No Laughing Matter: How Social Media Romanticises Abusive Behaviour

If you’ve looked at social media at all during the past few weeks, you’ve probably heard about rapper Kanye West, or, as he is now legally and professionally known, Ye, and his hilarious, goofily chivalrous attempts to win back his cold-hearted wife who has run off with someone else. At least that’s what Ye and his many supporters on TikTok, Twitter and Instagram would have you believe is going on.

The truth, however, is more sinister: Ye is a walking red flag and has been for quite some time. Long before his latest escapades, he was known to tweet barely coherent “roasts” of his now ex, socialite and businesswoman Kim Kardashian, and her family, including one directing expletives at her infant niece, Stormi. However the most concerning of these tweets, in my opinion, was not a conspiracy theory or a sweary outburst.

Source: Twitter

As shown above, it states that then-pregnant wife Kim did not understand what a blessing he was to her. Many people found this tweet hilarious, with one business even, somewhat bizarrely, making it into a T-shirt to sell, but even back then, I found it deeply unsettling.

As well as being a textbook red flag for narcissistic behaviour and emotional abuse, it struck a personal chord with me. I heard those words a number of months before Ye tweeted them, from a toxic and emotionally abusive ex-partner. When I decided I’d had enough of being hacked, tracked, stolen from, gaslit and, on one occasion, verbally attacked for attending my grandfather’s funeral instead of chatting with said ex on social media, he told me those words almost verbatim. “You just don’t see what a blessing I am in your life.” Now, in a healthy and happy relationship, I can say honestly that if that was a blessing, I hope to be eternally cursed.

However, before allowing me to move on, this ex-partner spent many years harassing me via social media, a pattern I am seeing Ye echo as he badgers Kim. He posts about her constantly, broadcasts their private conversations as an expression of “love,” paints himself as the lovelorn victim and ping pongs between aggression and lovebombing (remember the truck bed full of roses on Valentine’s Day as she tried to enjoy her day with her new partner, Pete Davidson?) as he tries to convince her to reconsider their separation.

Even during his brief relationship with actress Julia Fox, he continued to harass his ex-wife, mirroring how my own toxic ex-partner moved on while refusing to allow me to do the same and reinforcing my belief that this is not about winning Kim back. This is about making her suffer.

We need to be clear: Ye is not being sweet or funny. He is stalking and harassing a woman who does not want to be with him due to his own behaviour, insulting and threatening her partner, even encouraging his fans to “scream at the loser at the top of your lungs” if they saw him, and undoubtedly affecting the lives of his own children in the process. Only when Kim pointed out that his vendetta against her partner could end in violence did Ye explicitly discourage his fans from hurting Davidson, who he refers to with the nonsensical nickname “Skete”, but not without ominously adding that he would handle the situation himself. He is admittedly a talented lyricist and rapper, and Kim is regarded by many as annoying, but this does not excuse his behaviour. Abuse and manipulation cannot be validated purely because we like the perpetrator and dislike the victim based on media portrayals of the small parts of their lives and personalities they allow us to see.

And, concerningly, the vindication and validation of Ye and his deranged behaviour is not the only trend on this chilling note. An audio clip from the musical Heathers has recently gone viral on TikTok, garnering tens of thousands of videos and millions of views. In the clip, unhinged serial killer JD, who has manipulated girlfriend Veronica into assisting with his evil acts, is outside a door screaming and emotionally manipulating her into opening it and taking him back.

“VERONICA,” he bellows, “open the door, please!” before whimpering that he does not want to fight any more, then reverting to aggression as he warns “Veronica, don’t make me come in there.”

To anyone who has been in the shoes of Veronica, in other words, who has been browbeaten by a toxic partner through the cycle of aggression and pleading, the audio is at least mildly distressing. For others, it is creepy and worrying, as it was surely intended to be. However, many TikTok users, primarily young women and teenage girls, see it very differently. They have taken to the video platform in their droves to post videos of themselves acting as if they are Veronica, running to the door to show how eager they would be to open it, or writing captions to the same effect.

Their comment sections quickly fill up with all-caps affirmations of “LMAO SAME” and “YES YOU GET IT”, with only the occasional voice of reason proclaiming “this is what is wrong with the world.”

This is, in many ways, even more concerning than the romanticisation of Ye. While Ye’s behaviour is being misconstrued as romantic by many and funny by others, there is no room for misinterpretation with JD. He is not using complex emotional abuse tactics; he is an overtly dangerous and unstable individual screaming at and threatening his partner (who, I may add, cannot open the door as at that point in the play she is hanging from the ceiling having faked her death to avoid being murdered by him), and yet it’s still being glorified and sold to young people, many of whom are presumably yet to experience romantic relationships, as attractive.

A separate influx of videos in the same vein appeared shortly before Valentine’s Day, showing people – again, mostly young women – stirring a hot drink before pressing the spoon to their partner’s arm, burning them. The videos tend to be captioned along the lines of “when you remember he fancied other girls before you” or “when you’re making him a cup of tea then realise he hasn’t even asked you to be his Valentine,” implying that the painful act is a form of punishment for these trivial perceived transgressions.

I would like to believe that these videos are staged, and that this was discussed with the partners beforehand. However, even if that is the case, these videos still send a dangerous message on an app that has great influence over many young people – the message being that physically harming your partner as punishment is a light-hearted act, which it very much is not.

With all of this surfacing within the past month, I found myself wondering what went wrong so quickly, why, in a purportedly progressive world, I was seeing abusive behaviour glorified on social media apps that have “cancelled” people for far less. I quickly came to the realisation that this is far from a new phenomenon, and many social media users have been quick to excuse, laugh at or even sympathise with abusers for a long time. The first example that came to mind was the popularity of memes about partners having friends of the opposite sex, particularly about men in heterosexual relationships having female friends.

Dictating who your partner can speak to based on their gender is so normalised on social media that memes and jokes about harming, verbally abusing or leaving your boyfriend for mentioning a female name in a story or spending time with a female friend can rack up many thousands of likes. In fact, some of you reading may even be saying to yourselves “okay, I was on board with the Ye stuff but you can’t compare that to me not letting my partner have opposite-sex friends!” and to that I say: I can and I did, and I urge you to take a look at how social media and the platforming of toxic people and their equally toxic views have affected your views on relationships.

On a personal level, I tend to wonder how such people would cope in a relationship with a bi or pansexual person such as myself. Would I not be allowed any friends at all? Only gay men and straight women? Or would I be allowed to be friends with anyone but subjected to constant interrogation as soon as I mentioned another person? It is an unhealthy and destructive pattern of behaviour which will only serve to end the relationship and mentally damage the person being subjected to it by isolating them from those they care about. However, there is always someone willing to argue that treating a partner in this way is acceptable, and on many social media platforms you can quickly find yourself shouted down for stating otherwise.

In light of that, and after looking at how social media treats abusive and toxic behaviour, there are a few things I want to say:

· If someone doesn’t want to be with you, leave them alone. Stalking is not clever or funny, and in the real world it’s going to land you with a restraining order.

· If you are in a monogamous relationship and can’t trust your partner around anyone else with their preferred set of reproductive anatomy, that probably shouldn’t be your partner. At the end of the day, if you have a good reason to mistrust them, you deserve better. And if you don’t, but you’re still hounding them away from talking to half of the human population because of your own issues, they deserve better.

And finally…

· If you ever find yourself in the shoes of Veronica, for the love of all that is good, DO NOT OPEN THAT DOOR.