Girl’s girl vigilantism

On “Tea” and heterofatalism.

Just got back to New York after some oven-hot days in Rome and a few extra mesmerizing ones in Vico Equense, which is now an official Deez destination rec. It’s a sleepy little town on the outskirts of Naples / on the other side of the Sorrento Peninsula from everything Amalfi, so it’s both gorgeous and so low-key that you can rent your own boat and motor over to Capri without much fuss (though maybe some light seasickness).

The most Vico moments: After a day on the water, I was pacing outside a laundromat, a little sunburned and impatient for the wash cycle to finish, when the lavanderia owner brought me a plastic cup of beer from some festivities next door (a new shop had opened and all the neighbors were toasting with a batch of his home brew). Later that night, my boyfriend observed a 60-something-year-old Italian woman at the next table over showing her husband a clip of the Coldplay concert incident on her phone. We laughed through the language barrier about it together, and then the husband poured us some rum from the bottle he was working on and taught us how to nibble off a piece of dark chocolate first before shooting the rum. Extremely valuable research conducted for business-related purposes, I assure you. Also lol now prepare for a major tone change… -D

---

Have you guys heard about Tea, the app “helping women date safe” AKA to anonymously rate men? (Sort of like the Lulu of the moment, if anyone from the 2010s remembers that).

It’s currently the #1 free app on the Apple store right now, right above ChatGPT — which speaks volumes alone, I think, about our current relationship with information and how we apparently prefer to access it from either a disembodied algorithm or random anons (the internet and random strangers are, unlike one’s peers, always available). I was reading this explainer from Dazed about the app, and the discourse is now hitting Twitter/X…

@redheadedhater

@morganisawizard

Yesterday, I tried to make an account on Tea, but it put me on the waitlist. You have to submit a selfie to “confirm” that you are a “woman” (a method that is obviously airtight and will cause no problems whatsoever), and whoever is reviewing my “application” probably also does not love that I tried to take a million screenshots of the UX, all of which were blacked out in my camera roll afterward. (I call this “Netflix/Raya technology”)

There’s a chance, of course, that I’ll get in and realize that the whole thing is “useless” and glitchy (I think Lulu was so short-lived that my friends and I only got to log on once). But even from this vantage point, the advertised product appears awfully quixotic. The app promises to help you (well, women at least) avoid dating “red flag men” and to “set alerts for your man.” I joked to some friends that it was a new dawn for girl’s girl vigilantism, but obviously the app represents a terrifying new reality for everyone involved. Certainly, women throughout history have co-opted all kinds of new technologies for sharing valuable information with each other (and have been punished for it), but the go-to justification of promoting personal safety is harder to rubber stamp considering the age of viral shaming (see: West Elm Caleb) and resulting paranoia inflicted upon all of us regarding our flawed dealings with each other. (Related but to be dug into for another day: the fail rate of tech platforms that have tried to commodify and monetize anonymous whisper networks, save for I guess Reddit?)

This whole business with Tea made me think of these two other recent Dazed pieces on female radicalization and femcels, and then there was that big NYT Magazine essay just a few days ago from Jean Garnett, “The Trouble With Wanting Men,” which plants the flag in a big, Grey Lady-esque way on the term heterofatalism. Rereading these links together, it seems obvious that while so much discourse on the State of Men has been happening post-Me Too, wherein the default onus is placed upon diagnosing and rectifying the particular issues of the male population, with whom the various effects of modern life have calcified into a discernible political movement, we’re still figuring out how to discuss the other half of the coin, especially the other darker edges of the internet where intense anger, paranoia, and fear have curdled into near-total intolerance for and vilification of “The Other,” too.

Something I discuss often with straight male friends is the imbalance of male vs. female fear, the usual “men are afraid women will laugh at them, women are afraid of waking up in someone’s basement in chains” type of rhetoric. The obviousness of one side’s fear superseding the other is the whole point, and to even theoretically entertain any other interpretation has personally left me in tears of frustration more than once. It’s a conversation ender, and it’s supposed to be that way. Believe women! But the manipulation of any kind of fear that gives way to the adoption of an app-ified surveillance state and a new scale of anarchic vigilantism is quite extremist, if not totally counter to our original attempts to connect with said Others. Jesus. We so badly, understandably, want to be able to evaluate each other in neat, efficient, safe sums of bullet points and color-coded flags that we’re willing to give up quite a lot else in exchange. In Tea’s view, they call that a market opportunity.