Swipe Right Into The Dark Side
And we're cancelling people TODAY!
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Hey y’all,
I’m upset—we need to talk about Doja Cat!
A few days ago, I was minding my business while possibly bumping the new Doja Cat album for the sixth time in a row, when all of a sudden I saw her trending on Twitter. And why? Not because people are praising her album or debating which song is their favorite, but because Doja posted and deleted a selfie on Instagram of her wearing a shirt with alt-right Nazi sympathizer, Sam Hyde, on the front.
For some artists, there is a point in their career when they start…talking. And I don’t mean showing off their bathroom routine for Vogue or eating ghost pepper wings on Hot Ones, but they start sharing, in both loud and quiet ways, their sociopolitical belief system.
Of course, it’s okay for artists to do this, I mean, they’re people after all. And when we agree with their views it can be a reassuring feeling. Like ahh, I knew I listened to this person’s music or watched this person’s movies for a reason!
But what if their views don’t align? In fact, what if their views are so far away from what you believe morally, culturally, and socially that you’re taken aback when you find them out?
I hate cancel culture. I think it’s a very mob mentality way of bullying people for big, small, and teeny tiny mistakes. But after I lost my favorite artist, Kanye West, to the alt-right, anti-Black, anti-Jewish agenda, I started realizing that 1) it’s impossible to separate the art from the artist, especially when they’re adamant about sharing, and 2) there is a pattern when it comes to this rapper-to-nazi pipeline. I don’t care how “edgy” Doja thinks she’s being, I’m not here for it and I’m not getting played again. We’re done here.
*Removes “Scarlet” from favorites* #cancelled
This Week’s Story
Speaking of #cancelled, this week’s story is all about cancelling, blocking, and ghosting a Tinder misogynist who was purely in existence for time-wasting reasons. It all started with some innocent banter on Tinder but then very quickly became a whirlwind lesson in love and self-respect for Austin-based author Sabrina Wigfall.
Enjoy!
Anayo Awuzie
EIC of Carefree Mag
Swipe Right into the Dark Side: The Tinder Misogynist
by Sabrina Wigfall
Life is full of bold gestures, messy mistakes, delicate conversations, and the constant yearning to be seen, heard, and felt. Touch me here, touch me there, touch me everywhere: whisper in my ear, I love it here. Just a touch of love softly produced by Venus with the fiery passion of Mars. A persistent desire to find your person and purpose, but it seems like for Black women, it has to be one or the other. We are either matrixing through the dating pool with the looming pressure of being a sneaky link, in a situationship or left with thoughts of settling to evade loneliness. The sexual tension of merely being asked once again, "What's your favorite color?" and taking a hot comb to someone's- hair is thick. Chasing intimacy as if it's the next gemstone for the sake of feeling something, anything causes heartbreak, realizations, and a release of societal projections.
Clutch your pearls and let this be a lesson to all reading: you are the prize. And all it took for me to realize this was dating a man four years older than me who happened to be a complete, utter misogynist from Tinder.
What does it mean to chase intimacy? It's when you're in the safe confinement of your mind, and someone trudges along to build a room in your house. But they disregard your space, and you know this, gaslighting you and projecting their feelings onto you. And you know this; However, the sensation of being desired, wanted and felt almost brings you to tears because someone sees you. And maybe not through the beaming, illustrious rays of the night but through the window of a train ready to leave its station. Being insecure while dating means possibly dating someone who is a “ticking bomb”, and fearing that the intimacy you crave will cease to exist if you speak up. So you walk, no run, no chase the intimacy in hopes that things will be better, bold, delicate, and constant. It's the heartbreaking, terrifying story of flying too close to the sun out of pride and wanting to be right about this person after the last.
Heartbreak is inevitable, and for a while, I couldn’t recognize who I was because I gave so much of what I had to someone who didn't deserve it in such a short span. The confusion of speaking delicately yet firmly to a man with nothing but a fire in his heart and wondering how I was the problem?
