What to make of TikTok couples pranks?
Also: 'The Golden Bachelor,' home influencing as diet culture, and more in my weekend roundup.
Happy Sunday! Welcome to the weekend roundup.
I’m thinking about…
That viral TikTok trend that has women trolling their boyfriends and husbands by telling them that “Taylor Swift put Travis Kelce on the map.” (If you haven’t been following along, Swift and Kelce are rumored to be dating.) Kelce, a two-time Super Bowl champion, was a big deal long before he met Swift, so these boyfriends and husbands react with incredulity and, sometimes, anger.
The joke is on hardcore sports fans for getting so easily worked up over the game, but the prank is also about gender and power. These women aren’t just shortchanging a big-deal player; they’re suggesting that he’s not as big of a deal as the woman he’s rumored to be dating. Many of these boyfriends and husbands are reacting to that whiff of emasculation.
I found myself cheaply laughing at some of these clips because it’s just so absurd and over the top, but the viral trend also has an essentializing effect. It’s just one of countless couples-themed TikTok trends, like the recent Roman Empire meme, that poke fun at gender stereotypes while also concretizing them. It’s like hackneyed standup comedy, old-school family sitcoms, and 90s-era dating manuals: Men are like this. Women are like that. Hahaha. The point of this latest trend isn’t to capture a wide range of reactions—say, from men who could care less about football or who are nonplussed by the suggestion that Swift is putting Kelce on the map. The repetition and predictability is the joke.
A few years ago, I wrote for Jezebel about #couplepranks videos that specifically “bait guys into expressions of chivalry, jealousy, one-track-minded horniness, or commitment-phobic Peter Pan-dom.” This applies here, too: “The overall effect is naturalizing: Do X to a man and he will do Y. It presents stereotypical behavior, and difference, as an inevitability.”
I’m reading…
on the confluence of home influencers and diet culture. She asks: “Are we learning to embrace fluffy autumnal throws and scented candles as a stand-in for the comfort we’re not supposed to get from food? Or is the relentlessness of renovation culture, and the quest to always be perfecting your living space, in and of itself another kind of diet?” Highly recommend subscribing to her newsletter.Also: still thinking about this New York Times piece by
about Republicans trying to redefine the language of abortion.I’m obsessed with…
This essay from Molly Lynch on “chaos, childcare, and civilizational collapse,” which I found via
’s excellent Memoir Land newsletter. A choice excerpt:Sometime in the early weeks after becoming a mother, it occurred to me that by giving birth to a baby I’d also given birth to chaos. I don’t mean that my child embodied chaos. It was more like when the baby exited my body, a dark, swarming force rushed in. By wanting to protect someone, I’d invited into my life all that I could never protect him from. I’ve since thought that part of what changes you when you become a parent has to do with the way you encounter this contradiction: at the very moment that you take on the greatest act of caring, you discover how powerless you are.