Let's generalize about men

Yeah this is about West Elm Caleb

Happy Friday, did anyone miss me?

I have a story to recap today, and it’s pretty exemplary of why I have found this newsletter so hard to keep updated!!

If you haven’t heard yet about the Caleb from West Elm saga, read this Katie Notopoulos story, or I’ll sum it up here:

• A New York woman posts a TikTok in which she describes getting ghosted by a man named Caleb that she met on Hinge.

• Several other women comment and/or make their own videos, realizing that they’ve all been on the same date with the same man (who is an employee of West Elm), and have had similar experiences of getting ghosted, among other dickish behavior.

• This spills over on to other social media platforms, “West Elm Caleb” starts trending, Caleb’s actual face and personal information is leaked.

• The usual internet fanfare ensues: People start calling West Elm to tell them to fire Caleb. Wild, unvetted rumors of his offenses start circulating online. And of course, the Brands(tm) start to meme it.

  Taylor Lorenz--- ON BOOK LEAVE @TaylorLorenz

  Btw there are countless brands leveraging this harassment and doxxing campaign aimed at destroying “West Elm Caleb’s” life to advertise products

  

  

If you’re wondering what kinds of terrible things this man has done to warrant such an onslaught of attention, here it is (and keep in mind this is consolidated from the several original TikToks posted about him, technically we don’t even know if this is true):

• He ghosted people.

• He allegedly sent at least one person an unsolicited nude photo. Bad. Not ok. Probably the worst thing on this list.

• He recycled the same Spotify playlist with different dates and claimed he had made it just for them.

• He’d “lovebomb,” or show a ton of initial interest over text, before ghosting.

• He lied about his Hinge usage. One woman who went on one coffee date with him said that he told her it was his first Hinge date. He told someone else after a few dates that he had deleted the app.

• He played a numbers game: trying to match with tons of people, messaging, and going on plenty of dates but not seeming interested in a relationship.

• He was dating several women at once. Some women say he lied to them about this, but none say that they ever agreed explicitly to be in a monogamous relationship.

I hate just saying what Taylor Lorenz says lol, but everything below is pretty spot on to me:

Taylor Lorenz--- ON BOOK LEAVE @TaylorLorenz

Anyway, not trying to be a Man Defender™️ on here, but as a journalist with a lot of experience dealing with online hate and cancellation mobs, I’m acutely aware of how quickly things can turn very, very dark

Taylor Lorenz--- ON BOOK LEAVE @TaylorLorenz

All of this is so needlessly cruel to a man millions on the internet know zero about other than he is an entry level designer at West Elm. So many of these behaviors like “not making eye contact” and certain communication methods are completely normal for certain groups of ppl

Taylor Lorenz--- ON BOOK LEAVE @TaylorLorenz

“I don’t really give a fuck if this man lives or dies”. This is a human being! These TikToks have millions of views with thousands of comments from people advocating to fully destroy the life of a man they know zero about, whose side of the story they’ve never heard.

Taylor Lorenz--- ON BOOK LEAVE @TaylorLorenz

Here’s a woman saying she heard West Elm Caleb was in line for COVID testing by her house and joking about going outside to physically harass him in the COVID testing line. The top comments on TikTok are all cheering her on.

Taylor Lorenz--- ON BOOK LEAVE @TaylorLorenz

The energy around this is whole thing is so toxic. I understand how hard dating as a woman in NYC is but it’s not ok to treat people like this vm.tiktok.com/TTPdrqbRpE/

Taylor Lorenz--- ON BOOK LEAVE @TaylorLorenz

This woman calls herself a “victim” of West Elm Caleb, accuses him of “love bombing” (flirting on a dating app?) then says he unmatched her before they ever even met. Where is the thought to the ethical/privacy boundaries of using interactions on dating apps for content + views

Taylor Lorenz--- ON BOOK LEAVE @TaylorLorenz

The way destroying a man’s life who my one knows anything about, who no one has heard from, who most women calling him out have never even met IRL, is being sold as this excited rah rah girl boss feminism, is so gross. And the cruelest people are eating it up

I’m not trying to defend Caleb per se, but at the risk of sounding like a pick-me, can everyone chill? I mean god, “I don’t really give a fuck if this man lives or dies.” Listen to yourself!!!

I’ve seen so many comments saying something like, “We need to hold this man accountable!!” Of what?? Being a fuckboy? How do you hold a fuckboy accountable? By trying to get him fired from his job designing furniture? By plastering private messages from him online? By turning his face into a goddamn NFT?

morgan sung @morgan_sung

you know that an online trend is fizzling out when it becomes an nft, and the west elm caleb outrage cycle's time has come

If there was a reasonable way to “hold fuckboys accountable” then I’d be all in. But this is not it. This is not it at all.

morgan sung @morgan_sung

you can just say, "man this guy fucking sucks." you don't have to justify your negative experiences with someone by using language outside its appropriate context!

I think the real moral of the story is, you cannot post anything about anyone on the internet and assume that they won’t get doxxed. TikTok in particular holds nothing back, and what used to be gossip, banter, or just like a conversation at the very least, has been stripped of any level of nuance. Why can’t we just generalize about men without it turning into whatever the hell this mess is.

Privacy doesn’t exist and/or doesn’t matter. If you are the internet’s villain of the day, you deserve to have your life destroyed. You aren’t a real person. You exist to entertain us. If the internet wants justice, it will get justice (I use that term loosely though because the internet obviously has a fucked up idea of what justice is.) That’s all that this is.

Again, I’m not defending Caleb. He seems like an ass (but again I don’t even know this man how am I able to have any sort of judgment of him). And there is something to be said about crowdsourcing online to make dating strangers safer, especially for women who can use that space to minimize bad, and even violent interactions.

But really, this is all too much.

Sarah Z @marysuewriter

Frustratingly, acknowledging this, as in the above article, is often perceived as defending the initial wrongdoing. Surely one can recognize both that someone was shitty AND that the response is vastly disproportionate to the act in question? Sure, this guy sounds like an asshole

Sarah Z @marysuewriter

But this is....... absolutely insane, and it's not "abuse apologia" to point it out or acknowledge the very worrying trend of disproportionate, punitive mass-public shaming over interpersonal slights, all with a progressive empowering veneer

You know what I think is going to happen after this though? In the inevitable backlash to the backlash, the original accusers of West Elm Caleb are going to receive a ton of blowback: They’ll probably also get similarly doxxed, and they’ll be overwhelmed with harassment and insults, most of which will be unnecessarily misogynistic. Because rule #405738 of the internet is that the pendulum always swings back, always too hard, and usually misogyny gets thrown in somehow.

Maybe West Elm Caleb will even be offered a modeling contract or something. But please do not let me go down that rabbit hole.