I Met an Eboy.
By: Dakota Morlan
Tags: Humor, Culture, Teens, Tik Tok, Trends

I know that we’re in the midst of one of the most contentious elections in history , an economic crisis and a pandemic, but we need to talk about something important: I met an Eboy.

No, not eBay. That, I am dangerously familiar with. I said an Eboy.

If you don’t know what that is, it’s probably because you are a Medium subscriber, over the age of 19 and have never watched a Tik Tok in your life — except when one makes its way into the elderly pastures of Facebook.

Don’t be ashamed.

I, too, have never visited the Chinese platform where America’s children and some of our simpler citizens go to lip-sync, WAP and play solo make-believe. I’ve been blissfully buried in YouTube Land for years now, but Tik Tok still found me there via Kurtis Conner, whose channel is a resource for those trying to study today’s youth at a safe distance.

One of Conner’s explorations is the Eboy — a Tik Tok entity defined by his floppy middle-parted hair, ample chains, eye rolls, veiny arms? and heavily dramatized quick-changes into gothic attire. To me, this exhibitionist brooder appears to be the latest iteration of punk. An Emo who pulled up his pants, tucked in his shirt and dropped his horny hook into the tumultuous waters of Tik Tok teeming with 14-year-old girls who want nothing more than a graphic DM relationship with an edgy cyber boy they can’t bring home to meet the fam.

Yet unlike the standard Emo (some of whom I attended school with and occupied the outskirts of high school society), the Eboy seemed too edited, too performative, too much of a pubescent fantasy to be a real person. There was no way these boys with their high-waisted thrift store trousers and black manicures were walking the halls of American campuses and being regarded by their peers as real baddies worth banging.

I was wrong. The Eboys are among us. They exist in the physical world, and I met one.

I shook his hand.

At first, I thought he was a Soft Boy (thanks again, Kurtis) because of the way his supple fingers wilted within mine, as if they belonged to a 19th century baroness awaiting a deferential kiss. But his eye-grazing locks and unnecessary amount of chains suggested otherwise. He was there to mix an amateur rap album at my boyfriend’s studio. He’d arrived in a what appeared to be his mom’s mini van with his equally Eboy friend. They were quietly polite yet distant, with a soft, unfocused gaze. And they were both very young.

“Eboy!” I whispered excitedly following the introduction.

Eboys are real.

And I’m here to tell you, teenaged girls, (as if any of you will read this) that Eboys are just boys.

As with any other boy of that age, their prefrontal cortexes are half-baked and won’t be done until about 25. On Tik Tok, they’re doing all they can to lure you in with whatever the algorithm encourages this week. If that means painting their nails, wearing ill-fitting pants and filming themselves in their dark bedrooms, so be it. Hopefully, Mom won’t walk in on them this time.

Eboys are real, as were all the adolescent archetypes who came before them.

Someday, God willing, you will shake hands with the latest version and feel as old as I do now.