If I know anything about men, it’s that when they’re not thinking about the Roman Empire, they’re imagining how easily they could land a passenger plane without training. Or at least, that’s what the internet tells me.
Earlier this month, Kelsey Lewis Vincent tweeted her thoughts about an Instagram Reel posted by Roman reenactor Gaius Flavius: “I saw an IG Reel that said something along the lines of ‘women have no idea how often the men in their lives think about the Roman Empire,’” she wrote. “So I asked my husband: ‘How often do you think about the Roman Empire?’ And without missing a beat he said ‘Every day.’ YALL! Why!?”
The tweet got over eight million views, and soon, people began asking their own husbands, boyfriends, and friends the same question on TikTok. Then, tech and internet culture reporters began publishing stories about the trend, enshrining it as a kind of truism: Men just love thinking about the Roman Empire. Something similar happened in November 2022, when @ImagineAGuy tweeted, “i think all men sincerely believe they could safely land a commercial airliner in an emergency situation with only air traffic control to walk them through it.” A few months later, the idea had TikTok in a chokehold, with people once again putting the question to the males in their lives and discovering that, yes, this is a man thing.
If you’re a guy who is not either one of those guys and you feel a little weird seeing something you’ve never once thought about get branded as a universal behavior of your gender, you’re not alone. I get it, because, as a woman, I’ve been through four years of it. What started with “hot girl summer” in 2019 has culminated this year with “girl dinner” and “girl math”—extremely specific repackagings of the female experience that are presented, bafflingly, as something that all of us “girls” do. To reject them is to fall into the “I’m not like other girls” trope. But I’m not like other girls! No girls are, really. (“Husband meal,” however, is very real.)
This isn’t the first time the internet has decided things about men. In 2020, there was an entire Twitter (now X) trend about the things men would do instead of going to therapy. A year earlier, the discourse was about how so many dudes keep their mattresses on the floor. But the recent trends are different, because they come from a new playbook—the one we created for women.
Kate Lindsay
Source link
