We’ve hit a point where Instagram is beginning to become obsolete. There are more people on Tik Tok than Twitter, and quite frankly, the app is just getting started. I did a semester-long report on Tik Tok last summer, and it’s fucking genius. The algorithm figures out what you like to a tee, feeds you as much of it as possible and adapts for when you take in new interests. The average time somebody spends on Instagram is three minutes; on Tik Tok that number is nine. That one prick in your friend group that says that Tik Tok is “so fucking gay,” has become the minority. I had the same opinion on Tik Tok as most of you, I can imagine. An app where the biggest stars are shirtless kids in their late teens that sexually confuse pre-adolescent girls by semi-erotically dancing to Jason Derulo? No thanks. But just like many of you, I hopped on because of my girlfriend, and eventually, I curated a “For You” page full of quick-witted sketches, videos of kids doing dumb shit, Boondocks homosexual erotic fan fiction, and baseball highlights. My only issue with Tik Tok: it gives women Tourettes.
It’s eleven thirty-seven at night. You got off work, cleaned the fork you ate Chinese takeout with, and you’re laying in bed with your girlfriend. You’re watching The Bachelorette because your girlfriend at least pretended to give a shit about playoff hockey (something not even ESPN can do), and you appreciated that. After all the sodium and the two High Noons you had at dinner, you’re pretty tired, but you can tell by the way she’s readjusting her spooning position so aggressively that she wants to fuck. You pull yourself together, and you’re at half-mast sucking her titties when she tells you she has to pee. And as you’re laying there, proud of yourself that you overcame mild exhaustion to fuck the girl that carries you home from bars once a week, you hear her hum from the bathroom into the thick of it, into the thick of it…ugh as she washes her hands. Boner lost, energy gone, the moment is over. That, my friends, is Tik Tok Tourettes.
It’s a new phenomenon, but it’s everywhere. It’s there when my sister is whistling Dixie D’Amelio in the back of my car, it’s there when the lady checking you out at the grocery store is humming Doja Cat, and it’s there when your boy’s girlfriend- who fucking sucks- is belting the chorus of Mood by 24kGoldn. That’s my biggest issue with Tik Tok. An app where the same song is on loop one hundred times has created a culture where every girl is in never-ending choir practice. Do you know which girls I like to hear sing? Ones that make fucking money doing so. Unless you can yodel in a fucking Wal-Mart, I don’t want to listen to you botch Demi Lovato. It’s driving me fucking insane. The girl in front of me on the Subway that sang I was patient, yeaaah, I was patient will be the origin story for my Netflix doc, where I murder tens of people before getting put to death and eventually having the 2050 version of Zac Efron play me in a movie that weirdly turns girls on despite being about young women being cut into little pieces…or I’ll probably tell my girlfriend that it’s cute when she does it.