The Group Chat: Our Embarrassing TikTok Fascinations
Welcome to The Group Chat, a new series wherein the senior team discusses something relevant to the plot. And by “the plot” I mean the collective mileau of culture and current events that we’re all swimming in at any given time. This month: we all admit to more or less being on TikTok… and then we realize that “being on TikTok” probably means something wildly different for each of us. Enjoy this brief moment of levity / extremely mild existential crisis brought to you by the Autostraddle team.
xoxo,
Nico
Kayla: I am obsessed with watching extremely cringe lesbian couples who are content creators together. I don’t mean any of the ultra popular ones. I mean ones I find in random corners of the internet. The ones making the most cliched gay jokes and who embrace stereotypes and are so basic they almost circle back to being straight. BLESS THEIR HEARTS!!! The worse their sense of humor is, the more I like them. I am constantly trying to show their videos to my fiancée Kristen, but she can’t handle the cringe. She gets way too much second hand embarrassment.
Nico: My sister has Extremely Strong second-hand embarrassment, so now it’s a quality I find extremely endearing. I love this.
Drew: Kayla, is that on TikTok? I do think there’s something special about the TikTok algorithm’s ability to bring you to corners of the internet that will scratch your weirdest or most embarrassing brain itches.
Riese: That is unfortunate news for me because TikTok seems to think the weirdest corner of my brain is occupied by AI people from the 19th century telling the story of how they were murdered.
Nico: TikTok is really like the medicine in Mary Poppins that tastes differently to everyone. There is no definite TikTok.
Kayla: It is indeed on TikTok! My FYP is basically cringe dykes and food/recipe vids lol. TikTok is a wild place. I saw Kristen watching something the other day that was like a video of someone playing a phone game but with text from a Reddit AITA overlaid on it? And apparently that’s an entire genre of vids!
Carmen: I quite literally cannot process those words together as a sentence.
Nico: It is a genre of videos! People like, read Reddit threads while showing a video of something else.
Drew: My girlfriend Elise isn’t really on TikTok but it’s become an almost nightly ritual to watch the TikToks my friends sent me together before bed and then maybe scroll for a bit. Nothing like having an audience to really highlight the random things presented to you. Like why did I watch so many simulations of cars or trucks smashing into things at various speeds? What am I a four-year-old playing with Hot Wheels?
The weirdest for me though is probably the pizza cat monster who sings. Is this a popular account? I can’t tell if this is going to be basic or super weird. (Pauses to search for pizza cat monster.) Oh of course NOW I can’t find it. Did I make this up? I swear a couple times a week I watch the pizza cat monster.
Riese: I have not heard of pizza cat monster who sings but have you ever seen a straight white woman unload 45 different sizes and flavors of ice into her enormous freezer?
Nico: Really, truly, what do you mean by “pizza cat monster who sings”?? The phrase is kind of setting me on edge. I’m a little scared. Is it at all like the button dogs who are now asking why they are alive and what their purpose is and why daddy isn’t home anymore?
@whataboutbunny Bunny: Bringing you existential content since dogs could talk #bunnythedog #talkingdog #fypシ #aac #WeekendVibes #doggos
Drew: No, don’t worry. It’s way weirder than that.
Nico: Wonderful. Thank you for the reassurance.
Drew: In general, I love when TikTok feels like some sort of surreal video art. Even the milk girl who I know is pretty mainstream. I’m just like wow this would make Maya Deren or Matthew Barney or at least Ryan Trecartin proud!
(Keep talking… I will look for pizza cat monster.)
Nico: Drew, I love Maya Deren, also used to make video art. Strange days! Might be why I’m also so pleased to see that kind of shit so democratized by TikTok? I love that video editing has gone so mainstream. We’re getting a lot of really interesting things from it. I was talking to a friend of mine who makes TikTok’s and who has ADHD and they mentioned that it is the first medium that has ever allowed them to communicate accurately the kinds of associations their mind makes when thinking because they can do these cuts between subjects that also display the connections.
Carmen: That is fascinating!!
Drew: I obviously love slow cinema and don’t want us to totally lose the ability to watch things longer than a minute, but I also don’t think the kind of editing and storytelling associated with TikTok is bad! I mean, since Vine I’ve loved seeing people tell stories in very short periods of time.
Nico: I’ve loved watching people construct new art forms out of it! I have to find it but have you ever come across the woman who makes these shorts that emulate a point and click horror game, all starring her? She’s also an OnlyFans creator. I fucking love those so much. Okay, found her: mollymooonnn. I’m obsessed.
@mollymoonn2 Smile for the camera
Nico: So yeah, I’m also finding my most embarrassing content on TikTok? I’m currently on Cishet Women Who Are Fed Up With Cishet Men TikTok and they are… they have some things to say. I don’t know what it is. Is it the glimpse into a world I know very little about? Is it Just How Cringe some of their experiences are? Is it the ways that talking about emotional abuse has become normalized that allow me to process my past relationships in ways that feel safe? And also, I am truly horrified and continue to be horrified right along with them by the discourse around the “that phase when you slowly start hating your girlfriend” Tweet. Everyone seems to not be doing very well and I am just fascinated, watching. As my sister said, “straight men are having a moment… not in a good way.”
Also, my TikTok is now so straight because I keep diving in on these women. I’m obsessed with the lives they are living. Like, sure, straight women have been biphobic to me, but like, damn, when I say I have solidarity with women as a non-woman, that includes straight women. They appear to really and often be going through it.
Carmen: I have this straight mommy blogger out of Texas who I have built a parasocial relationship with. She has this husband and gay sister and two adorable little kids and her husband’s brother also married an influencer? So they are just this whole influencer family? Down to the grandparents? Anyway! I love her curated TikTok life because it feels so far removed from my IRL messy life and I find comfort in that.
@jaylabrenae5 Replying to @rinnsister the girl gang got it!💕✨ #nylabop
But every few days I have to like a few videos from studs licking their lips in a row, so that TikTok doesn’t forget that I’m gay.
Nico: Love how you snuck in that thirsty moment at the end like I wasn’t going to notice.
Riese: I think maybe TikTok thinks I am a gay man, which maybe started because I have seen every single Trixie & Katya clip on TikTok at least five times. When I think about all the creators who I see and follow most often, they are gay men. Obviously Brian Jordan Alvarez, but also I have an intense parasocial relationship with Max Balegde:
@max_balegde The most chaotic interview you will ever watch… Black Adam is out now!! As Noah said, watch it. #BlackAdam #noahcentineo
a British kid who drinks too much and loves his crocs and goes on shopping sprees in Disneyworld and also Dutch:
@dutchdeccc I have been waiting all year for this moment #september #september21
a New York native who loves couponing and sitting in his bathtub. I’ve really loved like, seeing them get more popular? I feel like Max is my son? Oh and those boys in North Carolina who eat a lot.
I think on TikTok I wanna zone out and get a break from The Discourse or anything lesbians are talking about (unless it’s relevant to a story I’m working on or celebrity relationship I’m keeping up on for potential future stories) so I try to aggressively swipe away lesbian videos to tell TikTok that I’m not here for that, but of course I cannot escape myself or the humor of my people! But honestly, I imagine I spend more time watching straight people. I like to keep tabs on what they are up to. I feel like I had no idea what straight people were up to until I got on TikTok.
Drew: That is fascinating to me, because I spend so little time around straight people these days. But then sometimes I’m in a straight space and I’m like OH RIGHT, this is why their feminism is so basic! Because sometimes it really is as simple as men suck! (Or at least the men these women are choosing to be around.)
Kayla: I do think I experience most straight culture via Bravo and TikTok and there is a LOT of the “All Men Suck” vibe in both spaces.
Nico: Right, I am like. These women are Fighting For Their Lives when it comes to getting anyone around them to recognize their personhood. They cannot get even the most basic elements of being treated like a human by dates, partners, men in their lives, other women who are authority figures. That’s a super interesting connection to just like, there still being a reason for their feminism being so basic. It’s because the people they’re dealing with have not moved beyond the basic, in so many ways.
I am having a moment of reflection now. Maybe that’s why I’m obsessed. It’s a deep dive into how fundamentally broken things are, even for people who queer people might think of as privileged or as oppressors.
Drew: Okay I found pizza cat monster, except I was wrong it’s a possum!
@alternatebazaarart dainty little pizza paws 😍 #pizzapossum #babybiscuit #marblecity #weirdcore #nostalgia #cgi #animatedmusicvideo #catsoftiktok #cursedfyp #blender3d
I guess the possum isn’t a pizza monster but rather is friends with the pizza monsters. And I see they also have a little strawberry friend and a corn friend.
Riese: EVERYTHING WHAT’S WRONG WITH POSSUMS: IT’S ALL OF THEM except I suppose maybe this possum pizza monster. My girlfriend apparently sees a lot of cute dog videos but instead I am sitting here watching a 10-part video about a girl who was attacked by a dog and had to get her face replaced.
Nico: Oh I know that guy! How is this being pushed so hard to both of us? TikTok is just like: here. You need to see this. Are they a promotion for a musical artist? What is their purpose?
Reminds me of my girl, Wendy Vainity who I will stand by as being a visionary artist, not cringe.
Drew: Oh this is wonderful. I could watch hours of this late at night on TikTok.
And I don’t think the possum is promoting anything! I think it’s just that person’s art! But if record labels were smart they’d pay the artist to have pizza possum sing their new releases.
Kayla: This is the first time I’m experiencing pizza possum and I gotta sayy………pizza possum: GOOD.
I also have a bizarre love for TikToks that’ll just be like 7 INTERESTING SCREAM THEORIES and just like… list basic facts about the Scream movies that aren’t theories at all and kinda seem like they were written by AI even though they weren’t. Does anyone know what I’m talking about?
Carmen: I absolutely do not have any idea what you are talking about.
Drew: I do know what you’re talking about but I hate them! Probably because I get excited for real Scream theories. :(
Riese: See meanwhile I am simply watching seven facts about Kowloon Walled City or seven theories about who is the most unhinged person on this season of Love is Blind.
Kayla: People are really obsessed with the “flannel theory” at the moment and it’s profoundly stupid lol
@sistapam #scream #scream1996 #screammovies #ghostface #scream2 #scream4 #scream5 #scream6 #steveorth #derekfeldman #livmckenzie #deweyriley #vinceschneider #mindymeeksmartin #screammovie #greenscreen
Drew: Also sorry to bring it back to my thing but now I’m doing a deep dive and the possum’s name is Biscuit !! Meanwhile, corn turtle’s name is just Corn Turtle.
