened between me and these people, but is this a sign that I'm not actually over it? Is this behavior unhealthy? It's not like I'm jealous—I'm just curious.....!

— Brick

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Dear Brick,

You’re not alone. Everyone loves to check in with people they’ve shared significant parts of their life with, even (or especially) if the relationship ended poorly. It’s a layered human instinct: Sometimes we do it because we hope our former friends and lovers are doing well despite how it all ended, sometimes we do it because we miss their friends or family or pets that ended up as lost collateral in the breakup, sometimes full omniscience is the final goal (which is to say, sometimes we’re just nosy). Then, of course, there are the times we find ourselves monitoring the success of others for less-than-healthy reasons that we’re too ashamed to admit—jealousy if they’re doing better; petty smugness if they’re doing worse.

Generally, I’d say that, though this behavior can be unhealthy, it doesn’t mean that it most definitely is. None of these things inherently make you toxic or obsessed. They just make you human. And maybe a little annoying, depending. But, you need to be honest with yourself! I may have changed majors in college because I was failing Calculus 2, but even I can tell you: This math ain’t mathin’! You say you’re “just curious,” but no one who “stalks” is “just curious” about their obsessions—or else they wouldn’t be obsessed with them to begin with. Not to mention, those ellipses after “just curious” seem…suspicious.

Look, I can give you a whole spiel about taking stock of how you feel when you check your former-bestie’s profile or your ex’s Instagram Story. I can give you a whole spiel about how social media isn’t real anyway, so you’re obsessing over a whole ‘lotta nothin’. However, the better question to ask yourself is: How would you feel if you unfollowed them or, at the very least, muted their Stories (people check who watches those, you know!). Would you just feel bored? Or would you feel like you’re missing out on something? If it’s the latter (and I have to hazard a guess that it is given the fact that you’re on their pages like you’re Bruno Mars in a casino), then Order in the court, the verdict is in!: You are still platonically and/or romantically down bad. In which case, you should try to get closure where you can. If you can’t, you need to work through those emotions on your own end. Perhaps with a therapist, or, you know, one of the friends you’re actually still friends with.

The thing about checking in on people you’ve cut all ties with is that, though it’s totally understandable, there’s no actual good reason for it. If you stopped and found out that you were just bored this whole time? Get a hobby. If you feel that you’re missing out on something real without access to their perceived life? No offense, but, get a life! You’ve got time on your hands, so use it wisely. Watch that show you’ve always wanted to, read a book, befriend your local bartender, bedazzle something, start planning next year’s Halloween costume, watch Joker 2 then go wash your eyes with bleach, call your mother or father or sibling or grandparent or literally anyone you know, volunteer, paint a wall in your apartment, take an online college course, bake a pie, learn how to play a new sport, or chess (sorry, chess is not a sport!), go to the circus. Hell, join one! Do whatever as long as you’re not a man buying a podcast mic. Or an NYU student buying a tiny mic for your upcoming TikTok series in which you harass innocent passersby in Washington Square Park about their favorite song when they’re just trying to eat their bagel. On second thought, maybe just stay clear of microphones in general. But, beyond that, you’re in the clear!  

You’ve done the hard work of letting go of something or someone that meant a lot to you, but, for whatever reason, needed to be released. Now revel in it with the newfound time you have! Step your diva up! Because the worst part is already over and life can (and does) exist beyond it, beyond them. Though this behavior isn’t inherently bad, it is inherently a waste of your time. Instead of investing your time and energy into people who have nothing to do with your life anymore, put it towards the people who could. 

Psst…guess what? Ask Steffi is doing another exciting collaboration, specifically addressing social media etiquette quandaries during the holiday season! If you want advice on what to do when your parents keep posting you on Facebook, or how to avoid DMs about hanging out, or running into your ex on hometown Hinge, ask Steffi through our form here.

More from Ask Steffi:

• NBC’s Daysia Tolentino offers some thoughts on when it’s okay to start getting goofy in your Hinge conversations.

• ICYMI’s Candice Lim and Steffi answer questions on following potential affairs happening on Facebook, how to DM about politics, and more.

• Rolling Stone’s CT Jones gives advice on what to do when you’re in love with the TikTokers on your feeds.

I feel helpless and worn, and I’m sure you do, too. We already know what a Trump presidency means, which is perhaps the most suffocating thing of all. It means billionaires paying less in taxes than working people, women being forced to drive across state lines to make decisions about their own bodies, and children facing ever-dwindling resources and the persistent fear of getting shot in their own classrooms. It means tax breaks for corporations and easing on fossil fuel conglomerates that will saddle future generations with carbon emissions and financial burden that I’m not sure they’ll be able to claw their way out of. It means the entire abolition of the Department of Education, overseen by Elon Musk. It means a government that will actively cheer on the death of any person of color, here or abroad. It means a government that will light the fire for people to kill on the basis of hate.

