On Oct. 25, British Vogue published an essay by Chanté Joseph titled “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?” Subsequently, the internet lost its collective mind over it.
The piece was subversive, eye-catchy and appeared to capture a growing sentiment that has been waiting to burst from beneath the surface ever since Sabrina Carpenter dropped “Please, Please, Please” in June 2024. I’d recommend fully reading it to understand the discourse, but it essentially rests upon this idea that it is no longer cool, chic or good aura for women to publicly tie themselves to their boyfriend. Instead, more women are subtly “soft-launching” their relationship, providing only basic, anonymized details to signal to the public that one is partnered but not telling them with whom.
The reason for this, as many across the internet have built on Joseph’s original concept, is that tying oneself to a boyfriend means creating a brand liability. Men, after all, generally have bad habits of doing things which are quite embarrassing to their girlfriends. This could be seen as something like cheating, but also other slip-ups, like how one popular Substack writer put it: “One bad outfit, one questionable like, and you’re publicly reevaluating your judgment.”
The key part of that quote is the word “publicly.” This is where the entire question originally presented by Joseph centers on: the idea of a boyfriend as part of one’s public persona. The article, and its progeny, views a boyfriend as a symbolic representation of status and partnership. The ideal presentation of one is strictly impersonal — at least, for the sake of the audience. In fact, the primary evidence she uses to explain her concept is from influencers, the population of people most dependent on the publicization of one’s personal life. She uses them as far as it’s possible to draw conclusions from trends in their content, which she then applies to the general societal mood.
This is because influencers represent only the extreme endpoint of a feeling commonly seen across society right now. They are the people whose personal lives are most exposed by the internet, but to some degree, all of ours are already exposed in the same way. Social media has created a world in which cameras are everywhere and people are always potentially watching. There’s no telling when we might be getting recorded by some stranger and put in front of an online audience that we neither measure nor control.
On the flipside of that, we are also purposefully putting ourselves online more than ever before. The process of creating and curating personal content and putting it onto the internet affects almost everyone to some degree. We exist in a generation of people who have an overwhelming desire to create and express a version of themselves online in the public forum, whether that be on Instagram, TikTok, X, formerly known as Twitter, or maybe even the pages of your local student newspaper… but I digress.
We are all constantly aware of the self as it is presented to others digitally, because we are also the consumers watching others as they exhibit themselves online. The gaze we put towards others eventually becomes the one we put towards ourselves. It’s a reflexive act. As philosopher Byung-Chul Han states, it is to the point where we live in a “digital panopticon.” We constantly act as though we are being watched, because we can never tell when we are or who is watching.
When we take this into account, the concept of an embarrassing boyfriend becomes all the more interesting. As another Substack writer argued, it shows that, “if Instagram did not exist we would basically not be having this conversation.” If our entire private lives weren’t put on the internet for display, people wouldn’t feel that watchful gaze that tells them to curate it all perfect and pretty. They wouldn’t feel embarrassed at their boyfriends solely because of the potential for them to cause some harm to their image as it is consumed by a faceless, amorphous online audience. The issue wouldn’t be getting turned into “the meme, the ‘couldn’t be me’ quote tweet,” but rather people could focus on the actual harm being perpetrated in relationships.
Credit: all points north
It’s more important to figure out why boyfriends are embarrassing than it is to discuss why women lose online followers when they post them. This discourse “engages in neither critical nor emotional work” on the subject, but focuses on love only as it is represented in content, on the aesthetics of it. When harm happens, interrogate the harm, not how it looks to other people. Encourage the work, from both sides of a partnership, to not do things that are embarrassing or harmful. In other words, touch grass and stop worrying about perception; do something about the problem.
Now, there’s something to be said that a significant portion of this article diverges from the direct statements of the original article by Joseph and focuses heavily on the points of discourse that came from it. As far as that article is concerned, there is still value in understanding the cultural “appreciation” for a boyfriend, because that does communicate something very interesting about the state of gender relations in the world right now. Although, as an aside, I’d question how much of society actually thinks like this. There are large conservative portions of society that do not romanticize the single life and the author does not consider them. This, frankly, is probably also due to the “online-ness” of the article’s focus, and that is ultimately the issue. While exploring a real societal shift, it focuses on the wrong aspects. If you’re worried your boyfriend is embarrassing, don’t worry about what Instagram will think — just dump him.