Why Is Every Internet Trend About Men or ‘Girls’?

If I know anything about men, it’s that when they’re not thinking about the Roman Empire, they’re imagining how easily they could land a passenger plane without training. Or at least, that’s what the internet tells me.

Earlier this month, Kelsey Lewis Vincent tweeted her thoughts about an Instagram Reel posted by Roman reenactor Gaius Flavius: “I saw an IG Reel that said something along the lines of ‘women have no idea how often the men in their lives think about the Roman Empire,’” she wrote. “So I asked my husband: ‘How often do you think about the Roman Empire?’ And without missing a beat he said ‘Every day.’ YALL! Why!?”

The tweet got over eight million views, and soon, people began asking their own husbands, boyfriends, and friends the same question on TikTok. Then, tech and internet culture reporters began publishing stories about the trend, enshrining it as a kind of truism: Men just love thinking about the Roman Empire. Something similar happened in November 2022, when @ImagineAGuy tweeted, “i think all men sincerely believe they could safely land a commercial airliner in an emergency situation with only air traffic control to walk them through it.” A few months later, the idea had TikTok in a chokehold, with people once again putting the question to the males in their lives and discovering that, yes, this is a man thing.

If you’re a guy who is not either one of those guys and you feel a little weird seeing something you’ve never once thought about get branded as a universal behavior of your gender, you’re not alone. I get it, because, as a woman, I’ve been through four years of it. What started with “hot girl summer” in 2019 has culminated this year with “girl dinner” and “girl math”—extremely specific repackagings of the female experience that are presented, bafflingly, as something that all of us “girls” do. To reject them is to fall into the “I’m not like other girls” trope. But I’m not like other girls! No girls are, really. (“Husband meal,” however, is very real.)

This isn’t the first time the internet has decided things about men. In 2020, there was an entire Twitter (now X) trend about the things men would do instead of going to therapy. A year earlier, the discourse was about how so many dudes keep their mattresses on the floor. But the recent trends are different, because they come from a new playbook—the one we created for women.

As a girl who is intimately familiar with the turbocharged, hyper-specific trend cycle we’re all now caught up in, I have some advice for the boys. Here’s what’s going to happen: The online conversation is going to die down. In fact, the Roman Empire discourse has already started waning, which means you should expect those unsolicited texts you’re getting right now about things like whether or not you’ve thought about installing your own vomitorium to trickle off. But the brands and businesses are just getting started. Random, everyday things—like ads for banks and a themed happy hour at the worst bar in your neighborhood—will be inexplicably and tangentially linked to the trend. You’ll see T-shirts, hats, and more hurriedly created merch referencing the trend go on sale, first on Etsy, and then on the websites of actual brands. You may be given one of these products for your birthday, or Christmas, and you’ll have to offer up a chuckle when you do.

Only after you have passed through this arc—when you have not only witnessed the trend cycle, but fully lived through it—will you be liberated from this collective fantasy of what men do. And maybe later, if you’re ever tempted to post online about how all guys secretly wish they played slap bass or will never forget their third-grade gym teacher, you will stop and ask yourself: Is this really true? Or does it just sound kinda funny?