Three Posts With @boywaif, (Tania)
the girlblogging/bookish communist/neo-reactionary nexus, and the art of posting bangers on twitter dot com
My friend Tania is a Twitter micro-celebrity and a great thinker on all things internet, oceans/islands, Édouard Glissant, and much much more. We talked about three of their more viral posts, what it feels like making hit tweets, and the aesthetic traditions that knit 2014 Tumblr, bookish communist Twitter, Ezra Pound, neo-reactionary aesthetes, and TikTok screenshot quote posts together.
AIDAN: So Tania, @boywaif, how would you describe your niche (or niches) on Twitter?
TANIA: I would say I have several niches that do overlap, but there are parts of them that definitely don't overlap. So a true Venn diagram situation. Not exactly like a crossroads, because that implies momentariness, but more like a series of streams and channels that move like water — that stay in the same place sometimes but also have, like, various outlets.
AIDAN: So rhizomatic, in a sense.
TANIA: Yes, in a way. So I feel like there’s one niche which is like “girlblogging,” aspirational content, very pretty cities and skylines, and shit I don’t do like getting up early and drinking matcha and photographing all of it. And that’s on like an “it girl” or quote unquote “that girl” spectrum. And then in the middle there’s the sort of French New Wave girl.
Interestingly, that has a lot of overlap with this sort of… traditionalist, you know, Red Scare-adjacent milieu that again has two poles, like the rightwing pole and the aesthete pole (NOTE: Red Scare, if you’re not familiar, is a cultural commentary podcast hosted by Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan which arguably started as a leftist podcast and now they do interviews with Alex Jones). Not everyone in this milieu is right wing, but to be there requires a certain level of flirtation with traditional values, a familiarity with the political milieu of the early 20th century… like, Ezra Pound I think is a touchstone figure to these people.
And then I also sort of occupy a niche of bookish communist, and this is actually what I am, although I’m more recognized as one of those two things rather than as a member of a bookish community. People who are well-read, are in grad school or applying to grad school, well-traveled, who have spent some time living in Europe or are planning to. And within that sphere there’s academic types and more writerly types. And I’d say that sphere is very familiar with the other two spheres, while the latter two spheres ignore it. The former two have kind of eclipsed the bookish communist one, because the aesthetic identity of the former two is stronger.
AIDAN: So between these three spheres, with the first two — “girlblogging aspiration” and “Red Scare” kind of overtaking your home territory of “bookish communist” (which is what I and others know you as in real life) did you feel a progression happening? Like, you started out in the bookish communist space and then all the Red Scare and girlboss people showed up?
TANIA: Yeah, I started definitely in the bookish Communist space and more particularly in the online sphere of Reed College, having a pretty popular college Twitter account without much reach beyond Reed besides Grinnell Twitter. So it felt a lot more like I was presenting someone who people that went to college with me would know, which still invited some degree of parasociality but not much. Honestly, at first it was almost like a personal diary and then I became more subdued on it, which meant I would refrain from posting about personal traumas or legitimate struggles in the unfiltered way I had before. It was very much my bookish communist personality.
Then, falling into this sphere was accidental. Part of the backstory which I think most people don’t know is I had this friend, who was primarily an internet friend, but we actually both went to high school in Puerto Rico, not together, but we had sort of overlapping circles. And we became internet friends through Twitter. But it was actually a real-life connection originally.
He had a quite popular leftist twitter account: he was hyperliterate, but part of his whole schtick was being extremely down bad. Like extremely publicly down bad, but not at all really a creep.
AIDAN: Like sex positive, kind of?
TANIA: Well… part of his thing was like a forever-alone virgin schtick. But it never crossed over into misanthropy, he just seemed kind of lonely and depressed. But also remarkably positive in a way.