Nico: Taste the biscuit!
Riese: Has anybody here ever seen someone go mini-shopping for their mini groceries in a mini store tho or nah.
The Group Chat: Our Gay Boyfriends
Welcome to The Group Chat, a new series wherein the senior team discusses something relevant to the plot. And by “the plot” I mean the collective mileau of culture and current events that we’re all swimming in at any given time. This month: while having a team meeting, we randomly started talking about guys we dated early on who wound up being gay and then like true content creators everyone was like “SHHHH we have to do this for The Group Chat — hold your thoughts! No more sharing!” And then, we did indeed talk about this phenomenon where everyone (but Heather lol) at one point had a gay boyfriend. HAVE YOU ALSO EXPERIENCED THIS?!?
xoxo,
Nico
Nico: I’m gonna kick us off! With a Gay Boyfriend who, after some light internet stalking, I have confirmed is definitely still gay to this day.
Back in the day (high school), I would on occasion get a ride to some dance club or other in Buffalo that allowed 16-year-old’s to get in, usually without a plan for a ride home. I’d find someone to crash with for the night and figure out the rest in the morning.
Carmen: And once again I have to say, for the public record, that you were the fucking coolest teenager I have ever met in my real, actual life. Because, how is that not a movie?
Nico: Truly, Carmen, if I ever had a kid it would be a nightmare for them because I would just be like “I know what you’re doing.”
Riese: For the record this is the type of Mom I had, which meant it was very difficult for me to attend as many raves as I wanted to.
Nico: Riese, I am sorry. Especially because I enjoyed going to raves as a teen.
So I was there, with x’s on my hands, and I’d dance, often with other people approximately my age. The fact that he was at a Madonna-themed dance night might have been a tip-off, but it wasn’t, to this young bisexual who already tended to favor dating people who were in some way gender non-conforming. But here was a boy from school who I didn’t really know well, who’d come out with his friend who I knew had a crush on me and who I’d flirted with before. They had a car. We danced. He asked what I was doing after. I didn’t have a place to go, so he took me back to his, along with his friend who was already staying over. We hooked up in his basement while his friend played piano, aggressively, in another room.
Heather: Oh wow, I’m the aggressive piano-playing friend in the other room. I never had a gay boyfriend but I had a lot of best friends hooking up with boys I hated while I acted out nearby!
Nico: LMAO. Afterward, we had a brief relationship that involved watching LOTS of America’s Next Top Model at his place (a show that both aged like milk and which many gays have self-reported watching religiously).
Carmen: It is me. I am gays.
Heather: My bisexual sister was also obsessed with this show.
Riese: Also obsessed.
Nico: I know, right? What did we internalize from that nonsense?
Nico: During commercial breaks he’d demonstrate model walks for me. By this time, he was telling me he was bi. We did some things, but never wound up having penetrative sex because he told me he wanted to have sex with me to GET OVER THIS GIRL HE HAD A CRUSH ON and I was basically like “No, that sounds like a you problem.” After we broke up, we stayed friends and he gave me updates on his forays into finding guys to make out and explore gay sex with. He found them on Myspace. Good times! I will never forget the little *send message* sound when I wrote “Proud of you!!” over AIM in response to him telling me about “practicing giving each other blow jobs” with another guy. However, these days, friend, I do have to voice that I don’t think there’s very much of a line between “practicing giving” a blow job and “giving” a blow job once there’s a dick in your mouth. Just saying.
Carmen: LMAO. Facts.
Riese: The role of my gay boyfriend in my life was so enormous and life-changing for so many reasons that I hardly know how to sum it up! But I did write about it in this essay, it’s the part of the essay headed with “1998,” and I think his personality is best described there.
Heather: 1998 was a perfect time to be a gay teen boy in my opinion due to the launch of Dawson’s Creek.
Riese: That’s true, like…. Jack and Jen’s best friendship, like… was deeply resonant to me later when that whole story started. Also Joey was always wearing sweaters from American Eagle, which was the only cool store at the mall where the mall bus would take us on weekends at my boarding school in the woods of Northern Michigan — so, anyhow, we were best friends. He was gay, and an actor and a senior. I thought I was straight, and I was a junior and new and awkward. My only friend when I first got to school was my roommate, June, whose hometown was about an hour from campus, and thus her friend Anthony, who was gay and VERY HOT, came to visit her early in the year and as we were walking around campus together, Hayden and this other gay boy, Ken, yelled at us from their open window to come hang with them, because they thought Anthony was hot. I went home and wrote in my diary for the first and not the last time that I wished I was a gay boy.
He found me and June the next day and told us we had to give Anthony his number, insisting June relay to Anthony that Hayden would both take him shopping for a new wardrobe and take him out to a nice dinner, whatever he wanted. But Hayden didn’t need to take Anthony shopping. When Hayden wanted something, he got it. And he got Anthony quick,. This is how we ended up on the same weekend trips home with June. One day, as his relationship with Anthony was already crumbling, they left us alone in June’s family’s house and we started joking around and talking and we just… clicked. Everything clicked. We had the same sense of humor and we immediately fell into an obsessive, all-consuming co-dependent relationship, all of our inside jokes and secret words and secret worlds. He gave me a makeover. He took me shopping for a new wardrobe. He broke up with Anthony. My friendship with June crumbled. Hayden and I started doing everything together, all the time, rearranged our schedules to always have every class in the same part of the school building. He was popular so now I was, too. Whenever I was out without him, I’d be asked “where’s your other half?” and vice versa. It felt nice, you know? I hadn’t felt whole in a long time and I did.
Riese: He had a lot of control over my life, but like, he was a teenage boy who had a lot of shit to work through — he’d grown up gay and closeted in Oklahoma, he was extremely religious, he’d been through a lot of trauma and had some complicated stuff with his family, and he had no tools to deal with any of it. My father had just died two years earlier and I had my own mental health problems. I was just so swept up in this connection I had with someone who was so different from me. I think we really needed each other. He was unlike anybody I’d ever known before, and he was so weird and charming and vulnerable and smart – and volatile, like there was always a new revelation, a new life plan, and a new way I was crucial to the execution of said plan. It was a constant emotional rollercoaster.
He decided we should lose our virginities to each other. Well, my virginity, his “girl virginity” (his term!), because he’d already been with men. We were so madly in love with each other that he thought I was his one shot at being straight, ‘cause he had so much internalized homophobia and wasn’t out to his family. (I loved his family, and had played the role of his “girlfriend” from the start of our friendship for them.) But that aside, we were alone in the woods in the winter and sexual tension just somehow started building. We were just so close in every way that it was like, well, let’s be close in EVERY WAY.
I didn’t think we’d become boyfriend-girlfriend after having sex, which happened for the first time over Spring Break, at his family’s ranch in Oklahoma, after sharing some generous glasses of Franzia White Zinfandel from a box. I think he got carried away with the idea, though, that he could be a boyfriend with a girlfriend. Unfortunately this did set the stage for me to be incredibly insecure in future relationships, because I spent so long in one with someone who was only attracted to me in incredibly specific circumstances, and who I think ultimately was mad at me for not “fixing” him. He’d withhold compliments from me because that’s how his Stepdad had raised him, like I can still hear him saying, don’t want my baby to get a big head, instead of a compliment.
He started college as I started my senior year. I was so scared we’d lose each other, being so far away, but after I began dating a boy that he’d felt competitive with in the theater program, he yelled at me for two hours on the phone and then stopped speaking to me for two months. I was devastated and felt like a piece of my body had been torn off. Eventually our friendship resumed, and that next chapter is yet another very long story, so I will end this part here! But we lived and we loved and he changed me forever. I don’t know where he is now, and every time I write about him, I wish that wasn’t so. Because once upon a time, we’d planned to spend our entire lives together — not as boyfriend/girlfriend, but as whatever else we were. We’d already picked out furniture for our adult Manhattan apartment and everything.
Carmen: Omg, this fucking gorgeous piece of writing. Devastating (which I mean in the highest possible regards, in case that felt unclear).
Kayla: I do admittedly want an indie rom-com set at a boarding school in Northern Michigan based on Riese and her gay boyfriend that ultimately ends up being more about friendship than about romance but ANYWAY.
Nico: RIESE. Kayla is so right. I need this to be an indie rom-com. I need this to be a novel! There are two things that resonated with me So Much here 1) envying gay men when I was younger and yeah, definitely feeling like it would be easier, better in some way to be one and 2) the intensity of teenage friendships and teenage love and then to add queerness to it, and to add all the dynamics of being closeted / not closeted, I feel that.
Riese: Yes! Honestly even at the time both of us were already like, “this is a great story.” I remember that Jennifer Aniston movie Object of My Affection came out that summer or maybe the next, and we were like, wait is this fucking play about us? But it wasn’t. I still think our story was more interesting.
Heather: It must have been a very heady experience to meet someone bursting with as many ideas as you when you were a teenager, Riese!
Riese: It was! We made lots of movies and music videos together!
Kayla: I never had a full-on gay boyfriend, but I had a brief fling with a guy during my first semester of college who I had a HUGE crush on and who allegedly also had a huge crush on me, which he told our mutual friends after I changed my profile picture to a VERY 2010 era tumblr-style graphic of me photoshopped against a backdrop of space with a bunch of random cats around me, which he said was COOL.
Nico: Kayla, this profile picture! I can practically smell what 2010 smelled like based on your description. (It smelled like mold and cigarettes and bacon probably.)
Kayla: Okay PAUSE, let me see if I can go find it/see how accurately I described it from memory…
***two minutes later***
Nico: AAAHHHHHHHHHHHH
Riese: OH MY GOD KAYLA
Heather: Sweet heavenly perfection!
Kayla: Fast-forward to the present, and we’re still friends and both EXTREMELY HOMOSEXUAL. But we went through all of college as friends who were in the closet and didn’t know it. TBH we should have known it based on how awkward and subtextually queer our brief fling was. There was one night where we basically stayed up all night in my dorm room bed talking about MISSY ELLIOTT.
Anyway, he ended things with me back then by showing up at my dorm room with mozzarella sticks and telling me he was still in love with his ex-girlfriend, and my first thoughts were: 1. His ex-girlfriend looks like Annie Clark and 2. I wish he’d offer me some mozzarella sticks. So, you know, just verrryyyy normal straight thoughts. My fiance now refers to him as “Mozzarella Mike” and when I was moving out of NYC to be with her, he showed up at my goodbye karaoke party with a BAG FULL of mozzarella sticks.
