You Can Do It, Baby! — An Examination of Tenderqueers
Growing up on Tumblr during the 2010s, I was definitely a part of the tenderqueer subculture as a teenager. I reblogged threads of the many variations of LGBTQ+ terminology, images of sapphic photoshoots with hazy lighting, friends’ selfies highlighting too-short bangs, nose scrunches, background plants, and some version of the word “baby” in the caption — “sleepy baby”, “small baby”, “baby’s doing their best”.
While this infantilizing language makes me intensely uncomfortable now, I can’t deny how prevalent it was and still is in internet circles. “Smol bean” is a phrase Urban Dictionary describes as “someone who is innocent and/or adorable” and is most commonly used in fandom subcultures. Typically male characters or celebrities are branded smol beans, ones who are known for their cute looks and absentminded, silly, or naive behavior. See: Louis Tomlinson from One Direction, the angel Castiel from Supernatural, Jung Kook from BTS, Youtubers Dan Howell and Phil Lester. Fans dissect scenes and interviews for endearing moments and even invent their own with fanfiction, ignoring the whole of the person in favor of what makes them adorable, which in many cases is their queerness or imagined queerness. Another phrase that seems to have come out of this era of fandom is “protect him [or them or her] at all cost”, a hyperbolic declaration of devotion to a certain person solely on their reputation of being cutesy or perceived as innocent.
Given this brief internet history synopsis, it makes sense that this language has migrated onto other social media platforms and though it does not mean exactly the same thing it once did, the sentiment feels the same. Instagram and Facebook are the perfect places to curate your own personal corner of relationships and content, becoming the same kind of echo chamber that Tumblr famously fostered. If you see yourself as a “smol bean”, your following list/homepage may show animal videos, cooking ASMR, drawings of animals telling you, “you can do it!”, and perhaps even the dreaded therapist influencers.
This article details how therapy is yet another avenue of monetized social media content, which thanks to the speedy circulation of algorithms, is seen by millions of people. While most of these mental health professionals have education and access in mind for their young audience, it’s clear that a minute-long TikTok video isn’t enough to diagnose anyone or even define terms like “gaslighting” or “lovebombing”. Weekman writes that when therapists interact with thousands of people at a time and market their tips like life coaches, instead of helping they can end up “arming their audience with a shiny new buzzword they may not fully comprehend.” Additionally, the content going viral seems to be made by white middle-class creators for users of the same background, which historically is not the demographic lacking access to mental health resources. Weekman, referencing the podcast Sounds Like a Cult, goes on to describe how when these therapists go full influencer, their advice sounds less like a medical professional’s and more like a friend’s, urging you to cut off “toxic” people and comb through your friendships for any sign of abuse.
A collection of faulty mental health lingo and a self-righteous attitude about their own decisions may be where some of it goes south: tenderqueers are recognized by others in the LGBTQ+ community for their overutilization of accusatory therapy terminology in standard interpersonal situations. I’m reminded of this meme:
I’d like to take a moment to say that making an ableist commentary on a community of sexual minorities is not the intention of this essay. I do, however, find the concept of tenderqueer subculture interesting because of its implications for politics and the cities that tend to foster this culture. I feel that I am able to discuss this based on my identity as a queer woman of color living in a “progressive” American city and my experiences on the internet with others of similar backgrounds.
So, while maybe politically a little risky, what does this meme tell us?
“Sock”, the white person supposed to represent a tenderqueer roommate in Portland, leans in the doorway, hands together, apparently too shy or awkward to tell the third roommate something that’s upsetting them. The second roommate, a Black individual, delivers the news that Sock believes the third roommate is being ableist by asking them to do the dishes. The joke here is that this is an unnecessarily convoluted social interaction, made confusing by Sock’s refusal to tell the third roommate that they simply can’t do the dishes right now. Sock also uses aggressive, confrontational language but feels like they have to speak through a conduit, who happens to be a Black person, and even stands awkwardly behind them during the conversation.
Is this meme ableist or queerphobic? I am prepared to say no. Many people who recirculated this image on Instagram, in my social circles at least, were themselves queer and neurodivergent. “Sock” can be a self-own, a light teasing of how some young trans and nonbinary people seem to choose their names.
The humor in the dish situation, in my opinion, is less that Sock won’t do the dishes but that their decision for avoiding this small task is to blame the other roommate and create house drama instead of just telling them, “Hey, I’m having a hard day today mental health-wise, can I do the dishes later or trade household tasks for something I feel capable of doing right now?” This attitude of treating others like they are “weaponizing privilege” is not only silly and hyperbolic but inappropriate, especially when addressing BIPOCs who experience the violence of racial privilege much more frequently.
Furthermore, accusing your friends and roommates of toxic behavior when any kind of conflict arises sets you up for social and emotional disaster. Regardless if you are neurodivergent or neurotypical, conflict is a reality of life, and like Dolly Rose writes in their fantastic piece “The Cursed Privilege of the Tenderqueer”: “If I retreated every time someone told me they thought I was doing something wrong (because as we know, policing the behavior of Black people is the favorite activity of both the collective and individual white), I would never get a single thing done. Conflict is not abuse, you will survive it, and you’ll come out better on the other end.”
