The Notorious I.C.K

A very close reading of your ick list

Honestly the Apple watch is kind of more of an ick than the untied shoelace

Have you ever gone off a man because his shoelace came undone? Left a date early because he ordered dessert? Swiped left because he was wearing a bike helmet on his Hinge profile? If so, congratulations, you have experienced The Ick. If you’ve been on social media in the last year you’ve likely witnessed someone (probably a woman) talking about a completely benign and inconsequential action from a potential lover that totally turned her off of him. They range from the understandable (men who talk too much about smoking weed) to the insane (when he eats Haribo in front of you). I’ve compiled a list of the silliest icks I could find online below, both for reference for the rest of this article and because to be fair, they are pretty funny:

• Velcro wallets

• Drinking a Frappe

• Can’t get the bartender’s attention to order drinks

• Needs to use a GPS

• Falling over when the tube stops

• Having perfect posture

• Baby talk to animals

• Wearing a vest outside of the gym

• Getting a perm

• Chasing a ping pong ball

• Holding an umbrella

• Ordering chicken tenders

• Uses snapchat

• Carrying a backpack

• Has the smallest room in his house

• Their contactless not working and they need to put in their pin number

Despite the constant seething online discourse, lists like this are mostly harmless fun. The girls like to giggle about it online, but realistically seeing a man chase a ping pong ball is not going to put you off a relationship unless you already had some serious doubts. But there’s something that intrigues me about the character of these icks. Although they’re all seemingly minor and arbitrary, there do seem to be a few uniting factors that gesture at something bigger. I’ll give a preemptive warning here that it is, of course, not that deep and I am seriously overanalysing the concept, but here’s some food for thought.

Some icks are indicative of a perfectly reasonable concern, really more of a dating preference than anything. For instance, using a velcro wallet might indicate that he’s not particularly fashion conscious or is a bit immature, which could be valid turn offs. In fact, a lot of the icks women discuss online seem to be men acting childish- ordering chicken tenders, not liking spicy food, or even sillier things like running with a backpack on or screaming on a rollercoaster. These aren’t just decontextualised actions that look icky, they all build up to tell us something about what a man is like. Nobody wants a childish man. Intellectual maturity is sexy, and no woman wants to be stuck with a man baby who can’t take care of himself. Ordering chicken tenders is obviously not implying that you don’t know how to be an adult, but there’s a sliver of something there that makes one suspect.

From another angle, a lot of these traits seem to gesture at femininity. It’s perfectly acceptable for a woman to drink a frappe, baby talk to animals, or get a perm, but when a man does it, it’s an ick. I think there’s a major contradiction here in the way that (straight) women talk about what they look for in a man. We want a man who is emotionally open, comfortable with vulnerability, communicative, free from the shackles of toxic masculinity. But when it comes to the icks, we’re sending the opposite message. We’re getting turned off by a chink in the armour of their performance of masculinity. A man cannot fulfill his archetypal role as your defender if he’s stepping on his untied shoelace. 

It’s also worth noting that a lot of these icks take place in this public sphere. This is where one of my personal icks comes into play: when a man spills a red pasta sauce on his white top. This happened once on a date and it just gave me a bizarrely intense feeling of secondhand embarrassment. Definitely unfair since I’m dyspraxic and constantly spilling things on myself, but The Ick knows no bounds of logic. This experience got me thinking. While there is certainly an aspect there of just liking a man who presents himself well, I think it was less about me looking at him myself and more about the way people around us would go ‘ew that man spilled pasta on himself’. I wonder how many other icks are more about social perception than our own perception. Do you really care that your date didn’t have his oyster card ready and was fumbling with his wallet at the barrier for the tube, or were you just a bit embarrassed that the people queuing behind him were probably minorly annoyed? As women we already tend to be hyper aware of how we are perceived, generally more so than men, so if we are viewing us and our date as a unit, it follows that we might be overly critical of how others are perceiving him.

People will say that there isn’t actually that much to the icks, it’s just a bit of silly fun, but nothing exists in a vacuum. Despite the concept of the ick being pioneered by modern, independent women online, a lot of the content subtly reinforces a regressive gender role. Men should be stoic protectors and providers. Whether this is because of our own inward desires as women or because of our consciousness about the way we and our man are perceived, I’m not sure. It might be impossible to separate the two. I’m not here to crusade against the concept of getting the ick (we can’t really help it) or writing down your ick list, they are an endless source of entertainment at the pub with the girls. However, I do think it is worth interrogating what these actually imply. So maybe buy your boyfriend a frappe today and stare at him lovingly while he drinks it. It’ll be fun.