Thank you, Cosmo. Thank you for allowing Carina Hsieh and Laura Beck to write this embarrassing, psychotic confession you are calling an "article”, titled, "19 Very Real Things Only Women Stalking Someone Understand". (Somehow they couldn't quite make it to 20? But I digress.) After reading this my eyes rolled back so hard they kissed the top of my cranium.
The so-called article examines the realest of real (or "literally", if you don't understand what that word means) when it comes to Instagram stalking. Things like accidentally liking a photo of someone you don't follow (and describing that as "literally worse than death") or "clicking on the profile of every girl who likes your crush's profile" (and getting caught) or "when you stalk a person a ton and then you have to pretend you had no idea what they were up to" (when you see them in the scary, scary other world known as "real life".)
As I said, there are 19 of these and as you scroll down the list, it starts to read more like something Robert Dewey Hoskins would have done to Madonna's profile, had Instagram been our bread and butter in 1996.
Cosmopolitan is trying it's best to rebrand itself as "feminist" (because being a feminist is now "cool", despite how little understanding one has about the ideology.) But since the days of Helen Gurley Brown, Cosmopolitan has sold copies based on ridiculous sex tips and outrageous techniques like "try doughnuts on his dick!" Sex mixed with pure shock value. Kind of like the Lady Gaga of women's health magazines.
I understand the point of this article is to make other people (who project their insecurities about love, romance, relationships and dating) feel like they are not alone in their social media stalker habits and that it's totally OK. Well, guess what? I'm here to tell you that it is NOT OK. In fact, it is full-on demented.
Social media has changed dating. Dr. Helen Fisher said it best when she told me that friends with benefits,casual dating, hook-up culture, googling dates before hand and so on are actually cautious techniques in this era of what she calls "fast sex/slow love". "We've got a long period of early adulthood to experiment, or what I call 'commitment lite', to see what works for us by hanging out, sleeping together, and getting to know someone before committing to them entirely," she said to me. "By the time we marry, we should have picked quite correctly."
However, what Fisher neglected to note is that during this "commitment lite" phase, the insecure, newly dumped, freshly single and totally fucked (which is, at some point, all of us) turn to Internet stalking as a masochistic coping mechanism. I would argue that Internet stalking is worse because the screen allows the stalker endless hours of obsessing into Internet black holes of information. Unless they slip up and accidentally double click on a photo, then no one has to have an inkling about what they were up to.
I understand that one could argue that Internet stalkers can only see what is made willingly public by a user whereas actual stalkers can break physical boundaries. Absolutely. But the obsessiveness is mirrored in both cases and that is exactly what’s concerning.
Bottom line is this: we are slowly becoming willing a nation of stalkers. I see no harm in checking out someone before a date, especially if it's a random, that's just common sense. However, if you find yourself nodding along to more than five of the 19 signs written in that Cosmopolitan "article", you have reached a whole new level of psycho hose beast.
