Replying to the Void

There’s a taxonomy of men who send unsolicited DMs that nobody wants to study firsthand, but somebody had to. Kelly Svirakova—MissesVlog on YouTube—went ahead and did it: she wrote back to all of them. Every single one.

The results are exactly what you’d expect, which somehow makes them funnier. Bots. Guys whose German appears to have been assembled from overheard fragments. Men offering friendship, love, deeply discounted companionship. And then the committed contingent, the ones who dispensed with preamble: Do you want a photo of my genitals? One requested to be enslaved. One announced, apparently with pride, I come on your pictures.

As a member of the gender responsible for this behavior, watching the experiment unfold carries a specific discomfort—the same feeling as reading your own species’ Wikipedia entry and finding it embarrassing. Kelly navigates it with clinical calm, which makes it funnier than it deserves to be. The void, when you actually talk back to it, turns out to be desperately horny and functionally illiterate. Not shocking. Not enlightening. Just true.