But let's start from the beginning, shall we? Before he caught my eyes, I was close to or as close as I could be to falling in love with someone. She was a charismatic, short, curly-haired woman who I cared about so deeply. However, the pandemic made the yearning too hard to wait for a proper meet-up, and it fell through. I was crushed beyond words because I wanted to love someone so badly. I could remember the day like it was yesterday, my chest contracted, and a choked sob fell my shaky lips. I felt like someone had punched me in the heart. I stood alone, my fingers shaking to say, "Goodbye forever."
I immediately called my best friend, my sister, who I knew could mend my broken heart better than anyone ever could. She answered in a fit of rage that could melt the world sooner than Global Warming. I cried as she began to give the signature "You're THAT Bitch" pep talk, and insisted that I try again because I deserve love. So, I wiped my tears instantly and grabbed my phone to dust off the Tinder app I thought I was free from.
I was alone in my dorm bedroom, and the moon's rays shimmered over my brown skin through the window. My lip tucked between my teeth, eyebrows furrowed as my eyes scanned over the app with anticipation running through my blood. I hadn't regained my confidence in dating another woman since the painful heartbreak, so I switched my Tinder settings to men. I then spent the entire month having some of the most dull and emotionless conversations with men possible. From one guy "jokingly" calling me a dickhead to another ghosting me after rejecting him. But then, he appeared. He had the most luscious dark curls, a chiseled jawline, and a piercing, hypnotic stare in his photos. I instantly swiped right on him, and to my greatest pleasure, he had also swiped right on me.
At that moment, I felt a notable shift in my body. He messaged me first and with a corny meme to break the ice. No one had ever messaged first with personality. I felt seen in a way that wasn't draining my energy or using me to pass the time. I thought that he would be different from the other guys. And boy, was he. I entertained him with my knowledge of astrology, and he emptied his head about the life he wanted to lead. Not even the word enthralled could describe how intense things grew between us in such a short time. We spoke for two nights straight, and it was magical. I was gushing to my friends about how funny and charming he was until he disappeared on the third day.
Confusion encaptured my mind, but I shrugged it off and thought, "Maybe he's busy." A red flag.
A week went by.
Where are you?
Are you still interested?
Did I fail at love ... again?
Disappointment had once again washed over me. I shared personal stuff about myself, put on a more chippy personality, and gave him space. And for what? To be ghosted chasing after a love that felt too intense too quickly, but it felt like I could never escape it. And maybe I didn't want to. I spent that entire week revisiting our conversations, hoping he would be back. The people closest to me disapproved of him and wanted me to move on, but I couldn't. I desired him.
He saw me.
He was interested in me, and I craved that.
Another anxious night, this time at home, as I was visiting family for the weekend, I sat across from my sister on my bed. She and my friends (over text) were grilling me about the Tinder misogynist being "redacted." I couldn't shake the pressure of wanting to leave him alone as they insisted or staying to see what if. What if he was the love of my life? I couldn't let others dictate my feelings, but they could see me for whom he couldn't, which meant I knew they were right.
Ding Ding! My phone alert went off.
It's him! It's him!
Maybe they were wrong about him!
"SAH-BEANA-BEAN! I'm sorry that I left like that. Sometimes I disappear when I'm going through things. My ex hated it when I did that." He said.
Why was he bringing up his ex? Another red flag.
The excitement that he wasn't ghosting me after all led me to ignore his reasoning, and I accepted that everyone was entitled to cope how they wanted to. So, the two of us instantly reconnected as if he never left, and we continued speaking every day for the next week. I started to believe that we could be a couple and that I could love him.
Ironically, I had a Tinder rule that if a conversation could survive more than two weeks, it was serious. And we were approaching that marker rapidly, so he invited me to come to his house for our first meet-up. We would meet on the first warmish Sunday that New Jersey spring could offer. But something shifted between us, and it felt like anything that could go wrong did each day as the date approached.
Three days before the Sunday we met, he compared me to his ex because we criticized his interests. "I like Joe Rogan." Ick!
Two days before, he said, "I'm not looking for a therapist. I want a girlfriend, and I'm scared I can't tell the difference with you." All because I asked him more about his life.
And the final day before the big date. He called me the problem because he felt I took things too seriously, and I was hot-headed even though he was provoking me with judgemental, sneering comments.
"You are baggage." He exasperated.
All because my sister wanted to meet him before we met as she didn't trust him and his weird request to come to him. I understood now why she did it, but in the moment, I felt my world crashing. She ruined my chance of having love because I could be the girl he needed. I could go to him because I was emotionally mature despite the secret trauma that I faced. He knew that. I knew that. But she wasn't convinced. I couldn’t ignore my sister's warning and the uneasy feeling in my gut at his reaction to her wanting to meet him. My spirit couldn’t shake that his intentions weren’t as pure as he led me to believe.
“You will not speak to me like that. You shouldn’t be this upset about her seeing what you look like. You are childish.” I exclaimed back angrily in text.
I'm the problem because I set boundaries and reiterated that I will not stand for his outbursts nor compromise on the respect I deserve. Mr. Tinder Misogynist thought women should expect awful treatment if they did sex work. Expect. A rage filled me, a pit forming in my chest, and I couldn't believe a human could be so disturbing. An ex of his was too opinionated and it made him feel like less than a man, so I was too opinionated for him. And he was right. I was, but at least I was someone.
Mr. Tinder Misogynist had no job, no core ambitions aside from making beats, and lived at home with his mother. But I'm the problem? He suggested I come to his house on the first date, and he would sneak me in until she returned home. At his grown age, you want to sneak around your mother? The adolescence in me considered his proposition because I had never linked with someone before and I wanted to prove that I could be casual. Maybe if I bent the rules, I could somehow make it liberating and show my friends that I too could be normal. Should I go to his house in secret or free myself of the howling cries of temptation? He was smooth, silky as pecan ice cream, and I was allergic, but the attraction was so powerful I could melt. Maybe I could go and watch anime as planned and if something happened, then it would be okay, right?
My emotions grew weary. I had grown accustomed to making homes out of people. I was sacrificing my identity, and my optimistic spirit to be a side character in his story. As a Black woman fresh into her twenties, I lost myself in a feeling because the ongoing fear of loneliness was evident. I lost the core of what intimacy and love truly meant to me. I realized that I wasn't going to meet him because I owed it to myself to be okay. I owed it to myself to be more than okay, especially relinquishing his toxicity, the intense yet faux attention, and restoring my faith in self-love.
Being in your twenties sometimes calls for an existential crisis of not knowing what you should or should be doing.
So what does that call for? It calls for distractions, and sometimes distractions are what fill in the void of not feeling like a complete failure. I thought since falling in love for the first time with a woman, I should try being with a man. It wasn't about the gender difference but the incomprehensible stages of life that we walk. I was a twenty-year-old, Black, Bi woman who dealt with adversity daily. He was a twenty-four-year-old, straight black man who had radical opinions despite his existence being radical and lived at home in hopes of being somebody but not making an effort to be one.
He was the second person on Tinder I connected with and the first person I had the same humor, banter, and joys of life with. But he was an insufferable-aggressive misogynist whom I had liked very much before I knew that side of him, and I knew that the cycle of toxicity had to end with him.
Now, I forever unapologetically choose myself. Every time.
I ended up ghosting him after and I never got to say my final words, so here it is: Good luck with booking that stage you speak of.
BLOCKED!
P.S. Thank you Rih Rih for being iconic.
Sabrina Wigfall is a Black, Queer, Non-Binary person writer based in Austin, TX. You can find more of her work on her website, PoutyWriter.
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Amazing article, love this read!
Never settle