V aesthetic: An ode to 2010s Tumblr– the good and the bad (with playlist)
Two months after being brutally dumped by my ex boyfriend– twice, I threw a massive house party. It was December at the end of 2009, and I was celebrating turning 18. I refused to invite my ex, so instead I invited a new guy in a band I was talking to, and he serenaded me with an acoustic guitar in my living room. I didn’t know how to tell him I found serenades to be cringe-inducing, so I allowed him to play his heartfelt tune, as I sat silently trying not to laugh.
Thankfully, one good thing came from inviting a ‘guitar guy’ to my party, because as we sat outside in the crisp winter night listening to muffled rap music coming from my bass-shaken garage, and he pointed at me with a cigarette and said, “Hey, you should join this new site I’m on. It’s called ‘Tumblr dot com’. It’s cool and I think you’d really like it.”
I didn’t smoke, so I just sat and analyzed his expression from my porch stairs. I couldn’t tell if he was joking or insulting me, but he seemed genuine. He casually nodded with approval, never making eye contact, which my 18 year old brain found insanely cool. With that in mind, the next morning when my hungover friends went home, I sat at my bedroom desk and typed ‘Tumblr dot com’ into my laptop, and made my account.
The Tumblr world
quite literally just a screengrab from my 2013 archives
If you’ve never used Tumblr, it’s a site for “microblogging,” a vague term that means sharing all forms of media. Upon creating an account, you’re given a blog. Whatever your username was, you’d get a URL that was ‘yourname + dot Tumblr dot com,’ and that’s how people accessed your content. You could follow blogs, and they could follow back.
Tumblr was comparable to Pinterest, with a heavy focus on imagery. Most of the site was photos of “aesthetics” people admired and wanted to be like. You could post anything you wanted thanks to its many templates (Photos, text, quotes, chat, audio, and video), and not much regulation on what was on the site, so the content was bountiful, and there was something for everyone.
The coolness of Tumblr, and who it was aimed at
Tumblr gained a cult following because it was cool to secretly have a Tumblr account. Everyone was on Tumblr, yet nobody was. It was very Fight Club. You wouldn’t talk about Tumblr in real life, because that was immediately deemed uncool. If someone asked if you were on the site, the answer was always no.
There were only two obvious crowds on Tumblr, and most were only on one side. Either you were on the “fandom” side, or you were on the “aesthetic” side. Personally, I was on “aesthetic” Tumblr. It was a lot of party photos, fashion bloggers, flower crowns, Lana Del Rey, Arctic Monkeys, hipster fashion (now newly for some reason deemed the ‘Twee’ Aesthetic), and indie movie stills.
I’ll be honest, I don’t know much about the fandom side of Tumblr, but you can sort of thank that crowd for many things that we now consider “millennial” such as Harry Potter, Doctor Who, and Disney adults.
Tumblr gained popularity when Myspace died, and there was a massive shift from Emo and Scene kids toward Indie Sleaze and Soft Grunge aesthetics. I was 18 in 2010, so of course I was listening to indie rock/pop, DIY cropping my ironic thrifted T-shirts, with smudgy eyeliner and messy hair, channeling Effie from Skins, because that was just the thing to do back then. Tumblr was a great place to exude a hipster energy without committing the cardinal social sin of proudly claiming hipsterdom.
The good parts of Tumblr
All you need to know is Tumblr was fun. I could spend hours on it. I was addicted to the social feeling it gave me along with the laughs and personal identity I was able to create with my little blog. Here’s some ways tumblr was actually good.
People always rooted for you
The best part about Tumblr was that you could say anything, and your followers would support you. If you were to have a bad day, you could make a post about feeling awful, and you’d always get at least 5 likes and an anonymous message saying, “I hope you feel better tomorrow.”
It was a great place to make real friends your age
I once scrolled my dashboard and I saw a girl I followed made a joke about Mall of America. I quickly messaged her, “You live in Minnesota?! We should hang out!” and she agreed. That wasn’t the first friend I made on the internet (thanks Myspace) and I had seen her sometimes post photos name-dropping her mutuals, or putting a can on her head upon request to prove she’s real, so I felt safe asking to hang out. We set up a day to meet, and since we both had similar vibes, we immediately became best friends.
After that first Tumblr friend, I felt confident in meeting more local followers. For some of them, I actively asked them to hang out sometime, and they’d do the same. Others I ran into while enjoying a night out on the town, so I’d awkwardly tap their shoulder, curiously calling them by their username, and they’d look at me and say my own username back in excitement. Almost a decade later, Tumblr was the reason I met at least a dozen friends in my early twenties.
A very specific sense of humor
Tumblr was funny sometimes. The jokes were just text posts, that someone would reblog with their comment below a post, and someone else would repeat, adding to yours and the original post, creating a chain of ongoing jokes. The jokes from Tumblr were so notorious at one point, that there are still photos of tumblr chain jokes floating around the internet. I would have family send me a facebook post, and it was just a screengrab of a joke from Tumblr.
Tumblr users were proudly political and progressive
I learned so much from being in college and being on tumblr at the same time. If there’s one thing we can praise tumblr for, it’s bringing forward great political views on like gender identity, mental health awareness, and voting politics. I can’t think of a place that was talking politics the way tumblr was. A lot of the progress in LGBTIA+, feminism, gender identity, and race equality that we have today can be sourced back to progressive leftist communities on Tumblr.
If Tumblr was the bread, then music was it’s butter
Tumblr was so heavily based on music, and that music always fit the aesthetic of the tumblr core. Some of the heavy hitters of Tumblr consisted of:
Arctic Monkeys
Marina and the Diamonds
Lana Del Rey
Grimes
Lorde
The 1975
I listened to all the heavy hitters, but I mainly fell into the Lana Del Rey, Marina and the Diamonds, and Arctic Monkeys sector of the site. I listened to more than what I shared on tumblr, but my favorite musicians were very Tumblr. My taste in music also matched my look at the time, because I liked Arctic Monkeys, so I wore leather jackets, and I’d wear pastels if I was listening to Marina and the Diamonds, and flower crowns on days I listened to Lana Del Rey, and so on.
The bad parts of Tumblr and why I quit in 2014
Yes, you’ve read correctly–where there’s a good side to something, there’s always a bad side to even it out. It feels good to finally say this after escaping the site, but Tumblr was insanely toxic, problematic, and entirely too influential to people who were struggling on and offline. Here are some ways that the Tumblr Era was bad, because we need to hear this so history doesn’t repeat itself (I’m looking at you Tik Tok).
Casually scrolling past graphic images, unannounced
Due to the lack of regulations on the site, many things were allowed to be said, and many images were allowed to be shown. You could scroll for hours looking at just about anything, depending on who you followed, so sometimes you’d see something you wish you hadn’t, such as graphic images borderlining on snuff (or literal crime photos), unwanted porn, or some bad written takes defending anti semitic opinions, and so on…
I remember once following someone for their movie stills and goth outfits. Suddenly they’d post something graphic, and I wouldn’t be aware, scrolling back to the top of the dashboard to be shown a photo of someone being stabbed. Obviously, most of these images were from movies, but sometimes they would be of actual gruesome crime scenes? For the first few years, I just unfollowed anyone who shared a photo of a dead guy, but after years of that just being the norm, I got used to scrolling by pornographic and hyper-violent images, completely desensitized and unbothered, like it was just another Wednesday.
Tumblr was very white
The pro-whiteness of the site was absolutely out of control, with an entire “pale girl aesthetic,” dedicated to idolizing and romanticizing pale whiteness. I’m tan naturally, because I’m literally not white– I’m Native American/American Indian, so therefore I’m not pale. I tried so hard to fit the look though, putting a light behind my camera, so that my face would be washed out to look pale for photos just to fit the overall aesthetic of Tumblr.
