In the soft folds of the first coronavirus quarantine — when midwestern moms were still sewing masks for nurses but before the same moms screamed at school board meetings about mask mandates — many people learned to make sourdough bread or crochet or finally get in better shape. Those of us without the will to improve as people, however, downloaded TikTok. I never would have considered joining an app with a reputation for teenage dancing were it not for the intersection of post-divorce numbness, unemployment, and an eternally open calendar, but I was surprised to find plenty of other elder millennials and rich content.
And by rich content, I mean an abundance of the most attractive people I have ever seen, online or off. Sure, there were the white-girl-next-door types and hunky cowboys in tight Wranglers that you see everywhere. But TikTok’s algorithms seemed to learn exactly what I liked down to the smallest detail.
Upon opening the app, I am met by a brown-skinned woman with three nose rings, slicked baby hairs, and golden box braids. A thumb flick in the upward direction, and there is an olive-skinned brunette with long hair in a perfectly tailored navy suit and brown dress shoes, putting her hands in her pockets authoritatively. Another flick, and a girl with glowy skin and bushy eyebrows tells me which astrological sign she would assign to different US cities. I slam the heart button immediately, like like like, and ask the horoscope girl about her skincare routine.
The impact of this carousel of beauties was embarrassingly profound. I was astonished to see so many women being beautiful in intentionally unconventional and unexpected ways, in ways so clearly meant for other women and not for men. After decades of exposure to Hollywood babes and the preening, self-assured influencers from other social media platforms, this new catalog overwhelmed.
The only other experience that had aroused in me a similar jolt of excitement and overwhelm was in the early days of the AfroPunk festival, when Black folks from all corners of the counterculture descended on Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn with wildly creative style that couldn’t be traced to any magazines or runways or storefronts. The women, especially, dazzled with outfits that mixed afrofuturism with punk fuckyou-edneess and New York swagger. Hair was massive, nipples were bare, thighs were out, and the girls were not worried about taking up space. I think I fell in love twenty times each year; it was impossible to look away.
This inability to look away is exactly how this period of TikTok felt, and I wasn’t the only one. Under innocuous videos of women watering their plants or smiling plainly, users confessed that they had downloaded the app identifying as straight but were now thinking about overtly lesbian coded activities: shaving their heads, planting a vegetable garden, buying Subarus. And it wasn’t just the youth; middle aged women with children seemed to be very seriously questioning their marriages. A frequent comment: “Me and my husband aren’t that serious.” Adults were crotch-deep in identity crises, and the only cure was more TikTok to help make sense of it. It was as if TikTok had poisoned the drinking water of every hot-blooded American woman and turned them all gay.
Journalists began to notice, too: “Everyone is Gay on TikTok” announced the New York Times. “TikTok Made Me Gay” according to New York Magazine, and “TikTok’s algorithms knew I was bi before I did. I’m not the only one” in Mashable.
Even years later, people still make videos crediting TikTok for outing them during those murky pandemic months when we were all dazed and confused and, apparently, very horny. It is such a fascinating assertion — a mass lesbian summoning stoked by social media — but I have yet to see anyone take this question up seriously. Maybe it’s too embarrassing to ask, but I can’t help it. What if TikTok really did make us all gay?
At the time, I laughed, but in her defense the word “algorithm” isn’t defined nearly as frequently as it is used in general parlance. The New York Times has 6,990 articles referencing the word algorithm dating back to November 5, 1853. In 1977, it was defined, in parentheses, as a mathematical procedure. Most times, it is not defined at all.
This is surprising, because the definition is startlingly simple: An algorithm is just a set of rules. It has no intrinsic connection to anything digital or technological. In fact, the term predates any computer or smartphone or fitness watch or vacuuming robot by at least a millenia. The word “algorithm” is an anglicization of the name of the Persian mathematician who invented the concept.
Unfortunately, the term “algorithm” has become a lazy shorthand for online surveillance, big tech, and the dismantling of society as we know it by blockchain robber barons and billionaires with rocket ships. “Artificial Intelligence” will feature in a news headline, with its evocation of dystopian robot overlords, instead of “Machine Learning,” the industry accepted term to describe just how algorithms do what they do. In well-respected journalistic outlets, algorithms are called “dark magic”, a “divine oracle”, and “sorcery” instead of just advanced mathematics, because predictive math tells us that conversations about predictive math do not generate clicks.