We would talk on Twitter pretty often, and I was curious about this person who grew up in similar personal/cultural surroundings and had similar academic aspirations, which is something I didn’t feel like I had at Reed. But he had all these high-follower mutuals who then started to follow me because we interacted so much. We’re talking 2019 at this specific point. I was talking to this guy and he was like, “oh, you totally could be a big account. You're very smart and funny, like, you just need to throw yourself out there more, you could do it too.”
I didn’t take this stuff too seriously, but I was like maybe I could post more, I was having fun talking to these people. And honestly, the vibe of all of this— I say this again partly to contrast it with the other milieus — was like, extremely positive, and non-creepy. Maybe I was a bit naive, but I honestly didn’t have any bad experiences with these people. We would talk on Discord and Zoom and stuff, and it all felt very friendly. And I grew up on Tumblr, so it gave me some nostalgia for having internet friends and I thought, “Oh, wow, like, I'm in a period of life many years after that where I have internet friends.”
Presenting myself to all these people that didn't know me in a real life context was a bit freeing from the constraints I felt in my social life at a small liberal arts college and from how my identity had always felt overdetermined by others. The @ I had for my two years as a college twitter account was brownguilt. I was poking fun at it, but I felt socially and intellectually trapped in the matrix of liberal identity politics of the time and the performances it demanded. This was up to and including the ultimately tokenizing reverence white students would treat me and my ideas with in campus discourse, the you’re so valid thing, which was a transparent manifestation of the white guilt my mere presence seemed to prompt in people.
@brownguilt was a play on that, while also being a play on the ouroboros of lateral bitching that existed in every supposedly anti-racist space and social circle that could even exist on such a small, insular campus. Meetings about legitimate problems, legitimate grievances devolved into these pecking contests about who had the right to the most victimhood and who was the most historically traumatized, who was really indigenous, things of this nature – I felt indignant, like, oh, I should feel guilty for being merely brown?
And, lastly, it was a reference, of course, to Catholic guilt. However at the time it was still just the ‘raised catholic’ thing - I was mocking my religious upbringing as a nexus of my internal hangups about shame, intimacy, gender, casual sex, these kinds of things. It was also, finally, a sort of origin story of my admitted tendency to self-righteousness that colors my Marxism, my “appeals to religion and violence” as someone in my DMs poked at it a few days ago. It was my way of lampshading my sincerely held belief that Capitalism was literally Satanic, that the Chicago school and its creations in Chile are the literal manifestation of Moloch on Earth, for the last four centuries we have literally been in Hell, and here we were arguing about who was really brown enough.
And then one day someone used brownguilt to refer to me in person out-loud in the Reed College cafeteria. So I changed my @ and started blogging.
AIDAN: I think that leads a little bit into the first post you brought in. About diaristic 2014 Girl Tumblr being recreated in these Twitter spheres. I guess about that post, like, do you remember the moment of inspiration for that?
TANIA: So the first post I have to censor who specifically this is inspired by. He presents himself as a “sensitive young man” REDACTED REDACTED he is REDACTED REDACTED in Europe, REDACTED and I’m so curious to know, like, do his 14 year old students know he’s talking to Groypers in Twitter spaces? Do his nice parents know that he’s REDACTED REDACTED? Like, why are you on the internet?
AIDAN: That’s the eternal question of internet people, just why?
TANIA: Yeah. What really struck me about his account was how he would breakfastpost, and dinnerpost, lunchpost. And you see, like, him posing his wrist to make it look smaller. And there’d be Ezra Pound’s Cantos open and then like, a plate of oranges. And there's another account that’s done the same thing so much that he's been mocked for it multiple times, and… like, well, I shouldn’t say it but fuck it, I’ll say what I have to say. His posts will be like “song of Songs” or like the Kabbalah, and then like a plate of figs or a pomegranate.
Always fruit. Always sensually posed fruits. And really showing an eye to composition, color, and showing this kind of physique one would obtain after only eating fruits. Maybe a reference to cigarettes. I’ve made these posts too and it takes time. They’re never casual. It takes time to do framing and shot composition and such.
And I thought – how interesting that people who really resolutely present themselves as men online in an ironic-but-not-really almost manosphere way, like “women would never read Ezra Pound people” present themselves like 14 year old girls would a decade ago. Like, here’s a highly specific diet, here’s a classic book. And also like self-disciplining, not just “here’s this nice bowl of fruit I have,” but “this is how I live, and I must live in this specific way.” And this was before even the Ray Peat stuff was a big thing. This is like a true, aristocratic or enlightened way of eating.
They talk about it differently but it’s the exact same thing, broadcasting something really refined and put together but most importantly broadcasting it as a routine. And it fascinated me so much, the way this whole milieu talks about physical health — you would think people who read far-right figures would be on the gymmaxxing incel stuff, but they’re really not, they’re really concerned with their physique in a way that’s stereotypically associated with teenage girls, they’re watching what they eat to look small and delicate. It’s a rejection of the incel-gym stuff, “I'm sort of embodying the kind of erudite aristocrat that never has to work so I never develop muscle. But I'm not a slob either, like, I take care of my physique!” but in a way that has been stereotypically associated with women — restricting and making kind of pointed choices with what you eat.
AIDAN: On that point, about how these aesthetics kind of get unmoored from their groundings — do you think the foodposting is evidence of cross-pollination between these three spheres — Red Scare, girlblogging, bookish communist? Like, you’re a bookish communist touching on the other two spheres. But are these guys like Red Scare people touching on the girlbossing and bookish communist spheres? Is there cross-pollination going on?
TANIA: I think there is a degree of cross-pollination going on. Dasha’s online presence is an interesting case. You can’t talk about all this without talking about her specifically. The people who I’ve met who know one of the Red Scare podcast girls, they always know Dasha. One of my friends was saying, “Dasha’s the actress, she’s the one with ties to the art world, and Anna’s the ideologue.”
What I’m getting at is, Dasha’s a product of this cross pollination. She’s very much a product of the girlblogging sphere, was very obviously on Tumblr — when you see the “Sailor Socialism” video she became famous for, you see she’s such a Tumblresque person. At that point she’s a Social Democrat, or at least in the social world of Bernie Bros. But something she alludes to constantly in her social media is like anorexia, a really disordered relationship to food that she publicizes and romanticizes in the way bloggers would on Tumblr.
And now, after meeting Anna and starting the podcast, she has rightwingers looking at her, and she’s influenced by and influencing them. For someone who’s aesthetically-driven, following art and intellectual stuff, they get into Dasha because she’s an artist and then into all the rightwing stuff through her. Or on the other end, there’s girl bloggers who look at Dasha because she’s skinny and edgy and has this aura about her, and they listen to a few Red Scare episodes, and then next thing you know, they’re following the Ray Peat diet and eating shredded carrots. So that’s definitely a big nexus of cross-pollination.
AIDAN: So, second post. What’s up with that one?
TANIA: That’s the first post of mine that blew up in a way that I noticed. Or, well, I guess my first one was about “The Idiot, by Dostoevsky” people went crazy for that. But it felt so unearned, because I’m making a facile joke in it.
But on this one, the joke is it makes fun of therapyspeak and the way people psychoanalyze each other online. That feels like something that really suffuses the way dating is talked about online and in general, that emphasis on ways to categorize people and point to some sort of psychological cause for their behavior. Like ‘red flags,’ ‘icks,’ if he does this this this he’s that that that in a way that’s actually counterproductive towards understanding the person.
And the really interesting thing is, if you took the sort of techno-optimist perspective people had in the 80s and 90s, you’d think people having access to so many different accounts of so many different types of relationships would really enrich and deepen peoples’ understanding of relationships. Yet it’s seemingly done the exact opposite, narrowing it. And I think that’s why it did numbers. People were like “therapyspeak is annoying,” and the way people tie any sort of behavior to a pathological trauma response is weird and fucked up. So even though that post doesn’t reference dating at all, it was riffing on the posts that referenced dating and that’s what people responded to.
