Don't Get Sucked Into The Thoughtful Gesture Industrial Complex

From boo baskets to event planners for proposals, we have to put an end to astroturfed relationship expectations.

Given that we just had Halloween, I discovered the concept of a “boo basket.” At first I assumed this was some kind of Halloween basket of candy and gifts for children, given to them by their parents. This seemed unnecessary, since we all know they will get plenty of candy (most of which will be thrown away or secretly eaten by parents anyway) on the actual night of Halloween.

But it was even worse than I thought—the boo basket trend originated on TikTok, and while some of it is about parents gifting their children, a great deal of it is directed toward adults gifting each other. Specifically, a new thing men should do for women, lest they be “doing the bare minimum.” (I will go a step further: if your boyfriend watches enough TikTok to know what a boo basket is, he’s gigacooked.)

I love giving gifts, and I love to shop! I go way overboard every single Christmas. I sew clothes for my husband and kids, and buying the fabric is half the fun. And, duh, I love to shop for myself. You know a Sezane raffia bag on TheRealReal hates to see me coming. So I am not a big anti-consumerist, anti-holiday, anti-fun killjoy. That said, boo baskets feel like a bit too much, especially for adults.

It’s obviously fine if couples want to get each other Halloween presents, as silly as that maybe sound. I’m pretty sure I got my husband sour straws for Halloween long before we had kids. I think what bothers me is that it’s a social media trend, and therefore a manufactured expectation that didn’t exist two years ago, along with many other similar (and equally ridiculous) astroturfed expectations.

The way TikTok works is that a boo basket isn’t just something that one especially gifty person does for their partner, but for some people, an expectation or source of conflict. According to TikTok (spurious “according to,” I know) some women expect their boyfriends to provide boo baskets, and then some women feel unwanted and undesired when their boyfriends fail to do so. It’s one thing to compare your boyfriend or husband to the partners of your friends, and another thing to compare them to the partners of TikTok influencers, who might be orchestrating everything themselves anyway. And of course, this also means parents are stuck wondering if other kids at their children’s school will get boo baskets, then frantically trying to keep up so their kids don’t feel less loved in comparison.

As silly as I feel writing the word “boo basket” in an otherwise serious tone, I feel like boo baskets are a great example of how TikTok has created what I’ll just be calling the Thoughtful Gesture Industrial Complex—new completely manufactured expectations with no cultural history or significance, driven mostly by influencers attempting to one-up each other with more and more elaborate things to convince people they need to do and buy. It’s the “hip dips” of gifts, if you will—something most people never would have considered, let alone worried about, if TikTok and Instagram hadn’t gotten involved. And boo baskets aren’t the only example.