Tik Tok user Jenna Christie (@fiancefinancial) probably knew she was going to get good engagement with the material she posted in mid-July. She although she maybe she didn’t know what kind. It was a video in which she recounted her birth and, specifically, listed all the “stupid” things her husband did that day. Christie’s water broke at two in the afternoon. Around six o’clock, when the contractions were already noticeable, her husband asked her what was for dinner. Later, when she was nauseous, he brought her the dog’s bowl to vomit into. When they went to the hospital, she took the wrong route and took the longer route, while she suffered terrible labor pains. And finally, he sent photos of her body at her most vulnerable moments to a whole group of family and friends. When they were ready to go home with the baby, that same morning, she was hungry – you have to factor in the American healthcare system, in which one more day in the hospital, with meals, could add tens of thousands of dollars – and between They both only had a protein bar. He said to him: can we split it? I’m hungry”.
What happened is that another TikToker, who “translates” problematic videos, picked it up and Christie was inundated with comments recommending divorce and quickly fleeing such a specimen. Jenna Christie was forced to make another video saying that yes, her husband is a disaster, but not that bad either.
Perhaps he did not correctly gauge the level of uselessness of his partner, but Christie thought with good logic that he was contributing to a genre that practically dominates humor on the Internet and that is fed daily by hundreds of thousands of Tik Toks, reels and memes, a humor based on differences between genders, which assumes that everyone is heterosexual and lives as a couple. Specifically, a bad couple.
It never ceases to surprise that what triumphs on networks in 2023 is a barely updated version of the ‘Matrimoniadas’ that Spanish Television broadcast at the beginning of this century. The examples are multiple and they are scripts that are in fact copied and replicated: I know that my husband would not be unfaithful to me because he would have to organize the plan for him and remind him 17 times. He held my wife’s hand in the supermarket. She thinks it’s romantic. Actually I do it so she doesn’t spend. When you are sick but your husband has no choice (he asks him for dinner). Content of this type is endless and is grouped on Tik Tok under tags such as “married life”, “husband humor”, “wife humor” and the like.
They also have a lot of territorial transversality. It is easy to find a video starring a heterosexual couple from Bangladesh or Pakistan with a script very similar to that of a couple from Wisconsin. She decorates the apartment well, he ruins it with her computer screens and her habit of leaving everything lying around. He doesn’t know how to use the toilet properly. She watches too many reality TV shows and spends too much on online shopping. He explains an Excel that he has created with all of her expenses and income, while in her brain various animals dance the conga.
“These videos are a reflection of the majority’s sensitivity. Maybe the mistake was thinking that the Internet would lead us to something better,” reflects, somewhat disappointed, Carlo Padial, comedian and creator of series like Doctor Portuondo, who has directed the native video department for several media groups and knows well how to press the keys. of comedy in the digital environment. “I live with quite a bit of discouragement that that great thing that seemed so powerful with the arrival of 4G video, in 2012 or 2013, that we were going to be able to decentralize audiovisual culture, not having to go through the approval of producers and other barriers, all the creative explosion that was generated with Snapchat and the first YouTube has been devastated. The reality is that as soon as this boom stabilizes we reach the current scenario, in which platforms, media and advertising agencies have given rise to that. Most people want to see this humorous customs. The most important YouTuber, Mr. Beast, is doing contests that are not so different from The Grand Prix. He has reinvented TV to leave everything more or less as he was.
The ‘Barbenheimer’ phenomenon, which will be studied in business schools and marketing classes for many reasons – how an independent fan-driven phenomenon ended up having very tangible economic effects, after studios and brands joined the car – also had something of that component, of young women producing videos with varying degrees of irony (sometimes little) in which they said they were incapable of understanding a biopic of a scientist who dedicates several scenes to issues of nuclear physics and was abundant in the idea of ??Barbie for girls and Oppenheimer for boys. Obvious that in reality both are very commercial auteur films with not so different constructions. After that explosion of creativity, ingenuity, but also of clichés handcrafted by network users that was the ‘Barbenheimer’ came what is already being conceptualized as the summer of Girl Trends on the Internet.
Some had already come from afar but all of them were emerging one after the other: Girls’ Mathematics (doing clever calculations to be able to afford more purchases), Girls’ Dinners (putting together various foods, almost always uncooked, on a pretty plate and assembling an aesthetically pleasing composition), the Pretty Girls Walks (walking fast), the Wild Girls, the Rat Girls… journalist Rebecca Jennings tried to catalog them all (Coconut Girls? Strawberry Girls?) in an exhaustive article in Vox .
“What began as an exercise in vindication of the feminine has ended up propping up the stupidest version of the stereotypes that we are supposed to want to destroy,” says Bu Arena, who usually reflects on these issues on her widely followed X and Instagram accounts. and in his articles in Vogue. “Memetic language is hilarious, but we have to be careful that internet performance is not like our identity,” she warns. “The progressive simplification of discourse benefits the market. In fact, I wonder if it is not the marketing of products like Barbie that is not only accelerating, but also promoting this drift,” he concludes and warns that it is not necessary or perhaps not entirely healthy to subject online discourses “to perpetual scrutiny.”
Jennings says something similar in his article. That these neologisms (Girl Math, Hot Girl Walks) are silly but harmless and that most of the people participating in this conversation are young women voluntarily labeling themselves. What happens, says the journalist, is that they are not even real trends (sometimes they come from a single viral video that jumps to the mainstream media) but rather marketing campaigns, since now it is no longer just journalists and media professionals. corporate communication who can name more or less prefabricated sociological phenomena.
So the summer that began with pink dresses to watch Barbie in a group and the “fawn girls” (women whose faces look like a deer) on Tik Tok ended up entering the fall with another much-discussed war of the sexes, that of the men who think about the Roman Empire, while women think about manicures? What will they put at your girl dinner? Although the phenomenon also had its ironic readings and bequeathed, at least for a time, to the Internet lexicon the expression “being my Roman Empire” (a permanent obsession, something that cannot be stopped thinking about), it also left large doses of essentialism of gender.
Because in the age of content, no one can stay too far from the topic of the day. The New York Times commissioned an editor to ask women of all types (writers, basketball players) what they think about a lot and was surprised that, who would have thought it!, each one thinks about a different thing : if Taylor Swift really had an affair with Karlie Kloss, the colonial sins of America, Princess Diana, motherhood or a former best friend – the latter had a lot of consensus in X–. For some, like historian Mary Beard, her Roman Empire is the Roman Empire. Regarding the latest trend, the emeritus professor said that “the Roman Empire is a safe place for ‘masculinist’ fantasies, it is where men can show that they are macho men.”
It has been 31 years since the best-selling Men Are from Mars and Women Are from Venus, written by relationship therapist John Gray, was published. The title had a great impact, especially in the United States, and it has been said that it was the best-selling essay of the nineties. It gave rise to a sitcom and a Broadway play, as well as several sequels and left behind ideas that were already floating in the popular heritage in various cultures, such as the fact that men need to retreat to “their cave” if something goes wrong, while that women seek to communicate with their peers.
Three decades later, several sexual and gender revolutions through countless refutations of this type of theory, such as those signed by neuroscientist Gina Rippon, who has been pointing out for decades how myths and legends about the “female brain” (and the male) They always find ways to perpetuate themselves, the algorithm sometimes seems to long for how simple those days seemed and decides to reward every joke, video, theory that confirms gender essentialism with undeserved exposure. Maybe because there is no idea that goes down as well as one that confirms what we already think.
