I started to see these friends differently. Or a horrible gender inversion of What Women Want. The Following tab had turned my life into Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Guys who had mostly eschewed stripper bachelor parties, even “ironic” ones. These were dudes who went out with or married age-appropriate women - many of whom are my friends. These were not guys whose public taste in women tended anywhere near the barely legal or barely clothed. Liking says “Look at me, I exist! Pay attention to me!” Did my friends - smart men! Or so I thought! - actually think these girls were going to … respond? Reach out to them? Offer marriage? What, exactly, did they think was going to happen? But to like a post is to ask for attention from its creator. It’s one thing to find yourself on an insomnia-fueled, libido-driven Instagram kick. Like a soft version of gaining access to pornographic searches, a close observer could even begin to pick out physical preferences: One person might be liking shots that focused on breasts, another mostly “fitness models.”īut the question I couldn’t answer was why, oh why, my friends and acquaintances felt the need go so far as to like the posts.

But it’s very different to watch your friends express themselves in ways you are pretty sure they don’t realize are public. It’s one thing to see the social-media self friends and acquaintances are consciously presenting. It was a vast and troubling new world of Insta-stalking. And when I checked out their entire feeds (scrolling lightly!), every photo was the same: aggressively sexy, and drowning in a flood of likes.

Armed with my new knowledge, I began to check out the activity feed first thing in the morning - and, sure enough, under the accounts of many of my male friends, a grid of photos of mostly un- or underdressed girls appeared! When I clicked through these photos, I’d find that each one had thousands of likes, and each woman would have at least tens of thousands of followers. Suddenly, the Following tab became much more interesting. Never, until a friend complained that not only was the guy she was dating constantly liking the swimsuit photos of random 17-year-old girls, but, as she breathlessly informed me, so were many of our mutual male friends and acquaintances! “Anytime you wake up early, just look,” she advised, shaking her head. (He did magic tricks, though!) But I’d never reached the level of boredom, or stalkerdom, that led me to the Following tab on the Activity page - the place where you can see what posts the people you follow are liking. I do my best to make sure I flick my scroll finger verrrry lightly so as not to accidentally like a 3-year-old “sexy” selfie of a friend of a friend of a friend I’ve never actually met once, I wandered down a rabbit hole involving several years’ worth of photographs on the account of the unfamous tween child of a B-list comedian before suddenly realizing how weird that was. Like most adults, I’ve frequently found myself lightly Insta-stalking in the evening as I procrastinate on sleep.

Sexy teenage girl model