Harry Sisson and trial by TikTok

This week, a story emerged about a dozen or so young women who each thought they were monogamously dating 22-year-old Democratic influencer Harry Sisson, albeit digitally. The 11 women, all around the same age as Sisson, claim that he had convinced each of them separately that they were the only woman on his “roster”; that they were the only women he was speaking to. He spoke to many of them for months at a time, with the conversations often being erotic in nature. Nudes were exchanged.

But while each woman claims they believed to be the only person Sisson was doing this with, via social media, they have now come to learn that this wasn’t the case – he’d been flirting and sexting with several women at a time. Now, they are taking to TikTok to rally against him – and their stories have been picked up by large accounts on X. One of the major threads of accusations is available here.

That these women would be disappointed that their relationship with Sisson was not what they hoped it to be is entirely understandable. Misleading women and misrepresenting your intentions in this manner is wrong. But let’s be honest: the public litigation and victimization doesn’t solve anything for the wronged women.

One motivation for the campaign against Sisson is as a way for the women involved to restore their (understandably!) damaged egos. The revelation that a person you were dating or “talking to” – even if just through Snapchat – has no real intentions of taking you seriously, and is in fact doing the same thing with other women, is devastating. There is nothing confusing about these women being upset, and nothing inherently shameful about their anger. In learning that they aren’t even a primary figure in Sisson’s life, they want to take whatever opportunity is available here, in this moment of online attention, to become the primary figure elsewhere. They want to redeem the chance to be the main character, even if only temporarily.

Nevertheless, this trial-by-TikTok phenomenon we’ve experienced periodically – most famously in the case of West Elm Caleb – is both a cause and a symptom of our romantic cultural malaise. Maybe as women we think we’re saving the fellow members of our gender from the same negative experiences, from the humiliation.

But instead of warning other women of genuine bad actors, of men who actually threaten our safety and autonomy, we deploy this “digital dating panopticon” to save ourselves from future humiliation. This is itself the defining feature of how many people date in the digital sphere: avoid embarrassment at all costs.

For those on the other side of this digital dating panopticon – especially young men, who don’t seem as likely to engage in the retaliation dynamic via posting – they might choose to opt out of dating entirely. How can we expect young people to pursue sex, and romance, and the various embarrassments and mistakes that will inevitably come with it, when there’s a risk that said embarrassments and mistakes become nationwide gossip? Again, I am not talking about the type of “mistakes” that are actual crimes – but rather the awkwardness and confusion and let-downs that come with the messiness inherent in navigating romance.

By engaging in this culture of surveillance of our personal lives, we suppress ourselves. We make it harder for us and the people in our dating pool to pursue our most basic human desires without fear of shame from complete strangers. We center social media as the arbiter of our thoughts and pursuits. Even if our intention is to treat everyone with humanity and respect (as we obviously should), we remain stifled by this constant sense that we are being watched. Because we are.

In the past, I’ve written about how the philandering behavior of the podcasting neuroscientist Andrew Huberman suggests an internal rift that his “optimization” philosophy cannot fix. Some element of the digital dating panopticon has been applied here, too. Huberman’s private life was litigated in the public, social-media arena. Still, I do think there are some crucial differences. For one, Huberman’s actions take place in the “real world,” involving women with whom he was actually having sex. These women were in their thirties and forties, looking specifically to settle down and have children. The futures dashed in his case are of more consequence than those imagined on Snapchat in Sisson’s, even if the pain is temporarily the same.

But this “real world” versus Snapchat element combined with Sisson’s youth do make this a different situation. Let’s imagine that Sisson had actually pursued all these women in person – would this still be a story? Without all the front-facing camera videos of the girls detailing their experience, without all the horny screenshots, would the story that a young man with a little bit of fame tried to sleep with several women be interesting?

So much of Gen Z’s life plays out online. It is normal that they would consider the romantic involvements they have there to be as real and as devastating as those they might have elsewhere. At the same time, let’s acknowledge the naivety. While l’affaire Sisson makes for some mildly entertaining gossip, it should not come as too much of a surprise that a 22-year-old guy with 1.8 million followers might be sexting with several women at a time. It shouldn’t warrant headlines or exposés. Men will woo you and call you “wifey material” and tell you you’re beautiful in order to get in your pants, even online. This is not a new phenomenon. What is new is this current head-in-the-sand response to it, the faux-shock that someone might be deceitful for sexual purposes. None of us are that innocent – and it is infantilizing to pretend otherwise.

The anger and disappointment from these women is entirely valid. Talk shit with your girl friends, print out his messages and burn them, cuss him out. He did wrong these women. But that really isn’t a news story – and attempting to make it one gets us no further in finding happiness or forming relationships or navigating the complexities of romantic and sexual pursuits. It actively holds us back.

There is an obvious political element to the scandal, too: Sisson is a mainstream Democrat, one the party has propped up in hopes of promoting Kamala Harris and other center-left figures. He shoots TikToks with Joe Biden and Barack Obama. He is trying to encourage other young men to vote Democrat. He is therefore a target and an enemy of some elements of the right. It’s these people, specifically, that are doing the work of promoting this whole story, delighting in the schadenfreude. They are using it as a political tool, a tabloid trope to undermine the Dems. They do not care about these women, at all – his story is just a convenient one.

This is what the digital dating panopticon does. It removes us as agents in our own lives. The powers in tech and politics are already watching us, working to keep us more isolated and more online and plotting how to use our wants to their own ends. Why should we give them any more to work with?

A version of this article originally ran on Magdalene J. Taylor’s Substack.