From Lucky Girl Syndrome to manifestation, tarot to astrology, our appetite for online spirituality is insatiable. And of late, that genre of so-called spirituality has become more sinister. The more we watch, the more extreme this content becomes. It stops being about mythology, and becomes more about purity, then conservatism, then something dangerously close to alt-right conspiracy. On TikTok, where a lot of this spirituality content thrives, there’s an alarming number of videos warning young girls how damaging casual sex can be, with vague references to ‘the differences between men and women’ and how our post-coital hormones are released. Much like temporarily abstaining from alcohol, temporary celibacy is not in itself an inherently bad idea. But it’s just one of the many bad-faith ideas promoted on the platform – where young women make up its biggest demographic – which feed into dangerous notions of conservatism and purity culture and an archaic view of female agency and sexuality. For a supposedly modern era, this feels decidedly second wave.
Surprisingly puritan TikTokers preach the virtues of abstinence because casual sex is poisonous. Others go beyond the premise that sleeping around will only make young women unhappy and lonely: videos with millions of views lambast hormonal birth control (for making us not our ‘true selves’) discourage women from being ‘too into’ their jobs (better to reject capitalism and be a “stay at home girlfriend” instead). Creators recommend books like The Secret and Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, advise their audiences how they can manifest better treatment from their boyfriends, theorise over whether foetuses have souls, and tell us that only women can truly understand tarot or astrology.
“Masturbation”, one creator tells us, in what is perhaps the apex of this bizarre ideology, “is a form of witchcraft”. Right. Sierra Scribner, the 23-year-old TikToker behind this nugget of wisdom, goes on to liken sexual pleasure to demonic sorcery. “You are literally controlling an orgasm”, she says. “That is witchcraft. That is a curse that you begin to place over your own life that will then literally bleed into your future children’s life.” Sierra doesn’t expand on this thought much but, as one of TikTok’s more staunch Christian creators, it’s a sentiment espoused regularly in some form. Sierra far from alone: linking sexuality to spirituality and purity culture is increasingly rife on the platform.
What emerges from these videos is an internet subculture where spirituality – and in the case of “your ex is coming back” tarot readings and Lucky Girl Syndrome, outright delusion repackaged as spirituality – is presented as progressivism, when in fact it’s little more than a pipeline to alt-right purity culture. Whilst it once existed as “witchtok”, increasingly mysticism on TikTok is inextricably linked with binary notions of gender roles. Writing about the proliferation of “divine feminine and masculine” videos in i-D last year, Laura Pitcher likened this kind of discourse to the kind of incel-lite misogyny championed by Andrew Tate, explaining, “With the general consensus of the divine dialogue being that the feminine is the ‘receiver’, while the masculine is the ‘giver’, the conversation often feels suspiciously like dating advice that you might’ve heard from your grandmother — like ‘letting the man take the lead’.”
It feels weird that we’re leaning towards ideas about sex and dating that are this outdated and old-fashioned, particularly when Gen Z are usually assumed to be the most progressive generation, and new relationship models like polyamory and ethical non-monogamy are becoming more accepted. But research has also found Gen Z to be a generation that are phenomenally lonely, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, curious about and susceptible to new ideas of spirituality in an attempt to find meaning in an increasingly absurd world. We’re also more online than ever before, which means it’s easy for toxic ideas to slide into our subconscious thanks to the breakneck speed of online discourse (look no further than the return of the Satanic panic recently, over Balenciaga, Lil Nas X and Astroworld).
Some have theorised that TikTok’s rabbit-hole like algorithm is especially primed to turn spirituality into conspiracy and then conspiracy into conservatism, given that alt-right ideals and far right hate speech already exist on the app. While for young men, this kind of internet conspiracy and spiritual content exists in the forms of QAnon and Norse mythology – or alt-right memes – for women it’s more likely to be linked to wellness, loneliness and love. “I accidentally fell down the alt-right pipeline on TikTok,” student Maggie Thomas revealed last year on Twitter. For Maggie, it began with recipe videos, health content, but soon the FYP was recommending her “crunchy” videos about birth control and fertility, and soon hashtags like “toxic feminism” spiralled into transphobia and anti-semitism. It’s unclear quite how that happens; for most of us, we still don’t really, fully understand the algorithm, how one thing leads to another, more extreme, more terrible thing. It’s the shady, adult equivalent of the YouTube algorithm rabbit hole, which, left unchecked, eventually stopped showing children innocent educational content and started showing them untold AI-generated horrors instead.
But just as our extreme online-ness makes us susceptible to these rabbit holes, it might save us too. On another side of TikTok’s vast ecosystem of subcultures, young women are recognising the spirituality to alt-right pipeline and pushing back against it. At a quarter of a billion views on the platform, such videos are necessary to combat this wave, even if many of those views are simply watched in jest. “There is a huge correlation between pseudoscience and misinformation, and misinformation to racism”, explains one video on the dangers of spirituality leading people towards alt-right conspiracies. One of the few silver linings of the pandemic has been the online exposure of the link between anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists and the darker side of wellness culture, which we’ve known about for some time. But with manifestation, tarot and astrology flourishing on social media right now, it’s still important to be vigilant to the kind of algorithmic brainwashing that this can lead to.
It’s understandable that young people, particularly young heterosexual women, are looking to re-evaluate their lives. Dating culture, particularly in the age of the situationship and the endless scroll of dopamine-dispensing apps, can of course be depressing, not just at this time of year either. It’s also understandable that, post-pandemic and hurtling towards yet another recession, zoomers and millennials are in search of meaning in something. Some kind of higher power, intellectualism or spirituality, it doesn’t really matter what. But in our desperation for meaning amongst the absurdity, we should be wary of falling into potentially dangerous and spiralling discourse online as an end result.