A Chat With Sam Bodrojan: Thinking About Our Boyfriends Thinking About Porn
helmet girl and the Chatner together at last
First: I am going to be in Portland on 6/2, the publication date for my next novel, Meeting New People, for a book launch at Powell’s at 7:00pm. Why not come by and say hello? It can’t possibly hurt you.
Sam is a “writer and woman of loser experience” who writes the popular newsletter cc: helmet girl. I particularly enjoyed her recent article about the perpetually-viral Tom Holland “Umbrella” dance, and heartily recommend that you read it.
Every so often a short-form video will get people talking about relationships online in a really interesting and degrading way. This week the conversation was precipitated by the following exchange, a TikTok video of a young woman dressed like Kelsi from High School Musical [Note from Sam: Kelsi was obviously a formative crush for me, thus everything I say from here on out should be disregarded as projection] reacting with disappointment to the disclosure that a young man, presumably her boyfriend1, had watched porn in the previous week.
Sam and I had a lot of fun taking the bait.
Danny: Sam! Hello and thanks very much for agreeing to chat with me about this. I’m interested more in the conversations that have sprung up around this initial exchange, rather than in weighing in on this particular young straight couple and whether they’re in a healthy relationship or not. Or getting paid $100 by Mr. Beast or whomever to pretend they’re in a healthy relationship. I wish them both reasonably well but don’t care to tell either of them how they ought to spend their twenties.
Can you tell me a bit more about how you came across this? Where did the question of “boundaries” enter into the conversation? I don’t see either of them bringing it up in the video, so I assume it came from someone else.
Sam: I wish this couple the best and I hope, for their sake, that they never feel compelled to discuss a relationship with The Cut ever again.2
Danny: If that’s a veiled criticism of me, I won’t hear it, and I won’t respond to it.
Sam: Anyway, this came up because I follow a higher-than-average number of NSFW accout; they are mostly my friends, but also just things I like. Since the Twitter algorithm is a pressure cooker of antagonism, I get pushed a lot of rad-fem discourse. This probably got scooped up around there.
I reject most iterations of the idea that Gen-Z is uniquely sex-negative, especially to millennials. Part of this is anecdotal counterevidence; I am certainly fucking, my friends have always been fucking. I’d buy that the Telegram users of the world are more sex-negative than they would have been in the nineties. But besides a growing standard deviation of conservatism amongst the youth, I’ve not seen any meaningful data that the median Gen-Z person is especially puritanical.
Danny: That seems right to me. People online often talk about generations in sweeping/totalizing ways I find totally baffling. There are a lot of different types of young people doing very different things! I remember that being the case when I myself was young, for example.
Sam: But I do think one place where I have found people my age have particularly bizarre notions around intimacy is the concept of “boundaries.”
Danny: Carmela Soprano had the same problem, and she’s older than both of us.
As P.E. Moskowitz recently put it:
“He continues: You’ll never be able to feel good about yourself, you’ll never not feel guilt and shame, if you’re Tony’s accomplice. Carmela tells him he’s wrong about her being an accomplice. He replies that maybe he should call her an enabler instead, then.
Carmela takes a moment to process this.
“So…you think I need to define my boundaries more clearly,” she finally replies. “Keep a certain distance. Not internalize —”
The therapist interrupts and hammers home his point. Leave! But it’s too late. “Boundaries.” “Not internalizing.” Carmela has used the language of therapy not to take accountability and change her life, but to keep it exactly the same.”
More from The Chatner archives on Carmela Soprano’s problems:
