The internet is tits

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Today’s advertiser is once again Authory, whose automated portfolio system I’ve subscribed to for years now. Although Beehiiv rules prevent me from asking or encouraging you to click the ad, if you do so, of your own free will and according to your own moral principles, each click will earn me $2.80.

When you run a newsletter on Beehiiv, you get a lot of Boost requests. A Boost is when you blurb someone else’s newsletter, either in your own email or on your Recommendations Page. Boosts can be free or paid—I offer Boosters $2 per verified subscriber¹ —and the requests can be either to boost your newsletter or for you to boost their newsletter. You pay or you get paid. Sometimes the requests I get make sense. The Culture Explorer, for instance, has sent me quite a few subscribers who actually seem to be reading Trying! (Hi, guys!) But some don’t: boxing newsletters and AI newsletters and hack-your-startup-for-unlimited-growth newsletters. I don’t doubt that those readers would benefit from Trying!, but I’m not risking $2 a pop on them.

And then, last week, I got a request from a relatively new newsletter called On the Throne. Here’s their pitch:

Eh, maybe? I’m a chill guy over 50 who likes things that begin with the letter B—maybe my man time needs maximizing? So I went to check out their site, and … it’s basically just tits:

Okay, ass, too, I guess. Their newsletters have a few other elements: a link about car chases, a blurb about the musician David Gray, a photo of a zebra. But really, mostly, honestly, it’s tits.

You will not, I hope, be surprised to learn that a goodly portion of the Internet is, at least for those IP addresses that the algorithms identify as straight men, all about tits. They’re all over Instagram and Facebook, lurking in Reels promo sections and the profile pics of bots that “like” your latest post. They’re down in the chum boxes of websites whose highbrow (okay, middlebrow) content you thought would offer you a reprieve. Tits are everywhere. There is no escape. If you’re an incredibly boring heteronormative white man (like me), you can’t do anything incredibly boring on the Internet without having constantly to dodge the boobs that come flying at you, squeezed into oblong thumbnails not quite at the corner of your vision.

Sometimes the nipples are off-camera, but would definitely, probably, I think, I guess, maybe (?) be visible if only the frame were larger. Other times, it’s just some video of a pert braless woman walking down the street and talking about something inane, but the braless perkiness is clearly the whole point, or why else would the algorithm be throwing this thing at me? And then sometimes you get this weird-ass array:

For a while, I tried to correct the algorithm. Any time one of these clips showed up in my feed, I’d tap into it, hit the three dots, click “Not interested,” and then “hide all” from whoever posted it. Except that the mere fact of my taking notice of these videos that I didn’t particularly want to notice was enough for the algorithm to conclude that I was, in fact, interested, and clearly wanted to see more knockers, more boobs, more breasteses. Watching a lot of rock-climbing and fitness videos did not improve the situation:

Let’s be clear: I don’t have a problem with seeing boobs. In fact—and I know this will STUN all of you loyal subscribers, including the paid ones—I like seeing boobs. I am, as I said before, America’s most boringly heteronormative man. Boobs = good. I’m even married to a woman whose boobs I get to see fairly frequently, because we live in a small New York City apartment where we just happen to be partially and unavoidably naked around one another all the time. We barely even notice. You’d think this would be great training for avoiding the errant tits of the Internet, but alas. They still somehow manage to reach out and virtually poke you—me—in the eye whenever they pop up, which is often.

Nor am I so consumed with lust at the sight of these ad-hoc knockers that I’m driven to, uh, distraction. I can scroll by just fine, thank you very much. The lines I draw between work and non-work, between public and private, are fairly strong, as long as I haven’t had too many whiskeys. Indeed, because I have some, let’s say, control issues, I like to keep those lines as impregnable as possible: There’s a time to write my stupid nagging emails for work, and there’s a time for playing Block Blast; there’s a time for scanning social media to see what’s going on in the world, and there’s a time for falling down an Instagram hole after dinner. Turn, turn, turn—just don’t get in my way.

(This is probably where I should say that I understand it’s probably a hell of a lot worse being a woman on the Internet, with harassment and dick pics at every turn rather than just a bunch of at best racy short-form videos crowding your feed.)

So, yes, I resent the tits for crossing those lines. But haven’t they always been crossing the line? Back in the golden age of magazines, TV, and advertising—the 1980s and ‘90s—you had racy, suggestive ads all over the place, right?

But as far as I can remember, and from what I can dig up through extremely cursory research, the titsiness was once far more restrained. This was advertising, produced by a highly paid, extremely professional collection of thoroughly awful elites, and they did not simply want to make veiled pornography. No, they were artists manqués. Their ads were weird, suggestive, racy, risqué, and often implicitly offensive, but their intrusiveness came from their power to stick in your mind—comfortably or not—rather than simply appearing in front of your face unexpectedly.

Again, what I liked were the lines: If you were a 13-year-old boy, as I once was and still sort of am, you had to seek out your titillation—in magazine ads, in damp pornography found in someone’s uncle’s shed, in teen-movie boob flashes no precision pausing could ever capture unblurred. The digital world offered it, too, early on, if you knew where to look: the sleazy kid at computer camp with the “Fuller Brush salesman” floppy disk (link NSFW!), the over-18 message boards on an out-of-state BBS. While there was definitely the thrill of accessing something forbidden, what stuck with me was the idea that there were two worlds separated by invisible forces, one public, the other private. The journey required to traverse them was an adventure, and rendered both origin and destination special and unique. One was open, relaxed, free, the other naughty, knotty, inscrutable. The possibility that one could live in both—simultaneously or alternatingly—floored me as a teen, and it’s that feeling, that human social life holds mysteries worth exploring, that I want to hold onto.

And so what really bothers me about all the tits is that they’re boring. They’re pornographic in the worst way: They have nothing to say, no wisdom to reveal. They transform what was once a hidden world of unutterable, unquenchable desires into an unending series of scrollable, swipe-able, forgettable engagement bait. To be sure, it’s better for society to be more open about sex, but must these mammaries be so monotonous? Their aesthetic, if we can even call this an aesthetic, is anesthetizing, and unchanged over recent decades. In other words, they’re about the least sexy thing anyone can imagine. Well, except for the musings on sex, desire, and the Internet of a 50-year-old white man. You just can’t get lower than that. But oh, goddamnit, how I wish you could… 🪨🪨🪨

Read a Previous Attempt: How to Write a Trying! Essay

1  Sorry, bots!