On monsters under the trundle bed

Meet Mrs. Bennett, who is a ridiculous idiot: grasping, coarse, and absolutely obsessed with marrying off her very eligible daughter, Jane, to one Mr. Bingley (a wealthy, handsome man whose need for a wife is the O.G. "truth universally acknowledged" of the Jane Austen extended universe.) Things are looking good on this front: Jane has been invited to dine with Mr. Bingley's sisters at Netherfield, a grand house several miles away. But when Jane asks for the use of the family's carriage —owing to inclement weather on the horizon — Mrs. Bennett shrewdly says no, she can only go on horseback, which will surely lead her hosts to insist she stay the night rather than ride back home in the rain.

In truth, the only reason this diabolical plan doesn't work is that it works out too well: Jane gets drenched on the way to dinner, and gets so sick as a result that she has to stay with the Bingleys for days on end.

Which on the one hand is a dreadful imposition, but on the other hand means that Bingley gets to attend to her, and also that her sister Lizzie gets the opportunity to visit and catch the eye of a certain Mr. Darcy, and gosh, you guys. Maybe Mrs. Bennett isn't such a ridiculous idiot after all? At the very least, you must admit she is a Machiavellian mastermind of the socially advantageous sleepover plot, one who knows all too well the serendipitous possibilities that arise from being a guest in someone else's home.

Ah, but that was a long time ago. Before courtship was replaced by dating apps, chamber pots by indoor plumbing, and strategic houseguesting with the extremely online consensus that sleepovers are seething hotbeds of sexual depravity and violence from which girls must be protected at all costs. By today's standards, Mrs. Bennett isn't just meddlesome, desperate, and lacking in social graces. She's a groomer and we need to call the police.

On the subject of sleepovers themselves, I have relatively little to say — and the mire of competitive safetyism that is millennial parenting has been more than adequately covered by Cartoons Hate Her. But the thing where people have determined to ban their kids from sleeping over with friends because what if there's a horny teenage boy in the house? Extremely my wheelhouse, many thoughts.

First, I say kids, but we're really talking about girls. Nobody ever seems to worry about someone's brother or creepy uncle crawling naked into a 13 year-old boy's sleeping bag during an overnight, for better or for worse. The anxiety is based on a gendered victim-perpetrator dynamic that goes only one way — predatory male, vulnerable innocent female — and I do think it's worth pointing out that it's not just absurd but wildly corrosive to social trust to view every man in your community as a potential sex criminal. (Also: not just any sex criminal, but the kind who is both sadistic and reckless enough to assault a child, who is a guest in his home, while his entire family is present!)

Of course these monsters exist, but to organize your life around the pretense that there's one lurking around every corner is its own bad thing.

That said, what is also absurd is the idea that adolescent girls at sleepovers can only ever be victims of unwanted attention. As if surreptitiously ogling (and perhaps longing to be ogled by) your best friend's older brother hasn't been a trope in coming-of-age stories since basically the dawn of time — and as if a significant percentage of today's "what if there's a boy in the house" worriers didn't spend a significant portion of the 1990s surreptitiously thirsting after their friends' brothers, or their brother's friends.

Because I am about 600 years old, I remember when the big thing re: teen sexuality was to insist that guys wanted to have sex because they wanted to have sex, while girls would merely agree to sex because it was a proxy for whatever they really wanted (love and commitment, usually, or at least attention and validation.) But in recent years, it seems like we've gone a step further: now, male sexuality isn't just problematic but actually demonic, and female sexuality isn't just emotions-driven but actually nonexistent. If, as the meme goes, guys only want one thing and it's disgusting, the unspoken last bit is that it's disgusting to girls — who want nothing and no one at all.

Obviously, the idea of a girl being intrigued or titillated by being in proximity to, e.g. a friend's older brother becomes impossible in this paradigm, which views men less as objects of desire than as unavoidable nuisances, like large bipedal bugs that keep landing in your hair and befouling your mimosa when you're just trying to enjoy a nice brunch. And the more we assume that heterosexual sex and sexuality have no allure for women, the more acknowledging the normal psychosexual development of teenage girls becomes weirdly taboo — or grounds for arrest, even.

But I think something more is going on in the anti-sleepover panic than just a MeToo-era allergy to admitting that girls are also capable of lust. I think this conversation is so intense — and seems so bizarre to normal people that they look at you like you're crazy if you mention it — because of the specific milieu in which it's taking place, which is to say, in the one environment where people with low trust, high neuroticism, and latent anti-social tendencies tend to cluster and find community and create endless affirmative feedback loops that only further reinforce all the aforementioned things.

Look: if the great thing about the internet is that it helps people connect, the downside to it is that it helps some people make connections specifically out of materials that they'd be much better off setting on fire. There's a meme about this — you've probably seen it — that posits the existence of a guy who is validated by the internet in his sexual pursuit of toasters, with highly unfortunate results.

Obviously, this is funny. But in its funniness, it does elide the very real and very dark implications of having created a milieu where the toaster-schtuppers of the world can coalesce in search of community — namely, that the life you fuck up by being a maladjusted weirdo may not be your own. Consider Gisele Pelicot, whose ghoul of a husband used the community-building power of the internet to recruit a cabal of local rapists to come to their home and assault her while she was unconscious — or the online covid cultists who continue to bond over their terror of germs while alienating and fracturing their own families.

And yes, consider the kids who are having their development stifled and their opportunities limited because their moms joined the wrong Facebook parenting group circa 2016 and have been trapped in a self-reinforcing terror loop ever since.

This may or may not be a persuasive argument for letting your kids sleep over at their friends' houses. But it is definitely an argument for not allowing the shriekingest people online to become the standard-bearers for How We Live Now — unless you like the idea of living in a world where social trust has become virtually nonexistent, where everyone is afraid of everyone else, and where there will be no dances at Netherfield Hall this year, or possibly ever again.