Riese: A class act until the end.
Carmen: I have actually had a lot of gay boyfriends, both boyfriends in the literal sense and boy friends with the space between — I’m a girl who’s always had a queer family that’s had a lot of gay men in it, an only child who’s found herself in a family of brothers.
The thing about my high school boyfriend is that, well ok yes he was gay. But also! We went on incredibly gay dates together? I was a theatre kid for sure, but even by theatre kid standards… if your “dates” involve going to see Rocky Horror Picture Show together? That is homosexual activity, my love. Did you celebrate his college acceptance by seeing a touring production of Rent — to which you both knew every word by heart — and then he cried when Angel died?? Darling! DARLING. You are in a gay relationship. We’d paint nails together (he always picked black) and go to midnight movies together when there was nothing else to do and honestly, all jokes aside, I can not imagine a better first serious relationship for me and what I needed.
Nico: That is Homosexual Activity indeed. Not Carmen going to Rocky Horror and saying she’s straight.
Carmen: 100% straight. Quite literally, no homo.
Heather: Darling!!
Riese: I also saw Rent for the first time with Hayden! That soundtrack was like, always on, it was so elemental to our relationship and also how I got into Rent in the first place. Then, it was touring in Detroit and my Mom brought us and my other friend down for the weekend to see it.
Carmen: OMG yes the Detroit tour, that’s what we saw! (Though probably the one you saw was maybe the one from when I was in middle school, since you’re a few years older then me? It doesn’t matter really, I went to them all 😳 — but imagine if we were, like cosmically, there the same night!!)
Anyway, we were inseparable best friends. The first call when I got home from school and stayed on the phone until mom came home, sat next to each other on bus rides sharing headphones, stay up until the middle of the night on AIM — we were best friends in such a way that there was no other description for the love we felt for each other except to start dating, you know? It was the only way to describe how we loved each other in any way that made sense.
Riese: Yes mhm I know this feeling.
Nico: Yes, and that makes my heart ache.
Carmen: But I think, looking back on it now, what we were really doing for each other was… we were creating a language for our queerness. Maybe we wouldn’t have said it that way at the time, when we were flirting, and playing games to see who could make the other blush first, who could give each other a hickey first, who could do more than that first.
Riese: (I also relate to the first hickeys game)
Carmen: (Hhhmhnm.) We were just two gay ass Black kids trying to find a home for the things that made us most different, and we found that in each other. And I don’t know, it’s hard for me not to find beauty in that now. To see something genuinely beautiful in what we meant for each other.
Nico: It IS beautiful.
Carmen: We fell out of contact with each other once he graduated a year ahead of me, but we somehow fell back together in college when he swiped right on my then-best friend (we’re still best friends, I’m just trying to differentiate so you can fully grasp the messiness that my high school gay boyfriend ended up spending a summer dating my college gay bestie). We had a time, let me tell you!! A time was had by all.
Heather: Carmen this is so lovely, so very you!
Nico: A time, indeed!
The Group Chat: How We Played With Barbies
Welcome to The Group Chat, a new series wherein the senior team discusses something relevant to the plot. And by “the plot” I mean the collective mileau of culture and current events that we’re all swimming in at any given time. This month: It’s Barbies because, well, whether you like it or not, it’s been pretty difficult to avoid talk about the upcoming Barbie movie. I asked the senior team how they played with Barbies as a kid (if they did), and to share their Barbie stories with us. Naturally, things got gay.
What’s your Barbie story?
xoxo,
Nico
Kayla: My sister and I were both extremely Barbie obsessed, and I’m glad our mother encouraged this obsession instead of turning it into a Barbie Is Not Feminist moment. She actually did two incredibly kind things for us pertaining to Barbies that stand out in my memory. My sister has Alopecia, and she lost all of her hair when she was a toddler. My mother ended up removing all of the hair from two different Barbie dolls so we could have a couple “Alopecia Barbies.” Even though she bought us a lot of Barbies through the years (once, for an elementary school project, my sister made a bar graph about our Barbies and I distinctly remember we had FIFTY TWO OF THEM), my mother thought the price of a Barbie Dreamhouse was absurd and instead MADE us a Barbie CONDO COMPLEX? She let us have an old plastic, huge shelving unit I assume she got through work (she worked in furniture sales) and we treated it like a multi-story Barbie home that we filled with a combination of official Barbie furniture and miniature furniture we made ourselves with the help of my mother’s crafting supplies and other scraps/samples from her job.
Carmen: Ok so first of all, your mom is an icon. Second of all, I also topped out at having over 50 Barbies as a kid! They took up over two shelves of my early-to-mid ‘90s bleached white wood bookshelf. But the real reason I am here! THE REAL REASON I AM HERE! is because my mother also would never pay for the price of a Barbie Dreamhouse, so she had her boyfriend at the time… build me one?
He worked in construction/architecture, and he went to Homo Depot (he was not a homo) to buy some plywood and built me a three story “Barbie Townhouse” — but did not buy any pink paint? He used the paint he had left over from his other jobs, I think. So her house had very plain and ugly “real world” colors like dark brown and gray! I know this is going to sound bratty as hell, but I fucking hated that house. 90% because I was like seven years old and I hated my mother’s boyfriend for not being my dad. But at least 10% because who goes through the work of building a Barbie house and doesn’t at least get some free samples of pink paint??