Additionally, the privilege was palpable, with photos of white kids smoking bongs in bathtubs getting 10k likes and 4k reblogs. I would sometimes think about how there are so many people of color in prison serving 20 year drug charges over 2 grams of weed, or how black and brown people are statistically more likely to be arrested or killed for drug offenses, yet non-people of color could literally be doing bong rips on camera for likes without a care in the world.
The most annoying part is that I was never shocked or surprised by any of it, because this all happened during a time where cultural appropriation was perfectly allowed, with Lana Del Rey rolling around in the desert sand wearing a headdress, and many coachella attendees wearing culturally sacred things from non-white cultures to be quirky and worldly.
(Source: Youtube)
Tumblr was pro-skinny and fat-shamed people regularly
(Skip this one if it’s triggering! I tried very hard to not use buzzwords, and I didn’t include any imagery)
The skinny culture offline was already a real issue, but it was exaggerated to an almost comical degree on Tumblr. Online, the standard was almost as bad as the “heroine chic” imagery of the magazines in the 90s, with people proudly flaunting their thigh gaps and sharing pro-eating disorder quotes (that I will not be repeating here, nor photo referencing, because we don’t need to see it). I remember my friends and I would hang out on our laptops, and we’d talk about thigh gaps and collarbones often.
I wasn’t a person who desired to look like these unhealthy body standards, but that’s a privileged take, because I already fit most of the standards, being petite and guaranteed able to shop at any store in my early 20s, so of course I can nonchalantly say this pro-skinny movement wasn’t hurting me or influencing me directly when it likely was, and still is. We all have a lot of bad diet and appearance habits to unlearn. Luckily, I came out of Tumblr for the most part unscathed by their rigorous and harmful beauty standards, but many others weren’t so lucky, developing body dysmorphia and eating disorders due to their time on the site.
The Depression Olympics
Lastly, the worst part of Tumblr, and ultimately the reason I quit, was because I had a hard time being happy. In 2014, the same year I was 22, I suddenly lost my best friend, aka: my first Tumblr friend in real life. After her loss, tragedy was no longer a loveable aesthetic, but instead based on the real crushing weight of grief I felt on and offline. What upset me the most was seeing my truly depressing posts gaining popularity, with a slew of likes, follows, and reblogs from people who found that sadness content deeply poetic and profound.
I hated that I only got likes for being sad. I saw my friends making their own posts just as sad as mine, gaining similar levels of sad girl clout. It was unspoken knowledge that sad posts got traction, like a depressing olympic competition. Scrolling through, it felt like everyone was competing to be the most sad– the most heartbroken– the most depressed, because that got the most likes. It was then that I decided I had outgrown Tumblr.
Wearing rose-tinted glasses, in hindsight
The tail end of my Tumblr Era. I was always into the Arctic Monkeys, and after their album AM, I got really into the leather jacket look. Here I was in a store trying on heart shaped “lolita” sunglasses, I didn’t buy them, but instead immortalized them with a photo? And in tragic, romantic tumblr fashion, I quit the site and chopped all my hair off to start fresh.
I left Tumblr to find happiness offline, and I switched to using Instagram. After I quit Tumblr, I realized how addicted I truly was, because I’d pick up my phone and muscle memory would cause me to immediately type “tumblr” into my browser, or open the app on my phone. Eventually I deleted the app and got over the site, and I rarely look back at those days.
Also, let it be known that there were sides of Tumblr that were just for the laughs, for fashion, or for fans to geek out about their favorite fan-made TV show relationship. Not all of Tumblr was problematic, but I’m sure each subgroup has their own horror stories.
I see little familiar traits passed on through other social media platforms like Tik Tok and Twitter, where the next generation repeats whole conversations and jokes that were invented on good old Tumblr. It was no surprise to me when I suddenly got, “I wish I was a teen/adult during this era” videos on my Tik Tok ‘for you’ page, with a series of photos from of the indie sleaze and hipster era, now categorized as Twee.
It was wild to see my youth idolized and pined over, not even a decade later, but I’m not bitter about it. I’m glad I was present for the peak Tumblr era. I’m also glad I never have to go back.
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