Welcome to the Golden Age of Oversharing

We do it. Celebrities do it. We've all been guilty of it at one point or another. Oversharing fell precipitously out of fashion near the end of the 2010s. But now it seems we may be entering a second age. 

A few things cinched it for me. The curious cat-killing controversy engulfing the trendy Los Angeles restaurant Horses. An assortment of things Meghan Trainor has told me, against my will, about what her and her grown-up Spy Kid husband do when they're alone together. Jameela Jamil regaling a horrified Al Roker with a tale about a booty call gone horribly wrong. Kourtney Kardashian and Travis Barker packing on the PDA for every tourist in Disneyland to behold. Megan Fox cutting a hole in her jumpsuit to have sex with Machine Gun Kelly. Alix Earle detailing her drunken college exploits in hyper-confessional TikTok GRWMs. Priyanka Chopra claiming Nick Jonas saw her win Miss World in 2000, when he was seven and she was 17. Christina Aguilera talking about her vagina and being a “promoter of the swallow,” as opposed to spitting. 

Oversharing is, more or less, stuff nobody really wants to know—the kind of thing that would make someone tweet, “She could've kept that to herself.” It's hard (though not impossible) to overshare with your friends and your family. But normally, there has to be some level of unfamiliarity. 

“Oversharing is like drinking too much,” advice columnist Heather Havrilesky once wrote. “You don’t recognize you’re the only one doing it until it’s too late. And just like looking around at midnight and realizing you’re the only one at the party with a drink in your hand, there’s this feeling of shame that washes over you when you look back on a conversation and realize that you emptied the contents of your brain all over the place and the other person revealed nothing.”

Oversharing isn't a function of quantity. It's a calculus of context and perception—the liminal distance between the oversharer and their audience. And the oversharing allegations are difficult to beat once you've been charged. But all trends are cyclical in nature. Scammer author Caroline Calloway's genre of long-form Instagram caption writing has gone in and out of style just as her personal brand has over the years. But the long-awaited release of her memoir next month feels somehow right on time. HBO's Girls (along with its creator Lena Dunham) is enjoying a renaissance too as many rewatch the show with a renewed appreciation for both its shortcomings and its strengths, its foresight and its blind spots. 

Reddit and legacy subreddits like r/confessions started in 2008, an early rumbling. The 2010s turned oversharing into a personality trait. By the end of the decade, however, it was considered a contagious disease. To give you a sense of where exactly we were at that point in pop culture history: From 2011 to 2016, xoJane monetized oversharing and codified the “first-person industrial complex.” In 2011, Melissa McCarthy was roundly praised for making diarrhea humor feel feminist and radical in Bridesmaids. Lena Dunham's Girls debuted on HBO in 2012. The rise of normcore as a “post-authentic” aesthetic trend in 2013 could be read as a reaction to the proliferation of oversharing and the privileging of eccentricity by making it cool to belong and like things that are popular—a reprieve from the pressure to perform individuality in the age of hipsterdom. 

Overshare was declared Chambers Dictionary's Word of the Year in 2014. Kim Kardashian was named the patron saint of oversharing at the Webby Awards in 2016, and by the end of the year, she was grappling with the trauma of having been robbed at gunpoint for $10 million in jewels her attackers noticed on social media—essentially weaponizing her willingness to share so freely against her. Oversharing became a political buzzword too, as it pertained to the NSA and WikiLeaks. Jada Pinkett Smith made oversharing a family affair with the premiere of Red Table Talk in 2018—the same year former White House communications director George Stephanopoulos's wife boasted about their sex life. From there, the trend began to peter out. 

Now we're looking at what could be a resurgence. What's different, of course, is that our collective threshold for oversharing is much higher. Back then, the term was applied so broadly that the meaning was diluted—sort of the way “random” took on, then promptly lost all meaning around the same time. According to this Business Insider piece, the simple act of being a celebrity with a Vine account meant you were oversharing. None of the cases listed would meet today's standards for TMI—not in a world where Travis Barker can hawk $182 collectible enema kits as a brand collaboration with Liquid Death, and sell out. 

The pandemic encouraged us to bring our whole selves to work. That kind of transparency was a necessity amid a global crisis that forced so many to work from home, blurring (perhaps forever) the line between our personal and professional lives. 

The proliferation of social media, too, has made people more comfortable with being honest on air, in interviews, and in real life. As author and researcher Shumon Basar explained on the inaugural episode of Dazed's Logged On podcast, the internet has upended the one-way trickle down of trends from traditional gatekeepers and tastemakers to the rest of us. Instead, trends “trickle up” from the masses on platforms like TikTok, exploding “those very clearly demarcated categories of what was good taste, what was refined taste, what was mass culture taste, what was bad taste.” Bad taste is routinely reclaimed as good. Until, inevitably, the pendulum swings back toward conventional signifiers of good taste. The clock app's current fascination with the “old-money aesthetic” is a prime example.

Still, we're not yet fully accustomed to hearing celebrities be frank, particularly about topics that are still considered taboo. Rachel Bilson claims to have lost work over her candid comments about sex. As Dunham once observed on Fresh Air, oversharing can be a very gendered term.

“I think that when men sort of share their experiences, it's bravery, and when women share their experiences, people are like, ‘TMI,’” she said. “Too much information has always been my least favorite phrase because what exactly constitutes too much information? It seems like it has a lot to do with who is giving you the information. And I feel as though there's some sense that society trivializes female experiences. And so when you share them, they aren't given—considered—as vital as their male counterparts.”

Oversharing can be truly laudable too. The Bachelor franchises have been fairly critiqued for their at times clumsy handling of tragedy. But former lead Katie Thurston and contestant Caelynn Miller-Keyes's decision to share their #MeToo stories felt like powerful and pivotal moments for Bachelor Nation. Prince Harry's memoir Spare embarrassed the hell out of his family, but the sheer hamminess of it—i.e., that anecdote about his frostbitten penis—served a higher purpose: forever dispelling the notion that royalty is ordained by God. Comedian and iCarly child star Jeanette McCurdy's tell-all, I'm Glad My Mom Died—one of last year's best reads—was a visceral portrait of the abuse she suffered at the hands of her mother and the entertainment industry at large. And in her memoir, Tell Me Everything, actor Minka Kelly bravely holds decades of shame and trauma up to the light: the sex tape her ex-boyfriend coerced her into filming and the pubic tattoo he convinced her to get; her abortion story and her brief stint performing at a peep show to make ends meet; the generous offer Harvey Weinstein made (and Kelly declined) in a bid to recruit her as his new girlfriend. 

Last month Lil Dicky went on Call Her Daddy to foster greater awareness of (and compassion for) a condition called hypospadias: a birth defect wherein the opening of the urethra is underneath, rather than on the tip, of the penis. And it was no small thing for Diplo to disclose previous sexual encounters with men on Emily Ratajkowski's High Low podcast in March, given the social stigma bisexual men still face. 

Most recently model Ali Tate Cutler was slammed for making a series of TikToks about her grandmother's decision to die by euthanasia following a terminal cancer diagnosis. Some found it tasteless of Cutler to document her Bubbie's end of life journey so publicly, but in doing so, she started one of the more progressive cultural conversations to emerge from the app. 

As big public platforms like Twitter gradually die out, many of us will retreat to spaces that feel more shadowy and intimate—the “dark forest” of the internet, where the thin veil of anonymity makes the experience of being vulnerable a little less excruciating. And perhaps a bit more fun too. 

Maybe we're okay with being perceived again and we're craving closeness. Or maybe we're all learning how to laugh at ourselves, that we're all kind of cringe and our experiences aren't unique. Or maybe it's the pervasive sense that nothing is permanent or promised. In this economy, who cares?