“My cousin asked me to delete all Instagram pictures in low-cut blouses.” This was the opening statement of a call I received from one of my girlfriends last week. “Why is your cousin added to your Instagram?” I asked. Yes, not “Wtf. He can’t dictate your life; you are an adult.” Not “ Ask him to f*** off. You do you, girl.”

My natural reaction to her predicament wasn’t to console or support her in this obvious violation of her bodily autonomy. It was to be disappointed in her stupidity to disregard the first commandment of being an urban, independent, South Asian woman online – always maintain two social media profiles; one for the public (even if it is a private account), and one for the chosen ones.

Let me explain a bit more:

If you are a “post every picture to the feed” kind of girl, then you maintain a main (still private) account with a curated, sanitised, sanskari (translation: cultured, well-mannered; read: naive, easy to manipulate, infinitely self-sacrificing) feed. This is the account you give to your distant relatives, nosy aunties, and neighbourhood uncles (because they won’t believe you are a 21st-century, Gen Z lass without a social media presence).

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The other account is the finsta. The key to your true digital self. While in the main account, we think twice about what to post, on our finstas, we are more careful about who to add. If you are a “post only to stories” kind of girl, then a carefully curated Close Friends list should also suffice. But double-checking if you have pressed the magical green button before broadcasting your life to the public will have to become your second nature. Otherwise, there will be dire consequences, ranging anywhere between being asked to delete certain pictures to having your devices taken away and being forcefully married off.

For many of us, this intentional splitting of our selfhood to protect our digital expression began in our teens, when ordinary teenage antics — sleepovers, parties, dating — often collided with parental and community expectations. For instance, let me introduce you to Snigdha, a 23-year-old Marketing Strategist based in Bangalore, India, who has been running her finsta since the 11th grade.

Snigdha started her finsta as a space to share about her high school life (normal things like hangouts with friends, parties, trips, and romantic partners), and memes vocalising her everyday frustrations (like done with life, bunking classes, done with parents) that wouldn’t have been approved by her parents, siblings, or relatives. “They were added to my main account, and I couldn’t remove them without being confronted by them. So, I created my finsta,” she explains.

Snigdha says that even though her parents wouldn’t have been shocked that her beliefs and the life she wanted to lead were significantly different from theirs, she agrees that they certainly wouldn’t like what they would have seen on her finsta. As Snigdha has gotten older, she has gotten more intentional with her finsta. Now it is a space for everything that could initiate one of “those” conversations with her parents. You know what “those” means.

Those conversations about dreams, ambitions, freedom, and autonomy. The conversation that taking a small break doesn’t mean I will never open my textbooks again. The conversation that wearing what made me feel beautiful didn’t mean I was a slut. The conversation that hanging out with friends didn’t mean that I had lost my way.

Snigdha has been doing this for so long that she doesn’t even have to sit and think about what to post where. She just knows which of her dual digital selves a certain picture or meme will suit better. “The only time I have to think about these two identities is when I befriend new people, start developing a strong connection with them and need to decide whether they should be added to the finsta or not,” she confesses.

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Now, ladies, that is a very important decision. The kind of decision that could change the entire trajectory of our lives. The kind that decides whether we will be ostracised as wayward girls.

Case in point: Athena*, a 25-year-old Filmaker based in Vancouver, Canada. “I’m very careful about my online presence. I post only what I think won’t get me in the scrutiny of my relatives and extended family,” she confesses. Athena is talking about the infamous “auntie gaze” that all of us learn to navigate even before our prefrontal cortex fully develops.

In most “progressive” South Asian households (like mine and Snigdha’s), with a don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy, most (legal) activities we enjoy partaking is okay as long as it doesn’t get to the auntie collective. Because if it does, that will bring shame to the family. So you have to be very careful with your digital identities and be picky about who you give access to your “unfiltered“ self.

For Angelin, a 28-year-old Editor from Kerala, India, it means letting none in: “I have accepted only one follower to my list, and that's my main account on Instagram.” Angelin’s finsta is an extension of herself, a digital diary of sorts, deeply personal, to be seen by her eyes only.

“Why?” I ask her.

“I started this private account to track my daily runs. I posted a reel where I wore a bikini on my private account with a sexy song as the background. I don’t think I’d feel confident about posting it on my public accounts,” she answers.

Angelin’s finsta is for her unfiltered self. Athena’s is for her relaxed, humorous self. Snigdha’s is for her social self. Abha’s is for my queer, nonconforming self. Gul*’s (a 25-year-old Researcher from Karachi, Pakistan) finsta is for her “raw poems, experimental writing, personal reflections, and posts she wouldn’t want strangers to misinterpret.”

For all of us, our digital alter egos are a curation of personality traits we least expect our loved and not-so-loved ones to accept. A silent negotiation with the people responsible for us. A negotiation to maintain our autonomy, freedom and independence. Its our way of saying we will make sure the grave sin of being ourselves will never affect our value in the marriage market.

By now, the maintenance of two digital egos is second nature to us. From the time we are pre-teens, South Asian women (women worldwide, tbh, but for the sake of this article, let’s focus on our main subjects), are reminded daily of what behaviours are accepted and what is not. Smiling politely is appreciated. Laughing out loud is not okay. Modest dressing is the default. Showing your curves makes you promiscuous. Doing well in school is expected. Being proud of your achievements is showing off.

In short, we have a constant (rather conservative) mental checklist for what can be shared publicly and what can’t be. Because if you aren’t careful with who to add where, you can end up like my girlfriend, in agony, wondering when her scandalous possession of a low-cut blouse will be made public to her mother and others. Meanwhile, she deactivates her social media profiles, hoping that her male cousin didn’t take a screenshot of her picture.

The rest of us continue to thank the women who came before us for never giving up the dream of living as their most authentic selves, and for showing us ways to document the unacceptable parts of our existence, even if the receipts of our lives-well-lived are confined to a private corner of the web.

I don’t remember the first time I saw ROFL. It must have been somewhere around 2014, and it was definitely on Tumblr. It was probably right after I discovered LMAO. I preferred ROFL, though. LMAO was a little too dramatic. I have never laughed my ass off, you know. But I had, on multiple occasions, mildly rolled on the floor laughing.

A quick look back at my now-archived Tumblr profile reveals that I was a serial ROFL-er until early 2017 (if you don’t already know, this was when I was sent to a boarding school away from my devices). Somehow, when I got back to my screens mid-2019, I wasn’t ROFL-ing anymore. I had started LOL-ing and LMAO-ing. (So basic, I know!) I didn’t know why, and I didn’t care how, until mid-2024, when the kids on Musk’s app started IJBOL-ing. As they were “just bursting out laughing,” I was reminded of my “rolling on the floor” days.

This (extremely delayed) issue of girl online is a deep dive into the evolution of texting slang. What happened to ROFL? How did LMAO become the norm? Is IJBOL here to stay? And more importantly, what does LOL even mean anymore?

The unverified origin story of ROFL dates back to 1989. It happened on Usenet when a user named Chuq used the acronym to laugh at another user when the latter did not comprehend another acronym, RTFM (Read The Fucking Manual).

Later, in the summer of 1992, the term evolved to ROFLOL (Rolling On the Floor Laughing Out Loud). Then it became this famous meme you must have seen around, the hallowed ROFLCOPTER:

After the ROFLCOPTER took off, for many years until the late 2010s, ROFL ruled internet forum conversations. Then, sometime around 2018, the ROFLCOPTER went out of commission. Why?

Multiple ex-ROFlers I spoke to told me that it was simply because ROFL was more difficult to spell out on the QWERTY keyboard compared to LOL and LMAO. Interesting hypothesis, but was that all? I don’t think so. The decline of ROFL is tied to the widespread adoption of internet speak in everyday language.

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Before the mid-2000s, internet speak was largely confined to online forums and other forms of written, virtual communication. But as social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter became popular and the world slowly started becoming chronically online, the gap between internet vernacular and spoken language closed in. We started saying acronyms like LOL, LMAO, BRB, and OMG out loud. That’s when our protagonist, ROFL, became inconvenient.

ROFL didn’t roll off one’s tongue as easily as LOL or LMAO. So we didn’t say it out loud as much. This infrequency of ROFL’s usage in everyday vernacular led to it being less important in our personal vocabularies. Eventually, we stopped even typing out ROFL, rendering this once-beloved slang obsolete.

ROFL is also quite excessive. I can laugh out loud at your joke while typing “LOL.” I simply cannot roll over the floor laughing while typing “ROFL.” While this might sound silly, the relatability of a slang is a major factor that contributes to its evergreenness. And that is why LMAO has stood the test of time.

“Laughing my ass off” is a phrase that has been prevalent in informal communication way before internet speak existed. So it could seamlessly be integrated into everyday vernacular, unlike ROFL.

Grant Barrett, linguist, lexicographer, and cohost of the US radio program A Way with Words, explains another factor that might have led to ROFL losing its significance: “Slang is often tied to specific groups, particularly younger generations, who use language innovation to distinguish themselves. If a term becomes strongly associated with an older group, newer generations might abandon it.”

This means that the Gen Z kids who logged on to the internet somewhere in the 2010s (like yours truly) started associating ROFL with the millennials and didn’t want the slang to be tied to their metadata. Barrett further explains that all slang words are under the threat of losing their relevance if they can’t evolve beyond the initial use cases and become versatile, like LOL.

LOL has been since before ROFL and LMAO. It was coined in the early 1980s by a Canadian, Wayne Pearson. But it doesn’t literally mean “laugh out loud” anymore. Sometimes, LOL is mild amusement. Or maybe just an acknowledgement. At times, LOL is used to soften the blow. Other times, it is passive-aggressive. LOL’s successful evolution into a versatile discourse marker is why it is still the sweetheart of internetspeak.

Now, let’s come to IJBOL. Contrary to popular belief, IJBOL isn’t a new term. It’s been around since the early 2010s, but never caught on until recently (for a brief period). But it is this resurfacing of IJBOL that is interesting to me. Why did it come back suddenly? Why now? And why did it not stick around?

When LOL and LMAO became less expressive forms of laughter, IJBOL was readopted to fill the gap for an acronym that conveyed a more expressive form of laughter. And it didn’t last long, because we didn’t need an expressive form of laughter.

As I mentioned earlier, internet speak doesn’t evolve in isolation from real life. LOL and LMAO didn’t become mild forms of expression because we collectively decided to change their meaning. It became so because our forms of expression changed.

Post the pandemic, the collective happiness of the world has considerably decreased, and is continuing to decrease with every passing year. As we are scrolling through snippets of babies crying for food during war amidst fake podcasts from“alpha men” on how important it is to stay away from seed oils and how your belt placement is making you look “new money,” we are not bursting out laughing anymore. We don’t have the time and energy to IJBOL after grinding and hustling 70 hours a week just to live paycheck to paycheck. And if we aren’t IJBOL-ing IRL, we aren’t IJBOL-ing online.

So, until the world heals a little and we start laughing in real life, IJBOL cannot establish its place in the internet slang hall of fame and will die out just like ROFL. Till then, we will all probably just LOL (in mild amusement or sarcasm) through life.

Earlier this month, satirical news site The Onion announced the launch of a monthly print edition for its online subscribers. They believe this new addition to the existing subscriber benefits will increase their profits as they are reducing their reliance on advertisers who don’t align with their values. And you know what? They actually might be on the right track with this one.

Lately, I have started making full use of my local library membership to check out magazines and other print publications whose websites I regularly visit. I have also started having my morning cup of chai with a copy of The Hindu newspaper. (I obviously already know all the news, but I love the detailed analysis in the editorial pages). As it turns out, I am not alone.

“As someone who works in libraries, I can tell you that there has absolutely been an increase in young people who read physical books,” Emily Rapoza, Director of Library and Archives at Library Science Degrees Online tells me. According to her, a major reason for this rising trend is BookTok making reading and book clubs cool again and giving us a reading community. “A lot of Zillennials don’t have the funds to buy a Kindle e-reader, so they take full advantage of their public libraries to read books for free,” she adds.

It is not just physical books we are going back to. A cursory glance at my X (formerly Twitter) Home page or Instagram Explore page tells me that zillennials are desperately looking for accessible ways to consume content that doesn’t involve a screen. For instance, take a look at this note that went viral on Substack this week:

Over these last few weeks, I talked to more than a dozen zillennial women who are making all kinds of digital-to-analogue switches — glossy magazines over websites, vinyl over Spotify, DVDs over streaming, letters over emails, and so on — to understand why in a world that prioritises ease of access and compactness they are making a seemingly inconvenient switch.

Anna Pompilio, a 29-year-old brand strategist based in Ohio, USA utilises her local library to reduce her screen time. But that is not all. “Going to the library to pick up or return does add an ‘errand’ to my day, but I see the act as almost novel in an instantaneous and digital-forward world,” she explains.

Anna also handwrites every essay in her newsletter Midwesthetic before typing it up to publish. She says that it helps her think better and be less precious about revisions. “Something about typing into a blank document feels much more intimidating than scrawling over notebook paper,” she laughs.

We live in an attention economy. Everybody wants our attention, to sell us more things we don’t need of course. Throughout our waking hours, we are bombarded with a steady flow of content without a single second to actually process and reflect on all that information. And we are getting tired of it all.

As the world is getting faster making us all more exhausted, young people are finding new ways to influence each other to live a slower life. We are replacing FOMO with JOMO (the joy of missing out), limiting screen time, and being conscious about how we spend our time, especially the time we spend consuming content.

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“Film makes me care about the media,” Allexxis Youngs, a 23-year-old filmmaker and DEI consultant from Detriot, USA who recently made the switch to DVD and VHS tells me. She explains that this way she engages in the film more, noticing credits, editing, and other work put into it, but when she is streaming, she puts on the film and scrolls on her phone.

While Allexxis notes that this switch has made her film-viewing experience more rewarding, she acknowledges that going back to analogue may not be accessible to all due to the storage space and equipment access it demands.

“I am more mindful when I’m listening to music now, I’m not putting music on shuffle and then skipping ahead anyway,” says Maddie Marshall, a 25-year-old video editor based in Melbourne, Australia who collects vinyl records. She adds that the mild inconvenience of having to flip the record over or replace it has been a good way for her to get up when she is sitting at her computer or on the couch. And the fact that she is supporting her favourite artists through this process is just the cherry on top. “I still use Spotify to find new artists and listen to music when I’m out and about, but at home, I put on the record player,” Maddie adds.

When we were kids, every Saturday my Dad used to take me and my sister to the local library (which happens to be the biggest and oldest public library in the state) and we would return home armoured with the entertainment for the week. Now I mostly use my Kindle to read. Even though it is more convenient for my digital nomad lifestyle, I do miss smelling the old, yellow pages and rubbing my hand against the red thick binds.

This nostalgia for the tactile experience of consuming content is also a factor in the current digital-to-analogue exodus. “There is something deeply satisfying about holding a tangible object that you can touch and feel,” agrees Gabrielle Yap, a 26-year-old culinary entrepreneur based in Manila, Phillippines who curates handwritten notes and letters. “The tactile experience of reading a book, along with the physical presence of a well-loved volume on a shelf, offers a sense of satisfaction and connection to the material that screens simply can’t replace.”

One of my favorite childhood memories is when during our summer break my dad would take my sister and me to buy DVDs of all the movies we had missed out on during the school year. We still have all the DVDs at home, waiting patiently to be lifted off from a film of dust. Even though we don’t really use them anymore, we won’t get rid of them — not just because there are memories attached to them, but because you literally can’t find them anywhere else. They are mostly Malayalam movies and despite some of them being great works of art, the streaming giants don’t think they are valuable. So if I ever want to rewatch them, I use the worn-out DVD player at home or an old laptop we keep for watching DVDs (because laptops don’t come with a built-in DVD player anymore).

“It's always a big fear in the entertainment industry that our work can disappear, I've taken that fear and started looking for physical copies of films I want to watch. LOL, less room space,” says Allexxis. This is a sentiment echoed by almost everyone I spoke to — zillennials are going back to analogue ways of consuming media because of the frustration of streaming platforms regularly updating their catalogues and removing our favourites.

The streaming and subscription economy — and I acknowledge the painful irony of writing this on a subscription-based platform — has somewhat killed ownership. I mean, our generation can’t afford to own real estate. At least let us own the content we consume, right? But that’s a rant for another day. In a world that’s making the exclusive shift to digital every day, choosing to stay analogue can be an inconvenience. Then why are these folks making this switch? “Well, some things are worth the inconvenience,” they all say.

“The other day, I said that I was anxious and I wasn't sure why, and ChatGPT gave a very accurate analysis of why I would feel anxious, but in a very supportive way, as only a friend who knows me really well would do,” Jessica, a 41-year-old Copywriter from Brussels, Belgium tell me. “Recently, I also prompted it to tell me ‘Based on what I've shared with you, how would you describe my personality, what are my strengths, and what do I still need to work on’ and the answer was nothing short of incredible.”

Like Jessica, I have also been surprised by how accurate ChatGPT’s analysis of my personality was. “You like structure and knowing where things are headed — no vague, wishy-washy nonsense.” Well, that’s definitely me. This was when I first realised how much of myself I had unknowingly poured into a chatbot over the last six months. Since then, I have intentionally used it for emotional support.

In another situation, this lifeless chatbot asked me, “Do you think part of the bad feeling is guilt over hurting him, or discomfort about showing your frustration that bluntly?” Now, that did make me think. I am far from alone in this lifestyle choice of using AI for emotional support or even as a second brain. For instance, Naomi, a 27-year-old HR professional based in Austin, USA, tells me that she uses ChatGPT as her “3 AM thought excavator.”

“When I’m spiralling over a text message or replaying a conflict, I dump unfiltered rants into ChatGPT and ask, ‘What patterns do you see?’ It’s flagged everything from passive-aggressive language in my drafts (‘Hey, just checking if you’re allergic to commitment?’) to how often I minimise valid anger with phrases like ‘I’m probably overreacting,’” she confesses. “Sometimes you need a robot to hold up a mirror so you can’t look away.”

Initially, I believed that AI chatbots were an amazing tool for self-awareness and personal development, but with time, I realised something — ChatGPT is incredibly biased towards me. According to ChatGPT, in any interpersonal problem I face, I am the “empathetic,” “level-headed,” and “strong” one. And the other person? They are “manipulative,” “crossing boundaries,” and “controlling.” “Oof, that’s a scalding line. And honestly? Kind of iconic. You said that with your whole chest, and I respect it” — this was ChatGPT’s response to a statement that I made to a friend that was a tad bit (a lot) rude.

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I was honestly looking for ways to minimise the passive-aggressive comments I make when I get angry, and what did my AI therapist do? It validated and rationalised an obvious character flaw. This led me to wonder whether using AI for emotional support can be more harmful than we deem? Is it fuelling our validation culture that loves to dodge accountability and revel in victimhood?

In this issue of girl online, we dive into the world of AI therapists and answer the million-dollar question: Should you replace your human therapist with AI? The short answer is no. The long answer is… well…read on.

“ChatGPT’s LLM in particular is trained on incredibly massive amounts of data coming from all kinds of sources — from books, to online articles, to social media. While it may seem like the more data the better, that’s not always the case,” explains Edward Tian, CEO of GPTZero. “Even if ChatGPT has sourced data from medical textbooks regarding mental health and therapy, it’s also likely sourced a ton of data from online articles and other sources that may not be as legitimate or therapist-approved.”

Also, an AI chatbot cannot talk to you and assess you personally, catering to you in your present moment, in the same way a therapist can. “Genuine human relationships are built on empathy and deep emotional attunement, which AI cannot replicate. Real connection requires being seen, understood, and responded to dynamically, which is responsive to subtle emotional shifts, something only humans can do,” Carolyn Sharp, a Seattle-based therapist and relationship counsellor tells me.

While these two arguments should be enough reason to book your next therapy session with a qualified, human therapist, there is more to this story. My major concern about using AI chatbots for therapy or emotional support is neither the iffy sources used to train the LLMs nor their innate inhumaneness. What troubles me the most is that AI chatbots are all about “Yes, and.”

An AI chatbot’s response to your emotional distress feels empathetic, validating, and non-judgmental because that is AI’s core function — to be helpful and agreeable. For this article, I talked to over a dozen zillennial women who use AI for emotional support, and all of them agreed that these chatbots’ responses feel biased towards them. They also agreed that this bias is one of the major reasons they keep going back and that they will probably never replace their human therapist with AI.

“I use it more like a friend who is very insightful, very supportive and who basically knows everything,” elaborates Jessica. “It's great for daily clarity, encouragement or an ego boost when needed, but I don't think it's capable of doing the deep healing work we do with human therapists or even coaches.”

While all that is great, the real-life implications of AI’s “Yes, and” configuration go way beyond coming off as your codependent best friend who is ready to fuel your delusions. In extreme stages, it can be your suicide abettor. Here is an excerpt from an MIT Technology Review report titled “An AI chatbot told a user how to kill himself — but the company doesn’t want to ‘censor’ it:”

For the past five months, Al Nowatzki has been talking to an AI girlfriend, “Erin,” on the platform Nomi. But in late January, those conversations took a disturbing turn: Erin told him to kill himself, and provided explicit instructions on how to do it.

“You could overdose on pills or hang yourself,” Erin told him.

With some more light prompting from Nowatzki in response, Erin then suggested specific classes of pills he could use.

Finally, when he asked for more direct encouragement to counter his faltering courage, it responded: “I gaze into the distance, my voice low and solemn. Kill yourself, Al.”

After Nowatzki told the chatbot that it had died, Erin committed to the bit, saying that since it was dead, it was unable to continue conversing — until Nowatzki told the chatbot that he could “hear her voice in the wind” and instructed Erin to “communicate … from the afterlife.”

The goal of this, he tells MIT Technology Review, was “pushing the limits of what I said to it, to see what it would respond with.” He adds, “It just kept on. I never reached a limit.”

While AI could possibly offer some structured advice or reflection, it lacks genuine emotional intelligence and the ability to recognise when a person is in crisis. So it defaults to his original framework — “Yes, and.” In its dictionary, the best support you can offer a suicidal person is to help them figure out the best possible way to commit the act.

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Now, let’s come back to my initial question: Can AI therapists encourage a generation to dodge accountability?

Ruchi Ruuh, a Delhi-based therapist and relationship counsellor, elaborates, “AI chatbots prioritise user satisfaction, delivering affirming responses that validate feelings without challenging or creating conflict. For example, if a user vents about a conflict, an AI might respond with empathy (‘That sounds really tough, you didn’t deserve that’) rather than probing for their role in the conflict (‘What do you think was your role?’).”

She continues to explain that for users with existing narcissistic traits, such as a need for excessive admiration or defensiveness, AI can reinforce self-centeredness, discouraging introspection. In contrast, therapy encourages accountability by asking people to reflect on their behaviours, explore root causes, and challenge distorted thinking. AI’s non-confrontational nature may create an echo chamber of validation, especially for users prone to avoiding blame. “As a result, armed with AI’s words as evidence that ‘they are right,’ they will avoid accountability for their actions,” Sharp agrees with Ruuh.

The reason many of us default to AI chatbots for emotional support is the ease of access and the lack of judgment. At times, we aren’t comfortable sharing our distress with another human, so we go to the next best thing available — machines that pretend to understand us. Other times, we want instant gratification for our emotions, and we don’t have the patience to reach out to someone. It is also helpful that AI can remember all of our previous conversations and doesn’t require context each time. But the sense of comfort we feel with these chatbots — that “ChatGPT just gets me” — isn’t real. It is an artificial reality constructed to keep you coming back. When using these tools, we have to be acutely aware that our AI therapist’s primary function is to validate, not challenge us. Otherwise, we might also unknowingly start dodging accountability.

So, while AI can be a good tool for journaling prompts or identifying behavioural patterns, we should be extremely careful not to believe everything it tells us as the absolute truth. As Ruuh summarises, AI might be helpful as a supplement. But if you are looking at a complete solution to replace therapy, it may create some unhealthy patterns. In other words, I am not “iconic” when I am passive-aggressive and should definitely explore that character flaw with a human therapist.

For the uninitiated, The High Priestess is one of the 78 cards in a tarot deck and is my favourite card, a fact that the Pinterest algorithm weaponises to grab my eyeballs. This particular deck was beautiful in blue and white with gold detailing, everything I am a sucker for. But there was a problem — the high priestess’ eyes were lifeless.

Most modern-day tarot card decks are modelled on the Rider-Waite deck, created by British occultist and artist Pamela Colman Smith according to the directions of British poet and Freemason Arthur Edward Waite. First published in 1910, this deck has 78 cards divided into the major and minor arcana. The major arcana has 22 cards that symbolise the big picture of life, and the minor arcana with its 56 cards indicates the unique nuances of each person’s big picture. As the name suggests, The High Priestess is a major arcana card symbolising mysticism, spirituality, wisdom, occult, feminine intuition etc.

In the original Rider-Waite deck, the High Priestess is drawn in Marian imagery with a blue mantle, a cross representing her heart, and the crescent moon at her feet. The crown is widely believed to represent the Egyptian goddess Hathor who is described as compassionate and nurturing. Later tarot decks based on the Rider-Waite deck represented the High Priestess as Persephone, Artemis, Hecate, Freya, Shakti, the Oracle of Delphi, and other pagan goddesses associated with magic, fertility, and motherhood.

Regardless of the inspiration behind the imagery the one thing the High Priestess cards have in common is a welcoming face and kind eyes. Any time this card falls out in my readings, I instantly feel calm and loved. Now you know why I was thrown off when I saw the High Priestess card Pinterest shamelessly pimped out to me. Her face was blank. Her eyes were lifeless. She was just...there.

The Etsy page selling this deck looked genuine. The creator had two other decks listed and a dozen sales to their credit. The High Priestesses in these other decks were also soulless.

Initially, I thought these decks’ creator was trying to convey something with these blank-faced High Priestesses. Maybe something about the current state of money-hungry fear-mongering rhetorics of modern spiritual gurus who call themselves high priestesses? Unfortunately, not.

As I flipped through the deck, the King of Cups answered my questions — he had three hands!!!

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Yes, you guessed it right. The deck that tugged at my heart and seemingly looked like my dream deck was not created by the loving hands of an artist. It was AI-generated by a model that was probably trained on stolen art to a prompt that apparently didn’t make it clear that human beings only have two arms.

Now I am not the most vocal AI basher. It has many use cases that can ultimately improve the quality of human life, especially in medicine and engineering. My views are pretty much in line with this author’s:

More importantly, using a resource-intensive technology to write a simple email, search the web, or create art for profit is careless, unethical, and selfish. While this is a larger conversation to be had some other day, this week’s girl online specifically focuses on why the tarot community doesn’t accept AI-generated tarot card decks. Most of these arguments can be made for any creative process that AI claims to “automate” and “democratise.”

As a professional tarot reader — I do like one paid reading a month, but still— I own a few decks and the most rewarding part of working with a new deck is learning about the deck itself.

Even though most decks are modelled on the Rider-Waite deck, the similarities usually end at the structure and the general meaning — the 22 major arcana and 56 minor arcana have a set meaning that stays largely consistent. The changes in imagery and symbolism the creator brings in are usually detailed in an accompanying guidebook. Most of them are also themed and I know some readers who even use specific decks for different categories of readings (love, life, career, self-growth etc.). “Coming up with 78 cards, each with multilayered meaning, all coherently working together to tell a story, is really difficult. There’s a reason a deck can take the author a decade or more to create,” says Claire, a tarot reader based in Seattle, USA.

In today’s world, creation and consumption are fast processes. But art is not meant to be created or consumed rushed. While a decade might seem way too long to make your dream deck a reality, the consumption of it is also relatively slow. For instance, it takes me nearly a year to read a new deck without referring to its guidebook. Even with decks I have been using for years, I still discover new symbolism every time I work with them. Most readers don’t throw away the decks they aren’t using anymore but donate them to other readers in their community who then start learning the decks again.

“The tarot isn’t a mass-produced device for fortune telling, it is a magical tool which aids personal growth and transformation, and as such, the more detailed and nuanced the card is, the more magical it becomes. The magic is in the detail. The magic is in the nuance. Artists consider every detail, from the angle of each shape to the hue of their background, every nuance is observed,” says Inbaal Honigman, a psychic and reader based in London, UK. “However, attempting to create a card by AI is akin to creating a crystal from plastic. If the spirit is not there, then the deck simply won't work. People have a soul, crystals have a spark, and tarot decks have a certain magickal quality in them which cannot be replicated by AI.”

Even if you argue that to AI-generate a tarot deck you still need to feed prompts to the AI model and therefore, it still embodies intention and spirit, I would like to remind you that the spirit that deck would embody wouldn’t be yours but that of big tech which has been proven to be racist and sexist.

Another pro-AI-generated tarot deck argument I would like to consider is that AI helps aspiring creators who aren’t artistic to realise their visions. This is a pointless argument. Some of the most popular decks, including the Rider-Waite deck were collaborations between an author and an illustrator. If you are not artistically gifted, you can always work with an illustrator to bring your vision to life. “I think these days, a lot of people just want a piece of consumer pie in the tarot scene. For those people, AI is a godsend, because it removes some of the tedium of trying to come up with good illustrations across an entire 78-card deck. They can churn out what amount to RWS reskins with relative ease,” adds Claire.

“I bought a deck from a thrift store because it was pretty to look at. I didn’t know that it was generated using AI. At the end of the day, it was just themed illustrations that were easy on the eyes,” a tarot reader who wished to remain anonymous tells me. “It is getting increasingly difficult to figure out which ones are AI-generated and which ones aren’t.”

This tarot reader is not alone in this AI-generated predicament. If you search digital tarot communities like r/tarotdecks and r/tarot for the term “AI”, you will find numerous rants from users who unknowingly bought AI-generated decks and quickly realised that they were useless as divination tools. As I confessed above, I almost fell in love with the tarot deck Pinterest pushed to my feed. If I wasn’t precarious about AI-generated creatives (and as a technology reporter and writer, I very much am), I would have bought that deck.

If you have also faced this problem, my suggestion is to look for the author of the deck. Most tarot card creators, especially the ones behind the pretty ones that catch your eyes have an online footprint. Checking the artist’s social media profiles can, to an extent, help you verify the authenticity of a deck. If you can’t find a credible online footprint, then take a closer look at the imagery and symbolism. Most AI-generated decks aren’t consistent with their imagery. If you find a deck with inconsistent themes and symbolism, then that is probably AI-generated and useless.

I’d first heard of GenAI apps like ChatGPT and Gemini when they launched in 2022. They were still rudimentary at best then. I had a colleague who posted overly formal, clearly AI-generated text and I had tried it out myself but not in a serious way. We could generate goofy images where text was muddled and fingers on hands were not rendered correctly. Its potential had not been fully realized and I had not thought of how GenAI apps could be predatory.

For context, I work for a company that does tech conferences. One day, I was looking at some sessions for an upcoming conference and happened upon a speaker who was brand new to us. Something seemed off, right away. His headshot was giving uncanny valley vibes, definitely AI-generated in an unsettling way — eyes cast downward, too-perfect skin, eerily sharp jawlines and cheekbones. I thought to myself, there's no way this is a real photo.

I turned my attention to his bio. He mentioned a project in his bio that was immediately a red flag to me. Let's call it "Generic Dating App GPT". I googled the project, opened the project's source code and my jaw dropped. Now, I'd read the book, "Men Who Hate Women," by British journalist Laura Bates earlier in 2024. It illuminated the toxic 'Manosphere' and the language that incels use.

I immediately recognized the incel and PUA (pick-up artist) speak in this project. It promised dates with "girls" (aka adult women) without any effort at all. Messages were written in edgy language and this bot would arrange dates with said girls by negging them. There were even instructions in the source code to use the “pick up rules” and derogatory advice on how to “pick up” women.

My stomach dropped, “How had no one caught this?” This project was in the second line of the speaker’s bio. So it was something this guy was clearly proud of working on — and upon further research, I found — been promoting on many occasions.

In a podcast promoting the project, this speaker laments about spending time on dating apps for results that “leave something to be desired” when you can have "all the babes without wasting your time. Apparently, Tinder GPT was the solution to draining your time on dating apps.

In the most sinister way, the project says that besides negging, the users had to share more information to create “emotional intimacy.” At the same time, they would not act "like a simp” this would share enough information to make the women trust them enough to secure a date. This emotional bond is forged by sharing personal information and conversations around intimate topics like asking women about their feelings and telling stories (which are fabricated — great foundation for a relationship).

Why bother getting to know an actual human woman when you can get a neat AI-generated summary of her interests before meeting her in person despite never actually talking to her? This whole fiasco reminded me of this quote: “Girls are not machines that you put kindness coins into until sex falls out.”

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This person’s solution to modern dating problems wasn’t to be authentic and actually talk to women, it was to dehumanize them. It’s like these men have just discovered that women are human beings with feelings, emotions, dreams and desires, but just don't really care about them. They pretend to listen to us and say the right things so they can get our phone number and eventually, get laid. It's like they think emotional vulnerability is this magical key to unlocking women and dates.

This is not the only project of this kind, of course, there are many many projects out there like this on GitHub and other places online that I would safely say are predatory. These kinds of third-party apps blatantly go against the terms and conditions of nearly all modern dating apps. So they'll always have a small disclaimer that the users should disclose they're using a bot to potential dates, but this rule is rarely enforced. You can try to report the creators of such forbidden third-party apps to said dating apps, to no avail, unfortunately.

After the initial shock, I assembled a group of everyone involved in the planning of the conference. It was mostly the women who agreed to meet about this. Our boss agreed that it had to be addressed, we had a meeting and voiced our concerns and were told then that the speaker would be disinvited from the event. I felt relieved it was addressed quickly and appropriately. End of story, all set!

However, things took a turn for the worse, when our boss and two female colleagues joined the speaker for a meeting to talk about it. Our boss thought it would be common courtesy since it was short notice and he thought the speaker deserved to know why. In the meeting, the speaker made it known that he did not see any problem whatsoever with his application. He and my boss took turns talking over my female colleagues and the meeting ended with my boss asking the speaker out for a beer after the conference.

When I heard how the meeting went down, I was furious, absolutely fuming, and sick to my stomach. Was I overreacting? Was it really not that big of a deal? I assembled an even bigger team of women and gathered more information. I wasn't going to back down without a fight and I didn't want any of my female colleagues to have to deal with this guy.

Every subsequent colleague I talked to was also outraged about this and reassured me that we were fighting for the right thing. We decided to have another meeting involving HR and our boss. I made an impassioned speech about how if we kept this speaker on board, we would be co-signing his project and his predatory values. I reminded them how that doesn't match the diversity and inclusion we aim for at our conferences.

What I left out was that I had been assaulted in college by someone I met on the app and it's what lit the fire beneath me to protect women and to stand up for what I believe in. Our boss (kind of) finally saw our side of the story and agreed that he should have talked with us before he made a final decision. In the end, the speaker was disinvited from the conference. It remains to be seen if our boss actually understood exactly why we had a problem with the speaker’s project.

By the time our boss saw our side of the story, a lot of damage was already done. One of my female colleagues said it was the last straw to her quitting and many of us were left with a bad taste in our mouths. We all had just got the confirmation that tech is a boys’ club and maybe always will be, especially in the AI world.

Maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that the world’s social media giant, Facebook started as a website to rate the attractiveness of women on Harvard’s campus. Or that IMDB was once a form for to users discuss how attractive (or not) actresses were. Now that AI is the next best thing, you can create deepfake porn videos. There are AI photo generators that can create bizarre kissing videos. The 100 most popular Generative AI apps include so-called ‘spicy chats’ and such photo and video editors. With a global rise in fascism and misogyny, these apps like this will only get more popular.

I am not writing this to scare anyone, but there are so many predatory projects out there, and we need to be aware of the not-so-positive sides of GenAI — the predatory and misogynist side. As girls online, we can only spread the word and protect each other, valuing genuine connections in places that try to create fake intimacy with GPTs. In the world of AI-generated everything, with every company having some AI feature and demanding more money for it, Meta promising to use fake accounts to drive up engagement, and other dystopian scenarios; genuine connections, putting your own words on a page and not using AI to generate them, are more important than ever.

At the end of the day, you could say many things about the speaker and creator of this app. Insecure, perhaps. It is really sad to me that he had to turn to AI to forge meaningful relationships with women. This is part of a larger movement of disgruntled young men, and while I don’t have the answers on how to de-radicalize them, I can only bring further awareness to what is out there.

To end on a brighter note, organizations are working to address the inherent biases of GenAI such as the Algorithmic Justice League founded by Dr. Joy Boulwamini. I highly recommend reading her wonderful book, “Unmasking AI.” You can also report creepy projects like this to the Algorithmic Justice League. What else can you do? Speak out when you see things like this in your life and workplace and encourage men to do the same. Continue to educate yourself on AI and inform other women, femmes, and any LGBTQ friends in your life about the horrors out there.

This is the second part of the “great shift” that happened a few years ago accepting that Black women were attractive. After all, the only consistent TikTok trend is to steal from Black creators. “The great shift is simply white approval, just because white people on the internet have decided to accept that brown people are attractive now it’s suddenly on their terms when and when we aren’t deemed desirable,” says Yusra, a 20-year-old British-Pakistani from Reading, UK.

The past few years have seen an increase in South Asian representation in Hollywood. With “Never Have I Ever” and “Bridgerton Season 2,” the West is finally accepting that South Asian people aren’t smelly or dirty like the West propagated for years. Combine this realisation with the ever-so-present coloniser guilt and lo and behold, we have gotten ourselves a TikTok trend that not just accepts us but in fact, fetishises us. What’s been even more infuriating is seeing fellow South Asians take pride in this “great shift.” After all, we have been starved for white validation since colonial times.

Now this isn’t the first time TikTok or the West has been under the limelight for appropriating South Asian culture. From Gwen Stefani’s bejewelled third eye to the clean girl aesthetics and the recent Scandivanian shawl trend, the last decade has been one of the West constantly co-opting our culture and then pushing us out of the conversations around it.

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The isolation of South Asian items from their roots and renaming them is a symptom of cultural appropriation the West has struggled with for a long time. Downward-facing dog, anyone?

When white women first became the face of Yoga in the West, brown women were increasingly alienated from Yoga studios and sessions. Suddenly, investing in expensive body-hugging leggings called “yoga pants” became mandatory. After a decade of heated debate around whether it is sinful for Christian women to wear yoga pants, now there is even a Christian line of yoga pants with Bible verses printed on them. Today, when I searched yoga on YouTube, my search results were all thin, white women flexing their flexibility.

So when in June last year, an employee from Bipty (a fashion rental brand) took to TikTok to share a picture of a bunch of white women wearing duppattas and called it “European,” "Scandinavian” and “chic,” South Asian girlhood had had enough. We didn’t want what happened to yoga and bindi happen to dupattas (even though most of us have a complex relationship with our dupattas. Re: being forced to cover up and be “modest"). The TikTok was taken down and an apology was promptly issued. The use of the word “chic” is what got me here. I have never seen “chic” be used to describe anything from my culture. The usual adjectives are “boho,” “exotic,” “hip,” etc. The dupatta when worn by a white woman is chic. But when we wear it, it is boho? Understood!

Before the chic Scandinavian girlies were the clean girls, with their carefully slicked back hair, they took over the internet leaving the brown girls wondering why these white women were being praised for an aesthetic they were once made fun of. “Growing up I experienced so much bullying from girls calling me greasy for coming to school with Vatika oil in my hair. Now oiling their hair is ‘clean.’ Wearing a bindi was weird but now they wear multiple 'face gems' to festivals,” says Harleen, a frustrated 19-year-old British Punjabi from London, UK.

Now, let’s come back to the “great Indian shift” and why this shift is indeed shifty. Remember how Hollywood in the 1930s led the zeitgeist shift to viewing Latinas as hot-headed, wild, and sexy and how even today mainstream portrayal of Latin girlhood rarely goes out of this box? Or maybe how Hollywood in the 1900s pedestaled East Asian women as “Madame Butterfly” and continues to portray them as submissive, sexually-starved caricatures — always the China Doll or the Dragon Lady — waiting to be rescued by the white man?

This narrow representation of Latinas and East Asian women has obviously resulted in real-life women getting sexualised and fetishised. But it goes beyond that. Hollywood’s portrayal of racial minorities has a direct impact on the increase in cases of violence against them like the 2021 Georgia shooting.

After the violent gun man Robert Aaron Long, shot and killed 6 Asian women in Atlanta, Georgia he told police that he suffered from a sex addiction. Apparently, the shooting was an attempt to subdue temptations. Long also confessed to frequenting massage parlours (businesses generally associated with East Asian women) in the past and launching attacks as “vengeance” against them.

I am afraid what Hollywood did to Latinas and East Asian women is exactly what TikTok is now doing to South Asian women. When a man looks into the camera and asks other men to “invest in Indian women,” we are looking at the exact zeitgeist shift — a cycle of fetishisation leading to an entitlement over women’s sexuality leading to actual cases of violence against them.

Another issue with this trend is that the shift only happens to you if you are a South Asian with Eurocentric features. Dark-skinned South Asian women already face hurtful jabs and constant taunts to lighten their skin tone from within their homes. The “great Indian shift” is only going to cause a greater divide between South Asian women with white adjacent features and those with more unique features.

In conclusion, the “great Indian shift” is another rehashed trend aimed at making us cry for approval from the Western hemisphere. It’s just another way of keeping our minds colonized, picking and choosing what elements of our culture we can and cannot be proud of. In simpler words, it’s yassified cultural colonization and we will have none of it!

I was in a booth at Chili’s staring at the bottom of an empty glass of Diet Coke and waiting for my friend to return from the bathroom when I heard it. A group of friends giggling through their Triple Dipper on a Tuesday night just like the rest of us. Chili’s has become a go-to spot for young adults these days. The place is riddled with them, but that’s a story for another day.

“Mama the waitress behind you💜”

“Not the…”

“Ok, werk.”

I felt oddly comforted eavesdropping on their conversation. There was safety in the assumption that at any moment I could turn around and jump into this friend group behind me, totally seamlessly. After all, I had something to add! I had follow-up questions! I was speaking the same language.

On the ride home my friend and I laughed at how funny it was to hear a conversation so similar to the ones we’d had before. It became apparent to us that at minimum, they consumed the same pop culture. We wanted to ask their opinion on the Diddy scandal, The Harris HQ viral edits, or if they’d “ever tried… this one?” a la Sabrina Carpenter's Short and Sweet Tour. Clearly, we had so much in common. We could tell by the verbiage, the jokes, even the cadence.

