It is hard to find a better example of the particularly deranged strain of logic that proliferates online than the viral story about a man known as “West Elm Caleb”. In January women shared their stories on Tik Tok of the “abuse” and “violence” they experienced at the hands of Caleb (who apparently worked at the upmarket furniture outlet West Elm), a man who they had all matched with on a dating app. His moniker trended on a number of social media platforms internationally, appeared in SEO-fuelled headlines and even got ironically posted about by brands such as Hellman’s and Ruggable.
Yet despite the enormous uproar, the crimes that West Elm Caleb had committed were not clear. The most-watched videos from young women accusing Caleb of mistreating them largely portrayed him as initially over-attentive, and then subsequently unresponsive (unkind, but far from abusive). Psychological terms, such as “love bombing” and “gaslighting”, were used to pathologise his behaviour, and to legitimise plastering one man’s face all over the internet as an evil, arch villain. One user even posted a TikTok saying: “I don’t care whether he lives or dies”. All of this was used as justification for the mass persecution and shaming of one random man; a series of videos that looked a lot like a sustained harassment campaign was reframed as empowered women taking action. One popular post on the matter read: “The sharing of West Elm Caleb stories is an excellent modern example of how women have long used gossip to share valuable information with one another, and the demonisation of gossip serves largely to preserve and perpetuate the patriarchy.”
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