The blame game has already ensued. People are blaming Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, the Democratic party, Jill Stein, third-party voters. Reports from inside the Harris/Walz camp are wondering where their campaign strategy failed them. Everyone wants to know why, why, why. Find the weak link, and muzzle it.

In part, it is true—Democrats missed the mark. Harris lost pockets of potential voters in places like Dearborn, Michigan, simply because she simply refused to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. It makes complete sense; it’s a predominantly Middle Eastern area where people are losing family members to Israeli missiles every day, and instead of greeting them with empathy, the Democratic camp sent in Bill Clinton to say Israel was “forced” to kill 41,000 people. Similar patterns were seen in Pennsylvania, which turned red last night. Many young women voted for Harris apathetically, conscious of the fact that she was never their true champion, but rather another compromise against the other venom-spitting, forked tongue-wagging, orange-faced evil.

Still, make no mistake, this election proved that millions of people are perfectly ready to embrace hate and violence in this country, and with the unfolding of social media, are feeling emboldened to act on it. Red pill content has spurred the popularization of prejudice and the embrace of misinformation, and this election has shown just how large that bubble has grown. Between 2016 and now, the manosphere has blossomed at breakneck rates, turning young men in particular towards right-wing values. Human trafficker and men’s rights streamer Andrew Tate commands more attention among teen boys than former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, and influencers like Sneako track millions of views while espousing vile rhetoric about women and the LGBTQ+ community. White people, men and women, are driving this ship into the ground. Trump got up and personally thanked podcaster Joe Rogan on the eve of the election, which is as damning a tell as anything. We are about to be engulfed in an era of their red haze, being force-fed their ideological rhino supplements for years to come.

But let’s be honest, this election was never about good and bad as much as it was about attempting to stave off the most damaging option. “This election was never going to save us, and so I have to believe it was never going to doom us either,” Scaachi Koul wrote for Slate. “Harris was not a savior, she was only ever a placeholder for something—someone—better.”

I feel broken and exhausted. I’m sure you feel it, too. Our grief is anticipatory and traumatic, and we have many more dark days to come. Today I will spend time with my loved ones and face the hard decision of what, realistically, must come next in my life. I must let go of my hope to one day have children. I must let go of the idea that the journalism industry will ever be what it once was. I do not have a champion in the White House or the security of knowing what waits for me tomorrow.

Hope is the last thing I have. I will protect that as we enter these years of red haze. I will strap it to my back like an oxygen tank at the bottom of the sea. Whatever tattered scrap I can hang onto, I will hang onto, until the ground swallows us whole and then for some time after we are trapped underneath. I do not hang onto hope because I want to. I don’t hang onto it because I am a fool. I hang on because I know in this world, in the reality we are about to enter, it is my responsibility to safeguard it for those who have lost all reason to keep it, so one of us can fight for us both. Hope is rare currency, and it is a powerful one. I’d sooner choke on the red pill than give it up.

“Hope doesn’t have to come wholesale,” Koul wrote. “You can pick and choose and take what you can get—in fact, right now you should, because it’s the only thing keeping our hearts from atrophy. Even in the rubble, light breaks through.”

There are many things that can still give us hope, whether it’s Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar being re-elected into office or Monique Worrell taking her Florida state attorney seat back from Ron DeSantis. It can be the fact that Breonna Taylor’s murderer was convicted, or the fact that many mutual aid organizations and labor unions are already beginning to plan for what comes next. I do not want to downplay the horrors that await us, but I must find something to hope for. Once you are feeling ready, you can join in again.

One day, I’d like to cast a presidential vote without seeing Donald Trump’s name on the ballot. I’d like to choose my candidate based on how I think they’ll protect my loved ones and myself, not for the sole reason of keeping a broke, fradulent rapist away from the nuclear codes. I hope one day it will come. I know we cannot vote ourselves out of this system. American politics is a theater that is overacting its role to try and convince you that it is the most important path to change. But if we’re going to be forced to take the red pill, I will do what I can do keep my feet on the ground. Hope is my responsibility now, as it is yours. Nothing else will get us through the work that needs to begin. Where you can scrounge around for it, make sure to share it. If you can find steady ground to take a step forward, know that I and many others will be there, right next to you.

More reading:

• The serious implications of a Republican Senate — Vox

• Sex Workers Are Trying To Warn Us About Project 2025 — The Nation

• What happens to Trump’s criminal and civil cases now that he’s been reelected — CNN

• So the world is bad. Now what? — it’s steffi

This corner of it’s steffi aims to address life within the social media age, and offer a little advice about how to deal with our most online quandaries. Once a month, I’ll answer a question you have, and invite some other internet culture friends to share their thoughts, too. If you’d like to submit a question, you can submit through this form.