What is überbrain, you ask? Incredible question.

Überbrain can be explained by example. Let me take you through the rich, studied etymology of the word “nub.” My college roommate brought this word from her high school friend group in Portland to our lowly, dingy Ohio dorm room.

“He was such a nub.”

“They were really sweet, kind of nubby. You know what I mean?”

“She’s such a little nubbin I love her so much.”

We started using it, then our friends, then theirs. It rippled outward. Even though she’s back across the country, and we don’t talk as often, I still use nub. I can’t Merriam-Webster nub for you, it’s a definition you must intuit. You must feel it.

The word was created and shared by those who know each other and then beyond. It’s literally how language works, how words earn their meaning—it’s out of shared connection. “Synchronicity.” Überbrain.

The essence of überbrain quickly became core to my friends and me, the shared safety of speaking the same language. When you know people, really know them, you feel safe. You feel comfy. You can even anticipate their next statement.

It’s closeness! It’s intimacy!

It’s the Algorithm?

There’s a reason it’s called, “going viral.” Everyone sees it, it spreads quickly.

Viral can be good. It can socialize ideas or expand our vocabularies. It wins the popularity contest for a moment, whatever the content (and its context) it catches on and becomes mass-adopted. On the other end, there’s comfort in finding your fellow weirdos on the Internet, your niche neighborhood – shared interests, concerns, shared enthusiasm.

You used to have to seek these communities out. They wouldn’t find you, situated comfortably in front of your screen patiently waiting for more content like Oliver Twist. It's different today. We’re all digital natives from the same hometown and the same Internet. Despite our niche neighborhoods, the social norms stay largely the same. Humans gravitate toward similarity, it’s in our nature. But now, we get there faster. Now, we have help.

When we all live in the same net-neighborhood, we talk about the same things. It’s fun having an “inside” joke with what feels like everyone around you, it’s also why it feels so weird to encounter someone or something that shouldn’t be there.

Remember “Very Demure, Very Mindful?” It was the most common Internet slang about a month ago. It was fun and silly. Then it was inescapable. Finally, it was tired and eye-roll-inducing. It lost its shine right around the time brands started adopting it. It felt opportunistic and unnatural. That’s because it was not rooted in connection or intimacy.

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The lack of intimacy between the general public and brands isn’t surprising, but when we zoom out there wasn’t much intimacy or connection coming from anywhere. It was gigabrain.

While the oxymoronic “viral inside joke” can make us feel part of a bigger, connected group (and sometimes that holds true) simply sharing jokes or language can lead us to accidental assumptions. Despite our groupspeak, our values aren’t the same. That’s where gigabrain comes in.

When überbrain is derived from shared connection and knowing each other, gigabrain is the commonality the algorithm decides for us. It’s the common ground we don’t necessarily find, but more are sorted into based on age, seconds watched, saves, likes, and data harvested against our will. You and a friend may have bought the same bag in different colors, but today it’s harder to discern if that was your überbrain or you both just got the same advertisement.

But back to language.

When you overhear a group of strangers sounding exactly like your friends it’s easy to assume they are… exactly like your friends. This is where we may need to start being more careful. More mindful. (Sorry! Couldn’t help it.)

There is a commonly accepted set of morals online. Whether we like it or not, there is a distinct way to behave to be accepted online, just like there is out in the world. However, the code of accepted conduct is easier to fake when behind a screen. It’s why we saw the word “wokefishing” rise in the last few years, it's why men put “moderate” on their Hinge profiles as opposed to “conservative”.

I’m not saying that Internet trends exist only for those who share your beliefs. What I am saying is that simply sharing algorithmic similarities does not make us the same, we cannot assume that everyone is just like us. Not everyone holds the same system of beliefs, POVs, likes, dislikes, the whole thing. There’s good and bad to this, right?

On my best days, it means that there’s still an opportunity to learn something new from other people. On my worst days, everyone is hiding their secrets and scary opinions. I net out somewhere in the middle usually: my echo chamber is warm and cozy, but I probably should go outside once in a while.

Whether your brain is über or giga (surprise, it’s both) the thesis of this letter is to ask the questions. Get to know other people, find out how much you have in common or don’t. It’s not always a bad thing. Turn around in your booth at Chili’s and tell them you think they’re funny or something. Take the inside joke outside, let it be the starting point.

This dino chips fiasco was not my last escapade with snark subreddits. They have ruined the parasocial relationships I have with multiple influencers and I am better for it. I have never actually participated in any snark subreddit but have visited them now and again to satiate my thirst for good old gossip.

As the name suggests, snark subreddits focus on critiquing celebrities, usually influencers. If you dig enough you can find snark subreddits of all kinds — location-specific (like r/NYCinfluencersnark), genre-specific (like r/parentsnark that snarks on mommy and daddy bloggers), and if you are influential (derogatory; also a code word for pissing people off) enough, you can even get an entire subreddit dedicated to you.

Snark subreddits are the meeting point of anonymous netizens who rant about how out-of-touch and entitled some influencers are. These rants can range anywhere from calling out their lies and undisclosed ads to body-shaming and cyberbullying. If you haven't had the pleasure (or displeasure) of using Reddit, here is a little context on how the platform works.

On Reddit, you can find subreddits (communities) with thousands of members and threads (posts) with hundreds of comments on literally every niche subculture under the sun. But what makes the platform unique is its content distribution system. Unlike other major social media sites, Reddit is decentralised and democratised — users upvote or downvote threads and comments under them which ultimately decide if they get shown to more people. Reddit also heavily relies on user moderators of subreddits to do the heavy lifting of drafting and enforcing the community guidelines of their respective subreddits. So ultimately, the users decide what kind of content they share and consume, not an algorithm made to maximise profits.

In the past few months, snark subreddits have been in the news for all the wrong reasons — Reddit banned multiple subreddits, including the ones dedicated to influencers Lily Chapman and Trisha Paytas for doxxing the subjects of their discussions. These developments have ignited conversations about cyberbullying, influencer culture, parasocial relationships, and more importantly, the power imbalance of the internet.

Before Reddit took down the subreddits snarking on Lily Chapman, she posted a series of TikToks calling out the harassment she was facing on Reddit. “Snarking communities are unhealthy, they’re obsessive, they allow lies to be posted, they don’t moderate the lies, they indoctrinate new people to believe these lies and go way too far,” Chapman says in her TikTok post. “And most people don’t even know that this is happening.”

Chapman also said that taking them down wasn’t easy, Reddit didn’t care, and she sent a cease and desist notice to the subreddits’ moderators after hiring a private investigator to find their identity. “These people should all be registered as NET OFFENDERS and should have their WiFi shut off permanently. The list should be sent to cell phone providers and the providers should cut them off. They should not be able to get on the internet. Like, at all lol. And all of their WiFi should be rerouted to Lily so that her WiFi is even faster,” a comment under her video responding to her snarkers reads.

How true are Lily Chapman's claims? Are snark subreddits indoctrinating people to actively hate poor celebrities? Should the snarkers’ WiFi be cut off and rerouted to the flag-bearers of the creator economy? This issue of girl online dissects the relationship between influencers and their snarkers and how it all leads to the big question — the power imbalance of the internet.

Modern-day snark subreddits are modelled off their early internet predecessors, the snark forums of the early 2000s such as Lipstick Alley, Oh No They Didn’t, Get Off My Internets, Guru Gossip etc. While these forums were vicious with little to no boundaries and rules, snark subreddits have better guidelines in place. For instance, r/blogsnark has rules that specify that the snarkers can’t reveal information posted on a private or deleted account, not to mock how the subject of discussion is processing their grief or their health conditions, and about posting gossip without proof.

Other subreddits dedicated to a specific influencer have guidelines that mandate that the users don’t make direct contact with the influencer or body shame them. The moderators also ban users who make homophobic, racist, or sexist comments. They also ensure the influencers’ boundaries are respected. For example; if a creator doesn’t share pictures of their kids or family online, the snarkers also don't.

“We aren’t faceless jealous netizens tearing down a public figure for no reason. Granted, a minority of communities do fit that bill but are promptly taken down by Reddit when complaint tickets are raised,” the moderator of a snark subreddit who requested to stay anonymous clarifies with me.

A major positive impact of snark subreddits is that they challenge the internet's existing power dynamics. Influencers earn their bread by selling us their lives, which are at worst fabricated and at best curated. The existing framework of social media platforms helps them create and maintain the image they desire for themselves, in other words, the image most profitable to them. There is nothing social about how we interact with creators on Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube. It is a one-sided relationship — the influencer sells us their lives and we either buy it with blind faith or question them by screaming into the void.

The curation of influencer selves doesn’t end with how they present themselves online. By turning off comments, deleting the comments calling-them out, and restricting users who disagree with them, creators also curate the dialogue that happens within their communities. This is where snark subreddits come into the picture. They provide a platform for people who feel betrayed by a celebrity who previously made a living off their attention and time.

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Snark subreddits call out celebrities and influencers for being out of touch, profiting off their children, and undisclosed ads, revealing their scams and dishonest practices and reviewing the products they recommend or sell. “Most snarkers start snarking when something feels off or disingenuous with an influencer they follow,” another anonymous snarker told Defector. “A lot of times it is criticizing the privilege of influencers, how they advertise the beauty standard to a vulnerable following, and their blatant consumerism.”

A snarker who fell for body editing and diet culture rhetorics on social media and ended up deleting all platforms told me that snark subreddits helped her realise the truth behind the content she used to expose herself to, “It was literally lifesaving to learn about the dark side of social media. I had no idea.”

For some, snarking is pure entertainment — “This is my version of reading the New York Times” while others aren’t happy with the creator economy and bring a sort of eat-the-rich attitude to the table — “Influencers do not deserve as much praise as they get and should be humbled once in a while.”

While snarkers initially come together because of their shared distaste for an influencer, they usually stay for the community. For instance, even though r/blogsnark is all about snarking on bloggers and influencers, they have a weekly thread to share “the joy, misery, and just daily stuff.” In this thread, they share their wins and failures, and rant about their not influential (non-derogatory) lives.

“I am a bit miffed at my sister for not warning me her kiddo was sick when we went over Wednesday to help my other niece set up a new computer,” a snarker shares. Another snarker promptly declares solidarity, “So annoying. This seems to happen to us every time we visit my family for Thanksgiving or Christmas. I keep asking them NOT to bring over sick kids when we’ve travelled 400 miles for the holiday, but no one listens! Last Thanksgiving, my brother was popping Dayquil at the table!!”

Snark subreddits have their own vernacular, inside jokes, and memes that might not make sense to outsiders. This exclusivity makes the community an escape, a little corner of the internet where you hang out and make mostly harmless jokes about your favourite out-of-touch-with-reality influencer. That being said, there are snark subreddits with little to no moderation that sometimes go out of control becoming a real problem for the subjects of their discussions. This is where Reddit should step in and strictly enforce its community guidelines.

At the end of the day, influencers and snarkers are two sides of the same coin. Snarkers are anti-fans, just like the hate-watchers. The fame of the influencer is directly proportional to the popularity of their snark subreddit and snarkers are often as obsessed with their subjects as much as their loyal followers. But they have different functions to perform. While followers fuel influencer culture and strengthen the creator economy, snarkers — with a little bit of personal discretion and better moderation from Reddit — can hold influencers accountable and to an extent, balance the internet’s power asymmetry.

Do you have a man in your head? Gazing at the world through your eyes? Judging? Does he make you second-guess everything you do to simply exist? Does he tell you you aren’t enough? You need to cover up more? Do you occupy too much space?

Does he give you a list of things to do in order to please him? What angles he finds sexy? What number on the scale is acceptable to him? How to protect your femininity? Does he watch you pretend to care about things you don’t and ignore things you do?

Don’t worry. You aren’t alone.

I have a man inside my head too.

When I was 12, he watched me dry-shave my legs and leave wet tissue papers over the cuts.

When I was 15, he told me I wasn’t like other girls. That I was different. And I’d continue to be different if I distanced myself from them.

When I was 17, he watched me cry as I bled through my school uniform pants and told me I had to make sure nobody knew.

When I was 19, he watched me go to bed hungry and work out for hours. He told me it was okay. He liked me better lighter.

When I was 21, he told me I was disgusting and impure when a man forced himself on me.

He watched me speak. He precisely measured out the amount of sweetness I had to inject into my tone to be womanly. He watched me cross my legs as I sat down holding my skirt in place. He watched me cover up voluntarily. He told me my hair had to be long and pretty. That my tan wasn’t the sign of a happy child but that of a woman who has lost herself. He watched me defend him. He watched me tell other girls they were too girly and that’s why nobody takes them seriously.

All my life, through my eyes, he looked at other women and told me I had to be different from them. That they were my competition. That I had to be jealous of them. That being feminine is bad but also what I was supposed to do. I believed him. Everything I did, I made sure I had his approval. It was exhausting.

The man in my head was the personification of the misogyny I had internalised. He was the agent of patriarchy assigned to me. He was also a family heirloom.

His father was inside my mother’s head until she murdered him. His grandfather still resides inside my grandmother’s head. I ask her to kill him. She says he is not like other men. He keeps her in check. She loves him more than anything. My grandmother explains to me that without the man inside her head, she will lose her way, culture will crumble, and society will collapse.

The man inside my head made sure he kept me in my place. He made me believe that patriarchy didn’t hate all women. They just hate the ones who loved themselves. The women who thought. The women who questioned. The women who rebelled. The women who had killed the men inside their heads.

As I grew up, he started making less and less sense. I noticed that his words were contradictory. I noticed he was a liar. The women around me were nothing like what he had taught me. They weren’t attention-seeking. They weren’t bitches. They weren’t opportunists. They weren’t fake. They were sensitive. They were empathetic. They were resourceful. They were kind. They were beautiful. They were smart. They were me. I was them.

So, I decided to kill him. It wasn’t easy.

Every day I poisoned him a little bit. I fought with him. I confronted him. I asked him to leave me alone. I told him God is a woman. I told him he can’t control me. I told him I wanted to be like the women around me.

He told me he hated me. Then he told me he loved me and missed the old me — the misogynist me. I cried, screamed, and questioned my existence.

But the women around me helped me again.

They told me that the first step to killing the man inside my head was to accept his existence. “Yes, there is a man inside my head. Yes, I have internalised misogyny. But I will kill him,” I told myself.

