The Age of Entitlement

Concert etiquette, breakup posting, polyamory, and the algorithm

Last week on Tiktok, a fresh round of Mitski discourse reared its ugly head. A white Gen Zer posted themselves listening to “Your Best American Girl” (a song about dating interracially as an Asian-American and never being truly accepted by American society, represented in the song by the mother of the man Mitski is pining for) with the caption: “the way all these performative ass Mitski fans would jump me for admitting I relate to this song as a white person dating a Black person”. The reaction was swift, with dozens of creators of color attempting to educate the person as to why this comparison was foolish.

Even more strangely, white commenters rushed to the defense of the original poster. They said: music is up for interpretation. Music is what you make of it. How dare you try to control someone else’s interpretation. When someone delicately explained that you *can* interpret music however you wish but some songs still have very specific original meanings, commenters rushed to say that the former was their opinion. 

I’ve seen this phenomenon before: somehow, people believe that stating an incorrect fact and following up with some variation of “well, this is what I believe” renders the opinion unassailable. In this case, three things were true: while the song can be interpreted however one wishes, using a song by a Japanese-American woman about a woman of color struggling to assimilate to American culture to denigrate other people of color was wild, the original poster’s post was stupid, and opinions can be wrong.

What was more interesting to me was watching how some people immediately centered themselves in the narrative. When a song about a specific, singular situation became popular, the meaning of the song had to be changed: the song could not stand on its own if the majority couldn’t relate to it. 

Something similar happened with another of Mitski’s songs, “Strawberry Blond”: the popular TikTok interpretation has decided that rather than being about a relationship between an Asian-American woman and a white person, it is instead about a cow, while folks on Reddit believe they should be allowed to identify with the object of affection in the song. The song must contort to their need to feel beautiful, rather than the pain of the woman trapped outside the confines of American desirability politics.

I’m not sure what it is about Mitski’s delicate and plaintive music that attracts such boorish fans. Two years ago, Mitski asked fans to stop filming entire sets on their phones, as the experience was reducing connection, filtering her through their screens and turning her into content. Fans on Twitter declared her ableist. After that, Mitski fans engaged in the eternal war of “who is allowed to screech at concerts”, reigniting recent discourse around appropriate concert etiquette (a battle that Swifties have weekly as the Eras tour continues). The most common response to my post about concert etiquette and entitlement among Gen Z was “I paid for the concert so I should be allowed to do whatever I want”. 

Similarly, Gigi Perez’s “Sailor Song” went viral two weeks ago, much to the chagrin of TikTok Christians. The offending lyric (I don’t believe in God but I believe that you’re my savior) was edited out or ignored completely in captions about the song. While most people probably can’t relate to the experience of being terrorized by particularly zealous young Christians from the Midwest or the South, the righteous fury they seemed to feel regarding the song was odd. The thought of the song simply not being about them or exist to please them didn’t cross their minds: how dare a song that doesn’t center their personal experience even exist.

Something is rotten online. Much of my Substack is dedicated to exploring social and sociological trends across the internet, but when I started thinking about entitlement and its manifestations online, my brain whirred with examples.

People have always talked about breakups and sadness online, only now there seems to be a poetry missing, a lack of grace. Posts about breakups have shifted in tone from the sadness of being alone to being affronted, stewing in their umbrage. There is a slight, but noticeable difference between “why am I alone” and “how could he do this to me. I don’t deserve to be alone”.

Not to be a Boomer on main, but a lesson you learn when you’re older is that you simply don’t get everything you want in life. It’s just a fact. Watching people post constantly about how the person they want shouldn’t be allowed to break up with them is odd, but I have to reiterate what I said in my post regarding anxious attachment: people are allowed to break up with you. The petulant cord being stricken by people posting about their situationships moving on or partners dumping them is new.

A recent viral Tumblr post gently mocked Taylor Swift’s recent album where she railed against Matty Healy for… breaking up with her after one (1) month. In “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived”, one of the songs turned into a battle cry by the Swifties, she says that “he deserves prison but he won’t get time” (again, for telling her he loved her and then breaking up with her). People have made hundreds of videos using the song recounting their sad stories, with the greatest sin a person can commit apparently being not wanting to date someone after flirting/dating/sleeping with them.

Over the last few weeks, the poly community has been buffeted by attacks. Sandy Frizzle, a Twitter user, attempted to start a conversation around the “poly people are ugly” memes by stating that the memes were rooted in homophobia and transphobia. From my view, (and I’ve already written about the uptick in media featuring polyamorous and open relationships) queer people, especially queer men, have been practicing polyamory for decades. It’s been an accepted, if not often discussed, part of the queer experience forever. 

What I will say is that most of the sudden uptick/curiosity surrounding different relationship forms is mostly being driven by cishet people in their twenties and thirties in big cities. What’s interesting to me is that being polyamorous twenty years ago was tantamount to living on a commune: there were associations of being completely on the fringes of society, with the freedom and baggage that comes from the disavowal of traditional capitalist life markers. Now that upper-middle class straight people are doing it, they demand acceptance and position themselves as victims to mean people who just don’t understand their “radical” decision making.

They want not only to de-radicalize the lifestyle, they want to be celebrated for participating. As I said months ago: I’m not attacking the poly folks. I get it. I’m a queer man, I’ve seen it all. Again, what I find interesting is the need to control the optics around the lifestyle.  For queer people under the LGBTQIA umbrella, it’s understood that queerness means living a life outside of tradition and expectations placed upon you by society. The need to be venerated, exalted, and celebrated for choosing to step outside the box is new. If there were to be a ticker tape parade for every person who buys a copy of The Ethical Slut in a Brooklyn/Austin/Portland/San Francisco/Seattle bookstore, the country would run out of paper entirely. 

Sanibel recently resurfaced a piece about class rage that exemplified the financial version of entitlement. As many a millennial has discovered, it’s gauche to explicitly say you’re jealous of someone: you must couch the complaint in the language of social justice to make yourself righteous. The piece was fascinating, if a little sad, because some of the anonymous author’s points were valid, but at the same time, the fury they felt wasn’t because they were underpaid or because of the widening gulf between the haves and the have nots in this country: the author was angry because they themselves weren’t born rich. To see someone wealthy and furiously whisper that should be me with no acknowledgement of the entrenched social forces that keep us divided is worrisome.

The bean soup debacle (I truly cannot explain this but basically: someone posted a recipe of bean soup, a commenter said they didn’t like beans and it spawned weeks worth of discourse) proved that algorithmic social media has transformed the way people consume content. Since the algorithms control what we see, whenever there’s a post people disagree with or dislike, their first response is to say the post shouldn’t exist at all. 

The whataboutism wars (what if I have social anxiety on a post about meeting people off the apps, what about people who are lactose intolerant on a post about grilled cheese etc.) have proved this. The idea that content can exist outside the realm of people’s enjoyment or ability to engage with is becoming foreign, and it’s terrifying.

And all of this is without mentioning the rise of incels (who feel entitled to women), influencers (who feel entitled to our attention), thinking of college professors as their employees (who feel entitled to berate them, since “their tuition pays their salaries”) and worsening entitlement in public spaces (people are now saying they should be allowed to use their phones in movie theaters simply because they want to) and we’re painting a portrait of an unsettling future. I sometimes miss the version of the internet that existed decades ago, where everyone was siloed and relegated to their own little corners. It was impossible to go viral on Livejournal, but looking around at the internet now, I’m not so sure that was a bad thing. 

Neat Little Morality Slogans

• I loved this piece about the phones taking away our desire. Ties in nicely with everything many people have been saying for the last decade!

• I’m going to discuss this on TikTok, but this article in The Atlantic about people who quit dating was fascinating.

• TtB Book Club: working on a location for September meeting. Stay tuned!