This week’s question is answered by the inimitable Daysia Tolentino, a culture and trends reporter at NBC News. She has written about pop culture and the internet for InStyle, Vulture, the Daily Dot, and more. You can follow her on Twitter or Instagram.

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Dear Daysia,

If I’m messaging with someone on a dating app, how soon is too soon to be weird and goofy? I want to be weird and goofy right away but I feel like the jokes don’t read a lot of the time. My gut says I shouldn’t change my humor, but maybe I should be a bit more chill? Unsure here.

— Goofy

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Dear sweet Goofy,

I know your pain. Finding love is hard, but finding someone to match your freak? That’s even harder. 

First thing’s first, you gotta get the conversation off the app—offline, even—quickly. If you are really interested in seeing where a connection goes and if you can kiki for real, you have to meet them IRL ASAP! Some people are funny online and absolutely sauceless in person. There is perhaps nothing worse than building a digital rapport with someone for weeks only to realize there’s no chemistry face-to-face. 

But of course, you must figure out what the vibe is before you commit the time, energy and cute outfit to a date. So to answer your actual question, I don’t think there is a time that is too soon to be weird and silly on the apps.

In fact, I think it’s good to sprinkle your goofiness into your profile. Apps like [REDACTED] or [NO FREE PROMO😗] give you a lot of opportunities to give people a sneak peek into that freak brain at your dazzling personality, whether it’s through voice memos, polls or prompts. Despite what TikTokers may have you believe, a lot of us are suckers for a silly voice memo or a stupid meme. I’m not afraid to admit it!

Showcasing your humor lets people know that you aren’t a robot (literally, these apps are filled with them these days). It also alleviates some of the pressure that comes along with the sick mating process we’ve all settled into in our new digital world. In an era when many singles have begun treating their dating profiles like their Instagram accounts, I think any crack in the veneer is welcome. 

I would add that you don’t want to show all of your cards at once. Make a joke or put a silly pic in there, but don’t make it totally unserious. Indulge in a little mystique. Put your sexy, wistful, who-is-she photos on display—but always sprinkle in a couple things that real clowns (complimentary) can riff on. That’s a well-rounded profile that will get you closer to the potential partners you want. 

Once you start chatting, feel free to express your humor and silliness as you please. If it’s not clicking with that person, they’re probably not right for you. Don’t waste your time on anything that feels forced or just doesn’t feel good. I can’t tell you the amount of time I’ve wasted trying to make a conversation work on the apps. You want a partner who will do bits with you effortlessly. It comes with time and patience but you should not settle for anything less. Trust me.

Again, the true compatibility test is being able to banter in person without editing your jokes or curating the perfect witty text. We all present ourselves a certain way on dating apps, but it’s never an exact substitute for our IRL personalities. Ultimately, dating is exhausting but it’s even worse if you’re on a boring date with someone who does not get your humor at all.

All this to say, trust your gut. Never change yourself for anyone, especially not a stranger! Because seriously, who is that rando??? And why are they making you feel bad? 

In the great words of Christine Baranski and Julie Walters in the 2008 classic Mamma Mia!: Screw ‘em if they can’t take a joke!

Xoxo,

Daysia

Psst…guess what? Ask Steffi is doing another exciting collaboration, specifically addressing social media etiquette quandaries during the holiday season! If you want advice on what to do when your parents keep posting you on Facebook, or how to avoid DMs about hanging out, or running into your ex on hometown Hinge, ask Steffi through our form here.

More from Ask Steffi:

• Steffi gives counsel on the best move when you keep seeing your enemies on your feed.

• Rolling Stone’s CT Jones offers advice on what to do when you’re in love with the TikTokers on your feed.

• Steffi suggests what you should do when your friend subtweets you via TikTok repost.

“I hate gay Halloween parties, what do you mean you’re Liev Schrieber, your husband is an enormous jar of vodka sauce, and your third is a mop,” one wrote.

People are hating on the modern-day Halloween costume, fueled by the fires of social media. “The Chronically Online Have Stolen Halloween,” Kate Lindsay wrote in The Atlantic this week. “Death to Themed Halloween Parties,” Luke Winkie wrote in Slate.

Winkie particularly called out themes like Powell’oween, thrown by Okay Zoomer’s Kelsey Weekman, who encouraged attendees to dress as Hollywood heartthrob Glen Powell. There’s also a Clown’oween, which is asking people to come as “jesters, jokers, mimes, harlequins.” He also mentions his upcoming appearances at a “villain-themed” Halloween and his very own Broadween, inspired by Broadway characters.

Of course, as meme culture and social media has entered the mainstream over the years, the conceptual Halloween costume has become even more meta, as people recreate specific pop culture references and niche fandom symbols that you just have to be in the know to understand. Only real DCOM fans would immediately feel the impact of a biblically accurate “Sneakernight” Vanessa Hudgens, and only the most chronically online frequenters of Gay Twitter could pick out the couple’s costume depicting a iconic Real Housewives clip of NeNe Leakes stepping into the house with the white fridge.

The argument made in The Atlantic and Slate, as well as among some of the tired users on Reddit and Twitter, is that a themed Halloween abandons the original theme of the hliday—one we know and love as a spooky festivity of ghouls, ghosts and goblins. The costumes are not easy enough to understand now, allegedly. They collapse under the weight of their own references, they are complicated and unnecessary and annoying in the way of theater kids tearing apart a Denny’s after opening night.

All of this is wrong! And all of this is entirely missing the point of Halloween! This holiday has long been for the freaks, for the crafty, for the bitches filled to the brim with joie de vivre. I don’t like dressing up, I don’t like thinking about a costume, I don’t like the pressure to be the most creative person there. That’s fine! Just don’t go crying to me about it! Me? I’m dressed as Avril Lavigne’s body double Melissa, stemming from the 2017 Twitter conspiracy theory. I don’t have time to hear your endless drivel about your many self-imposed stresses and gripes. I’m listening to my pregame playlist and have a party to go to.

The fact of the matter is, no one is putting a gun to your head and asking you to purchase a full morph suit to go as the worm in Dune. You’re cycling through four different costumes because you couldn’t figure out a way to recirculate the pieces in your wardrobe? That’s a skill issue. Me and my girls were raised with a hot glue gun in hand and armed with unending romance for finding fun wherever we can. Yes, some people are kind of shit at choosing themes. So bend the prompt to your will. We use conceptual thinking and cultural touchstones in this bitch, and if you don’t like it, take your sensitive ass back to Spirit Halloween.

Any themed costume event offers flexibility by virtue of it being a party, not a court order. My birthday party theme was “Song of the Summer,” with the ask being to dress as a song of the summer, present or past, or how you would dress for your album cover if you were about to release your own summer anthem. Meaning, you could literally wear anything you wanted, as long as you felt like the most free version of yourself. And let’s be real, that is the true point of any theme party, and the essence of Halloween itself. It’s why girls wear lingerie with very vague references to some sort of animal or cartoon character. It’s not really about the theme, but about letting your intrinsic diva shine for the day.

This holiday is for people who find joy in creating a spectacle and for finding the other weirdos who can match their freak. Come in costume, or don’t. Spend as much as you want, or don’t. You only have to invest what you want to into this night, but it is an ask that you enjoy the effort others put into their costumes instead of whining on the sidelines because you didn’t get a round of applause. Let’s be honest: I am not judging anyone for having a half-baked costume. I am entirely focused on the fact that my friends and me look fabulous. As long as you’re having a good time and appreciate my costume, that’s all that really matters.

I say all this because I know with the two Halloweekends, morale might be low. But you have to be okay with playing to lose when it comes to these nights, because you simply won’t hit it out of the park every time. I will always love and defend Chronically Online Halloweens. It’s still clever, still fun, still flexible to whoever wants to give their best shot at it. It’s entirely in the spirit of the season. Calling Powell’oween “a fate worse than death” is a level of dramatic that could have gone into creating a costume from your own closet. Have a ghouls and goblins party in July if you want to, but be honest with yourself if you’d even serve then. The only thing scary about y’all is your sheer lack of whimsy.

Of course, I’m not here to leave you all in the dust, so if you are scrambling for Halloween costume ideas for Weekend 2, let me offer some suggestions:

For the chronically online:

• She’s so crazzzzzzzy: Put a bag of Cheetos on top of your head with some version of a loose sweater. Many have already gone viral for it, and it’s perfect every time.

• Her body tea: Take a piece of printer or card stock paper and string it through some twine long enough to be a necklace. Draw the Lipton or Twinings design on the paper. Wear something you feel hot in. She’s annoying, but the body is tea.

• Tyra Banks in America’s Next Top Model: Wear a bodycon dress and hold sheets of paper in your hand. Extra points if you can draw your friends on them and reveal which of them is staying, and who must leave the competition.

• Hillary Clinton in the Kitchen: Sweep your hair up into a faux bob (tutorial here) and put on that pantsuit. Plus points if a friend can find a white cardboard box and go as the fridge.

• Kamala is Brat: Flip out your hair and put on your corporate friend’s pantsuit with a neon bra underneath. Put on sunglasses and IJBOL.