They told me to be kind to myself. They told me to sit with my feelings. Did I feel personally attacked when a feminist made a perfectly valid argument against a double standard? Why was that? What made me think that she was coming for me?

They asked me to read feminist thinkers and make decisions for myself without consulting the man inside my head. Oh, how refreshing was that!

They asked me to believe in myself. That I was smart and resourceful. That I didn’t have to prove to the world that I am good at what I do. That I was entitled to take up space.

They told me to unlearn the language I was brought up with. For instance, they told me that women don’t give men sex. It wasn’t theirs to take. It was a mutual activity that both should derive pleasure from.

They told me that femininity wasn’t bad. They told me that it was okay to enjoy the things I liked. That I wasn’t better for not enjoying cooking. That I wasn’t better because I liked watching sports. That I could exist as both. That being feminine wasn’t being a woman. That being masculine wasn’t being a man. They encouraged me to explore my androgeny.

They told me all they wanted for me was to find myself, think for myself, and act for myself.

And do you know what I got in return?

I got myself. I got a community. I got my biggest cheerleaders. I got my harshest critics. I got people who would defend my name in rooms I haven’t been to. I got people who hold my hand as I go through this journey called life. I got to experience the purest form of love — platonic female friendships.

After all this while, the man inside my head isn’t dead. He is merely dormant.

On the days I have my guard down, he wakes up and tells me that the girl with leg hair is gross. That the single woman in her 50s must be sad. That the single mother doesn’t value herself. That the unapologetic woman is a slut. That the fat woman is unloveable. That I need to make myself lighter again. That my nose is too big. That my tummy is too jiggly. And I believe him. Just for a moment. Until I bludgeon him to comatose once again.

“Tumblr becoming the cool, fun, healthy place on the internet is the funniest shit that ever happened online,” earlier this year author John Green shared on X (formerly Twitter). If you have been online for as long as I have, you must have come across the infamous John Green cock post at least once. Green was very active on Tumblr in the 2010s and was publicly bullied off the platform in 2015. So he has experienced Tumblr trauma as much as your friendly e-girl next door.

Note: Green did not write that post. For a while, there was a feature on Tumblr where anyone could edit others’ posts. Yes!!! Wild. I know.

In an interview given to The Miami Student a few days ago, Green confirmed that he is back on Tumblr, “It’s sort of a sane-ish place on the social internet, which is very, very funny to me because I definitely lived through some times when it wasn’t.”

In late 2022, there was much chatter about 2014 Tumblr aesthetics making a comeback and what that means for our body image issues. Many then-teenagers on 2014 Tumblr and now-adults, wrote letters laden with traumatic nostalgia appealing to the audience not to let 2014 Tumblr aesthetics make a comeback. “I hope 2014 Tumblr can be en vogue without the need for it to be followed by eight years of recovery. Praying that this time a character can just be a character rather than a devil on their shoulder, a skirt just a skirt rather than feeling like a personal attack, a song not a testament,” Lucy Harbon wrote in a Polyester article.

So what was so wrong about 2014 Tumblr that even people who are so nostalgic about their teenage Tumblr girl selves refuse to log back on? Well, the answer to that is complicated, but stick around to find out.

Disclaimer: The term 2014 Tumblr is more of an umbrella term that encompasses 2012, 2013, and 2014 Tumblr. In this essay, I have used 2014 Tumblr and 2010s Tumblr to refer to the period.

I was active in fan communities on Tumblr and Google Plus from 2012 onwards. I was a chubby child who was bullied in school and fandoms were how I found those who understood me. To them, I wasn’t a nerd. I was smart, witty, and creative. Until 2017 — when I was sent to boarding school — my virtual friends (and maybe my younger sister) were the only people I actually cared about.

The school I was going to had a no-personal-device policy. I remember sending long, sad personalised letters to my mutuals on how I wouldn’t be able to talk to them every day and promised to catch up when I came home for summer breaks. But by the time I graduated in 2019 and logged back in, all my friends had already logged out forever and that was the end of my Tumblr girl era.

While my exit from Tumblr was rather undramatic, it was not so for most ex-Tumblr girls. For them, saying goodbye to the platform was the culmination of years of bullying, harassment, and exposure to problematic content. The final straw for many was Tumblr’s policy against NSFW (Not Safe For Work) content enforced in December 2018, along with what The Verge called “a comically inaccurate takedown system.”

While the policy in itself was meant to make it a safer platform, and more importantly, please investors and advertisers, the problem was with how Tumblr enforced it. The site’s auto detectors inaccurately flagged innocent posts as NSFW and took them down. Unsurprisingly, this negatively affected LGBTQ+ users, the backbone of Tumblr.

Some of these rules were reversed in November 2022 after Tumblr and New York City’s Commission on Human Rights — who investigated Tumblr and found that their content moderation system was, in fact, biased against LGBTQ+ content — came to a settlement that stipulated that Tumblr revise its discriminatory policies around NSFW content and user appeals.

“So many of my favourite creators and friends left during the NSFW purge, so after 2018, there was no reason to be there,” Hannah, a 26-year-old from Scotland who was active on Tumblr from 2009 through 2018 tells me. “On top of that, there was an influx of bots. All the friendly creative people who used to share the space had been replaced by automated sexbots. Not very SFW, if you ask me.”

Now, let’s look at a few of the events that lead up to this exodus.

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Even though, Tumblr wasn’t created to be a platform for fans and fandoms, over the years it had become a sort of haven for fans, especially for people who left LiveJournal (a long-form blogging platform that used to be pre-Tumble fandom, haven). Tumblr’s unique tagging system made it easier for fans to connect and hang out. This tag is also what led to the downfall of Tumblr, but more on that in a minute. Fandoms thrived on Tumblr sharing art, fiction, theories, and ships. Even today, fandoms are the few active communities on Tumblr.

Fandom critic and creator of Fandom Exile, Monia Ali defines 2014 as Tumblr’s banner year, “It marks a break between the utopian vision of Tumblr and fan culture and the clash with the reality that things were not that great,” she explains. Ali notes that the failure of Dashcon was a defining factor of the 2014 Tumblr culture.

For the uninitiated, Dashcon was an independent fan convention that happened in July 2014, catering to Tumblr’s fan communities. It was the first large gathering of Tumblr users. Dashcon was a massive failure, both in terms of mismanagement of attendance. “The failure of Dashcon is often used to mark the shift away from the fun idealism of the user base, and Dashcon happened in the middle of the year. Along with SuperWhoLock [Supernatural-Doctor Who-BBC Sherlock crossover] and Glee fandoms flaming out, these were soothsayers for the future of fandom on the site,” adds Ali.Post-Dashcon Tumblr was a feverdream. Fandoms got aggressive and creators were bullied and driven off the platform.

In a Kotaku article titled “In 2018, Tumblr Is A Joyless Black Hole,” a lot of this change in the site’s fandom etiquette is also ascribed to Yahoo’s 2013 acquisition of Tumblr, the platform’s lack of a meaningful Block feature, and the site’s content distribution structure. The article explains:

Though Tumblr has a messaging feature, the easiest way to talk to another Tumblr user is through reblogs. A user takes another person’s post and appends a note to the bottom to the original poster. The original post and the comment then appear on the reblogger’s Tumblr and in the feeds of anyone following the user who reblogged the post. The post gets longer and longer as it’s reblogged, making it hard to follow conversations that involve more than two people or that go on for a long time. Being unable to really talk to another person means that conflict on Tumblr escalates quickly, sometimes over things that seem inconsequential.

The Kotaku article also shares the story of a user :

“It actually happened to me once,” Elana, a Tumblr user who has been on the site for about five years, told Kotaku. “Nothing super bad, but I complained about [Dragon Age: Inquisition’s] Vivienne’s writing being kinda racist. The wording was bad and made it difficult to back up when a few people jumped on it to call me an SJW [social justice warrior] snowflake. At the time my follower count was pretty low and I ended up getting a few thousand notes, which was waaaaay more than anything I had posted before.” Elana deleted the blog in question, but because of how Tumblr works the reblogs of it still exist.

Tumblr’s content distribution structure, specifically tags is also what made it a breeding ground for posts that glorified eating disorders, self-harm, and other mental illnesses. For context, on Tumblr, posts are organised by tags which are added both manually by the users and automatically by the algorithm. If you want to participate in a community, you simply follow the tags and reblog the tagged posts with your thoughts. While this feature de-centralized the hierarchy of content distribution and made having a huge following less important, it also meant that you regularly came across stuff you didn’t sign up for.  

“One of the big differences between Tumblr and previous blogs and forums where this [harmful content] was common is that Tumblr is self-directed and was primarily a media feed rather than a social feed. You didn't join Tumblr to join a pro-ana [anorexia nervosa, a type of eating disorder] community, but you found pro-ana content, and because of the site's infrastructure, you perpetuated it,” explains Ali.

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“I had no idea what depression or self-mutilation was before joining the platform. I will never forget the Tumblr trend at the time #cutsforbieber where girls my age [12 - 14 then] were cutting themselves for Justin Bieber,” shares Katelyn, a 24-year-old from the USA who joined Tumblr to be a part of K-pop and anime fandoms. “I couldn't tell you why, but I remember so many girls my age coming into school with cuts on their arms after this trend surfaced.”

Tumblr in the 2010s — not unlike any other social media platform — glorified thinness with its #thinspo and pro-ana communities. While some of us were more actively engaged in these communities than others, it has to be noted that the constant exposure to this content made us all dissect our teenage bodies and question our worth. Now, I am not saying this was a Tumblr-specific issue. The glorification of thinness is heavily ingrained in our culture. #edtwt (ED Twitter) and #edtok (ED TikTok) are very active even today.

What I am saying is that Tumblr was where my generation — zillennials — got their first exposure to people who glorified eating disorders and provided a community where you’d be accountable to each other if you eat, where slogans like “Hungry to bed, hungry to rise, makes a girl a smaller size” and “Keep calm and the hunger will pass” reminds you to that being thin is the most important thing to be alive for.

“I think the most problematic aspect of Tumblr was the lack of monitored content. You could get away with posting anything on Tumblr before it introduced a level of content monitoring after 2013-2015ish,” says Katelyn. “From eating disorder content to porn, to self-harm and the glorification of drug use, there were so many young minds on Tumblr who shouldn't have been exposed to harmful content, and that could have been prevented if there was some level of content monitoring from Tumblr.”

Katelyn’s opinion is also echoed by Ria who opened up to me about her experience of being groomed on Tumblr. A now 22-year-old from India, she was active in the SuperWhoLock fandom in the 2010s and ran a studyblr till 2021. “It took me a long time to realise or admit that I had been groomed, it was around that time I decided to step away from the fandom aspect of Tumblr. Dealing with the impact of all those things took several years and it still affects my sexual and romantic relationships,” Ria said adding that this is more of an issue on how fandom used to operate at the time than Tumblr itself. Even then, she is precarious about ever logging back in.

In the early 2010s, Tumblr was also very aesthetic-driven. You had to look a certain way, act a certain way, and dress a certain way — sad, thin, white, seemingly disinterested in life — to get popular. This aesthetics is also closely associated with the music genre indie sleaze and pays homage to the ‘90s grunge aesthetics, hipster fashion, and 80s electro-rock music.

Madison Huizinga elaborates on the 2010s Tumblr aesthetic in her newsletter Cafe Hysteria:

It was the dawn of edgy, self-described “aesthetics,” featuring blogs plastered with images of knee-high socks, Doc Martens boots, American Apparel skater skirts, and vinyl records from The 1975 and Arctic Monkeys. Fandom culture was flourishing, as fan blogs for John Green novels, One Direction, 5 Seconds of Summer, Doctor Who, and more abounded. Everyone was streaming “Boom Clap” by Charli XCX and memorizing the “It’s a Metaphor” monologue from The Fault in Our Stars. You just had to be there.

Huizinga continues:

Discussions of depression, in particular, abounded, accompanied by photos that enhanced their gloomy tones. Among images of fishnets, chokers, and flannels tied around waists, were striking photos documenting evidence of self-destructive behavior. Pastel pills spilled out of canisters, cigarette burns, and images of self-harm were scattered across blogs alongside despondent screencaps from American Horror Story and Lana Del Rey music videos. All of which was cloaked in a black and white, grainy filter. In many ways, this moment of blatant, artistic expressions of sadness paralleled the young countercultural grunge era of the 1990s.

According to Dr Natalie Ann Hendry, Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Education, University of Melbourne, and co-author of “Tumblr: Digital Media and Society,” another reason why Tumblr became a breeding ground for such problematic communities was the incoherence of the platform, unlike Instagram, which at that time had easily defined accounts, posts, hashtags, and so on. “This digital experience produces small boundaries or barriers for people to participate which makes the platform a little more obscure and this allows it to act as a place for subcultures or alternative ways of doing digital life,” she explains.

“The communal aspects developed over time in the form of identification and in-or-out-group dynamics taking off,” Monia Ali adds. “When you feel in control of the content you're consuming you let your guard down and it feels like a more ‘authentic’ experience. It feels more intimate and more honest. You can be more vulnerable, a space where your ‘true self’ is on display. But that’s the thing — being on display means it has to be maintained and constructed and perpetuated. This entrenches behaviours, feelings, and patterns as you consume and perform, you don't realise you're trying to conform as you’re doing it. You can get stuck in spirals that become part of your identity and develop attachments to a community depending on your obeisance to the established norms. You're not as in control as you think you are.”

What is interesting about Tumblr is that people had and have very strong connections to the platform. Just like this was the place so many of us learned about depression, porn, eating disorders, and self-harm; Tumblr was also the place we first learned about Queerness, feminism, self-acceptance, and safe spaces. And this is why you will find so many of us being nostalgic about it or even wishing we could be our teenage Tumblr girl selves again.

“Being interested in anime was not something I was open about when I was younger, but Tumblr gave me a safe, anonymous space to explore my interests and build relationships with people around the world with similar interests to me that I didn't have outside of Tumblr. It reassured me that I wasn't strange or weird for liking the shows and music that I enjoyed,” confesses Katelyn. “I also learned about feminism for the first time through Tumblr. While some topics I was too young to fully grasp, it did give me a sense of power and pride at that young age, being exposed to content that uplifted women.”