But the way it sort of came to me was, while I was working as a language assistant, I was always free but my friends were not. I was kind of making a joke of, “you have work? Come on, that’s not real, it's your trauma.” And there’s a thread in it too of the dysfunctional relationship our generation has with work.
AIDAN: Yeah, there’s so many hit tweets and memes on that theme, parodying therapyspeak and that same structure of “here’s a normal thing to say and do” and “now I’m pathologizing and redefining it.” But with a hit tweet like this, with 117,000 likes, it kind of reaches beyond those niches where your account or followers are based. So what’s that like?
TANIA: This one did reach beyond. Like, someone sent me Dean Kissick’s post about it on his Instagram story. He reposted it with another riff. And now there’s people seeing it with no initiation to my lore. I joked about wanting to sell vibrators on it, and did post a picture of myself which is what people do when they’re trying to sell vibrators. Obviously there was no vibrator to sell, but even like having, you know, two hundred and twenty people like a picture of myself — obviously it was because it was right under the tweet, but it was crazy to feel public in that way. And that was just a picture I took of myself and the apartment I was living in at the time.
I think part of when it crosses over is when the screenshot of the tweet circulates on other platforms. People don't even think of it as attached to a person then, they think of it as like a quote or an image. And that ties in well to the next tweet, because that did numbers not only on Twitter but on TikTok. It spawned like a whole sub genre of TikToks, and I think that is how people are mostly familiar with it.
A couple weeks ago I was hanging out with two people and I mentioned it before to one of them, and it came up, and the other person said, “that tweet actually annoys me so much.” and then he brought it up to a third person who joined us who was like, “oh yeah they did like the French professor tweet, that was them.”
And I've had people send me TikToks of it, and I've seen people on Tumblr posting it so it's a real kind of full circle moment. They posted as if it was a quote, as if it's from a movie or from a book. But it's not a quote from anything, right? Or I guess it's a quote from the body of work that is my Twitter account—
AIDAN: But I gotta say — it's a quote from life! I was in the room when he said that.
TANIA: Yeah! You were literally in the room. And it started out as like, yeah, a text to you and then I was just still thinking about it.
AIDAN: I remember too, I saw this tweet on TikTok and I was like “but that's Tania's tweet.” And I just felt this weird disconnect — so I imagine for you it must be even stranger to see it circulate and go full circle and kind of take on a life of its own.
TANIA: It really did feel like it took on a life of its own. It's so strange seeing all the different times I’ve been re-confronted with it. I had someone message me a few months ago who was teaching a course on Appalachian writing and they used it in their slideshow to say, like, “here's how I try to write.”
AIDAN: I also think that one in particular is really wholesome.
TANIA: It’s definitely one of the most wholesome tweets I’ve ever made. I think some people probably even found it like annoying and saccharine.
AIDAN: That's how you know you're doing it right.
TANIA: And also kind of corecore, indomitable human spirit
AIDAN: There’s another thing I wanted to ask about this one and about the other two. There's stuff like the accent mark on “catégories,” or like, the fact that it’s very stylized — there's only three periods and no other punctuation. I know you're a writer and a poet. And, like you said, the 24 year old dainty-wristed men are also composing photos and doing some kind of artistic aesthetic work. So where do you think the discipline of working through and writing something artistically meshes with it being on Twitter or being on Tumblr?
TANIA: I definitely think being on Twitter and posting so much made me a much better writer, and definitely made that sort of more central to how I think of myself. With the French “catégories” thing actually it was accidental autocorrect on the French keyboard.
AIDAN: So I overanalyzed.
TANIA: But I really like that reading! I'm glad that it happened because it is a nice touch, it brings you into the moment, like that’s how he really pronounced it. But I think that definitely also stylizes the tweet and, you know, sort of jumps between time frames and speaking, etc. Because you know for certain parts it’s EXPURGÉ speaking, and then there’s a time jump and it’s me.
AIDAN: You could say it's a form of free indirect style.
TANIA: Yeah. (laughs). Like a stream of consciousness. But I do usually edit a fair amount before I post unless it's a total throwaway tweet that I'm not putting much thought into. With the “I can’t, I have work” tweet I was thinking, “what’s the most distinctive way to parody this therapy talk?” Or, like with the first tweet, I was like “let me sort of paint the picture of this milieu.” It was also a bit of a sub tweet of this one specific guy because I wanted to see how he’d react to it.
And I did notice the person I was subtweeting start to call himself a “sensitive young man” more often and I think this is lodged in his brain a little bit. I think the ending is so strangely phrased because I didn't want to seem like a hater. Like I was trying to bring neither them nor the 2014 Tumblr girls down. It was this weird affectionate note of like, “I love both of you.” And “straddler” I guess because I was on Tumblr in 2014 but never fully in that girl sphere. You would think that I was like really deeply in it, but I was actually using Tumblr in a slightly different way. I had a poetry blog and stuff. I used it to consume writing and share my writing and share like screen tabs and pictures of paintings and photography and weird internet art.
But like really not at all like, “here’s my breakfast, here’s my skinny jeans.” I felt too insecure, I think, to participate in that stuff. And it didn't really interest me at the time. But it's something that's I’ve almost retroactively joined. So it’s me sort of like taking it all in.
And that's why I did all those ellipses, because I’m just sitting with it, it’s not so much an assertion it’s more all these things I'm noticing. I guess that's what the tone of that is supposed to be like.
AIDAN: On that last Tumblr point, to what extent do you think there's like a clear progression from 2014 Tumblr (not necessarily girl Tumblr or the parts Tumblr you were on) to the stuff that people are posting on Twitter or elsewhere today. Like do you see a chain of influence like in the way you'd say, I don't know, certain poets or writers influence each other, like… bad example but people are like Joan Didion really relies on Hemingway in some sense stylistically… Like, Tumblr is modernism or realism and then Twitter today is like new journalism. Is there a stylistic progression, you think?
TANIA: Yes. I saw someone put it on Twitter, like people our age — especially men our age — are engaging in the sort of self-mythologizing that girls who listened to Lana Del Rey in 2014 would be doing. Self-mythologizing became a really prominent mode of engagement with the Internet during Covid. The podcast Nymphet Alumni talks about this really well, how the Internet became people's entire world for like a year and a half which is a long time. And I feel like it's kind of weird that we talk about it so little now, although it’s kind of obvious at the same time.
Everything was the Internet. School, work, all of it blended into this weird myth that we were all scrolling through apart but together at the same time. And the only real thing to grab onto was aesthetics and out of that, self-mythologizing. You know I'm literally a deer. I’m literally an Italian mob trad wife. Literally a Slavic ballerina sitting down in the snow. And I think that crossed gender lines too. You have a lot of people transitioning or really altering their appearance during COVID, again sort of a combination of freedom and idleness.
But people our age — I think in a way we're drawn back to it because we remember when we were self-mythologizing in high school, wondering what would be when we'd grow up. And now we have grown up, but if anything the world is so much less certain. So it still feels like we're sitting around wondering what we're going to be when we grow up. So it's kind of comforting to return to moodboarding it instead of acting towards something real or something tangible.
AIDAN: Wow.
TANIA: A hot take to conclude on, yeah.
AIDAN: I think that's ultimately why I follow @boywaif, your content soothes the psychic turmoil that comes out of growing up. I'm also sure for people younger than we are, your account must be a source of… solace?
TANIA: I hope so. I had a tweet once of... I posted like, “I imagine that my account is me sprinkling rose petals on your floor.”
Which was inspired by the fact that I would buy dried crushed rose petals and they would end up on my floor because I wouldn’t clean my kitchen which was also my bedroom because I lived in a studio. But I like to imagine I'm pouring you a warm cup of tea or you know, we're sitting across from each other and I'm gently showing you stuff I’m reading. Saying things and noticing.