Anyone who spends their days looking at the internet knows how horrifying it can be—fake news spreads like a virus, white supremacists run rampant, and thousands of ill-advised tweets are posted every minute. On Monday evening, a woman named Leah McElrath, who identifies as a “writer, encourager, [and] truth-teller,” posted a tweet so twisted, it offered us a reminder that the universe would surely be sweeter without the world wide web:
Now that everyone has gone for a long walk to think about that tweet, let’s break it down: Here, McElrath is theorizing about the sexual prowess of three possible 2020 Democratic candidates. She thinks Beto O’Rourke, the rising Democratic star who recently narrowly lost his bid for Senate to the grotesque Ted Cruz, is the type of guy who “makes you cum until your calves cramp.” In one sense, this is extremely good, strong, vivid writing. In another, much more powerful sense: Ew.
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Even more shocking than the tweet itself is its popularity. It has almost 10,000 likes, and here’s a sampling of some of the top replies:
Even though resistance warriors responded as hornily as you would’ve expected, others had a different take, with many users refusing to link to the tweet itself, referring to it as the “Beto sex tweet”:
But this is Twitter after all, meaning that within hours there was a backlash to the Beto sex tweet backlash:
It should be noted that the Beto sex tweet comes from a long tradition of progressives being horny for their heroes. When Barack Obama was president, the feminist writer Roxane Gay tweeted the following during one of his speeches:
What have we learned from this? First of all, we are all sinners. Secondly, the internet hasn’t made people better, it’s just allowed them to broadcast thoughts they should probably keep to themselves. This was clearly a mistake, but we don’t need to compound that mistake—so please, never ever tweet when horny.
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