The Free Press
It’s been a tumultuous week for 23-year-old Harry Sisson. The DNC’s favorite Gen Z influencer came to mainstream prominence for his adoration of ailing President Biden, who Sisson called “an amazing man and amazing leader.” He brushed off concerns about the president’s mental decline as being manufactured and not a real issue.
Born in Singapore and raised in Ireland, he somehow became one of the Dems’ most high-profile young defenders. Last year, he gained nearly 2 million followers on TikTok, appeared on cable TV news, and was profiled in The New York Times. He stood out because many online men his age are moving decidedly to the right; he’s no left-wing Rogan, but at least he’s something.
But now, Sisson has come under fire—and not just from the Navy SEAL who is credited with killing Osama bin Laden and who once bizarrely suggested he’d keep the rosy-cheeked youth in sexual slavery were it not for the internet. In the last week, 11 women came forward on TikTok to accuse Harry of the unthinkable: flirting with them via Snapchat, simultaneously.
Harry was sending risque messages to nearly a dozen women and exchanging nudes with some. He was in an exclusive relationship with none of them, and one of the women, Carlee Hosch, even provided messages in her videos in which Sisson explicitly said, “Right now, I can’t do exclusivity.”
Another woman, Sara, said she sent “explicit” videos to Sisson because she believed he was a person “who genuinely cared for women more than for just their bodies.”
Come on, girl. Sending topless videos doesn’t exactly scream read my dissertation.
The chief complaint from these women though isn’t that Sisson harassed them—most don’t seem to have even met Sisson in person—but that he led them to believe that he “didn’t have a roster,” and was only “talking” to them.
This, to Zoomers, is a sex scandal.
In the age of dating apps and social media, many young people are finding themselves in ambiguous romantic and relationships that nobody—including the people in them—can define. They call them situationships. Unlike in the past, people can languish in these relationships for months, often without ever even meeting in person. Instead of hooking up and meeting parents, those in situationships will often end up developing emotionally intense bonds that never make it off a screen. It’s like friends with benefits except you’re more than friends, and there are no benefits.
Situationships took off because there are no longer universally accepted rules on how a relationship should begin and proceed, like that you go on vacation after a few months, or meet the other’s parents after a year. There’s not even a universally accepted end goal—which in the past was marriage.
For heterosexuals, that is.
For homosexuals, those norms never existed in the first place. Until a decade ago, most gay men couldn’t even get married if they wanted to, plus many families didn’t accept their gay children. Plus, men aren’t as commitment-obsessed—casual sexual relationships have always been the norm. But now that gay marriage is legal, and everyone’s becoming accepted, we’re all somehow collapsing into the gay male dating paradigm. Gay men didn’t start acting straighter; straight people started acting like us.
It’s a gay guy’s world now—and the straight girls who find themselves living in it need to understand this: That man you’re talking to is not your boyfriend unless he says he is. And if he isn’t, and especially if he says he doesn’t want to be, he’s definitely screwing other people. Or at least trying.
When gay men pair up in exclusive, monogamous relationships, we have explicit conversations in which both parties agree to the terms. It’s not subtle, it’s practical, and brutally honest. Straight people navigating the modern, anything-goes dating scene would be wise to start doing the same. When they don’t, it leads to absurd situations like the following:
Hosch, a fellow content creator who frequently flirted with Sisson via Snapchat for around nine months, began calling out Sisson on TikTok, saying she had been “played” by the liberal influencer, who she called “despicable.” So he messaged her: “We were not exclusive and I made it abundantly clear I didn’t want that and you said that was fine” and “I haven’t done anything that wasn’t allowed within the parameters we set. What and why are you screenshotting.”
He’s correct. Why are you screenshotting? In addition to it being below her, and embarrassing, she’s not even winning the point. Another woman Sisson flirted with, Hannah, called him “sick and perverted,” then printed out their texts as evidence, as if she were presenting them in a court of law.
This is how the #MeToo zombie era ends, with young women canceling a Democratic influencer for hurting their feelings, and calling it feminism. Choosing to continue interacting with a guy who isn’t willing to commit to a relationship with you is a choice—the wrong one—but if you make it, you have no one to blame but yourself.
Ladies, if you want a man, you gotta lock him down. Explicitly. If you can’t, it’s time to let him go—or to at least stop acting shocked when the inevitable happens. Snapchatting outside wedlock is not abuse, and it should not be a national news story. Get it together, girls.
A previous version of this article mistakenly stated that Harry Sisson is not an American citizen and is therefore not allowed to vote in elections. We regret the error.
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