• JoJo Siwa: My friend Sharon did this for my birthday, but it is such a good idea—paint your face and wear all black to get the perfect “Karma” recreation. In true makeup influencer fashion, you can also see Sharon’s tutorials for Chappell Roan and the Brat album.

For the pop culture fanatics:

• Dune 2: I know I referenced it earlier, but it’s actually relatively easy if you just wear some kind of textured black outfit (I have a black dress with laces along the side, but you could also just wear all black with some belts or knee pads fashioned around you) and a tan sheer scarf wrapped around the head. I was going to draw the tube in black eyeliner because I don’t want to buy one.

• Challengers: Everyone has done it, and you can do it, too. Tennis clothes and a racket. Plus points if you have access to Stanford merch. Even more points if someone is willing to paint their face green and go as the tennis ball.

• Love Island USA: All you need is some kind of tight dress, black string (ideally elastic string, which you can get for $1.50) and a black pom pom for the microphones. You can make several of these for all your friends who need a costume with the spare materials. Make sure to do heavy Instagram face makeup.

• Sabrina Carpenter: Any version of a corset and mini skirt. For my Song of the Summer birthday party I also added fake blood as seen in the “Taste” music video, which is $5 to buy, but I just borrowed from a friend. You can also reuse the fake blood to go as Jennifer’s Body, Pretty Little Liars, or any other vague horror show that involves clothes you might own already.

For the nostalgic:

• Phineas and Ferb: I was almost about to do this, but you just need an afternoon to make the heads out of cardboard. I was planning on making the head and then wearing like a tank top and cutoff shorts to make it sexy with the big cardboard head, but I decided on something else. Still, I would like to see this happen.

• Dear Evan Hansen: Polo shirt borrowed from a straight man near you, wrap your arm in gauze. Wear a backpack. Deny being a nepo baby.

• Angelina Ballerina: All you need is a tutu (here is a tutorial on how to make one without sewing, the fabric store is pretty cheap if you’re not committed to buying one and want to repurpose the tulle) and a tank top. Draw on whiskers, too. I like doing cartoon characters for Halloween because they’re easy to identify.

• Junie B. Jones: A lot of mismatched clothes with loud prints. If you have your childhood copy, bring that along with. This is only worth it if you have most of the clothes already.

The response online was immediate. Tweets began pouring in. TMZ callously posted photos of Payne’s body that swiftly brought backlash for their nonexistent journalistic ethics. Every emotion—sadness, anger, shock, relief—was posted for the world to see.

“i genuinely truly think the last time my phone was blowing up like this with texts from people from all corners of the earth was when zayn left one direction,” one said.

“i feel sad because he was a part of a band that took up a big chunk of my life,” another wrote. “i also feel sad because of the type of person he was and how he never sought out help. it’s gonna be mixed emotions wow.”

Whether you liked their music or not, One Direction was an undoubtedly generation-defining band. Songs like “What Makes You Beautiful,” “Story Of My Life,” “Perfect” and “Night Changes” have been streamed billions of times; they were an immovable representation of my coming-of-age and many others’.

They were also one of the first juggernauts to collide with social media’s expansion. The very backbone of modern digital fandom was cemented largely through communities like the Directioners, who pioneered the act of weaving a content ecosystem for their stars. Directioners arguably changed the very definition of fandom by taking it beyond just following their idols, instead using the tools of social media to make the fandom as equal of a pull to continue being a fan. They built a cemented sense of community with fan group chats and mutual follows, created standalone content with fan edits and fanfics (long live Larry Stylinson), and recorded a history of fandom inside jokes that became just as important to know as information about the stars themselves.

Even as a thirteen-year-old, playing “Magic” and “Kiss You” on a loop as I played Tetris with my friends during study hall, I knew that the first death of a One Direction member was going to shake our generation. It’s the inevitable fate of when a celebrity takes the world storm like that—Selena, Whitney Houston, Princess Diana. But this time, we were all interconnected on social media, constantly seeing images and audio of the bandmates. That being said, I don’t think anyone thought it would be so soon. The refrain on Tumblr was always that you’d be 50 years old and have to pull over on the side of the road when the radio announced the first One Direction death. While we’re older, much of the fandom is still a far cry from 50, which makes it all feel more jarring.

After John Lennon was shot and killed in 1980, TIME critic Jay Cocks wrote a cover story to commemorate the artist’s legacy. “For everyone who cherished the sustaining myth of the Beatles,” he wrote, “the murder was something else. It was an assassination, a ritual slaying of something that could hardly be named. Hope, perhaps; or idealism. Or time. Not only lost, but suddenly dislocated, fractured.”

