Reject the Digital Dating Panopticon

Stories of young men like Harry Sisson dating several women at a time continue to circulate. Is this culture of romantic surveillance doing us any good?

a screenshot being shared on X of one young woman’s TikTok against Sisson, detailing their Snapchat conversations

Most of our love lives will, at some point within them, be the locus of a good deal of disappointment. There are few other aspects of ourselves that deal so specifically with expectations. That is really what sex, dating and relationships are: a place to put our hopes and visions for the future. Heartbreak, by extension, can really just be viewed as the failure of these expectations. When a relationship fails, it isn’t just the loss of the person themselves that we mourn, but the loss of what we imagined was yet to come.

This week, a story came to light about a dozen or so young women who thought they were each monogamously dating 22-year-old Democratic influencer Harry Sisson, albeit digitally. The 11 women, all around the same age as Sisson, claim that he had convinced each of them separately that they were the only woman on his “roster,” that they were the only women he was speaking to. He spoke to many of them for months at a time, with the conversations often being erotic in nature. Nudes were exchanged. Again, each woman claims that they believed to be the only person Sisson was doing this with. However, via social media, each of these women have now come to learn that this wasn’t the case — he’d been flirting and sexting with several women at a time. Now, they are taking to TikTok to rally against him, and their stories have been picked up by large accounts on X. One of the major threads of accusations is available here.

That these women would be disappointed that their relationship with Sisson was not what they hoped it to be is entirely understandable. Misleading women and misrepresenting your intentions in this manner is wrong.

But we need to be honest with ourselves here, too: none of this public litigation and victimization are doing us any favors.

Part of this campaign against Sisson is a way for the women involved to restore their (understandably!) damaged egos. The revelation that a person you were dating or “talking to,” even if just through Snapchat, has no real intentions of taking you seriously and is in fact pursuing this same routine with other women is devastating. It is hurtful! There is nothing confusing about these women being upset, and nothing inherently shameful about their anger. In learning that they aren’t even a primary figure in Sisson’s life, they want to take whatever opportunity is available here in this moment of online attention to become the primary figure elsewhere. They want to redeem the chance to be the main character, even if only temporarily, and reassert their own agency.

Nevertheless, this trial-by-TikTok phenomenon we’ve experienced periodically — most famously in the case of West Elm Caleb — is both cause and symptom of our romantic cultural malaise. Maybe as women we think we’re saving the fellow members of our gender from the same negative experiences. We think we’re saving them from the humiliation we’ve experienced. The whole dynamic has been warped, though. Instead of warning other women of genuine bad actors, of men who actually threaten our safety and autonomy, we are using this digital dating panopticon to save ourselves from future humiliation. This is itself the defining feature of how many people date in the digital sphere: avoid embarrassment at all costs.

For many of those on the other side of this digital dating panopticon — especially young men, who don’t seem as likely to engage in this dynamic via posting — this might mean opting out of dating entirely. How can we expect young people to pursue sex and romance and the various embarrassments and mistakes that will inevitably come with it when there’s risk these embarrassments and mistakes become nationwide gossip? Again, I am not talking about the type of “mistakes” that are actual crimes, but rather the awkwardness and confusion and let-downs that come with the messiness inherent to navigating romance.

By engaging in this culture of surveillance of our personal lives, we’re suppressing ourselves. We’re making it harder for us and the people in our dating pool to pursue our most basic human desires without fear of shame from complete strangers. We are further centering social media as the arbiter of our thoughts and pursuits. Even if our intention is to treat everyone with humanity and respect (as we obviously should), we remain stifled by this constant sense that we are being watched. Because we are.

In the past, I’ve written about how the philandering behavior of Andrew Huberman suggests an internal rift that his “optimization” philosophy cannot remedy. Some element of the digital dating panopticon has been applied here, too. Huberman’s private life has been litigated in the public, social media arena. Still, I do think there are some crucial differences. For one, Huberman’s actions take place in the “real world,” with women he was actually having sex with. These women were in their 30s and 40s, looking specifically to settle down and have children. The futures dashed here are of more consequence than those imagined on Snapchat, even if the pain is temporarily the same. While I disagree with the idea that Huberman’s cheating needs to become a matter of magazine discourse, I nevertheless think there is a broader conversation about the shortcomings of contemporary wellness culture that can be gleaned. Still, I don’t particularly like my own instinct to use this discourse as a means of having this conversation.

But this “real world” vs Snapchat element combined with Sisson’s youth do make this a different situation. Let’s imagine that Sisson had actually pursued all these women in person — would this still be a story? Without all the front-facing camera videos of the girls detailing their experience, without all the horny screenshots, would the narrative that a young man with a little bit of fame tried to sleep with several women be interesting?

So much of Gen Z’s life is online. It is normal that they would consider the romantic involvements they have there to be as real and as devastating as the ones they might have elsewhere. At the same time, I think we’re dealing with a bit of naivety here. While it all makes for some mildly entertaining gossip, it should not come as too much of a surprise that a 22-year-old guy with 1.8 million followers might be sexting with several women at a time. It shouldn’t require headlines or exposés. Men will woo you and call you “wifey material” and tell you you’re beautiful in order to get in your pants, even digitally. This is not a new phenomenon. What is new is this current head-in-the-sand response to it, the faux-shock that someone might be deceitful for sexual purposes. None of us are that innocent, and it is infantilizing to frame it otherwise.

The anger and disappointment is entirely valid. Talk shit with your girl friends, print out his messages and burn them, cuss him out. He did do these women wrong. But that really isn’t a news story, and attempting to make it one does not get us any further in finding happiness or forming relationships or navigating the complexities of romantic and sexual pursuits. It actively holds us back.

There is an obvious political element to all this, too: Sisson is a mainstream Democrat, one the party has propped up in hopes of promoting Kamala Harris and other center-Left figures. He has TikToks with Joe Biden and Barack Obama. He is trying to encourage other young men to vote Dem. For that reason, he is a target and an enemy of some elements of the Right. It’s these people, specifically, that are doing the work of promoting this whole story. They are using it as a political tool, a tabloid narrative to undermine the Dems. They do not care about these women, at all — it is just a convenient story. Once again, young women’s lives and desires and emotions are no longer their own.

This is what the digital dating panopticon does. It removes us as agents in our own lives. The powers in tech and politics are already watching us, working to keep us more isolated and more online and plotting how to use our wants to their own ends. Why should we give them any more to work with?