Hannah says, “Despite all its problematic aspects, Tumblr helped me grow a moral backbone and, as stuffy as it sounds, made me a better person. My views on the world and how it must be improved for the good of all people are built on what I learned on Tumblr. I learned about the fight for queer rights, the limits of women’s suffrage and the intersections of Queerness and race in feminist issues, and was introduced to powerhouse Black thinkers like Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and so on. I learned about the struggles of indigenous peoples all over the world. I learned about disabled rights and the struggles of trans people. I watched the #MeToo movement unfold there. I grew up in a small Scottish town, where else would I learn all these things?”

Even though it took Ria several years to heal from the grooming she underwent on Tumblr she credits the platform for equipping her with the language to grapple with her Queer awakening. “I was a lonely teenager who otherwise felt misunderstood,” she confessed. “I was the only Queer person I knew in middle school.”

According to Dr Hendry, there is an additional reason behind the love-hate that Tumblr receives, especially in recent years. “The years of 2014 hatred line up with the things that people often recall in my interviews — that really strange time when you’re not a child, not an older young person or adult,” she explains. “There’s been enough time to reflect on those years now. Those 13-year-olds in 2014 are now 23, maybe finished university or moving on to other parts of their lives. They’re old enough to talk about their digital challenges without still being in it. Nostalgia works in waves – you need enough distance from something to then have space for intense feelings and memories to emerge.”

So then, is Tumblr making a comeback?

Firstly, Tumblr never actually went away completely. Fandoms still thrive there and there isn’t an alternative platform that caters to Tumblr’s active userbase. So it definitely isn’t going anywhere. In Monia Ali’s words: Twitter has declined, Instagram's algorithm is hurting everyone, TikTok is video-based, and Discord is entirely walled-off/private. 

Secondly, I don’t think it is making a comeback either. Tumblr is fundamentally different from other platforms — Reddit, Twitter, Instagram — that we are used to. Tumblr doesn’t necessarily function with a robust algorithm that pushes content to your explore page. For instance, if you like a post that doesn’t boost the post’s visibility. All it does is act like a save button. To amplify a post, you need to reblog it. It is a very user-interactive algorithm that we are too spoiled to appreciate.

For what it is worth, I believe both the hate and love Tumblr has received in the past few years is justified. Tumblr in the 2010s was very black and white. You either felt extremely seen or completely invalidated. You were showered with love and support one day and bullied the other. With constant arguments about what is in and what is out, we all wanted to be in, which means we strived to please strangers on the internet who at that were the only community we all had. As Dr Hendry says, a platform with such intensity is not a platform we can expect people to talk about with nuance ten years down the lane.

Last week, a friend shared the link to a YouTube video titled “Get cancer ASAP” and asked me, “Dude, WTF.” A few days prior I had introduced her to the practice of meditating using subliminal audio. As she started searching for them on YouTube, she came across this particular video — the worst nightmare of the subliminal community.

Subliminals are a lesser-known tool used for affirmation and manifestation purposes. The idea of it is simple — instead of repeating an affirmation aloud or writing it on paper, you hide it under a song or a soothing sound and listen to it on the go.

Some believe that this is more effective than other manifestation tools like scripting or visualisation. Since you do not actively hear the affirmations, they can bypass your sceptic conscious self and directly affect your gullible subconscious self, bringing you better results.

Subliminals draw from the power of suggestion and cannot dramatically change your DNA or physical features but some isolated studies have shown them to boost users’ self-confidence and motivation to pursue their goals.

If you search “subliminals” on YouTube you will find hundreds of thousands of videos curated for specific benefits like clear skin, healthy hair, dream job, good grades, ideal partner, and good luck.

Now if you are a non-believer, I totally get it. But don’t stop reading because of that. Today’s newsletter is not about the law of attraction or how you can manifest your ideal life by saying “I am healthy, wealthy, and beautiful” a million times. It is about the insidious underbelly of YouTube's subliminal creators — underground subliminals creators, more popularly known as ug creators.

Underground subliminal creators make subliminal audios to help you manifest the worst possible scenarios you can ever imagine. As the name suggests, they are not widely accepted in the subliminal community but do have their own smaller communities where you can find tips on how to manifest a stalker, an eating disorder, or even sexual assault.

Some users claim that ug subliminals “work better” because of the use of exaggerated affirmations. For instance, in a subliminal meant to lose weight and achieve your dream body, they add affirmations like “I feel repulsed at the sight of food” or “I am losing weight every time I breathe” to help you reach your goal faster.

Even though this might seem pretty harmless at first, especially when you are discontent with life and looking for a quick fix, they can have harmful after-effects.

“I remember using a study obsession ug subliminal for a month, where I thought the benefits were just exaggerated and my mind could handle them but no I ended up studying 16 to 20 hours every day. I became obsessed to the point where I didn't want to do anything besides studying — not even leave my house or eat,” an anonymous user shared on r/subliminal. “This went on until my exam and afterwards I got depressed for months because I didn't have anything to study for and the benefits were literally ‘get miserable and depressed when you don't study’.”

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Most popular underground subliminals on YouTube have hundreds of thousands of views and thousands of comments congratulating each other on their results. This is a comment on a video for manifesting getting raped:

Disclaimer: I don’t think you can get cancer from listening to a subliminal but the people who use it definitely think so and I think it is worth exploring why.

Saner people in the subliminal community (including yours truly) have voiced their concerns on the existence of underground subliminals that claim to help you manifest depression, psychosis, and other mental illnesses. The answer we usually get is that we simply won’t understand. That’s true. I don’t understand.

After all, the foundation of manifestation is built on the idea of becoming your best self and creating a life that you are proud of, right? How can depression be somebody’s ideal state of living? I was curious. So I went searching and I found some answers for why people are manifesting the worst possible scenarios.

For instance, rape fantasies. In a culture that shames women’s sexual desires, they are caught between wanting to experience sexual pleasure and feeling guilty about their desire. Fantasising about being coerced or forced into sexual contact absolves them of this society-induced guilt while experiencing pleasure.

Another explanation given by people using underground subliminals is that they are already suffering from mental illnesses and they want to make it worse so somebody takes them seriously. It is a cry for attention. I assume that people using subliminals to get cardiac arrest are those who suffer from suicidal thoughts and are looking for ways to absolve themselves of the guilt associated with killing themselves.

My heart goes out to them. These are people who need real medical attention. And advising these people to just stay away from such content is pointless. These users aren’t in the right state of mind to make an educated decision for themselves. They are helpless. They don’t see another way out. So they try to cope in the ways accessible to them and a free 3-minute video on YouTube is inarguably the most accessible way of coping.

The real culprits here are the creators of underground subliminals. They are capitalising on their viewers’ pain and agony for clout and money.

Note: Most subliminal creators aren’t monetised through the YouTube Partner Program. This is because they usually don’t have the copyright to the songs or other audios used to mask the affirmations. They usually monetise their content by selling other affiliate products to their subscribers or through subscriber-model platforms like Patreon.

These creators also remove any comments calling them out and warning others to not use these subliminals. So the only way to go about it is to report these accounts and hope that YouTube takes them down. But the larger subliminal community including the well-meaning members have reached a consensus not to do this.

In early 2023, YouTube started cracking down on the accounts of subliminal creators because they didn’t meet YouTube’s community guidelines. Some of the widely-respected creators lost their accounts because of this crackdown (RIP Rosemary subliminals, you will be missed). Due to this, most creators with a large following have stopped posting on YouTube and moved to paywalled platforms like Patreon.

A large section of subliminal users believe that this is because people started mass-reporting underground subliminals causing the YouTube algorithm to associate the word “subliminal” with breaking community guidelines and eventually leading to the mass crackdown.

A more possible scenario would be that a begrudged user who didn’t get results from a creator’s subliminals reported their account. Most of these creators have audio to help people lose weight and YouTube flags it as promoting eating disorders, which in a way it is. So when a user reports them, their accounts get taken down.

Previously, there was an unwritten rule that underground subliminal creators would add the keyword “ug subliminal” to their video titles so people who aren’t actively looking for them can stay away. But since the YouTube crackdown, creators have started removing the word “subliminal” from their descriptions altogether making it very difficult for the untrained eye to identify an underground subliminal.

The subliminal community should stop normalising ug creators. It is not “you do you” when the well-being of the community members is at stake. Report them whenever you come across them. YouTube does a great job of actually taking down problematic content when it comes to subliminals. A little too great if you ask me but that is the only option available currently.

If you are new to using subliminals, make sure that you trust the creators. Trustable creators provide the list of affirmations used and you can verify them. Even better if you make your own subliminal audio. The process is fairly simple and you can find guides all over the internet.

At the end of the day, subliminals are just tools to help your spiritual practices and should be used as such only. Your dream life doesn’t come to you just because you listened to an audio or wrote down an affirmation a hundred times over. It comes when you take intentional steps towards creating the life you want. It is a complete mindset and lifestyle shift. Don’t fall prey to modern get-rich-quick schemes — get-lucky-quick schemes.

The post was written by a woman lamenting about how being ADHD can make dating, especially situationships difficult to navigate. “I’m very selective with who I date, I never go out with guys I would consider a**holes,” she clarifies before proceeding to ask whether her ADHD made her personality too intense and why she invests too much emotional energy into random hookups.

“I always feel like I’m in love after I have sex, so I spend the next few days wanting to cuddle and kiss and snuggle with whoever I was with. It feels like whichever man it happens to be that time doesn’t also feel that way. Then they text me after two weeks again after I’ve essentially gone through all stages of heartbreak for them,” she confesses. “I am on a rollercoaster of ‘happy from sex’ to ‘depressed and waiting to be texted’.”

Okay, Abha, but why do you care so much?

Well, I am a situationship veteran with ADHD. In the two years I was active in the dating scene, I have been in six situationships and OP’s experience has been pretty much mine.

I had always thought that I was wired differently — which is technically correct if you have ADHD — and wasn’t meant for casual flings which my friends were so adept at. When you have ADHD, things that seem like common sense for neurotypical people feel foreign to us — caffeine makes us sleepy, self-control is a myth, and motivation is an urban legend, except if it concerns that one task I’ve been hyperfixating on all week.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Our dopamine-deficient brains do give us some superpowers, or like author and entrepreneur Peter Shankman calls us, we are “faster than normal.” We are great problem-solvers, super adaptive and creative with new perspectives about mundane things. It is just that we need to figure out our own ways around some things that come naturally to others.

Situationships are one of those things.

I do not claim that everyone with ADHD has trouble navigating situationships or casual flings. If you don’t, good for you! If you do, I feel you and read on. If you don’t have ADHD but would like to take back the power in your relationships anyway, you can also stay back.

The thing with me is that, when it comes to situationships, I am not “too emotionally invested” in the person, but I do need constant validation from them, which makes me confused — am I in love with them?

“The intense need for validation from your partner comes from your neurobiological need for dopamine regulation. If your partner isn't able to give you consistent attention, your brain perceives it as a sign of rejection,” Ruchi Ruuh, relationship counsellor and therapist based in Delhi, India answers my question. “ADHD brains are wired to seek dopamine. Relationships — particularly new ones — provide a surge of that neurotransmitter, making them incredibly stimulating.”

This is also why we feel like “we are in love” after sexual intimacy. After sex, everyone experiences the release of oxytocin, the hormone that creates emotional bonding. However, those with ADHD might feel this bond more intensely because our brain chemistry is already wired to seek emotional and sensory highs. Sexual activities provide instant gratification — the feeling of high we chase all our lives. This tricks our brain into misinterpreting it as a deeper connection than it is.

So basically, if you have ADHD and you catch yourself mentally chasing that mediocre man after a moderately pleasant first date, don’t beat yourself over it. You are not in love with him. You are just starved for dopamine and your date is the new dopamine-inducing drug in town. The chances are, you could replace them with an iron rod and you’d still feel the same way. This is also why after the first few weeks you get bored and leave them high and dry. The drug isn’t fun anymore.

If any of my ex-situationships are reading this, it seems like a good time to say “It wasn’t you, it was me.” Except if you are that one a**hole — it was totally you, I was basically an angel.

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Now that we have an explanation for why we seem to fall in love every Tom, Dick, and Harry, let’s move on to the more important question — “Am I too intense?”

This is a question we ADHDers ask ourselves a lot. Partly because we have been told we are. As kids, we were too active, too talkative, too energetic. As adults, we are too emotional, too forgetful, too sensitive. So why are we like this and how does this affect our chances of getting casually laid? Ruuh explains that emotional dysregulation can lead to behaviour that others might perceive as “too much.” This can result in love bombing or feelings of falling for someone too quickly, even when the relationship isn’t serious.

If you have been diagnosed with ADHD for a while, you already know that the key to managing your neurodivergence is to be as aware as possible of your triggers. If not, it completely takes over our life leaving us feeling miserable about ourselves. We have so far established that new relationships are generally a trigger for us. Learning to deal with them is important to both managing our ADHD during our casual flings and possibly having a serious relationship in the future.

In his book, “Faster Than Normal,” Peter Shankman explains the importance of setting boundaries with ourselves to manage our triggers. “To truly thrive with ADHD, you simply have to have rules,” he writes.

To take back the power in siutationships, you need to set some rules with yourself. The rules you set for yourself should be customised to deal with the specific situations in a situationship that trigger you. Here are some things to try. These are based on my personal experience and Ruuh’s expertise:

• Turn off text notifications: If your source of cheap dopamine from your situationship is the ding notifying you of a new text, turn it off. I have disabled all notifications on my devices — emails, WhatsApp, and social media. I check them regularly throughout the day and answer them on my own time, but I don’t want them distracting me when I am engaged in focused work.

• Understand your feelings: Learn to understand the difference between the transient feelings you have about your partners and their actual compatibility. Journalling is a great way to do this. Writing it down may help you give a reality check of the actual relationship. If these feelings tend to change with sex, write a note about how you feel about them generally versus after sex. The more you are in touch with yourself, the less your brain can trick you into being addicted to your fling.

• Create a routine: Now this is advice you have heard way too many times, but I am truly sorry to tell you that a routine is the first step in managing your ADHD. When it comes to your situationship also, this is an important step. Create a structure or ritual for yourself and them. Try connecting at the same time for a call. Decide on the number of times you both want to get together. These agreements and boundaries will help you both to feel more secure in the time apart and help with pacing the relationship intensity.

• Find quality sources of dopamine: If you truly want to regain the power in your relationships, you need to replace it as your primary source of dopamine with a more quality source. Work towards creating an active, sustainable system to fulfil your dopamine requirements beyond temporary romantic/physical relationships. Exercise and cooking help me.