I think Payne’s death represents much of the same thing to many of us. The grief is feeling a little death of our youth, naiveté, optimism. One Direction songs sang about those very themes, after all: the promise of young and true love, the joy of living for today, the journey of friendship. Their discography was a corporate package of sugar that we remember even more fondly in bitter times. Many of us are navigating the early stages of adulthood, and the punctures of youth already feel so profound. If Lennon was “a creature of poetic political metaphor,” as TIME wrote in 1980, then Payne was very much a creature of untroubled optimistic meritocracy, where a boy could audition on X Factor UK at 14 years old and sprint right towards stardom with four new friends in tow. It’s natural to grieve a physical loss tied to a distinct ideal.

But grieving the actual person is an entirely different story, because the memory of Payne, much like Lennon, is also marred. As the members grew out of their teenybopper packaging, it became clear that the individual members were not as untroubled as their pop songs were. Payne’s continuation in the public eye drew backlash after backlash, as he made claims like saying he was the reason One Direction was put together and that he both disliked and liked bandmate Zayn Malik. He had a child with one of the judges who watched his audition when he was 14 years old. Days before his death, his ex-fiancée Maya Henry filed a cease and desist against him, revealing that Payne was harassing her and her family, and had previously assaulted her. Immediately after Payne’s death was announced, some fans took to Henry’s Instagram to leave some truly heinous comments, mocking or blaming her for his death. None of this should be looked past for our inward torschlusspanik. All of it speaks more to the individual’s character than their parasocial marketing trappings.

“The worldwide appeal of the Beatles had to do with their perceived innocence, their restless idealism that stayed a step or two ahead of the times,” Cocks wrote in TIME. “The songs became, all together, an orchestration of a generation’s best hopes and fondest dreams.”

While I think we’ve evolved past the point of disregarding the morality of an individual for the vague marketing wrappings of their artist, I do think learning to identify our grief will become ever the more important, especially as social media continues to race towards hyperbole, misinformation and SEO-ification of everything. Payne left a complex legacy, including some reprehensible choices. What he represented at the onset of his career is still cherished by millions. Many things can be true at once.

This corner of it’s steffi aims to address life within the social media age, and offer a little advice about how to deal with our most online quandaries. Once a month, I’ll answer a question you have, and invite some other internet culture friends to share their thoughts, too. If you’d like to submit a question, you can submit through this form.

Today’s question is answered by the incomparable , a culture writer at Rolling Stone with previous work in Vulture, Vox, and Refinery29. Their profile work and reporting is deeply fascinating and their criticism has shifted my worldview entirely. You can follow them on Instagram @christjonesy.

Submit a Question!

Dear CT,

helppppppp I need to know why i fall so in love with influencers and how to get over it — one in question is noah beck. i ran into him a couple times. now i follow fan accounts and own 2x hoodies and underwear from his brand. i have BOOTLEG MERCH!!! a serious issue.

— Belulu

Leave a comment

Dear Belulu,

Falling in love can be hard. What makes it harder is when the object of your affection isn’t a white boy you locked eyes with across a sweaty subway platform, but instead a (very jacked) white boy whose claim to fame involves being apart of something called ‘The Sway House,’ dating a D’Amelio sister, and being born after the year 2000. 

Let’s be honest. There’s nothing really wrong with being infatuated with celebrities. The very nature of fame is that the best celebrities succeed by having a public persona that draws you in. The same can be said for influencers as well. You’ve watched Noah post TikToks recreating Minions scenes with his family, or cliff jumping with his friends off the coast of Greece. You feel like you’re there with him. Meeting him in person probably only cemented the professionally curated vibe he’s built online—to be a personable shell to project on to. Cute mustache or not, the Noah Beck you see online isn’t really a person. Sure he exists…somewhere. But unless you’re the protagonist of the newest Cinderella Story, the chances of you ever getting a chance to meet the real Noah is low. The person you’re obsessed with isn’t a person at all. He’s a product. It’s not your fault you’ve got your consumer brain on. I mean, c’mon. No one buys bootleg merch unless what you’re really craving is the act of clicking “add to cart.” If you wanted a date, you’d already be trying to con your way onto Raya. 

It sounds to me like you’re not not ashamed about developing a parasocial relationship point blank—you’re ashamed that you’ve developed one with an influencer. I get it, the aforementioned Sway House can be an unpopular thing to bring up over a couple of drinks with friends. It’s a hard sell, especially for people who either aren’t online or are adamantly against the very system that brought Noah his fame. But again, there’s no shame in becoming obsessed with an influencer. You are not above being sold to. Okay, so you watch his videos. So you’ve turned his Instagram post notifications on. So what? Unless you’re one of those fans who’s camping out by his hotel rooms, or trying to find the Kroger where his mom shops at, I can promise you you’re probably not doing anything wrong. Now, if you’re crossing any of those lines, I’d consider getting help—either in the form of a therapist, an orgasm, or a good old fashioned kick in the ass. 

