S1E11 Mike and Felicia: Men on the Internet
“Incels,” “reply guys,” the proverbial “Mom’s basement”: is the Catfish agenda to get men off the internet?
Even in 2021, I think we harbor a lot of cultural anxiety about what men are doing online, or, maybe, how masculinity is affected by living as online as we do.
In spite of everything, I think there’s still something about the idea of a man who spends a great deal of time on the internet that, societally speaking, we don’t like. What are they doing with all that bandwidth, hmm? Indulging a porn addiction? Planning a school shooting? Learning Elvish? We have a taxonomy of these men, who never seem to be the same men we know, love, and respect. There are the irritants, like those overfamiliar men who populate the reply section of a woman’s Twitter account; the perverts (remember ChatRoulette?); the losers (unemployed, out of shape, swigging Mountain Dew); and, of course, the rageaholics, those men we see gather online so that their societal wounds can fester and leak, the kind of men that get written about in New York Magazine.
Is there something that seems more pitiable about men who use the internet as a means of finding connection? The assumptions about any Catfish hopeful - that they are withdrawn, passive, insecure, someone who has been rejected from or simply opted out of more public spaces - do not cohere around our current masculine ideals, no matter how universal the concept of “being online” has become.
Rewatching “Mike and Felicia” opened my eyes to the additional urgency, even a rehabilitational tilt, that the show takes on when the hopeful is a straight, cis, white man. It actually becomes less about the relationship they’re ostensibly trying to facilitate, and more about, well, getting this guy out of the house.
The Episode
Mike is a young artist who is in a tough spot in his life. After struggling to find work, he’s moved back into his parents’ house; his girlfriend of five years recently broke up with him so that she could date women. Into this puddle of disappointments wades Felicia, with whom Mike has formed a fledgling relationship via PlentyofFish (a website that in a later episode will be referred to as “plenty of catfish”). Mike and Felicia have built a real connection, but as usual, something is amiss; though for the most part they lived mere towns apart (he in Clifton, NJ, her in Hoboken), they have never met in person. In fact, when they did make plans to meet, Felicia stood Mike up, later claiming that she was in a car accident and broke her pinky (Catfish Core Lie #2). Mike was troubled by this, and feels even more uneasy now that Felicia has moved to Orlando, Florida and is now more out of reach than ever.
As they pack up to head east, Nev describes Mike’s predicament: “If she’s messing with him, that’s messed up,” he says. “He was seriously emasculated in his last relationship.” Max nods, and we, the viewer, see dark clouds congeal in the distance, threatening a shit storm of toxic masculinity. Instantly, Mike’s problems take on renewed import: it is not enough that he is unhappy and seeking solace in the face of understandable setbacks. He is emasculated, and must address this via an IRL relationship with a flesh-and-blood woman, because as we all know from American Pie, that way lies salvation.
When viewing photos of a male hopeful’s online paramour, Max and Nev do their best to bring sex back to the forefront. In Felicia’s case, they note that she’s “full-bodied,” and joke that she could “wipe the floor” with Mike. So now it’s not just that Mike met Felicia in the “wrong” way, but that Felicia herself is wrong, potentially poised to worsen the crisis of Mike’s masculinity. Thanks, I hate it! By the way, Mike himself doesn’t seem bothered by any of the things that Max and Nev seem to indicate he should be bothered by. He just wants to know why Felicia’s been so elusive.
The boys seem to be against Felicia from the beginning, and okay, to be fair, they have reason to be. They go through all her recent Facebook photos from a birthday party and can’t find any pictures of her wearing a splint on her pinky finger. Then they talk to Felicia’s friend Charmaine, who says that Felicia actually hasn’t lived in New Jersey since high school and (gasp) has a history of lying to people on the internet. “We had to have an intervention,” says Charmaine, the latest Catfish character to borrow the language of addiction.
When everyone arrives in Florida, Felicia is exactly what she appears to be in photos; however, Charmaine-the-narc was correct about everything else (that is, no Hoboken, no car crash, Felicia doesn’t really own a hair salon). Mike is very taken aback and turned off by this, but Felicia doesn’t quite understand his reaction. She has been catfishing a very long time, and, because she used her own photos this time, this was the most herself she’s ever been. The two of them go on a very prickly date, and Mike is clearly having trouble processing it all, but isn’t really able to express himself very clearly. To make matters worse, a lot of people are now projecting their shit onto him. Felicia is upset because he doesn’t seem to want to be her boyfriend right away, and upset that he’s upset that she lied; Max and Nev suggest that the lies would matter less to him if he was more into Felicia, and with all these opinions swirling around him Mike just kind of throws his hands up and says he just needs time to think.
BUT! When they check in with him a few months later, Felicia has made plans to come and visit; and the epilogue reveals that they are now officially a couple. Take that!
Mike and the Real Girl
We are fed the notion that all difficult feelings - depression, anxiety, loneliness, rage - are simply a consequence of unsettled chemistry, a problem to be fixed, rather than a response to structural injustice or, on the other hand, to the native texture of embodiment, of doing time, as David Wojnarowicz put it, in a rented body, with all the attendant grief and frustration that entails. —Olivia Laing, The Lonely City
When I say that there’s cultural anxiety around men who live their lives on the internet in some significant way, what I mean is this: the physical conditions of online life (physical solitude, disembodiment, inaction) still do not square with our collective idea of what it means to be a “real man.” (Look at Alexander Skarsgard. He is not reachable on any social media platform and as far as I can tell spends all of his free time hiking fjords. He is in the vanishingly small minority for this, and yet I think we can all agree that he is perfection. Sorry, what was I talking about?) This perception obviously does not change that pretty much everyone uses the internet the same amount, these days. All it does is make men feel weird and/or bitter and/or guilty about being judged for doing the same thing that everybody else is doing.
People make friends on the internet when they’re feeling lonely or isolated, and it is indisputably less acceptable for men to admit to feeling lonely and isolated. It is simultaneously also less acceptable for men to pursue the traditional avenues for alleviating loneliness, like opening up to friends, receiving therapy, and yes, talking to people online. This is bad for the rest of us (as was memorably explained in a Harper’s Bazaar article a couple years ago, title: Men Have No Friends and Women Bear the Burden) and certainly puts a strain on relationships. And of course not allowing men to express their dissatisfaction with their lives in healthy ways has led them to express it in unhealthy ways, scary, violent ways.
What if we permitted men to feel difficult feelings, to express them, to take stock of them for what they are? What if, instead of framing Mike’s predicament as one of emasculation, Max and Nev simply let it be a bummer? It is disappointing to lose a job. It is sad to mourn a relationship. It is natural to be lonely. What if, instead of trying to “fix” Mike (or expecting Felicia to fix him) they just provided the help he requested, namely, reverse image searches and comped plane tickets?
I guess that would undermine the whole enterprise. After all, Max and Nev are not immune to a worldview that sees “insecurity at the heart of online life” (Nev’s words, from his book), actually, they are agents of it. They must believe that the answer can be found merely by getting their guy away from his keyboard and out into the “real” world, and by securing him a “real” girl. And in this way I think Catfish does its straight, cis male hopefuls a disservice, because it builds them up as men, and abandons them as people.
I think I’ll leave it there for now. Happy weekend, all!
XOXO,
Hannah
LOGGED OFF, or what I’m doing when I’m not watching Catfish
Reading: Waterfront Journals by David Wojnarowicz
Listening to: well...not the Reply All series on the BA Test Kitchen anymore
Weekend plans: Pizza and a Weeds rewatch before Netflix axes it on March 31st (fair warning!)