(I’m a brat. I know.)
Nico: Omg Carmen, I am picturing this, like, real-world-colored Barbie townhouse and laughing so much.
Kayla: I distinctly remember making a flat-screen television from cardboard and printing out a photo from Charmed so our Barbies could always be watching Charmed.
Riese: My Mom also loved having us make our own doll supplies for things she thought were overpriced, or finding similar products that were cheaper, like for my Samantha Doll! She also was like, very much anti-Barbie. All my friends had Barbies and I did not, which was absolutely tragic to me on every level. She said Barbie reinforced toxic ideas about how women were supposed to look. She did for Hanukkah one year get me Barbie-adjacent Black “Heart Family” dolls — they wore full outfits with high necks and were grown-ups with children which I guess seemed less problematic than a white blonde Barbie in a bikini going to surf at the beach with Ken? Anyhow they thrived in happiness on the bottom shelf of my bookshelf which is where I set up their whole apartment. I actually didn’t realize until looking them up for this conversation that Heart Family was a spin-off of Barbie also made by Mattel, I thought they were a different brand altogether!
Nico: The Heart Family doll clothes are SO 80’s, Riese. There’s a lot of lace happening.
Riese: Vaguely Mormon vibes, honestly.
Kayla: I feel like this is probably a cliche, but Barbies were absolutely my introduction to storytelling. I remember being young in the bath with a couple of Barbies — and Skipper, my favorite — and just going wild with my imagination, constructing whole serialized narratives for them with soap operatic twists. Also, my favorite Barbie hands down was my Mary-Kate Olsen one.
Riese: I think I did most of my storytelling with the historical paper dolls I collected, like these Dolly Dingle paper dolls? But I obviously did play with my friends’ Barbies. Mostly I remember my Cousin Carrie’s Barbies, because Carrie was so fascinating to me — I never felt like I knew how to be a girl or even like I was a girl, but Carrie had big blonde hair and a cotton-candy-pink bedroom and a bed with a canopy and she always had a boyfriend and she wore Guess Jeans and she was a baton-twirler and she had Christmas Barbie and Barbie Goes to Prom and like, whole crates of Barbies under her bed. When we played I sometimes made my Barbies naked not because I was a kid who liked being naked (I was in fact the most modest child to ever live) but because I wasn’t sure how to dress a doll with a body like that, you know? I didn’t know how to dress a woman. I was always latching on to girls who knew how to be girls, and those girls always had Barbies. My cousins got Christmas Barbies every year (I didn’t because my Mom said No Barbies for Riese) and their Moms (my aunts) had Barbie collections on display going back into the 50s. I was unsurprisingly more interested in the history of Barbies than the Barbies themselves. Obviously it was American Girl dolls that really captured my heart.
Riese: I think the Barbie I wanted the most was a Skipper, because Skipper felt less intimidating than Barbie and she had a gender-neutral name. Ken was cool, whatever, I understood Ken, nothing aspirational or mysterious going on there.
Nico: He’s just Ken.
Kayla: While we had over 50 Barbies, my sister and I had maybe…two?…Ken dolls. I think one of them was actually Eric from The Little Mermaid.
Riese: I definitely also had an Eric from The Little Mermaid figurine because I had a set of all the dolls from that film?? Eric in his white shirt and blue pants, Ariel on a rock, etc.
Carmen: Here I am, another one joining the Eric from The Little Mermaid hive!
Kayla: I had a Tara Lipinski Barbie that I was obsessed with for some reason even though I was more of a Michelle Kwan girlie, and she had these wind-up handles built into her sides so that she could be lifted and would spin! It was so cool. But I literally never let Ken or Eric hold her in the air to spin; it was always another Barbie or perhaps Teresa. I loved Teresa.
Anya: I am floored by all these different types of Barbies, I definitely didn’t know all this! I also think there’s a real business opportunity for Alopecia Barbies and that your mom should probably trademark that and go on Shark Tank.
Nico: Kayla, this is absurdly wholesome. I am also FASCINATED by this spinning barbie! I agree with Anya that there should be a line of Alopecia dolls!
Also, also, the making of your own furniture was Totally A Thing. Sometimes, dolls just don’t come with what you need! It sounds like your mom’s game was miles ahead, like wow, but yes.
Carmen: Okay, so, there are two Barbie stories that stick out most for me? One’s very serious and the other is incredibly horny. A fork in the road, and which path is best one traveled, who’s to say? But let’s do serious first.
So, I was a Barbie obsessed kid. There was no rhyme or reason for this obsession, my mother hated dolls, my closest aunts were the kinds of feminists who never would have bought me a plaything with a 39″ bust to match her 18″ waist, and I had no sisters. Barbies were probably the first thing that were entirely of my own, something innate about my femmeness that came from within me.
This was given to Carmen for her birthday just last month, in preparation for the Barbie movie.