If you’re still embarrassed, or are convinced that your Noah Beck obsession is taking too much time away from having a real, tangible life, there are a couple options to fully get over this crush. Step back for a minute and recognize the context  that you exist in and all that came before you. If Noah’s 33 million TikTok followers alone are anything to take into account, there are at least 1 million other people who agree with you. A lot of them might be children. Can you bear the thought that the object of your desire probably has his photos in thousands of middle school lockers around the country? How would you feel if you went to the mall, and you and an 11-year-old were wearing matching bootleg merch? If shame is enough of a motivator to have you ask an advice column for help, let’s hope it’s enough to get you a new crush. In the meantime, just accept that you have a weakness for tall white men with mustaches. Even better, walk outside and find one. They’re everywhere! You’d probably be doing someone a favor.

More from Ask Steffi:

• Steffi and ICYMI’s Candice Lim answer a few question about Facebook wall affairs, political arguments and more.

• Okay Zoomer’s Kelsey Weekman assuages one reader’s worries about ways to swipe up on Instagram without being cringe.

• Steffi tells you what you should do if you keep seeing your enemies on your feed.

From June 11 to July 21, I was locked into this show like was my job. The series, which spanned a 36-episode run of near-daily hourlong installments, was impossible to look away from. Every episode was packed to the brim with drama and like a sedative to the brain. Who among us will ever forget the moment Kenny Rodriguez broke down crying from heartbreak? What about when it was revealed on social media that “bombshell” contestant Daia McGhee might have been courting season winner Kordell Beckham because of his elder brother, NFL star Odell Beckham Jr.? Perhaps most importantly, we will cherish the friendship between the women in the villa—particularly between season winner Serena Page, JaNa Craig and Leah Kateb—that gave the show such a sweet touch of platonic love amidst the ups and downs of couplings and recouplings.

But the most pivotal moment of the season was when bombshell Andrea Carmona was voted off the island by her peers just days after her entrance. It was a plot arc that spurred days of arguments and ignited discourse among the millions watching at home. In fact, it was such a dramatic moment that during the August 16 cast reunion episode, the producers took nearly twenty percent of the entire reunion just to revisit the night and air the full, uncut voting process.

“When I came out of the villa, I was getting attacked saying I was a mean girl,” Carmona tearfully said during the reunion, as cast member Liv Walker chimed in to say, “But watching the show back, you made snarly comments many times.”

The accusations of mean girl behavior have been bandied about this year like no other, with fans calling everyone from Carmona to Kateb, Craig, Page and Walker “mean girls” at different points for comments or expressions they made on screen. And it’s not the first time we’ve seen this by our digital watering hole. Amidst the public reception over Sabrina Carpenter’s newest album, Short n’ Sweet, in which she allegedly speaks about her situationship with Shawn Mendes in between his breakups with Camila Cabello, some have taken to TikTok to accuse her of “not being a girl’s girl.” And back in March, on Neflix’s Love is Blind USA reunion episode, the women of the show threw the comment back and forth at each other like a hot potato, indicting each other with behaving like a “pick-me girl” and not a “girl’s girl” at various points throughout the season.

“You should relax calling someone a clown when you told him shit about me [sic] the entire time, saying that I’m a pick-me girl? You’re the pick-me girl,” season villain Sarah Ann Bick yelled at cast member Laura Dadisman as they rehashed the memory of Dadisman’s fiancé leaving her for Bick. And just as castmate Jessica Vestal came to Dadisman’s defense, telling Bick, “you’re the pick-me girl,” Bick sniped back, “You’re the pick-me girl—don’t start!”

The idea of the mean girl has long been cemented into our popular lexicon, but the concept of a pick-me was revitalized on social media in 2022, when straight women began to make fun of other straight women who eschew traditionally “feminine” interests for “masculine” ones in order to appeal to men. It’s inherently the opposite of what we understand as a “girl’s girl”—the kind of woman who sticks by her sisterhood no matter what. And while it’s easy to relegate these phrases to the contrived world of reality television, their impact is much wider. The term “girls’ girl” exploded on Google Search from August 4 to August 10, just a week before the Love Island USA reunion. The term “pick-me girl” soared in Google searches during the week of the Love is Blind USA reunion this year, 100 times the frequency of searches in 2019.

