MILLENNIAL DIARY
‘Markle seems to have been cooked up in a millennial dream lab...’
LAST week, a 2009 video resurfaced of a younger Meghan Markle in a tortilla chips advert. The 31-second video, which features Markle in a supermarket looking at some crisps and making a variety of facial expressions, was hailed as ‘iconic’ and ‘life-changing’ in typical millennial over-reaction.
Frankly, I couldn’t believe it took this long to come out; it’s not even a decade old. 2009 was a post-Myspace, YouTube technological landscape, not entirely removed from today’s. Facebook regularly assaults me with my life in 2009, because my “memories are important to” them.
Though I have tried to forget those years, my mortifying eyebrows, aggressively overstyled hair and horrible taste in men (boys), I cannot. Every time I log on to Facebook, my dark-mirror of times past greets me with in-jokes long forgotten and potentially ideologically problematic.
Do I want to ‘share’? Like hell I do.
The latest member-tobe of the royal family has prompted many millennials to engage in what I like to call “The Markle thought experiment” — that is, if in a few years you became engaged to a prince, or a member of One Direction, what picture of your life so far would the tabloids be able to build?
We look at our Instagrams as if we were strangers from the future; what kind of person do I seem like? We wonder which of our friends would have their heads turned by the price for an exclusive.
Meghan’s is a cautionary tale for millennials: our entire life in all its Technicolor mortification is easily searchable online. We are entering a period of mandatory full disclosure. If the only skeleton in Meghan’s closet is a crisps advert, she’s a lucky lady. Or maybe she’s the clever one, with a premeditated long-game plan for snagging a royal. Either way, we can’t help but pay close attention to her progress, and take notes.
Markle seems to have been cooked up in a millennial dream lab. She is the perfect cardboard cut-out for us to pin on our biggest gripes, insecurities and paranoias. Every article about her possibly tooskinny legs begets 20 about body shaming. Every voice that expresses alarm at her breaking royal protocol to express support for the #MeToo movement is met by thousands who shout back about the importance of outspoken female role models. Every one tweet about how her single grey hair launches 5,000 tweets about the evils of such obsessive vacuousness.
My question is this: does anyone actually truly care about the trousers or the protocol or the hugging of plebs?
Sometimes I wonder whether Meghan Markle is a boomer conspiracy designed to keep us snowflakes occupied, so we can’t cause any real trouble.
At this point, when Markle-news is refreshed daily, it genuinely seems a more likely explanation than the idea that anyone actually finds anything about this UN-princess-Barbie objectionable.
******* Last Wednesday, the unthinkable happened: Tinder crashed. Thousands of people found themselves in a log-in loop that meant they couldn’t access their accounts. When they finally got in, many found that all their matches and messages had been deleted. Millennials everywhere observed a minute’s silence. We will all remember where we were during the Great Tinder Crash of 2018.
The disaster revealed something about the way we use the app. The majority of people keening and wailing at the glitch were not upset about having lost contact with a potential soulmate. They were devastated at having lost their historical matches, most of whom they never even talked to.
For those who’ve never graced Tinder’s hallowed interface, I’ll explain: when two people like the look of each other on Tinder and swipe right, they are ‘matched’ — either one of them is then able to initiate a conversation with the other. All these matches are stored on the app which provides a running total, and you are free to peruse them at your leisure.
This feature is the jewel in Tinder’s crown. I know people who have hundreds of matches on Tinder but haven’t gone on a single date, and don’t do messages.
I get it. I love nothing more than to hunker down on a friend’s Tinder and get swiping. There’s the sociopathic joy of stamping ‘NOPE’ on the faces of strangers, the ecstasy when ‘I’ match with someone. That ‘It’s a Match!’ screen is an end in itself. It’s a high.
Tinder has become a bolster for millennial selfesteem — something we snowflakes are preoccupied with. Our match count has become a yardstick by which we can measure ourselves — when we’re feeling sad and ugly, we can scroll though the hundreds of strangers who saw a pictures of us and thought ‘yeah, all right’, and feel OK again.
And there’s something immensely satisfying and soothing about hitting a nice big round number on your matches — people who were on 930 and gunning for 1,000 were inconsolable. It’s like a neurotic and only slightly more grown-up Pokemon but with real human people.
I imagine the crash was like when your brother messed with your GameBoy and lost your Charizard and Wigglytuff. The horror. The rage. And so we must go back to the beginning again; gotta catch ’em all. Back in those Pokemon years, I remember vividly the mysterious sex-ed set pieces gleaned from science lessons: “When a man is ready for sex, his penis becomes erect.”
This phrase has been etched indelibly on to my psyche for the past 20 years.
I remember trying to piece together exactly how the sex happens with only these Delphic tidbits to go by. I was baffled by the mechanics. There was no mention of what happens to women when they are “ready for sex”, leaving my young mind to reach the conclusion that either women are never ready for sex — or are always ready for sex. Although I grew up and learned, I find myself today wondering whether some men ever did.
In this brutally scientific rendering, women’s sexuality (if you could even call it that) was simply a collection of confusing sounding hormones and those iconic diagrams of the uterus. Millennials in their youth will have had little concept of where the vagina actually was and on what planet it would be possible to get an erect penis (whatever that might be) into one. It sounded fairly traumatic. Being taught that women’s bodies change too to get “ready for sex” would have been fairly life-changing.
Of course, it was the same for our parents. But our knowledge gap wasn’t filled by a couple of dirty magazines or Carry On films. Because in 2005, two megabit broadband launched and porn was parachuted into our homes, right past our sweet clueless parents. We are the first generation to have grown up without real sex-ed and with easily accessible hardcore pornography. And the catastrophic effects are making themselves known now. Need I mention ‘spitroasting’?
In a porny world, sex-ed needs to also be that’s-notwhat-sex-is-ed. The “guess what I got taught at Catholic school?!” lols are wearing thin.