Gender & Sexuality Observation Report 'Women I'd Let Rail Me' trend on TikTok

 Observation Report on ‘Women i’d let rail me’ trend on TikTok

Only when my corona-boredom hit a peak, my girlfriend was finally able to convince me to download TikTok. All I knew about it before was that there were kids doing funny dances on it? Or something? Apparently that doesn’t have to be the case. Within one day my ‘ForYou’ page consisted of short, one minute videos on Drag Race, baby animals and the lesbian lifestyle. At first the accuracy of the algorithm freaked me out, but in these times I’ll accept anything that will distract me from reality. Within ‘Lesbian TikTok’ one trend stood out to me that I want to observe in this paper. 

[screenshot TikTok (@jemilys.daughter, 2020)]

Description of video format

The TikTok’s always begin with a random shot: sometimes a view of somebody’s house, more often a selfie angle, showing the user that is posting the TikTok. The introductory text ‘Women I’d let ~rail me~ but it gets more and more illegal’ or ‘Women I would let step on me but it gets more illegal as it goes on’ tends to be  visible  on the screen. 

This text makes it obvious that they are not just regular admirers of the women shown, they would like to sleep with them. The words shown in the TikTok are not spelled with capital letters, which is common on TikTok.

[screenshot of TikTok by (@mothskeletons, 2020)]

After the opening shot, pictures of different female celebrities will show for a few seconds, in this picture it will say the celebrities name and their age. The first celebrities shown are between the ages of around 18 and 25 years old. Popular picks for this part of the TikTok are the singer Billie Eilish (18), actress Zendaya Coleman (24) and actress/singer Willow Smith (20). Predictable from the opening text, gradually the ages of the celebrities go up. About halfway through the video the TikTokker will show people like (for example): actresses Katie McGrath (37), Jessica Chastain (43) and Sarah Paulson (45). The final act will most often show women aged 50+. Common examples: Actresses Rachel Weisz (50), Cate Blanchett (51) and Meryl Streep (71). 

Music

Most of these TikToks use the 2005 Hip Hop song ‘Pump It’ performed by the Black Eyed Peas to play in the background of the video. This sound is not exclusively used for this type of video. I found Minecraft videos (@crabslab, 2020) that used this sound as well as the user @grandadfrankk (2020) dancing to the same song. I could not figure out why this particular song was used for this trend. The only thing I could think of was that the lyric ‘Pump it’ puts extra emphasis on the sexual nature of the users’ interest in these women.   

[comments on TikTok (@h0peelisa, 2020)]

Comments

The comments on the TikToks are very similar throughout the different videos. They are either agreeing with the original choices stated in the video or making an argument that person X should also be added on their list. Sometimes the commenters make an observation that there’s an overlapping category that some of the women on the list belong to. Stating that the original poster (for example) must be a fan of the show ‘Orange is the New Black’ because they’ve put multiple actresses from this show in their list. All comments I saw were positive, even if they were disagreeing with the original poster’s choices it never came across as hateful. 

Posters

To find more information on the users behind the TikToks I researched the accounts of eight users who made a TikTok that falls within this trend.

All of them either presented themselves as female or had she/her pronouns listed in their bio. The users who put their age in their bio were between the ages of 14 and 25 and by visual appearance the users who did not mention their age would probably also fall within this age group. 

Not many users mentioned their location, but when they did it was always The United States. Often rainbow flags were used in their bio’s to signify their presence in the LGBTQ+ community. 

The other videos that these users posted varied. Often there was more content about being a WLW: Woman who Loves other Women (“Queer undefined”, z.d.), but these users had videos ranging from classic TikTok dancing videos to using other trendy formats. Both common content on this platform. The amount of followers between the users varied; Both accounts with a big following (20.000+) and no following at all posted this type of video. 

Tags

Tags on TikTok are meant to classify the audience the video would appeal to most. The users that like a video that uses a specific tag will then be shown more videos that use this tag on their ForYou page. The most common tags used on these TikToks were #’name of a celebrity mentioned in the video’, #lgbt, #lesbian, #gaytiktok, #mommyissues, #middelagedwomen and #gay. This explains why my girlfriend and I both get these videos in our feed as we both have liked content that uses some of these tags.

Literature

The overarching theme for these TikToks is that these younger girls are expressing their love for women so much older than them, that it reads as ‘illegal’ or inappropriate. This sentiment is expressed in the title of the videos in which they describe their attraction to these women as ‘inappropriate’ or ‘illegal’. 

Rubin (1984) writes about the sex hierchy in which they differentiate between The Charmed Circle and the Outer limits to differentiate between ‘normal, good sexuality’ and ‘bad, abnormal sexuality’ in that order. Rubin describes cross-generational encounters as one of the categories that falls in the negative category together with for example ‘SM’ and ‘sex for money’. 

Even though Rubin wrote this in 1984 based on the norms of that time, the way the girls that post these TikToks describe their attraction to the women as ‘inappropriate’ or even ‘illegal’ shows us that the norm on this has not changed since Rubin published her works. The popularity of these TikToks does prove that the category ‘homosexual’ has moved on the spectrum from bad to good sexuality. Especially in the comments, lesbian sexuality is celebrated with a lot of acceptance and positivity. 

References

@crabslab. (2020, 13 november). Tactical voiding [TikTok video]. Geraadpleegd van https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMeSede9k/ 

@grandadfrankk. (2020, 3 november). I forgot to press 60 seconds :( I hope this 15 second one is just as good [TikTok video]. Geraadpleegd van https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMeSeh84T/ 

@h0peelisa. (2020, 8 november). If you know you know [TikTok video]. Geraadpleegd van https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMeSej67E/ 

@jemilys.daughter. (2020, 2 november). It’s called mommy issues [TikTok video]. Geraadpleegd van https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMeSJx5jf/ 

@mothskeletons. (2020, 29 oktober). ::D :D :D [TikTok video]. Geraadpleegd van https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMeSe1TFn/ 

Queer undefined. (z.d.). Geraadpleegd op 17 maart 2021, van https://www.queerundefined.com/search/wlw 

Rubin, G. S. (Gayle) (1984). ‘Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality’. In Vance, C. S. (Carole) (ed.) Pleasure and Danger: exploring female sexuality. 267-319. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul.