Sex and the city

It has become almost a rite of passage in any talking stage to do the dreaded stalk: who your current infatuation is following on Instagram. After many failed talking stages and first dates, I feel as if I’ve seen it all: hot ex-girlfriends, Instagram models, OnlyFans baddies, charliekirk1776 — the list goes on.

Recently, I went on a couple of dates with a witty, charming and smart man whose company I enjoyed thoroughly. I made the mistake of combing through his 1,400-account-long “following” list, only to find such atrocities as I previously mentioned, most notably a lot of ass-shaking.

In the sixth episode of “Sex and the City,” Miranda had to raid her date’s apartment to find out that he was into being spanked by finding a porn DVD hidden in his underwear drawer — how vintage! Yet, today’s men will follow accounts that post (practically) porn on their main account.

Now, I am obviously no prude (or porn-shamer, for that matter). I mean, porn’s obvious anti-feminism could be its own topic, but that’s a discussion for another day.

What you do with your private time is your own business. But, if you let all of your Instagram followers have access to what and who you’re into, how is that different from walking around with a sign hanging off of you that says, “I jerk off to Daisy Keech’s ass”?

I can already hear the anti-stalking community knocking down my door — some (men) may find it ridiculous to investigate who someone follows, especially when the list is hundreds or thousands of accounts long. 

But is it really “stalking” if you follow these baddies from an account under your full name that anyone can find? I mean, it doesn’t exactly take advanced hacking skills to access this information.

Real stalkers know that if you want to keep up with a potentially suspicious account on Instagram, you make a second account and keep all the people with whom you want to keep up in your “recently searched” log.

I don’t mean to generalize here, but men usually do not recognize the repercussions of lurking because they don’t do it themselves. They don’t understand the parasocial relationship that exists between you and the girl that your boyfriend called hot in 2019 when he was in ninth grade.

As a self-proclaimed all-time great of internet stalking, I have practically gone to the dark web for information about a guy that I once saw at the Recreation Center — and your main Instagram account’s “following” list requires nowhere near that level of expertise. 

But does the phenomenon of men following their guilty pleasures on Instagram signal something larger? Back in the day, teenage boys had to hide Playboy magazines under their beds so that their moms wouldn’t find it. Now, they follow their moms and Livvy Dunne from the same account.

While feminism has advanced to unprecedented levels, men objectify women more publicly than ever. I don’t mean to sound boomer-esque, but young men these days could at least put in the effort to type “pornhub.com” into the search bar.

Above all, following a bunch of porn-adjacent accounts on Instagram only makes you look bad. Everyone knows that content to get off to is readily available on the internet, so why do you have to follow it? So it can find you on your feed, rather than the other way around?

Men, girls do look at your following list. So do their friends. And their friends’ friends. Girls you’ve never even heard of know that you are horny for random women on the internet because the word spreads. 

I have had friends whose boyfriends followed some truly atrocious accounts on Instagram. When they recount their fights about this topic to me, men frequently cite the same points: 

1) They won’t ever actually meet these women, so it doesn’t matter. 2) They followed the accounts before the relationship began and they forgot/didn’t care to unfollow. 3) They like her work in other industries.

Look, I’ve had a celebrity crush or two. I like to look at hot people. In fact, I would say it is one of my greatest passions. Yet, I understand that it would be off-putting to potential romantic partners to publicly display that I can’t look away from abs or biceps. It also just would make me look like an out of control horndog to put my reputation at risk for the sake of seeing hot people in my feed, constantly.

Open your phone, get on Instagram and get unfollowing! You will get laid more, I promise.

Diana Paradise wants to follow you on Instagram.