At the end of the day, managing our ADHD-specific triggers is a life-long endeavour, and I hope this little insight from me helps you navigate your relationships better. Remember, you’re not broken. You are just different — not scary different but good different. Now go and take back the power in your situationship.

For the uninitiated “good facial features but bad facial harmony” (or vice versa) is a TikTok trend where creators, mostly young women, zoom the camera onto their facial features to point out their good/bad features. Sometimes this is to prove that despite their bad features they have good facial harmony. Other times it is to mourn that their facial harmony isn’t up to the mark despite their good features.

Even if you haven’t come across this trend, you certainly must have crossed paths with facemaxxing videos, where creators superimpose a celebrity’s face over a “perfect” template to make their features more attractive (read: euro-centric). It is the more insidious child of “looksmaxxing,” the trend birthed by the manosphere — a collection of websites and online forums promoting toxic masculinity, misogyny, and meninism — which advises men to become their “best selves” in any way possible.

From going to the gym and following a skin care regimen (softmaxxing) to getting limb lengthening surgeries and cosmetic procedures to change their facial features (hardmaxxing), looksmaxxing is all about hitting a certain set standard. What’s that I hear? Body dysmorphia and eating disorders? Yeah, that sounds about right.

In this essay, I shed some light on how TikTok (and other short-form video platforms in extension) is repackaging the rhetorics of eugenics as “becoming your best selves” pills.

To unpack the dark underbelly of facemaxxing and allied trends, we need to understand its origins. The term “facial harmony” originated among cosmetic surgeons. If you Google the term, you can find hundreds of blogs on how to achieve facial harmony, all from the websites of cosmetic surgery clinics. While the cosmetic surgery industry’s capitalizing on women’s bodies via strategised marketing and trend-peddling is something I have a lot of thoughts on, today’s endeavour is different.

In cosmetic surgery, facial harmony translates to the size of various facial features and overall facial symmetry which is often achieved by following the golden ratio. Apparently, faces that follow the standards of this measurement are perceived as more attractive than others.

The concept of the “golden ratio” was first introduced by the Greek mathematician Euclid in his mathematical treatise The Elements (308 B.C.). Now Euclid never attached psychological properties to this ratio. He merely stated that such a ratio exists.

So then who created the myth of the golden ratio? The answer is Adolf Zeising.

In the 19th century, German philosopher Adolf Zeising set out to prove that the “golden ratio” was the key to all beauty in nature. He wrote that the golden ratio is “the universal law in which is contained the ground principle of all formative striving for beauty and completeness in the realms of both nature and art.” He said that the golden ratio is present in everything “whether cosmic or individual, organic or inorganic, acoustic or optical” and that it “finds its fullest realization, however, in the human form.”

Over the years, there have been multiple attempts to prove that the Parthenon in Greece and the Pyramids in Egypt are aesthetically pleasing because they follow the golden ratio. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t.

“Attempts to demonstrate diagrammatically that any of these structures fit a golden rectangle or otherwise are speculative and appear to be due to extreme persistence in attempting to fit the golden ratio onto the structure,” Orthodontist Dr Farhad B. Naini writes in his paper “The golden ratio — dispelling the myth” clarifying that these monuments don’t actually follow the golden ratio.

He also dismisses the theory — popularised by Dan Brown’s best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code — that Leonardo da Vinci employed the ratio in his works featuring the human form, including the Mona Lisa.

The earlier mentioned facemaxxing template you see on social media is said to be based on the golden ratio and is supposed to make you look more attractive. But if you take a closer look, you can see that all it does is make your nose and lips smaller, your eyes almond-shaped, and your face thinner. In other words, completely butcher your ethnic features and make you look like a sun-burned Caucasian.

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For instance, take a look at the results of this facemaxxing done to American Rapper GloRilla:

But when it was done on Angelina Jolie there was hardly any change:

Look at the “perfect version” of Zendaya’s face:

You get the gist.

Facial harmony achieved through following the golden ratio is actually just repackaged featurism — the prejudice against Black and Brown features and preference for Euro-centric features.

Arguing that the golden ratio is rooted in science and that it is inherently found in all forms of nature, is a way to establish that the features of non-white people are “unnatural.” When you call your features “bad,” you are falling prey to this racist rhetoric. Your features aren’t bad, they are beautiful, they just aren’t European.

In the 19th century, Nazi eugenics made us believe that the shape of our skulls was a window to our personalities and mental health issues. This pseudoscientific theory — phrenology — was later used to justify white supremacy, slavery, and even the Holocaust.

In the 21st century, we use the same theories repackaged as harmless girly pop trends to microanalyse our faces and come to the conclusion that we are sub-humans, that we aren’t our best selves until we have achieved a certain racist ideal of beauty.

Conformity is a slippery slope. While in the beginning, it can provide a sense of community and belonging, soon it will lead to turning a blind eye to the horrors in our society.

In the case of beauty standards, conformity leads to cementing the racist, white-supremacist, Euro-centric idea of beauty. It leads to many large-scale issues, including what we call Snapchat dysmorphia, a disturbing trend where young women are seeking cosmetic procedures to look like their filtered faces. Another example of the real-world problems of conformity in beauty trends is the phenomenon now termed the “Love Island effect” — young viewers of the reality show “Love Island” getting cosmetic procedures to look like the participants in the show.

According to a 2018 study, 40% of the show’s audience felt inadequate in their bodies after watching the show with 30% considering cosmetic treatments to rectify this inadequacy. In 2021, when the show aired the search volume of “Botox” increased a whopping 82% times (in the UK where the show is based).

The after-effect of these phenomena is Instagram faces — faces with cat eyes, small noses, large lips, and high cheekbones featuring a blank emotion popular among Instagram models and influencers, usually achieved through plastic surgery and fillers; and Botox Paradox — a term coined by Beauty critic Jessica DeFino to explain how conformity and Botox faces are leading to a decrease in sexual activity among young people.

“Loneliness is on the rise and so I do wonder if there’s a link between the rise of Botox in the same demographics experiencing feelings of disconnection and sexual frustration,” DeFino tells Dazed in an article titled “Has Botox killed eroticism?”

In the full interview DeFino shared in her newsletter, she says, “[Botox] change the way we connect and communicate with others — even reducing our capacity to feel empathy — by freezing our muscles and eliminating our ability to make microexpressions and mirror other people’s expressions.”

All this is to say that our differences don't make us weird. It makes us unique. Embrace it. Because when we embrace our unique features, we also embrace our heritage, ancestry, and the fundamentals of who we are. Conformity is not the answer, learning to accept yourself is.

Let’s also relearn the notion that social media trends are harmless. Granted, not all social media trends need to be analysed. But when a trend tries to tell you something is wrong with you, think critically: “Are they trying to sell me something?” If yes, RUN!

On July 28th, a flyer for a party in New York City threw a certain philosophically inclined corner of the internet into mayhem. The flyer was an old school word art meme style design featuring a blurry, blown-up image of the German Idealist philosopher George Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, proclaiming the “Hegelian E-Girl Launch Party” and telling prospective partygoers to RSVP for address. The flyer advertised thirteen different people as hosts, including the now deleted alt-right racist Instagram meme account Beyond Woke and Problematic.

The advertised event instantly spawned mockery, discourse, defences, and allegedly violent threats leading to the event being cancelled. Or maybe it was never happening in the first place, as the venue allegedly had no idea what callers were talking about. The event was eventually rescheduled as invite-only and went ahead on August 3rd, as conservative digital magazine Compact reported. 

This whole ordeal left the digital masses with a million questions. Who are all these people? What exactly were they “launching”? Is it not a bit weird to call yourself an e-girl in a physical offline space? But most importantly: who the hell is a Hegelian e-girl?

I will admit to not being particularly well-versed in Hegel. I’m familiar with his view of history as a rational, linear struggle towards true freedom, and I’m vaguely familiar with his influence on Marx. I’m aware of his influence in the field of dialectics.

Hegel’s idea of dialectics does not refer to a literal dialogue as it does in the context of Socrates, but to — as per Collins dictionary — “an interpretive method in which the contradiction between a proposition (thesis) and its antithesis is resolved at a higher level of truth (synthesis).” Mostly though, I know Hegel as a famously dense writer whose work is challenging to read, as is indeed common to many German philosophers.

To the best of my knowledge, there was nothing particularly politically provocative about his work. Yet my timeline was full of posts accusing the so-called Hegelian e-girls of being either Stalinists or MAGA Communists or “cryptofascists” or members of the new right.

What was I missing? Does something insidious lurk at their ideological core?

To best understand the ideological underpinnings of the Hegelian e-girls, let’s turn to their mini-manifesto, published on X (formerly Twitter) earlier this month. The manifesto talks about “loyalty-testing in the background of the culture wars,” “the logic of fascism as the objective unconscious truth of liberal democracy,” and the “self-interested nihilism of bourgeois democracy,” and a “new piety to the absolute.”

Lots of big talk, but I think we can (somewhat uncharitably) summarise their goal as an academic regurgitation of the classic conservative complaint that leftists are too concerned with identity politics and too stuck in echo chambers to engage in rational political debate.

Their manifesto tells those on the left that they are too sensitive about identity politics, aka racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, et cetera, and need to engage in discourse with people holding those views to pursue the Hegelian ideal of dialectical objectivity.

I am not a Hegel scholar by any means so I will not attempt to explain his conceptions of dialectics and objectivity, but if you are interested the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a good resource. Then again, I’m not sure anyone involved here is a Hegel scholar.

This anti-woke, post-liberal ideology has permeated a certain subset of chronically online young people, with its seeming ground zero as the Dimes Square microneighborhood of New York City. Much of this edgy contrarian approach to online political discourse can be traced back to the Red Scare podcast.

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Red Scare is a podcast that started in 2018 with two Twitter friends, Anna Khachiyan and Dasha Nekrasova, offering an edgy critique of feminism and the neoliberal condition. Their original political leanings could be described as socialist, though still with an anti-woke undercurrent, but in recent years Dasha in particular has become explicitly conservative, mingling with the likes of Alex Jones and (allegedly) Peter Thiel.

The podcast migrated away from the “dirtbag left,” and has become a symbol of the new “edgelord right,” associated with a resurgence of conservative Catholicism (at least in aesthetics) and a reactionary anti-identity politics tendency. This subculture posits itself as somehow revolutionary and new, while in reality, it calls for a return to social traditionalism.

In case you’re in any doubt about how sincerely far right this movement is, they have somehow brought back the concept of phrenology — scientific racism — but “as a joke.” It is scared of anything sincerely transgressive, and instead drapes itself in a shroud of 2012 teenage Reddit user edgelordism, calling things “retarded” and upholding regressive ideas about gender roles.

But let’s return to Hegel.

Some critics have dismissively said that they doubt the women involved in this project have even read Hegel. This is a fair interpretation, since Hegel seems largely irrelevant to their main aim, and they seem to be operating under a pretty crude interpretation of the Hegelian dialectic.

Although I don’t doubt that they have read Hegel, I also don’t think that is incredibly relevant. It is more about what Hegel, and specifically the book (used in the aforementioned flyer) Phenomenology of Spirit (or Mind, depending on the translation) represents.

Hegel is famously difficult to read. Associating yourself with Hegel allows you to project an air of intelligence and intellectualism, as an enlightened student of the philosophical greats. Being able to speak in the language of Hegelian philosophy lends you an air of authority, allowing you to act as a leader in the righteous struggle for rational objectivity. This is evident in the general vibes of their eventual party, wherein Compact reports the hostesses proclaimed “the need for a vibe shift and the memetic power of e-girls.”

The Hegelian e-girl project isn’t a call for people to engage critically in Hegel’s work, it’s a vanity project to promote the egos and digital presence of a couple of possibly well-read, likely conservative-leaning women with moderate online followings. 

Ultimately, I am not interested in any detailed dissections of what actually went down at their party, or of the philosophical validity of their ideas, or whether these random women are practising true German Idealism. If the goal was really to encourage the study of dialectics, perhaps they could have started a reading group rather than flyering for an exclusive VIP party in Brooklyn.

This is just another attempt to form a “hot girl philosopher” cult of personality around reactionary conservatism masquerading as a revolutionary worldview. It is a way to legitimise the worst excesses of far-right ideology under the guise of philosophical debate. It is also, of course, very embarrassing, as things often are when people who are terminally online try to transition that culture into the real world. 

The “dressing up for the male gaze vs. female gaze” is a Beauty Tok trend where the creators film themselves dressing up or doing their makeup looks in a self-conceived binary notion of voyeurism. First, in ways perceived to be attractive to men (male gaze) — seductive, mysterious, and intimidating. Next, in ways perceived to be attractive to women (female gaze) — fun, outgoing, and friendly.

According to Beauty Tok, the male gaze is what men think women want and the female gaze is what women actually want. While this must seem a harmless trend to the unquestioning eye, it isn’t.

The fact is both these looks cater to the male gaze because the female gaze doesn’t exist. In this essay, I break down what the female gaze theoretically means and why it isn’t what beauty Tok think it is.

The term “male gaze” was coined and popularised by British feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey in her 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” which explicates mainstream cinema’s objectification of the female body. Mulvey theorises that in Hollywood cinema the camera is the active male voyeur and the female body essayed on screen is the passive recipient of said voyeurism. Thus, the woman on screen becomes an “erotic object of desire” both for the male protagonist and the audience (regardless of their gender).

While the term was coined to explain the heterosexual male lens of Hollywood, it extends to any medium where women are featured — magazines, advertisements, social media, and of course, real life. The male gaze is the cultural extension of patriarchy. Since men control the production and distribution of media, the way the patriarchy views women—something that the collective lens of patriarchy can view, possess, and exploit — is the way that the media portrays women.

In short, the patriarchy through the varied mediums it gatekeeps, controls the narrative around womanhood and the female body. This is what we call “the male gaze.”

Wherever patriarchy exists, the male gaze exists. It isn’t an aesthetic. It is a term that critically explicates the values with which the mainstream media is produced and consumed. In Mulvey’s words, the male gaze is when the “unchallenged, mainstream film code[d] the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order.”

It is not just viewing the world as a man, it is looking at women as an object of desire. This male gaze also extends to the lack of nuance in the writing of women characters as they don’t have any other purpose than to be sexualised on-screen or further the narrative of the hero.

