Here come the maid boys nyaaaa ლ(=ↀωↀ=)ლ

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“Help! My TikTok Went Viral And Now Jimmy Kimmel Is Talking About Me”

I got a DM from a Garbage Day reader named Casey a couple days ago saying she had accidentally gone viral and didn’t know what to do. A quick aside, but I really love how many of you email me in semi-panic over viral content.

Over the weekend, Casey decided to prank call President Trump’s voter fraud hotline. If you’re out of the loop on this, the Trump campaign has a phone number you can call to lodge your very legitimate complaints of voter fraud 👀. There’s obviously no way anyone could have predicted that a bunch of people would start fucking with it almost immediately. Here’s a really really good one:

Casey said that she made a video of her calling the hotline and, at first, wasn’t planning to post it publicly anywhere. Her TikTok up until this point was mainly for cute videos of her dog.

“I called the hotline and recorded it to send to my family group chat and decided to edit it down into a TikTok,” she told me. “It didn’t get that much attention but then someone commented ‘POV you’re coming from NBC News’ so I then found the first article.”

She said she isn’t sure exactly how far her TikTok has traveled, but it did end up on Jimmy Kimmel. Which is honestly crazy to me! Imagine someone putting your face on TV — especially in the context of dunking on Trump — and no one warning you. Her TikTok was also linked to by Breitbart. But luckily for Casey, she hasn’t had any abuse or harassment.

Casey also said this brush with viral fame hasn’t convinced her to become an influencer.

“My other TikToks didn’t end up getting that many views, even with the attention. I guess people aren’t interested in my dog being adorable but you know,” she said. “My boyfriend did ask me last night if I wanted to start a Chicago based TikTok house lmao.”

An Unacceptably Horny Star Wars Post

I absolutely hate this. A big thank you to Keith for sending it my way. I confess that I really try not to spend a lot of time on Facebook. Aside from the psychological concerns, it’s also just the ugliest and most useable app I’ve ever seen, just from a user experience standpoint.

Yesterday, the Star Wars fan page, Just Jedi Things, posted a truly troubling update. The page typically posts just really cringe Star Wars memes. I’ve actually wanted to do a big thing for a while about the weird politics of the Star Wars prequel memes community. It’s not exactly a radicalized space, but it’s solidly “I’m 17 years old and think being a Republican is actually punk.”

Anyways, yesterday, Just Jedi Things posted an insanely horny tribute to a character they’re calling “Frog Lady” from the Disney+ show The Mandalorian. Here’s a passage from it:

It gets A LOT more NSFW from there.

The post was setting off my copypasta alarm so I put a bit of it into Google to see if it had been posted somewhere else and, sure enough, it’s from 4chan! It was posted to /TV/ two days ago. Here are a few comments from the original 4chan thread:

• “even satan is upset by OPs post”

• “fuck off”

• “It really does suck, knowing you'll never get to go out there and try and fuck whatever lives in the stars.”

The comments underneath the Facebook post are equally angry about it. Oh, btw, in case you’re wondering, this is what Frog Lady looks like.

Cool, I guess.

Some Good Taylor Swift Content

There’s so much good stuff in this video. It came across my timeline thanks to a tweet from Popular Science executive editor Rachel Feltman. It’s just a really cute video. I also absolutely love how completely creeped out this guy is by the age difference between John Mayer and Taylor Swift.

Goodbye Substack, I’m moving to Parler

JK I’m not a pathetic grifter. But a Garbage Day reader named Paul asked me if I could help explain why a bunch of right-wing influencers are moving over there.

According to NBC News, Parler is racing up the download charts right now. Conservatives, bristling at even the slightest moderation from tech platforms, are heading to Parler in droves, it seems. A pro-Trump member of my family actually texted me about Parler yesterday. So clearly the app is blowing up right now.

Well, I was curious what exactly this bastion of free speech looked like from the inside. So I made an account! After I signed up, the site immediately asked me if I wanted to follow people like “reporter” John Solomon, Sean Hannity, and that awful Christian version of The Onion, The Babylon Bee. It also suggested a second list of “active users” I should follow like Ted Cruz and Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson.

I was curious what Parler considered “active,” so I clicked through to Cruz’s page. He’s posted once a day this week, most likely to capitalize on people leaving Facebook and Twitter, but before that, Cruz’s last post was October 20. His posts are all extremely boring.

In terms of design, Parler is a pretty standard Twitter clone. Instead of tweets, posts are called “parleys,” which, lol ok, sure. The site also has a “Suggested” hashtag widget. The top ones this morning were #Bitcoin, #Meme, #Videogames, and #Twexit lol. I was curious what kind of incredible discourse I’ve been missing out on. So I clicked on #Twexit.

And the top post was porn!

There’s something nice about how when a bunch of conservatives make a social network, it will, without fail, immediately fill up with porn bots.

The whole platform seems to be full of spam though. When I clicked on #Bitcoin, the top posts were all just QAnon slurry.

