An Instagram Story

My friend, whom I am going to call Georgia, is a huge sports fan. Recently, while she was home fighting off the flu, she opened Instagram on her phone and listlessly scrolled through a sports channel. She saw a photo of a basketball player with some stats on it and, in trying to pull it up to see the stats, accidentally “liked” a comment that was alongside the photo. The comment said, “I have a big-ass booty.”

While Georgia was trying to figure out how to un-like the comment, she started receiving all manner of, um, interesting replies from men. She freaked out and called her 20-something son for help.

His first response was, “Mom! What are you even doing on Instagram?” Then, “Why did you “like” a comment? Stop reading those responses! Get off there right now!” Georgia kept trying to explain she was just scrolling through a sports channel and didn’t intend to “like” anything, but he wasn’t having any of it.

Georgia wailed, “Why would someone even post that she has a big-ass booty?” It turns out, sports figures have groupies who follow them on social media and make comments designed to draw attention to themselves. Apparently it works, as Georgia certainly got a lot of attention of her own simply by liking someone else’s comment.

The attention Georgia got horrified her – both the comments themselves and the speed with which they appeared. Within 20 minutes of her accidental “like,” she had pages of responses. Being an LOL and not a young thing with a big-ass booty, she didn’t even know what some of the responses meant. “One guy said if I want a real straight guy, talk to him. What does that even mean? A real straight guy? As opposed to a fake straight guy? Is he gay? I don’t know what he’s talking about.”

Naturally, Georgia and I could not stop laughing over this unfortunate incident when she told me about it, and the next day at work I told a couple of my 30-something coworkers the story. They laughed pretty hard, too. Then I remembered the “real straight guy” and asked if they knew what he meant. My coworkers’s eyes grew large and then they howled with laughter. They did know. This is not an R-rated blog, so all I’m going to say is, the key word is “straight” and it has to do with rigidity as well.

Oh, my.

I need to go tell Georgia.