The Specific Catharsis of 'That Guy"
THE ACCURACY
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Yesterday’s “What are You Drinking” thread (now, somehow, over 750 comments??) may have convinced me it’s Fall? And that I need to buy artificial lime packets in bulk? And last Friday’s “What Made You Change Your Mind” thread surprised me and delighted me and comforted me in so many ways. There’s a lot of really poignant self-reckoning going on and it’ll absolutely absorb your morning.
I was going to write about the new (honestly terrifying) norms of dorm decoration for today — and am still planning on writing about it for next week, so if you’ve seen examples/have thoughts, send them my way — but then a TikTok meme got in the way.
A quick explainer (and my apologies, because there’s no way to explain a meme without sounding like a doofus): on TikTok, you can apply filters to your face. Many of them are pretty advanced and mold to the contours of anything it senses as face-like.
I’ve seen beard filters floating around for some time, but this current iteration — which applies a skinny mustache and a goatee, complete with soul patch — has taken off into the memeosphere for a few reasons. First: by women who try it out and are like, wow, as a man, I’d be unstoppable.
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And then, by people who try the filter and feel….something else.
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There’s also the emotionally complex experience of trying on this filter and seeing your dad staring back at you, on glorious display here:
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When the sister sees herself and yells DESPICABLE! I die. It’s perfect. All of these are fantastic. But none of these are the variation that’s responsible for the ongoing memetic energy, the sub-meme I call “That Guy”:
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The specificity is mind-blowing and yet: I know that guy. I bet you know that guy. Some other guys:
The conceit is best understood if you consume the actual TikToks, which I’ve collected here.
Screenshots give you the jist, but the progression of facial expressions (and comedic timing) at work in the TikToks themselves really seal it. (As a side note, I’ll also say that this is part of what makes a good TikTok a piece of art — and why it works differently than, say, Instagram. If you’ve never been on it, it’s almost certainly not what you think it is).
These Tiktoks display an accuracy borne of lifetimes of observation — of encountering so many distinct types of men. Or more specifically: of dirtbag. It works because a man who chooses this type of facial hair is almost always a man with a gap between his self-importance and actual importance, between what he thinks he deserves and the way he’s showed up for others in his world. And that’s the very heart of dirtbagness, right?
That’s also why so many of the characters created by this filter are deadbeat dads and creeping on high school kids and saying weird shit to service employees. That fucking goatee is entitlement manifest. It’s AI’s patriarchy aesthetic. And you can see how it would be unbelievably cathartic to be able to readily ridicule that posture towards the world — what it feels like to be surrounded by that guy, by so many iterations of that guy, every day of your life.
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This dude puts on the filter to point out what makes it so effective: the targets of the critique can’t reproduce it. “[These] men can’t retaliate, they just can’t,” he says. “They can’t take a face feminizing filter or whatever and come up with a genre of girl because, like, most of these guys at tops know two types of girl and on top of that can only imagine one or two more. They don’t have the nuance. They don’t have the experience. They don’t talk to girls.” Or, as one viewer put it in my Instagram DMs, “they only know two categories of women: those they’d fuck and those they’d begrudgingly fuck.”
These dudes see women, in other words, as objects for them to possess — and as a result, do not see them at all. Women see these men as specific obstacles to navigate in order to live, to thrive, to raise their children, to shop at Ross, to work, to find a partner. That’s why the types are so vivid and so recognizable. You’ve likely already developed an antidote for them: an escape route, an avoidance strategy, a means to survive.
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Of course, there are exceptions — the character of This Guy changes, for example, when he’s smiling. Wild how amenability changes the whole vibe and thoughtfulness of That Guy! But the sheer number of That Guys still being generated across TikTok, the breathtaking breadth of them, the fact that they span races and ages and locations and vocations — gotta say, it’s telling! Not all men, and yet!
It’s also telling that so many of my friends texted me telling me that they were laughing so hard they cried or peed themselves or watched the entire cycle again, and again, and again. It’s as if naming That Guy, embodying him so precisely, and, as audience members, bearing witness to it — it’ll vanquish him, or, at the very least, diminish his power.
Patriarchy means that no amount of bad credit, bad reputation, bad work ethic, bad behavior or bad vibes can truly get in this guy’s way. It means that all sorts of people — including mothers and girlfriends and sisters — have enabled him, in ways subtle and significant. That’s the thing about dominant world orders: they enlist the very people they subjugate to maintain them. Sometimes that enlistment is sneaky or manipulative; other times people (like, say, white women!) understand that a repressive system is still one that ultimately benefits them. But that’s what I like about this filter: it’s not just pointing out a Type of Guy. It’s very softly underlining the role all of us, regardless of gender, play in his survival. ●
Final Note: If you’re a guy reading this or watching these and thinking “not all men,” well, obviously. This Guy doesn’t have to be All Guys for this to be a problem. But also: I have a Tok for you.
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It should be clear but I’ll say it clearly: having a good conversation about this topic is going to be more challenging than usual. Be thoughtful about your own reaction and how you’d like to articulate it; I’d particularly like to hear about your reaction to the specific Guys collected (and what I haven’t yet said about them and their persistence). I’ll be monitoring the comments closely and we’ll stick to the overarching maxim that we want to keep this a good place on the internet, even when we’re talking about patriarchy and That Guy.
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I also really love these because often encounters with “That Guy” in real life can be deeply uncomfortable, isolating, and sometimes frightening experiences. These TikToks feel super joyful and communal, and point out just how ridiculous the patriarchy is, in addition to being a repressive and violent institution.
I have complete source forgetting about what clever woman said this where, but someone recently on something i was watching/listening too etc said that "creepiness" is the way we have to define something (to mostly other women) that someone (usually a man) is an implicit threat. That might seem so obvious that you're now thinking, duh, but when it was framed like that I was like RIGHT! That is what I have been saying! For social norm reasons you can't come right out and say your Volleyball coach is a potential threat, but you can say he's creepy and now every woman in that radius has their head on a swivel.
Loved these videos, horrified by the universal experiences we all have, but oh man, women are FUNNY.