A pick-me girl can be characterized by any number of markers: having few girlfriends, playing video games, dubbing oneself as “wifey material.” Meanwhile, a girl’s girl has been identified as a similarly infinite number of traits: defending other women in public, taking care of your friends, unapologetically loving feminine-coded things like pink and sugary drinks. Many of these characteristics are a direct response to the “not like the other girls” meme of the 2010s, as well as the sanitized feminism that trickled down through the #GirlBoss era. If you talk badly about another woman, you’re not a girl’s girl. If you make another woman feel badly about herself, you’re not a girl’s girl. If you take the side of a man, you have no sense of solidarity, which is inherently the opposite of a girl’s girl ethos.

It’s useful terminology. Many of us women have experienced betrayal at the hands of other women you thought to be your friends. Many of us have argued and lost women in our lives to something as silly as a boy. We’ve been degraded and belittled by other women in professional settings, or felt alone in a group of women because their values so clearly diverged from ours. It’s a heartbreak that stings more than any other kind. Pick-me girls are so exhausting to deal with because you know they are actively defending a system that will never protect her the same way. And it’s frustrating to feel the blunt of her shame and punishment simply because she operates under some false impression that she can win over the affections of a world that is oppressing her.

But while the intentions of the term may have started in love, now, women now use these accusations against each other like some kind of modern-day stoning. You can see it in the way these reality stars throw the term at each other like they are brandishing irons, the way people on social media lob it onto these stars like Caesar decreeing the dealth penalty. The crimes range from stealing another’s man to giving an offhanded glance one time, but the damnation is the same. And it doesn’t really matter if the women learned from their mistakes, or if there was more to footage aired, or if they acted out of character. “Witchery’s a hanging error,” as Mary Warren cries in The Crucible.

Mean girlism’s a hanging error. Burn her at the stake.

It’s a cutting and effective punishment. After all, no one wants to be seen as a bully or the girl begging at the feet of men for their approval. The undertones imply that your behavior is embarrassing, backstabbing, and anti-feminist. But the problem with the way “girl’s girl” is weaponized now is very much that it doesn’t allow for any space for continuation. It is an all-encompassing moral fork: either you are a bad woman, or you are a good one, and that’s that. The term “pick-me” was meant to be used for privileged women who have exercised their privilege by contributing to the pain of other women. But as I watched these reality stars lob the term “pick-me” at each other in their Sherry Hill prom gowns on hastily-constructed film sets this year, I failed to see how any of this vocabulary was doing any good for us.

See: Having anti-trans views is truly pick-me behavior, because you just hate women. Giving another girl a cold glance because she’s crying again shouldn’t warrant community exile. It just means you’re a little catty. And who among us…?

Moreover, the idea of what makes a “girl’s girl” or a “pick-me” is entirely based in external imagery rather than internal value—a byproduct of feminism online, no doubt. This is what has happened to many theories on social media: they are positioned as more of a performance than a process, by virtue of being presented as a flickering image on a screen before you are given the chance to sit and digest the idea. What this ultimately does is emphasize the importance of appearing like a girl’s girl rather than being one, which many industries attempt to do when they market their products as some experience of girlhood while simultaneously exercising gross amounts of capitalistic power.

The reality is, women make mistakes, feel anger, lash out when they don’t know how else to articulate their beliefs, and are already penalized by the world for it. It doesn’t do anything for them when they are then also afraid of being shunned by other women for making said mistakes. To fixate on how your face looks around other women instead of practicing solidarity with the most marginalized of communities is not liberating anyone. And placing one blanket punishment for a myriad of behaviors is as nearsighted as it is self-flagellating. What does the witch hunt for women’s wrongs do besides put more blame on women?

I don’t like it any more than you do, because I simply do not vibe with all women—some of you bitches are very dumb. But once your politics is hinged upon being correct more so than being loving, you will never achieve the collective goal you so desire.

“Some people will come to a coalition and they rate the success of the coalition on whether or not they feel good when they get there,” the late feminist scholar Bernice Johnson Reagon famously said. “They’re not looking for a coalition; they’re looking for a home. They’re looking for a bottle with some milk in it and a nipple.”

Girlhood has lured us into some illusion that true feminism is liking all women, but that’s simply not true. Solidarity, particularly non-colonial solidarity, is a regimented practice. Not everyone will be your home in the process. And frankly, it is a waste of time to shame someone for not being your home, rather than work on a world in which you can build a safe one. Let the criticism fit the crime. You can hate them and still acknowledge that their dick-sucking worldview is a fault of the dick, not their mouth. Isn’t it a better use of energy to just castrate the dick?

More on this:

• White women want their power back: on BBLs and ballet core, and the entropy of aesthetic.

• Girlhood online: the Snoopy–crab rangoon Madonna–whore complex.

• Ask Steffi: My friend shaded me via a TikTok repost…