The idea that the American right wing will all migrate to Parler is, of course, a total farce. Thanks to the political influence of both Gamergate and Trump’s weaponization of Twitter, there actually isn’t a coherent way to express right-wing ideology anymore without online harassment and abuse at its center. Being a Republican without antagonizing liberals is like doing improv without an audience. It’s the reason subreddits and 4chan boards constantly go on raids, invading left-wing Twitter threads and attacking progressive Tumblr users. Without an Other to demonize, and then vanquish, the entire movement would feel completely hollow, pointless, and, most detrimentally for Trump and his allies, boring.

Social media is a video game and Parler is a map without enemies to defeat. So, no, Parler will not catch on. Just as Gab never caught on. But we can let these miserable con artists pretend for a while! See you guys when we all migrate to the next free speech platform.

A Cool New eBook To Check Out

Carlton Mellick II’s seminal erotic eBook The Haunted Vagina is making its way around Twitter again. My friend Rega sent me this and I had to, unfortunately, tell her, yes, I have seen this before. The Haunted Vagina came out about six years ago and it has relatively positive reviews on Goodreads.

Two funny things from the Goodreads page. The top question is, “I wanted to buy this on audible but it looks like that's not an option” and the most popular answer to that question is, “It's better that way. Trust me. You would waste more money on audible.”

The top comment is from a user named Christina, who writes, “Ok this title is crazy weird and the synopsis just as much so but I'm too curious for my own good and have to see what this is all about lol Anyone else read it yet?”

Another very helpful user named Cassie wrote a very thorough answer: “I just finished it last night. It was really a one day read. I found it worth the time despite the title. You'll find it makes more sense than you wanted it to, and it does get a bit sexually graphic but not pornographically so. A surprisingly interesting read, unlike things I've read before, which was nice.”

Just A Great Post About A Flashlight

Thank you Molly for flagging this up.

If you can’t immediately tell what’s going on here, an Uber Eats driver was having trouble finding a Redditor’s house, so the Redditor used a flashlight to guide him.

I’m a huge fan of single-purpose enthusiast subreddits. I follow a ton of them. So I had a suspicion that if I went over to the Reddit post I’d be able to find out the exact model of flashlight used in the photo. And I was right.

It’s a Noctigon K1, Osram W2.1. I don’t know anything about flashlights, but it seems pretty good!

Maid Boy TikTok Is Blowing Up Right Now

Last month, a TikTok user named @nextdreadpirate made an amazingly hilarious video about working at a maid cafe. There were definitely maid boys on TikTok before this, but @nextdreadpirate’s video went really viral and really made maid boys into a thing on the platform. Some users are also using the #CatBoy hashtag for this, as well.

Refinery29 has a good piece on the tend which you can check out here. But basically, TikTok tends to inspire a lot of gender fluidity, especially among young men. Which makes sense, genders are aesthetics and, as I’ve written about in Garbage Day before, on TikTok any kind of visual aesthetic can become a trend, a meme, or an entire subculture. There’s a lot we don’t know about the AI that powers the app, but it’s essentially a remix engine. A boy wears a maid costume and voila, maid boys are a thing. The app turned boys painting their nails into a similar trend last month.

As TikTok has inspired more and more gender fluidity among young men, it has also become a huge target for TERFs, or trans-exclusionary radical feminism. One of the central tenets of TERF ideology is that men will use gender nonconformity as a way to prey on women. This is the main argument TERFs use against trans women using women’s restrooms. JK Rowling is a big proponent of the predatory trans woman theory. I haven’t seen any compelling evidence this is a real thing to worry about.

So it’s both disappointing and expected that this same kind rhetoric is appearing around maid boy TikTok videos.

The TL;DR of the video above is that “sinister” young men on TikTok are using gender fluidity and maid costumes to ingratiate themselves with young women to prey on them.

As a reporter, I’ve spent a lot time investigating predators on video apps. I am fully aware that platforms like YouTube, Vine, and TikTok have had huge problems with older men using video channels as a way to groom underage boys and girls. I have sadly had many painful conversations with victims and the parents of victims. My longest investigation took almost two years to put together. So believe me when I say that it is extremely dangerous (for many reasons!) to conflate the sexual predators that lurk on video apps with young men playing around with nail polish and maid costumes.

TERF ideology, like far-right ideology, spreads online by adapting to whatever’s going viral at the time. This is not the last time this will happen. But also, I’ll admit, I don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of every TERF code and meme. So if any of my readers know any good big lists of TERF talking points send them my way.

Anyways, keep doing you, maid boys nyaaaa ლ(=ↀωↀ=)ლ

Alright Guys, I Need Your Help

I’ve spent all week trying to figure out where this video came from. It has extreme Douyin energy to me, but I can’t, for the life of me, track down who made it. It also appears to be part of a series, but I really can’t find the source on this. Help me find the origin!

P.S. here’s how you get a photo of Trump golfing.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***