Many a social media quip has been written about the out-of-touch tumblr queer. A youth completely disconnected from the material reality of the queer struggle, weaponizing mangled forms of queer theory against her peers in an attempt to carve out a place for herself. It’s a tale as old as time, but as we tell our little jokes about the oppression olympics and bottom bingo, we forget one important detail. There is a real person making these oft-clowned on posts. That real person was raised with the social media sphere as her only exposure to queer culture. For her, online is real and it carries heavy consequences. This is where one might invoke Jean Baudrillard. Unfortunately, she hasn't actually read Simulacra and Simulation. She has instead read people who have read Simulacra and Simulation.
For the terminally online queer youth, social media is typically the first exposure to queerness or even basic feminist concepts. She and many of her peers learned what “misogyny”, “homophobia”, and “rape culture” looked like by listening to people she concluded were simply more experienced and smarter than her online. She concerned herself with the words of her “queer elders” who were only 20-somethings themselves. After all, they were older and more experienced than that baby gay. How could they possibly lead her astray? To disagree with them was to deny their lived experience and reinforce cisheteropatriarchy, was it not? Why, then, would a queer youth object when her boundaries were pushed by someone she had come to consider a mentor? “To be queer is to be transgressive”, she was told, and so, when she was transgressed upon, she thought to herself, “This is queerness and I must accept it.” for where else does the queer youth belong? She’s self actualized now. She cannot return to the world of the straights, but with only the internet to turn to she finds herself trapped in a series of echo chambers. These chambers leave their mark upon her even when she finds her way out of them.
Her first echo chamber prides itself on sexual liberation. She’s only just become familiar with the concept of sex, let alone the concept that sex is good for you. She is lacking in experience and knowledge, so she reads posts. She reads post after post about sex being sacred. It’s a universal good, especially if it’s gay. Who wouldn’t want to have sex all the time? That feeling like worms were wriggling in her stomach? It was probably just a latent seed of conservatism she’d failed to banish. No one could know about it. After all, why would a sexually liberated individual say no to another sexually liberated individual? Didn’t she want to be a good feminist? The queer youth was lucky to escape this echo chamber with as little injury as she had, but that guilt she felt over not being “liberated” enough stuck with her. It made her quite the easy target.
While the rest of the world was enjoying its last shred of normalcy before Donald Trump’s first presidency, the queer user base of tumblr was tearing itself apart. This is not an uncommon occurrence, but this one in particular remains infamous. She knew not who posed the question, but the youth was forced to answer, “Are asexuals REALLY queer?” Lines were drawn in the sand. Mutual rings, skype groups, and discord servers fractured into tiny little pieces when it was revealed that someone in their midsts believed the asexual to be a valuable member of the queer community. After all, they didn’t have gay sex. That was what made someone TRULY queer, the amount of queer sex they were having. Being queer while not having sex was an absurd notion. It was laughable to everyone, everyone but the queer youth who simply had to laugh along and hope her sympathies were not discovered. Even her partner had made it clear how vile and abusive the asexual was for not putting out. After all, he needed sexual attention. It was how he dealt with his trauma. What was she going to do? Abandon a traumatized trans boy? That just wouldn’t do. So instead, she keeps placating him until something else makes her snap. Her desires, or lack thereof, are made known and she is cast out because she can no longer provide.
The queer youth retreats into the arms of her sisters. Tumblr had been heralded as a bastion of feminist discourse, so surely other women had to be there for her. They were, too enthusiastically. Her youth made her a valuable commodity, someone that was malleable. Her online existence led to a lack of concrete identity. In its place, she was projected onto. She received the sisterhood she sought, but her sisters had a much more invasive idea of what “sisterhood” meant. “Are you sure you’d have sex with a man?”, “Y’know, I hear incest is okay if it’s siblings. Wanna be my little sister?”, “You should call me when your birthday gets here.” And bereft of other options, she takes the bait. Hook, line, sinker. Nobody ever told her older women shouldn’t be asking her questions like that. And if they did tell her, it was just because they didn’t want her talking to other queers. What reason was there to turn down an offer from a sister? Didn’t she want to be liberated? Didn’t she want to be useful?
By becoming sexually available, the youth exposes herself to the proclivities of her peers. The young, queer population of the internet often find themselves in what they like to call, “hard kink”. This has been discussed to death. What went unmentioned in these discussions was their lack of ability to step outside of their kink scenarios. Our youth found herself interacting with 24/7 dominance/submission dynamics without an awareness that this was not expected of her. She watched her peers beg to be beaten and asked herself, “Is this what I’m supposed to want?” Did she have the right to decline? This was queer culture. She either had to participate or leave.
Beneath the youth’s misguided quest for liberation lies a little-discussed and commonly exploited tool. Ideas do not enter girls’ heads from nowhere. They must be placed there, not just through rhetoric but through repeated exposure in a variety of contexts. The culture of the online queer lives and dies by the meme. Memetics are frequently applied to explain the American Right’s normalization of its heinous ideas, but rarely do we consider the way our own lighthearted jokes reinforce ideas. Every text post and image edit about how the only way to defeat fascism is by having gay sex with older women reinforces her need to be available to others. It is useful to the movement to shirk her boundaries regularly, so she does. She does so with her self-esteem in tatters as she reads the latest post about how bottoms are weak and built to be shoved around. She does so while watching her mutuals reblog an Asexual Margret Thatcher moodboard and concludes she’s so glad she decided she couldn’t possibly be asexual. Otherwise, that might have really hurt her feelings. The queer youth forgoes her own mental health again and again because this is just what being queer is about, right? She’d never known anything else and it’s possible she never will know. Her window into the mind of people who don’t want her dead is a series of poorly cropped edits that depict a pink-haired girl posing like Drake in Hotline Bling to indicate which topic of the week is gross and cringe and which is transgender culture. It seemed like coffee was out and cannibalism was in. The youth hoped she’d grow a stronger stomach. It was all she COULD hope for. After all, where else could she be but here?