West Elm Caleb

I'm Sorry I Had To

Ok fine. I’ll talk about West Elm Caleb. I mostly avoid stuff like this because the dating politics of straight women don’t interest me. However this whole thing has snowballed to a degree that I simply can’t stay quiet anymore. I put something on the memeforum close friend's instagram story explaining my thoughts in brief, thinking that would scratch the itch and I would be done with this forever, but I can’t stop. I keep thinking of things to say. 

The Man The Myth The Legend

If you don’t know who West Elm Caleb is, it started with a TikTok with one girl warning the other New York City girls to watch out for a designer at West Elm named Caleb. There weren’t really specifics but it was more lighthearted and fun than other “watch out for this man if you live in this city” videos of the same genre.  Then other girls chimed in. I scrolled past these videos because I don’t live in New York and, again, I don’t care about the dating lives of straight women. It mostly amounts to serial ghosting, having a pre-made playlist he sends to every girl, and hooking up with multiple girls at the same time. None of these things are that bad. To me, it all seems like a failure to DTR, an idea that was drilled into me as a necessary part of relationships in the modern era since I was twelve. 

Everyone on TikTok has their knives out for him. This led to all the tech writers writing about it and warning of targeted online harassment campaigns and how bad they are. Finally on Twitter people were finally willing to say that this whole thing is stupid and that Caleb had done nothing wrong. Certainly nothing that warranted the treatment he was getting. 

Everyone is talking around the issue. What does West Elm Caleb represent? Everything that gets popular on the internet is not actually what it's about. We should know this by now. Here everyone is trying to prescribe a problem after the fact. Everyone wants to attach their pet issue to West Elm Caleb. He is a symbol of so many more things than simply ghosting. He is a convergence of many grievances we all have with the current internet landscape. Everyone is projecting and no one’s right.

First of all I want to say the tone of this whole thing is completely out of control. The first video starts off as fun and flippant.  If you want to blow off some steam and call the person you were casually dating a fuckboy, that’s fine. However the whole thing takes a turn when it becomes a campaign of warning other women about him. Warn them about what exactly? I do not want to live in a world where we frame all emotionally uncomfortably in dating as a form of, or a guaranteed precursor to, sexual violence. Women warning other women about a man has always revolved around coded language of sexual assault. Dating a lot of women that one met on a dating app and not feeling a strong emotional attachment to them and acting accordingly is not a crime. It might hurt your feelings but so does all rejection. People say they don’t want to be ghosted but really they don’t want to be rejected. 

People have been calling this a whisper network but these women are not whispering. The whole point of a whisper network is to keep it within your community. It is about privacy. It is not about making things public and airing things out. Once things move to the public internet, it is no longer a whisper network but a call out. The internet has made our communities bigger and with more wandering ears and eyes. The point of this was to reach as many people as possible to call someone out for something that is just simply not that bad and mostly well within his rights. This goes against almost every tenant of a whisper network.

That's really the central problem with this story. The publicness of the internet. This story is pure internet from start to finish. It has no life without the internet and it reveals that for all the ways the internet has made it easier to connect, we have not learned the rules for how to connect. We do not know how to treat people we meet on dating apps. We do not know what personal details are ok to reveal to our followers on our public accounts. We know how to use our dating lives for content but the ethics are fishy. It involves thinking twice and considering how another person might feel. Something we’re not all automatically good at. 

Empathy is learned behavior. It’s a skill we get better at through practice. The internet makes it even more difficult to practice. The person on the screen isn’t real, I can’t touch them and I’ll never see them irl. I can treat them however I want. The screen creates a divide that stops us from recognizing the humanity of the people we engage with. No one has manners anymore and that's bad. Not because we necessarily need to all be polite all the time but because there's no initial framework for how to behave. We need to have rules in order to break them. There is simply no such thing as common decency. It’s not enough to just get rid of the old rules, we need to create new ones.

This isn’t new though. The concept of a private person has existed as long as celebrity. The problem is that we don't understand modern celebrity. We’re still not great with the ethics and manners of celebrity but it’s even worse because we don’t consider these people really famous. TikTok famous isn’t real famous. Sure it’s not typical or even lasting but it still meets the technical definition. What we haven’t grappled with is that TikTok is just more democratic TV. With that democracy though, there’s no one to blame but ourselves. There’s no production company or studio executive or legal department to blame when everything goes south. 

We love democracy. Or we think we love democracy. We were told in 7th grade civics that we get an equal say in a democratic society and whether or not its true about our government, the idea is intoxicating. We want it to be true. We want our collective voices to be heard and useful and powerful. That’s why we love the internet.  If we love someone we can rally around them and make them famous. Even better, if we hate someone we can tear them down. The powerlessness we feel about the state of the world is funneled into a place we have power. The court of public opinion. 

We believe that we’re all equal on the Internet. That everyone using the internet has an equal chance of virality. Each person can start a Twitter account. Every person can post on tiktok. Anyone can say anything about anyone else and it’s fine because we’re all allowed to do that. Except it’s not equal. We know it's not equal. Half of all conversations on TikTok are about how the algorithm favors rich thin straight white people. We are well aware of the inequality of who gets to blow up on TikTok. Yet we continue to have these debates as if the internet is just real life but bigger. The internet is a big high school and this is just gossip we heard in the bathroom.

It isn’t that though. Some people are paid to post. They are paid to generate content and views. They are figuring out a way to go viral to launch their careers. We forget that the second we turn the camera on things are no longer pure reality but a representation of reality. We’re all being played for views and content. The girls on screen are not our friends and we have no reason to protect them. They need us as wrapt viewers. We don’t need them.

West Elm Caleb made all the girls, who were to some extent professional content creators, a little bit famous for the day. It made a man who had no desire to be famous the center of public ire. It gave everyone (including me) a little think piece to write. Everyone took their stand and now we’re waiting for the next thing. We’ve said our piece and learned nothing. There’s many take-aways but none of them are easy to digest or have immediate fixes. No one’s mind is changed and enough people are on either side, that I would call this a draw, discourse wise.

My personal take is that West Elm Caleb should be the martyr for a new kind of sexual revolution. I’m praying that after this incident women will rewrite the rules of engagement for modern dating. If I were an enterprising young heterosexual woman, I would use this opportunity to make myself the new Carrie Bradshaw or even Emily Post. Men are playing a numbers game, ladies. Maybe it's time to change the rules or even the game entirely.  But that’s your call.

No one’s mind is changed. No one is better off. We’re at net neutral for this whole thing. All I can say is conflict is not abuse and ghosting is good but we knew that already. At least Bad Art Friend was fun to debate. This was mind numbingly boring but so are most stories about dating that don’t involve clandestine meet ups and international travel. 

In Conclusion: