WEST ELM CALEB AND TOXIC ACCOUNTABILITY CULTURE

Once upon a time when I was in college, I went on an awful date with a guy at a Mexican Restaurant in Boulder, Colorado called Rincon Del Sol.

He texted his frat brothers the entire time, called me the wrong name at one point, and then asked me if he could drop me off at my friend’s house instead of my apartment because “it was closer to the gym.” I said sure because of who I am as a person.

He never spoke to me again nor did he text or call me to see if I made it the 2 miles from my friend’s place to my apartment. Except occasionally when I saw him at the bars senior year and he’d yell at me from the top of his lungs “SHRIMP TACOS!” while splashing me with his Coors Lite. You know… because… I had ordered… shrimp tacos.

ANYWAY! All that amounted from that awful encounter was an excellent story for me to regale you with today. I think I cried for 15 minutes on my friend’s couch and then mainlined 10 shots of Rubinoff vodka, put my hair in a pouf (cuz early 2000s), then walked to the bar because it was Boulder, a Thursday, and I was ~ a party girl ~.

And why does it matter?

Feminism. Cancel culture. Toxic accountability. And social media. Casual, right?

But yah. A swath of the internet (people of all genders) went after an average man living his life in NYC because he was a big jerk to a lot of women and they posted a TikTok about it. The dating world in 2022 is truly a barren hellscape of misery. Single people suffer constantly at the hands of callous and inept people who treat them with flippant disregard. The thing is, humans behave poorly all of the time. It does not make their behavior “okay.”

But it is not misogynistic to not text back. It is not “anti-woman” to only want a physical relationship with someone. Claiming that poor dating etiquette and dismissive treatment of potential partners is “anti-woman” is simply too deductive. There are plenty of people in the dating world who ARE misogynistic but, especially in the case of West Elm Caleb, the behavior was defined only in part by those who experienced it, and mostly by the internet mob who deduced his “crimes” from various accounts without due process.

His behavior is abhorrent, immature, and honestly, sort of SDE (don’t look that up, just text me about it later - NSFW) but, in all cases but one, it is not abuse. It is not trauma. Less than desirable treatment is not abuse. And calling such matters in the dating world “abuse” trivializes the REAL abuse and trauma that so many men and women suffer from at the hands of partners and potential partners all of the time.

I self-define as a “medium” person.

I try really hard to do good as much as I can and my moral compass points pretty north. But sometimes I mess up and I realize that maybe I shouldn’t have said that thing about that friend, maybe I should have been honest that I didn’t like that guy from the start instead of having him fly from Colorado to Boston for a weekend and then break a glass in his hotel’s pool so they had to drain the whole thing and charged him for it.

Sometimes when we’re 22 we do dumb things (NOT CRIMES, but DUMB THINGS) and we grow up and realize “wow that was actually very not okay, I’m glad I do better now.” Each NORMAL (not famous) human deserves to be able to do that without the internet telling them they are definitively, without question, a bad person. In some instances, maybe those people ARE bad people, but that is not up for us as a society to convince them of via harassment campaigns. And TikTok honestly needs to CHILL OUT sometimes. Sheesh, talk about GROUP THINK. But that’s a discussion for another day.