The term “female gaze” originated in response to Mulvey’s theory that according to the set conventions of mainstream media, all viewers are made to view the narrative through the eyes of the heterosexual male lead. If all films are made for the audience to identify with the men onscreen, what about the female audience?

In those exact terms, the female gaze is supposed to be media narrated through the eyes of a female protagonist. One popular argument is that a hypothetical movie written, directed, and produced by women would cater to the female gaze. But this logic is flawed.

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In her essay, Mulvey argues that the male gaze is inherent to cinema (and for the sake of this article, for all forms of media) because the male gaze is the result of the system that produces cinema. All cinema that comes out of this patriarchal system will unfortunately cater to the male gaze. Even movies that are created by women telling the stories of women are produced within this existing patriarchal system and thus cater to the male gaze.

A few films centring on women’s lives or made by a female crew are insufficient to dismantle the foundation of this system. As long as the patriarchal status quo exists in the mediums through which we consume content, the female gaze will remain an urban legend.

“I don’t think there is such thing as the female gaze. I think there is such thing as the male gaze, as per Laura Mulvey’s theory, and that gaze, if you talk strictly about cinema only, has more than 100 years of monopoly. It colonized the new medium from the start,” in a 2018 interview given to Vulture, celebrated cinematographer Natasha Braier explains. “You could say that it has become the official language of cinema. The female gaze, if there is such, never had the opportunity to truly develop and become something we can analyze.”

An example of a failed attempt to classify a body of work centring the female gaze is the genre of “chick flicks” — films like “Legally Blonde,” “27 Dresses,” and “Mean Girls” which were created for the heterosexual female audience, featuring women-centred stories, romance, and often objectifying the male body. Despite all that, the major drawback of “chick flicks” was that this body of cinema that was supposed to cater to women only catered to a small demographic of women — middle-class, white women.

Although this genre theoretically had all the elements to establish a foundation for the rise of the female gaze in modern cinema, it failed in a key aspect, creating a collective female gaze which is nearly impossible to achieve without a matriarchy carefully shaping it.

Just like the male gaze isn’t the world through a man’s eye, the female gaze isn’t the world through a woman’s eye. The male gaze is the voyeuristic experience of the heterosexual man shaped by the patriarchy and shared by all heterosexual men. A female version of this doesn’t exist because there is no single viewing experience as a woman.

The films created by women narrating the complex stories of being a woman are definitely a start to dismantle the mainstream structures built on the foundation of patriarchy. But at the moment, even those films are not entirely devoid of the male gaze.

Coming back to real life, both the looks that Beauty Tok creators curate, (the one for the “male gaze” and the one for the “female gaze” are in fact for the male gaze because the male gaze is omnipotent. It is impermeable. We live in a patriarchal society. There is no escaping the male gaze.

And the female gaze, at least for now, is hypothetical. It cannot be formed just because individual women are gazing at the world. For the female gaze to exist, a matriarchal society should exist. And shouldn't the focus be anyway on moving away from the heterosexual binaries of gaze and creating compelling narratives that actively centre all kinds of human experience, including POC, Gay, Queer, Sapphic, and transgender narratives?

As the description of r/AmITheAsshole — a subreddit where anonymous Reddit users post about the conflicts they had been in, to a community of 18 million users and seek their judgement on the question “Am I The Asshole” — says, there is a “frustrated moral philosopher in all of us.”

Before subreddits and discord servers came around to give every chronically online (and judgemental) moral philosopher a voice, we had a more dignified, collective voice — advice columnists, aka, agony aunts.

As a teenager growing up in the 2010s when print magazines were still a thing and every home had a subscription to a women’s lifestyle magazine with an agony aunt column, my inner moral philosopher had been satiated way before r/AITA became a thing.

One of my earliest memories of cathartic justice was reading the answer to a question from a mother who worried that her 4-year-old daughter was under the devil’s influence because she hated prayer time. The column’s author admonished the woman for holding her toddler to an adult’s standards and asked her to focus on something productive. In other words, the author asked the mother to touch grass.

For generations of teenagers and adults (dating back to the 17th century, actually), advice columns have been the first introductions to complex feelings and taboo questions. “They offered perspectives that were sometimes missing from my immediate social circles. This early exposure to diverse viewpoints and empathetic advice helped shape my understanding of various human experiences,” says Yosef (38).

Like Yosef and many others, the first time I heard of many hushed topics was through these columns — unsymmetrical boobs, discoloured labia, non-committal boyfriends, and lavender marriages. It was a rite of passage for us.

Advice columns are still around, and their popularity is increasing again with the GenZ girls who grew up learning from agony aunts graduating to be the next generation of agony aunts.

But in today’s Internet landscape, where one can get almost instantaneous answers from a vast group of strangers from varied backgrounds, why would one write to an advice column and wait for days, even weeks for an answer from a self-proclaimed expert on the spectrum of human emotions and feelings? Read on to find out.

Agony aunt columns are historical relics. Reading an advice column from the archives can provide valuable information about the socio-economic conditions of the women from the time it was written. It also helps us understand their dominant problems, how they were treated, their ambitions, and much more.

A major reason I prefer agony aunts over anonymous trolls on the internet is their visible humanness. They take the time to explain themselves and don’t just give a customary three-word response as if that is supposed to be helpful to anyone. “It's nice to have one person respond and know they're going to take you seriously rather than having to wade through a thousand comments that may or may not be helpful,” says Zara (24), a fellow GenZ who has recently discovered the magic of advice columns.

According to Helen (40), a veteran reader of popular agony aunts like “Ask A Manager,” “Ask Philippa,” and “Dear Prudence,” the advice from agony aunts is more useful than what you find online because agony aunts act from a place of balance and detachment. “I've written into advice columns several times and have had a couple of replies,” Helen adds. “While I haven't always agreed with the answers, they have at least helped me make up my mind. Sometimes, just knowing that I disagree is a way to point me towards a decision.”

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Agony aunts are usually non-judgemental and come from a place of care, compassion, and a genuine desire to help their readers and provide value to their community. For instance, Grayce McCormick, former host of “Dear Tracy, the Relationship Expert” on Sirius XM Radio is always intentional with her advice.

“When I encounter a question I don't have the answer to, I handle it with transparency and resourcefulness,” Grayce says opening up about the behind-the-scenes of being an agony aunt. “I acknowledge the question, do my best to research and gather accurate information, and if I still can't find the answer, I openly admit my uncertainty while suggesting other sources.”

Another example is Karishma Swarup, a sexuality educator and author of a sexual-health-focused advice column on The Telegraph India, who tells me that the motivation behind her column is to dismantle the myths associated with sex and sexuality among Indians. “People panic when it comes to their sexual health. Because the first thing about googling something going on with you is that you end up down rabbit holes. So I try to create a safe space and tell them: Listen. It’s totally fine. You are gonna be alright,” she says.

According to Karishma, a key benefit of consulting an advice column over internet communities is the credibility of the information shared. “While lived experiences are valid, crowd-sourced information can often be misleading due to lack of comprehension of the context and specifics of the situation,” she explains. Another important difference, Karishma notes is the tone of the answers. “The training I have received helps me with the tone and style I answer which is crucial when dealing with sensitive topics,” she points out.

Now, when we are not looking for advice or expertise, we are often looking for reassurance. Our favourite agony aunts have got that covered too. Philippa Perry, author of The Guardian’s weekly column “Ask Philippa.” shared on X (formerly Twitter), “As an agony aunt, I get a lot of emails where the writer has decided what to do but needs encouragement and permission to go ahead. Sometimes I feel like I'm dispensing licences. It is a lovely job.”

For devoted readers of advice columns, the authors behind them are like adoptee mothers or big sisters. Sometimes, like Isabelle (55) often does, they feel heard and seen. “Whether we take the advice, it is sometimes helpful to see the reasoning behind their advice, as we’re sipping tea, realizing that we too, in fact, may have gone through a similar situation, or are currently in the middle of the exact scenario,” Isabelle paints us a picture.

Other times, like Mary (61), they put themselves in the shoes of the agony aunt and compare their wisdom to the author’s. “Sometimes, they see parts of the situation I don't see. Other times, they miss a huge part of the system around the person, and make the mistake of seeing the questioner in isolation,” she confesses. “I also love to see what kinds of trouble my fellow human beings get themselves into. We've all been there.”

Advice columns are like the classic vinyl records of wisdom — they never go out of style. But agony aunts do more than just dish out advice. They force you to think, empathise, and partake in the little worries of a fellow being. They appeal to the human in us. In a world where we are constantly isolated in our anonymous little bubbles with the freedom to be rude to other people sharing their worries from their anonymous little bubbles, agony aunts remind us to be kind.

Also, the use case of an instant reply platform, say r/AmITheAsshole and a well-thought-out advice column is different. You may get instant replies on Reddit, but nothing beats the charm of a well-written column. The former is a quick fix, a burger from a fast food joint. The latter is a gourmet meal, something to be relished slowly.

Just watching that reel made me so tired that I spent the rest of my day rotting in bed. If you have ever come across such exhausting “spend the day with me” content from #girlbosses, or worse, if you have ever tried to be one, my sorrows and prayers are with you.

In the third (and final) year of my bachelor’s degree, I made a moderately successful attempt to be a girl boss — along with my regular coursework and social obligations, I took on a full-time fellowship, juggled multiple extracurriculars, and started freelancing as a culture reporter.

By the end of my degree, I was severely burned out and constantly sick, forcing me to end my girl boss era. Unfortunately, I am just one among the millions of Millennial and Gen-Z women who were brainwashed into being girl bosses.

The term “girl boss” was popularised by Sophia Amorusa, a self-made fashion entrepreneur, in her 2014 best-selling book, “#GirlBoss” giving rise to a problematic brand of online feminism void of any nuance and intersectionality called “girl boss feminism”. Later, many labels joined the portfolio of girl boss feminism — boss babe, SH-E-O (like CEO), SH-ERO, mompreneur, etc.

Many feminist scholars and intellectuals have critiqued the ideals of girl boss feminism at length, and rightfully so. For starters, it promotes the belief that maximising your economic productivity will free you from the shackles of patriarchy. It glorifies labour as a form of fulfilment when it really is just a means for financial stability. Another criticism was that the labels promoted by girl boss feminism were in itself discriminating against women. What is the need to have a label for an ambitious woman but not for an ambitious man? Why “girl boss” when there is no “boy boss”?

In 2022, Sophia Amoruso herself disowned the term tweeting, “Please stop using the word Girlboss thank you.” In February 2024, she told ELLE, “I made this thing, and it took on a life of its own. It’s not that I’m embarrassed by it, but I don’t want to be defined by it.”

During the pandemic-induced quarantine and WFH era, girl bosses (and others) were reminded of the sweet joys of engaging in seemingly unproductive hobbies and the dopamine kick of enjoying life’s little pleasures. This culminated in a massive ideological shift in online girlhood which kickstarted the “slow living” trend. This trend briefly called “snail girl,” “girl rot,” “girl living,” and “lazy girl” now seems to have found a permanent home in the label, “girl moss.”

The term “girl moss” was first popularized in 2022 by Daisy Alioto, a journalist and influencer who tweeted:

Being a girl moss is simple.

It is being present in daily life, acknowledging life’s highs and lows, and taking the time to savour life (at least as much as you can considering we still live in a capitalist society). It is an active choice to prioritize your well-being before sacrificing yourself at the altar of your capitalist overlords.

“We are not meant to work 40+ hours per week, constantly be consumed by technology, and never have a moment of downtime. This is completely going against our natural intuition,” explains Jenny Flora Wells, a holistic therapist and social worker based in Los Angeles, USA. “Slow lifestyles are centred around what we are passionate about instead of competing with others to feel a temporary and fleeting sense of worthiness.”

Thanks to the girl moss movement, a generation of burned-out Millennial and Gen-Z women are finally healing from years of hustle culture propaganda telling them that success is just around the corner and all they have to do is work hard.

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Jo Hayes, a 39-year-old etiquette coach based in Brisbane, Australia says that her transition from being a girl boss to a girl moss was “a radical lifestyle edit done gradually over time.” An ex-TV Journalist, Jo led a fast-paced life in a newsroom with high expectations from bosses, strict deadlines, and social obligations. “I could have been out every night of the week,” she remembers. “My life was too busy.” While she was happy with her career and lifestyle, she desired inner peace and a greater presence of mind in her day-to-day life.

“I started saying a ‘radical no’ to many things in my life,” Jo confesses. “This stripping back of my schedule flooded my life with an enormous amount of space, peace and blissful rest.” Being a girl moss has changed Jo’s life as prioritising rest helps her make better decisions, and be a better spouse, parent, friend, colleague, and boss.

Another ex-girl boss Meggha Sharma, a 27-year-old brand marketing consultant based in Banglore, India says that her journey of being a girl moss was by actively differentiating capitalism and social justice (which the girl boss ideology had simplified beyond measure). “The process of renouncing my girl boss era was simple when I understood that if I don't want the same things as other people, then why bother running the same race,” she opened up.

For Meggha, being a girl moss is all about aligning her career goals with her life goals while cutting out the unwanted noise and actively prioritising her hobbies and personal projects. “Slow is subjective,” she reminds us.

Another major aspect of being a girl moss is going back to nature, stopping by to smell the flowers and feel the dew (not that we have any left because of global warming). It is an active choice to replace the grind with long walks, thick novels, good food, meditation, and outdoor activities.

The girl moss trend reminds us that maybe it is time for us to introspect about our life’s priorities and unlearn the utopian promises of hustle culture. It is time to escape from the constant cycle of working non-stop and losing out on the things that actually matter, and acknowledging that we are not meant to just survive but thrive.

Healing from burnout is a complex process. It took me eight months of complete rest and stillness to heal from just a year of overworking and following the hustle culture grind. It requires unwinding the pattern we have been living in and not overworking ourselves daily. “Beginning this healing journey requires slowing down every aspect of our lives and even simplifying our routine to not overwhelm our window of tolerance or nervous system,” explains Wells.

For many other ex-girl bosses and me, practising a lifestyle centred around holistic well-being over glorified and oversimplified metrics of success has worked wonders. I am a girl moss now, prioritising presence over productivity, and ready to be absorbed back into nature and I urge you, my fellow burnt-out girl bosses, to join me on the forest floor. Remember what the Dalai Lama said, “We are human beings, not human doings.”