It’s important to know this to understand what is still one of my worst childhood memories to share (because if you knew who I grew up to be, and yall do, you will immediately clock how embarrassing this is for me) but once when I was about two or three years old my mom took me to a toy store and took down a Christie doll — she was Barbie’s Black bestie — for me to have. I immediately, and resoundingly, had a temper tantrum in that store! And I mean, thee worst temper tantrum of my young life. The kind where you throw your little body against the dirty linoleum patchwork floor and wail. Where your whole tiny body shakes with every muscle within it. I did not want a Christie doll. I wanted a Barbie.
Because Barbie, white and blonde and blue eyed and an impossible body frame? “She’s pretty! I WANT THE PRETTY ONE!”
Miraculously, my mother did not grab me up right then and there — not that we were a spanking household, we weren’t, but again I’m talking about the magnitude of the scene I was causing as a toddler aged Black girl in a toy store over wanting the white doll, so I can only imagine what she was thinking. She let me cry it out and then she took me home, no doll in hand. And it was another few months before I was allowed a Barbie again. Straight up cold turkey withdrawal. (When we resumed Barbie buying in our household, a new rule was amended that for every white doll I was given or was bought for me, there had to be a Christie or Teresa doll, no exceptions, which certainly contributed to the massive size of my childhood collection.)
Nico: I have never forgotten what you shared about your mother’s parenting methods in this interview, and I have to say that I so deeply admire her intentional parenting.
Carmen: Ok! But! The second story is so much lighter!! As mentioned, I loved Barbies, which also meant that I had Barbies a little longer than most kids…. I probably didn’t put down the pink box for good until about seventh grade? Which meant that my Barbies got to live through the unfortunate onset of my puberty — the awkward intersection where you’re still not too old for dolls, but you have a lot of hormones to account for no place to put them.
I am so sorry to my Barbies for the last 18 months of our relationship. So much naked plastic smashed against even more naked plastic. So many inflexible limbs just thrown about recklessly. So little understanding of the world.
Nico: I do have to say that Barbies are maybe one of the WORST ways to learn about realistic human anatomy, and yet they are maybe one of the toys most subjected to hormone-driven sexual experimentation by toy proxy.
Riese: Right, like the idea of “Barbies scissoring” is an image that already exists in my head. I never did that with my dolls because I don’t know, I was a chaste child, but I know I’ve seen pictures somewhere of Barbies Scissoring. it’s like, in the zeitgeist.
Anya: For some reason, I don’t think Barbies were a big part of my childhood — or at least they didn’t make enough of an impression to be something I recall at a pivotal moment like this, when I’m trying to reflect on the import of Barbies in my life! To my recollection, I had one (1) Barbie, and the only defining characteristic I remember about her was she changed color in the bath. I remember when I took baths she was often there with me, changing colors like she does. I also am pretty sure I removed her hair and drew stuff on her head (yes she was that kind of Barbie and I was that kind of kid). But honestly, I don’t remember caring that deeply about her! I’m so sorry, Mattel. I’ve failed you.
Carmen: Ok but Anya this is literally the gay prototype. Kate McKinnon Barbie Realness.
Anya, you must choose.
Anya: I did have a lot of stuffed animals, though. The ones I remember are a dog (I think) named Princess and my favorite stuffed animal of all time — a cat named Sad who may or may not be here in Brooklyn with me right now as we speak. I do crack up every time I imagine my four-year-old self announcing that I have named my new stuffed animal “Sad”.
Nico: Why were Barbies also always bath toys? Also, lol Anya, I named one of my toys, at about age three or four, “Detour” because I thought it sounded creepy. Do you remember why “Sad”?
Kayla: SAD SOUNDS LIKE AN ICON!
Riese: I love this for you, such Eeyore energy.
Anya: Sad is absolutely an icon. I remember going to this toy store in San Francisco called The Imaginarium which was incredible because it had one human-adult-sized door and one human-child-sized door so you felt like you were getting your own special little PORTAL into this magical place. I saw Sad there and the way her mouth is shaped, she really looks like she is not smiling. I remember seeing this stuffed animal and being like, she gets it… she’s seen things… and I thought the name “Sad” best captured this animal’s wisdom. Four-year-old me was really not down with toxic positivity!!!!
Nico: I’m obsessed with this door situation.
Kayla: It feels relevant that I have a stuffed calico cat named Academy Award Nominee Kirsten Dunst, but I call her Kik or Kiki for short.
Nico: So, for me, the first, most visceral memory that stands out to me when it comes to Barbies is inevitably having to confront the fact that at any given moment, there were multiple Barbies of mine that could be found naked and tied up in the plastic bin. They were hog-tied, or just their wrists were tied, or their ankles were tied, or they were twisted and tangled up in enough string, twine or shoelaces so as to almost form a cocoon. Some people find kink later in life, and I guess, some kids just hit pre-puberty and are like I’M INTO ROPE. I’ll let you guess which one I was.
Riese: NICO
Nico: As far as Barbie games go, once again, on the bondage path, I was irrevocably and immediately impacted by the Xena: Warrior Princess episode, “Locked Up and Tied Down” which not only opens with Gabrielle giving Xena a massage, but which then involves various people being chained up and also flesh eating crabs. Now, no Barbie of mine was going to suffer a fate that terrible. That was Ken’s job. Specifically, that was the job of one of two Ken dolls I had, either the Beast doll from Beauty and the Beast, or a more generic brown-haired Ken who I’d modified by piercing his ears with a sewing needle and inserting glitter glue and scraping up his biceps with said same needle to give him tattoos (I definitely did at give him at least one heart pierced by an arrow tat).