The tenderqueer dating scene is also an interesting space. A Vice article refers to these individuals as the “softboi[s] of the queer community”, which I heavily concur with, having been deep in a friend group where everyone seemed to have romances going with each other simultaneously. Our conversations were rich with astrology analysis, art, past trauma, and feelings of love towards each other that felt too deep to even explain. We daydreamed of our futures together living in a communal home where we’d play music and cook for each other. Within this bubble of affection, however, were spikes of passive-aggression that put the friendships on pause until whoever was upset stopped giving everyone the cold shoulder. For all of the Tumblr text posts we created to vent our deepest frustrations and fears, we could not face each other and say what was bothering us. While the drama of my teenage years does not reflect on current tenderqueer trends, some elements still ring true to me: if we send a text to someone like Sock to voice an issue or ask what’s wrong, we would get an answer where “Everything is about “space” and “holding” and “healing” and “intimacy” and if they’re not replying to your WhatsApps with an essay including these words, they’re probably just replying “haha :3” five days after leaving you on read.”
The aspect of tenderqueers that feels the most pertinent is their tendency to victimize themselves when they tend to be of the white middle or upper-class background, often coastal elites. They may bulldoze other marginalized voices so they can tweet about how they perceived a barista to be somehow committing a microaggression about the specificity of their coffee order or otherwise trying to accuse strangers of abuse. They may center themselves in conversations that should be led by others or not engage in political discourse at all for further fear of conflict. The “uwu save the bees” rhetoric in the very first meme in this essay shows that some tenderqueers have the energetic/emotional capacity for interacting with current issues, but advocating for bees and “love your mother earth” bumper stickers are the easiest to align yourself with because they hold no political weight. Certain Pride events are arguably apolitical celebrations too — specifically the ones with corporate sponsors and practice rainbow capitalism and do little to recognize the violence and resistance that was necessary for queer liberation at Stonewall and afterwards. Buying a Pride edition Nike shoe has no impact on giving aid or solidarity, it just gives more money to a company that uses sweatshop labor and makes you look performative and tacky. Except for this handsome devil, which I will be immediately purchasing:
Personally, I would love to save the bees and reverse climate change. How will we do this? By forcing corporations to pick up the mess they’ve made, platforming actual leftist candidates, and making natural resources public goods instead of private? Oh, no? We should just post on Facebook for National Bee Awareness Day and hope that one day the billionaires have a change of heart? Cool.
This brings into question which spaces are safe, according to these people, and who are they safe for? If a space is safe because there are boundaries where you never bring up past trauma or present conflict, how can you grow within it? I agree that everyone deserves rest from stress and no one is required to doomscroll and make themselves feel horrible. Yet there is something to be critiqued when ignoring issues that involve you, like systemic racial oppression, because they make you uncomfortable. It’s not appropriate to pick and choose your battles when you’re choosing vague bee slogans over civil rights. As Dolly Rose says, “We all have the right to boundaries about how and when we engage with people, but when someone needs to tell you about a hurt you’ve created, your boundaries are no longer the priority. Especially not when the person you’ve hurt holds less privilege than you do.”
I mentioned before that I live in Portland, Oregon, a city notorious for its “woke” politics. It is deeply disturbing to me that our social services and individual behaviors don’t reflect that idea: 58% of our homeless population is unsheltered due to a lack of emergency and permanent beds and 39.6% of our homeless are people of color, despite them only making up 32% of our overall population. In a place that brags about how socially left-wing it is, there are very few leftist policies that make us stand out. However safe we want to be for LGBTQ+ folks, our city is still very unsafe for others due to racism, crime, and the danger of becoming homeless or dying of a drug overdose.
I see middle to upper-class Portlanders post egregious opinions on the Nextdoor app, which clearly is a safe space for them, where they congratulate their neighbors on having an encampment near their million-dollar house swept by police and theorize about how the non-white family panhandling by the grocery store is actually a criminal conspiracy involving human trafficking. Obviously not every Nextdoor user in my area is a tenderqueer, but in a city known for being queer-friendly, there are bound to be some folks who share the same politics as their wealthy NIMBY parents. With both difficult emotional situations and homeless tents, to them, if it’s out of sight, it’s out of mind.
So, is there a moral good or bad in being “soft”? It’s complicated, of course. To me as a teen, softness sometimes felt like a currency or even a virtue in an online world where many users were aggressive and preachy. The idea of radical softness meant little to me since it was removed from its academic origins. I also knew it as a catchy feminist saying, something for corporations to co-opt from the people and monetize. But it has the potential for much more than a moodboard or a marketing tactic. Daisy Jones from Vice asserts that “When queer people are more likely to have experienced violence and abuse, it is radical to cultivate and encourage a culture of softness and positivity within our community and modes of interaction. But this isn’t about that. It’s more about wearing that type of language as an aesthetic.”
Radical softness can exist and be practiced as a form of healing and resistance, so long as it is truly inclusive and used in good faith. Where it fails is when it’s used as an excuse for why someone isn’t participating in social responsibilities (listening, learning and unlearning, doing work to better themselves) when they are called upon. I want to live in a society where all marginalized people can join together in liberated communities and work toward a better future, and that requires a lot of emotional labor, conflict resolution, and problem-solving. We will need to learn to balance times of rest with times of work.
