When Libs of TikTok Come Knocking
Suddenly, she shows school pride....
At Montessori, when we were in 9-12 (the Montessori lingo for 4th-6th grade), we had an event called “Sex and Pizza Night.” The concept was that students could submit questions anonymously and educators, teachers, and parents had the ability to address sex as frankly as they could. (I used to tell a very clever joke I felt I made up that was something along the lines of, “I like to skip the pizza and head straight for the good stuff!” Badum-cha.) It was deeply awkward, but also slightly profound. Adults were willing to talk to us about sex. It wasn’t scary. People had it, and when they did, they had a right to demand respect and expect communication.
The questions, aside from being tinged with a lot of fear and apprehension (“So, does sex actually feel good?”) were mostly about puberty. Because when you are between the ages of 9 and 12 years old, your body begins to change. And, like, I guess you can try and just ignore that…but it might not be a good idea.
And in 2022, it appears that addressing that moment, the liminal space a person dwells in between the child and adult (that, frankly, many of us linger in longer than we like) is more fraught and political than ever. Especially when that person knows they aren’t straight.
Today, my mother texted me: “Project Veritas just went after Francis Parker,” which, in my terminal condition of being extremely online, is not surprising. Francis W. Parker is my HS alma mater—I was a very lucky scholarship student and am going to my classmate’s 40th birthday party tomorrow, because our school was tiny and we are mostly still bros. (68 kids in my graduating class, though I was a consummate punk and rebel.)
I actually walked along the sidewalk of Parker last week, over Thanksgiving, reminiscing about all of the extremely woo-woo stuff that made Parker both frustrating and special. We sat on the floor. We discussed the case for reparations. We didn’t have bells between classes, but a rotating selection of jam bands pumped over the speakers (this, I hated). It was, as nomenclature would come to call it, extremely woke.
Project Veritas is an extremely ethically suspect far right activist group that creates “gotcha” style videos, usually of workers inside politically targeted spaces, like abortion centers or leftist organizations. They take non-consensual footage and generally edit it to their needs, and then pipe it out to far right spaces like Libs of TikTok.
*deep sigh*
Libs of TikTok, if you don’t know, is a woman who spends her time scouring TikTok for examples of “wokism in action”, usually someone exploring their gender or discussing intersectionality, and then makes fun of them, driving their hundreds of thousands of followers to attack and bully their targets. Its cause celebré is anti-LGBTQ+ messaging, and its focus on these spaces possibly inspired and often capitalized on the recent increase of anti-LGBTQ+ attacks, like the recent shooting in Colorado Springs.
So, like. Parker in 2002 would have been a great target. Parker in 2022, when moral panics seem to be at a 30 year high, is especially ripe. Which is why I received an email today from my former principal (Dan Frank, who was the faculty sponsor of my slam poetry team), explaining that, well:
[We] are heartbroken to learn that one of our colleague’s words have been severely misrepresented for a malicious purpose. Project Veritas is a far-right activist group that produces deceptively edited videos of secret recordings in an effort to discredit mainstream media organizations, progressive groups and educational institutions.
Promoted by Project Veritas, Libs of TikTok, Jack Posobiec, Christopher Rufo (the guy who coined the term “critical race theory”) and the rest of the retweet-this-to-spread-gay-panic crew shared a video of Parker’s current Dean of Student Life discussing sex ed, in which he had an LGBTQ+ organization in to discuss queer sex ed with students. And, of course, dildos and buttplugs were passed out, which is the pull quote everyone is running with. The educator called it “cool”. (The exact context of the conversation is absolutely lost to Project Veritas’s editing, so it is unclear what he was referring to as cool.) I’m not linking to it, but you can see the chaotic chumming of the waters below:
Since then, my alma mater has been so inundated with hate mail and threats they’ve needed to add additional security, and as of tonight, all their social media pages are pulled down—which makes sense in regards to the safety of the community. The teacher is being targeted as a “hashtag groomer”, and the internet is rife with demands to see him arrested.
Several things:
This makes me unreasonably mad.
There is this knee-jerk reaction we all have to the word groomer now that makes us so defensive because there is viscerally nothing worse than being accused of harming children. Calling someone a groomer immediately puts them on the defensive. Even feeling like you are defending yourself from such an accusation is wildly unpleasant and horrendous. It appears that folks like the above really understand the power of that accusation—and the wild furor such a label inspires.
Arrested? I did a little digging, and I don’t think there is an age law around who can buy sex toys. So, while having sex toys in a class may squick you out, it isn’t illegal. Your 15 year old can wander into a Target and pick herself up a vibrator today.
Parker appears to be defending this teacher, which: Good on them. The context is lost, but more importantly, sex toys are a part of queer sexuality. Should they be trying them out in school? Hell no, but (speaking as a grad) I’m fairly sure that’s not what’s happening here. As my classmate Elias (and class president ‘02, hell yeah) says: “This had better not make a fucking blip on the board's radar and they'd better stand by him and the practices. Like he said, it's queer sex. We're supposed to get sex education (which I’m sure these fascists oppose even in hetero-assuming formats), so why should it be hetero-normative sex ed?” Boom.
As if it matters, but this isn’t the Dean of Students, it’s the Dean of Student Life, which is a different role entirely. When I was there, the proxy of that role that we had was an anti-Apartheid activist who worked as MLK’s security team. So?
Were we all heathens? …Maybe? But at least we were really smart heathens.
It feels weird when a moral panic lands in your backyard, hits people you know, and enters your house and begins to make a mess of things. It also feels weird because, you wonder, how much of a panic is it, anyway? How many people care about drag queens giving baked goods to teens?
The truth is: All it takes is one to feel like it is his divine right to prevent whatever outrage is happening in our pizza shops, night clubs, or hospitals to show up and deliver violence. Just one.
One of my favorite Twitter friends, the incredible Parker Malloy (who shares both the name and the city of the subject at hand) shared a recent transcript from her friends at Some More News that really struck home with me (emphasis mine):
Take the recent “groomer” panic that has right-wingers all bunched up in their grundles about supposed pedophilia and out-of-control wokeness in Disney cartoons and public schools. The Libs of TikTok account, which we’ve talked about before, takes advantage of the fact that moral panics usually begin with factual events before escalating to absurd gibber-fibs. In this case, sometimes gay or bi or trans teachers or caregivers will talk to students about their identity. If anyone sits and really thinks about this – it’s not a big deal at all. There’s no formal instruction going on about gender identity or sexuality with young kids, and if you watch the videos posted by the account, it’s typically just a teacher or caregiver talking about identity in a totally reasonable way. The same way you might explain to a child why some people’s skin is a different color than theirs.
But, Libs of TikTok’s audience hates queer people, so once they establish the true story of some teachers speaking to their students about gender identity, they begin to build on that story with manufactured bullsh*t designed to whip people up into a sudsy panic. A real froth-fest. The Great British Hate-Off. And the people buying into the panic are none the wiser. Because it confirms their prejudice, they’re disinclined to verify whether or not it’s actually true.
Take something out of context, attach children in peril because GAYS (!!), and amplify it. This is a group that rails against cancel culture but gets #ButtPlugDean trending to put this guy on Fox News, and send a rabid group of folks wearing wraparound face glasses into his LinkedIn messages. Because the pushback against wokeism and “cancel culture” continues to be, on its face, an effort to destroy the guardrails that target harassment, inequity, and accountability. So, like, don’t fall for it. And hope Francis Parker doesn’t either.
I dunno, maybe I’ll delete that post about D&D before someone starts connecting me with a cabal since Satanic panic is back, baby.
Well, at least it stopped us from talking about Kanye for a moment.