The Rise of the Highfivesexuals
Young teens often pursue their sexuality by antagonizing or avoiding their crushes to impress their friends--and a new crop of adults aren't growing out of this phase.
If you’re still on Twitter (and if so, this is your sign to drink a glass of water and check in with yourself) you’re probably aware of a series of videos floating around, displaying a group of edgy right-wing influencers throwing up Nazi salutes, including the Tate brothers. Several of these men are people of color, some of them are sexually ambiguous, a couple are Muslim, and three of them are formerly incarcerated—to their credit, a far more diverse crew than you’d see at a leftist CHAZ demonstration in 2020. Just to put things into perspective, when a meth addict famous for hammering himself in the face to improve his maxilla projection is the least embarrassing person in your crew, something is probably not quite right.
Of course, people cringed. Not that I ever thought any of these people were cool, but seeing them together in a limo, giving Temu 2009 club-rat hustle bro core, making Hitler roll in his grave with their bizarre edgelord We Are the World version of the Third Reich just really sends the message home. And across Twitter, people had the same “wow, this is embarrassing” reaction, including people who are unambiguously right-wing.
But beyond cringe, a lot of Twitter users postulated was that this group of men “seemed gay.” It was an easy dig. The evidence of “gayness” was mostly influencer Justin Waller telling Clavicular to stop taking girls out on dates and instead focus that time and energy into “business,” and then later admonishing a young woman sitting on Clavicular’s lap for being a “7 sitting on a 10’s lap” while getting verbal high-fives from the Tate brothers, who further glazed Clavicular’s good looks to humiliate the young woman. The highlights from the night don’t include any of the men making any progress with women, but purposefully insulting and/or arguing with women to impress each other. But I disagree that any of this was gay—it was highfivesexual.
Highfivesexuality is a temporary sexual orientation that you see pretty often with young teenagers or preteens, especially boys, and they usually grow out of it by the time puberty finishes. The idea of highfivesexuality is that boys’ attraction to girls exists only insofar as they can use it to seek approval (and high fives, verbal or physical) from their same-sex friends. Put simply: to a highfivesexual, it is more appealing to make fun of girls than to make out with them. To some extent, this also manifests with young teen girls, where rating boys, gossiping about boys, and mocking boys with their female friends is more appealing than actually dating boys. These kids aren’t gay; they’re twelve. The only problem is that Justin Waller is thirty-six.