Carmen: Sorry to interrupt your flow a little bit, but damn this is so gay and I am delighted. Please continue.
Nico: Hahaha thank you Carmen! When it was time for flesh-eating crabs for Ken, Barbie, their imprisoner and tormenter, would tie the Kens to the floor, where they would have to await their death. I’m sure this can be analyzed but why would you. I of course also played house, wedding, school, war, all the usual Barbie games.
Kayla: BONDAGE!!!! BARBIE!!!! I’m in awe! Like…I think I mostly have logistical follow-up questions such as how did you have so much access to rope as a child? Was it actual rope or more like yarn? Were you good at tying knots and if so where did you learn this skill?
Nico: I grew up in the country with ample access to rope, oddly? Like, I was provided my own spools of rope for play as a child because, of course, kids need rope. I remember just having this nylon rope in my wooden toy box that my dad (who had been a carpenter at one point) made for me. It wasn’t the softer actually-for-bondage kind, but the kind for various jobs around-the-house. In one instance, a group of friends and I devised our own pulley system, with our own rope, to get an abandoned wire spool up into a treehouse to use as a table. Rope was everywhere in my childhood! I also had yarn, thread, sewing needles, shoelaces, and endless cloth scraps to play with.
As far as tying knots goes, that was also something that adults sometimes indulged us in and that the kids taught each other. I remember, for example, morbidly, figuring out how to actually tie a noose and teaching the other kids. Some other kid taught me how to tie a slipknot. Knowledge! It’s beautiful!
Carnal knowledge! It’s beautiful!
Heather: The year my sister and I got the Barbie Dream House, Barbie Corvette, and Peaches & Cream Barbie from Santa, we also got an Atari 2600 with Asteroids and Cookie Monster Munch. I asked my dad recently how in the world this was possible. We were poor. He said he must’ve gotten some kind of bananas Christmas bonus that year at the factory where he worked making phone booths, or maybe it came from the local church, or maybe it came from his parents. Either way, it was magical. My sister gravitated toward the Barbies and I gravitated toward the video games, and that makes perfect sense because she loved femme stuff and I loved sports and nerd stuff.
I would have probably never picked up a Barbie if my sister hadn’t made the brilliant move of forming a town that included the Barbie Dream House and She-Ra’s Crystal Castle. She asked me to build some infrastructure with Legos, and then she used her saved up allowance to buy a Ken doll who had a black tuxedo with a pink cumberbund, which she said I could put on any Barbie I wanted. (I was nuts for tuxedos, even as a five-year-old.) Some days we put on elaborate fashion shows with Skipper and Catra. Some days we had wild adventurers where poor Ken would drive off a bridge in the Corvette and She-Ra and Barbie would have to do search and rescue missions in the lake (the bathtub). Sometimes poor Ken would get kidnapped by Skeletor and sometimes Barbie would rescue him and sometimes she’d just leave him to fend for himself in Castle Grayskull.
Carmen: I am living for this Barbie/She-Ra crossover that Netflix was too cowardly to give to us. But we deserve.
Nico: I have not once been jealous so far in this conversation until this moment when I learned that you had a Skeletor doll.
Riese: Same but also the She-Ra doll, I wanted one of those so bad!
Heather: One time, after our terrible neighbor Ivy came over and played Barbie/She-Ra with us, my sister’s favorite Barbie outfit — the California Dreamin’ blue and pink polka dot mini-dress with matching leg warmers and yellow sneakers — went missing. We thought for sure it was Ivy because we hated her because we always helped clean up at her house and she never helped clean up at ours. So we made an elaborate Home Alone-style plan to break into her house and steal it back. We drew up a map and everything. We were gonna go in dressed like Batmen because I had a lot of Bat-accessories (again, homemade by my great-grandma).
Carmen: Heather, I’m screaminggggggg.
Nico: If two children broke into my house dressed in home-sewn Bat-gear — well, I can’t figure out if I would be terrified or overcome with a giggling fit. Let’s not test that though…
Heather: Luckily, before we could commit a felony, we found the California Dreamin’ getup under the bed.
My great-grandma was not overly impressed with how Boob-y Barbie was, but she helped us make clothes for her anyway, including an Atlanta Braves baseball uniform. Barbie beat out poor Ken for the starting pitcher job, but he watched and cheered her on from the bench.
To be honest, I was kinda scared of Barbie the way I was scared of all beautiful women because I knew there was something going on with me that wasn’t going on with most girls. It was lesbianism that was going on, but it was the 80s and I’d never even heard that word or encountered the idea of being gay. I just knew I was different somehow, and I was already weird enough. I didn’t need some other oddity to add to the mix. So, like with most everything I was thinking and feeling, I kept it to myself and to my playtime with my sister, the only other person in the world I could trust. She knew somehow that boobs both fascinated and freaked me out, so she made a point of talking about them constantly like it was no big deal. And she kept doing that until I was 27 and finally came out to her.
Nico: I agree, Heather, that Barbie’s just, extreme boobiness was so disconcerting for a queer kid! The boobs are in your face, like freaking torpedoes! Impossible to ignore! And you just have to play and pretend like absolutely no one is fascinated by women’s bodies themselves.
This meme thing is easy-peasy-banana-peely.