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The Out-of-touch Adults' Guide To Kid Culture: What Is A 'treatler?'
This week, young adults are calling each other "treatler," vowing to show up at the beach with a full bush in a bikini, and playing an online game that has been heavily censored by China. Read on to unpack all this, plus learn why goats like to jump in fire.
Who (or what) is "Treatler?"
"Treatler" and "Treatlerite" are online insults that combine "treat" and "Hitler." They refer to the entitlement of some users of services like Doordash or Uber Eats, specifically people who seem to regard luxury delivery services as a human right, and don't consider the hardships of the people who do the work that makes "private taxis for burritos" possible.
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The term "treatlerite" was coined by X user @posting_forever, and is becoming online shorthand for the type of person who files an angry report when the Instacart driver buys the wrong brand of ice cream. The argument gets deeper when you consider that many disabled people say they rely on these services. But is this a good argument? Some say, "nope."
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There's nothing new about having a pizza delivered, but the widespread use of services like DoorDash and Grubhub has created a new class of gig workers, but we don't usually think about the corresponding "upper class" of people wealthy enough to pay someone else to go grocery shopping for them. It's interesting how the new upper class has exactly the same problem with this as their old-school counterparts. Weighing "I'm paying a lot for this, so I expect good service" with "the people I pay to do my menial tasks are worthy of respect too" has never been easy, and thanks to capitalism, young people are trying to make it make sense without having been born into a wealthy family.
Why is everyone talking about "full bush in a bikini?"
TikTok user sujindah signaled the possible future of seaside grooming habits this week by posting a video of her repeating the phrase "full bush in a bikini:"
The video has been played over 13 million times in the past three days, and commenters are vowing to go "full werewolf feral" this summer.
Sujindah credits an Etsy review of a bikini, "where the girl had a full bush," for "radicalizing" her on the topic. "That's how it should be!" she says.
I'm sure many of you reading this are old enough to remember when every bikini contained a full bush, so there's nothing new under the sun, but it's encouraging when young women look at societal beauty expectations and say, "I'm not gonna do it, and you can't make me."
What's up with Jerkmate Ranked?
While young women are vowing to not clear the brush before their trip to Kauai, young men are making jokes about jerking it, specifically, "Jerkmate ranked," or "competitive gooning."
Gooning, as defined by me in my guide to Gen Z and Gen Alpha slang, refers to extended masturbation without orgasm. Jerkmate is an adult website that puts users in public chatrooms while they watch live streams, so the joke of "Jerkmate ranked" is that there is a competitive element to gooning. Meme-makers are posting sarcastic brags about their rank on Jerkmate, or imagining the rules of competitive gooning. Jerkmate doesn't really offer ranked "matches," but I wouldn't be surprised if they were working on it at this moment.
Everyone is playing Marvel Rivals, but no one can mention Winnie the Pooh.
Marvel Rivals is the current must-play online game. Launched just over a month ago, the team-based PVP shooter set in the Marvel universe is the best-selling game on Steam (it's free to download, so I guess that's more like "most downloaded") and the third most-played game on the streaming service. It lets gamers play as a Marvel character. The roster includes both well known heroes like Iron Man and Hulk, but also obscure Marvel creations like Squirrel Girl and Peni Parker.
Marvel Rivals is causing international controversy and highlighting China's growing control over discourse in gaming and pop culture in general. Marvel Rivals was developed by China's NetEase Games, and the game censors politically touchy language related to China in its chat. Captain America cannot type "Free Hong Kong" in a Marvel Rivals chat window, and Groot cannot respond with "Remember the Tiananmen Square Massacre!" Players can't reference Winnie the Pooh (because of memes pointing out the characters resemblance to Chinese leader Xi Jinping) nor can they type "Taiwan is a country." But you can type "911 was an inside job."
Viral videos of the week: A goat jumps in a fire and Disney gingerbread horror
This week features two viral videos, because they're short. The first was posted by Instagram user xiaoling5350, and it features seemingly suicidal goats jumping into a fireplace in someones's living room. Even after being pulled out of the flames, the goats return to the inferno, as if intent on ending their life.
Along with jokes about self-cooking curry, many viewers of this video (including myself) wonder why a goat would jump into a fire repeatedly. Goats and fire have a deep relationship. Goats are famously happy to eat anything, so they can be used to prevent wildfires by setting them free to gobble up underbrush. But they seem to love flames: there are tons of videos of goats playing around with fire and reports of the animals creepily staring into campfires. The accepted explanation on the internet is that goats burn themselves to kill parasites in their fur or throat, but I'm not buying it. How often would wild goats have been close enough to fire to have developed this behavior, and wouldn't being drawn to fire ultimately kill more goats than it helped? So I'd like to propose a second explanation: Goats are really stupid and don't know no better.
The second viral video poses no questions about animal behavior; it's just funny. TheMainStreetDuo are Disney fanatics who posted a hilariously simple video of an interaction during a Disneyland parade. While giant gingerbread men are walking by, half of the Main Street Duo takes a huge bite of a gingerbread man cookie, leading to horror. Not much too it, but it's funny enough to have been viewed over a hundred million times.