The algorithms make startlingly accurate predictions because the techniques used to guide them are getting more effective, more powerful, and more autonomous. They are only able to improve, however, because there is more and more data collected about all of us every year. Every click, scroll, share, comment, mention is fed back into the algorithm for further analysis. But the algorithms themselves have no embodied evil or hauntedness to them. The ghost story is just capitalism.
Adrienne Rich, American poet and feminist thinker, suggested in her groundbreaking work on sexuality that a monogamous relationship between one man and one woman is not a biological imperative but a cultural construct subliminally imposed on women to uphold male dominance. When girls are born, they are given a book of rules to follow about how to behave, whom to love, and how to make a life for themselves. Girls don’t know to question these rules until they’ve already been fully socialized. And by then, perhaps, it’s too late to change how they see the world and their place in it.
Many observers pointed to compulsory heterosexuality when trying to make sense of the supposed mass lesbianization that took place on TikTok during the pandemic. They argued that once women retreated from the male-dominated world during quarantine and immersed themselves into women-loving-women content curated just for them, they began to finally see the water in their own fishbowls and realized they were indeed gay all along. Once life as we knew it ground to a halt, there was no real way to enforce society’s rulebook. Homosexuality seeped into the empty spaces of people’s homes like a gas.
TikTok vaporizing heterosexuality is gay mythology I absolutely love for the storytelling but find problematic, because it falls again into the trap of positioning algorithms as magical and not as tools for wealth generation. I am convinced that TikTok’s only magic is that they figured out how to monetize the feminine gaze. It is the only media capable of serving me hours of uninterrupted content featuring queer women with neck tattoos, dogs, and alt girls trying on thrift store outfits, and it requires almost no effort on my part. “The robot is taking our jobs” becomes true if robot means the algorithm and the job is my thumbs. But instead of a futuristic alternate reality, it feels a lot like watching local access television from the ’90s if it had been powered by a supercomputer. The AI is not sentient; it’s just really good at calculating the probability that I will like, comment, and share any video that features Bad Bunny in a crop top.
We know little about exactly how TikTok determines which content to show its users, but there isn’t evidence to suggest they are using any innovative techniques. Many platforms utilize some version of Facial Beauty Prediction, for example, where the faces of content creators are given a beauty score, and then those with the highest scores are shown first or amplified more widely. That isn’t terribly different from what Hollywood casting directors do every day in analog.
But TikTok had figured out what Hollywood hadn’t in all these years; women’s desire was not a mysterious unknowable magic. It could be codified, classified, calculated, and then used to amplify the content women actually wanted. In this case, the female gaze was transformed into a series of algorithms supercharged by layers of statistics so complex it can’t be understood by the human brain. But the digital real estate could still be segmented and sold to the brands who thought those women might like their eyeliner or iced drinks from Panera.
This was not a gay bomb, this was gay content served to the people most likely to engage with it based on their online behavior. Math and marketing. I suppose it is easier to believe there was mystical intervention in something as personal as our sexual orientations and gender identities than to accept we’ve been outed in the relatively straightforward pursuit of corporate profit.
During the literal and figurative heat of that first pandemic summer, I taped a handwritten note to my neighbor’s door asking if she wanted to hang out sometime. We had never spoken before, but we waved each morning and evening as we walked our dogs. All I knew about her was that she had one elderly terrier that moved cautiously and another dog that lunged and barked at every nearby creature despite being significantly less than ten pounds. And perhaps most notably, an ass that pulled at her scrubs in all the right places.
The night I left the letter, we met on the rooftop of our building and chatted for hours. Two weeks later, I lay beside her sweating and thankful for whatever combination of biological, analog, or digital algorithms that had helped me get off my phone and into her bed. As hard as they may try, no algorithm has been able to replicate the effect of two queer bodies in orbit, safe and in love and making up their own rules.
love this essay so much