Two years ago, someone added Rebecca Sandeman to a lads group chat – here’s what she learned about men and communication…

The 4 of April 2023 is a date that will be forever seared into my memory. Funnily enough, it has nothing to do with Donald Trump pleading not guilty to 34 felony counts or with Norway finally joining NATO. It was actually the day I became part of the ‘Top Shaggers’ group chat with three other men – one of them being my husband so the ‘Top Shagger’ part is (hopefully) somewhat ironic.  

What originally started as a two-week WhatsApp chat for travelling around Malaysia and Vietnam has morphed into a cultural experiment where I’m simultaneously lurking in the nether-realms of ‘lad chat’ but also being an active participant in said chat. I’ve always been a staunch girl’s girl, never meant to peek behind the veil of how men talk to each other in private (god forbid). Yet here I am, and I’ve got the Minion memes to prove it.

Like David Attenborough with a Galaxy A52

My pictures had ended up on the internet and people were speculating whether I’d had a boob job or not. I was sixteen and didn’t want to make a fuss. Nobody wants to be the uncool girl who’s upset she’s being publicly critiqued on whether she’s got implants or not. I remember feeling such shame at my ‘actions’, not realising until years later that the guy who decided to share my images without consent was in the wrong, not a year 11 girl who’s yet to take her GCSE food tech exam.

So forgive me for being a little sceptical of the ‘Top Shaggers’ at first. But what I quickly discovered was that it was more of an exercise in deep linguistic exploration, as Star Trek would say: ‘To boldly go where no girlie has gone before’. They spoke my language, sure, but they warped and twisted it, ignoring conventional grammar and etymological rules.

So, I decided to consult someone qualified (another man, albeit gay), my best friend Ashley, to see if he could shed any light on whatever the hell they were going on about.

Lads Group Chat and the Deep Lore of Inside Jokes

Ashley: ‘I think they’re bonding, Becky. This is how straight men talk.’

Becky: ‘But, how is this bonding? It’s gibberish.’

Ashley: ‘It might be to the untrained eye, yes. But sending memes is their way to connect with each other instead of say hugging or talking about their feelings.

Was I witnessing a love language that was built on the back of pictures of Roy Keane and impressions of Mr Beast and/or Steven Bartlett? Does this suffice as enough emotional support in lad group chat land?

Jake*, an avid user of a lad group chat over the past 16 years, says that it’s built on ‘deep lore’ where inside jokes have mutated and developed over time to create their own meaning that only the members of the group chat understand. ‘There’s a shared sense of despair’ that can be alleviated through referencing the same situations over and over again with a slightly different take; ‘a camaraderie through the apocalypse’ that is modern living. And in a world where it’s £50,000 to get a deposit on a 1-bed in Clapham with structural mould, we need all the camaraderie we can get.

Perhaps I had been looking at it all wrong after all. From what I initially thought was gibberish was actually years upon years of ‘lore’ and shared experiences. It’s a tool for nostalgia, a ‘pebbling’ of when times were simpler and we didn’t need to think about pension plans or whether we can afford to have children without selling our organs on the dark web.

This is an example of what I’ve called ‘semantic layering’ of previous jokes. It features a flavour of ice cream from Croatia and turns a brand of European buses into a song.

If You Can’t Beat Them, Join Them

Confronted by a fresh perspective on the ‘Top Shaggers’ I leant into the discourse, embracing the freedom of sending random phrases referring to our ‘gap year’ where we’d pretended to be posh girls called Minty and Flossy. This made a change from the collective trauma dumping I had with my friends, which would take the form of 8-minute rambling voice notes. I loved being part of low-stakes conversations that had nothing to do with biological clocks or absent father wounds. I even started making my own memes – Pikachu sipping a cocktail was a personal favourite. Honestly, I was starting to feel like one of the group. I’d picked up their way of speaking, I understood the jokes and the nuances – and without meaning to, I’d become a ‘Top Shagger’.

And then suddenly the gap year was over. The group chat no longer had a purpose, and the three of them would return to their own chat (The Miriam Rodriguez Appreciation Society) and leave me alone, with nobody to send Pikachu memes to. I tried not to feel saddened by the mass exodus, because whether I wanted to admit it or not, this virtual space had meant something to me; a ‘fella affinity’ if you will.

What the Hell is Waffle Wednesday

Nikki, extols the benefits of a group chat with a big guy-to-girl ratio; once a week, they all take part in something called ‘Waffle Wednesday’. ‘Basically, every Wednesda,y people check in with 2-minute videos of how their week’s been, or what’s been going on in their lives. There’s been a lot of emotional support and opening up, even some bombshells that nobody knew about before, despite the fact that they’ve known each other for years. Overall it made everyone closer despite living on opposite ends of the country.’’ 

Waffle Wednesday, with over 12.1 million views on Instagram, has been a useful tool to get men talking more in group chats across the world.

As we move through our twenties into our thirties and forties, responsibilities pile up and leave us with less and less time to prioritise friendships. In the middle of all that, lads group chats often throw us a much-needed lifeline – helping us stay connected to mates who’ve long since stopped being ‘lads’ and are now fathers, career mules, or even wild swimmers.

The Top Shaggers Rise Again

But I didn’t need to worry about being Ieft in the lurch, for reasons I can’t explain Top Shaggers continued to exist outside the jurisdiction of our holiday and now I’m just seemingly in a lad chat with my husband and some of his best friends from secondary school. Yes, they’ll sometimes casually throw in something that happened at Maryland Chicken shop in 2008, which I have no frame of reference for. But for the most part, I have a glossary for the endless loop of inside jokes that range from saying: ‘The Joker Mall’ about a department store in Croatia, chanting ‘Squid Games’ for reasons unknown and trying to find anything that contains the word ‘edge’.

However, if I’m looking for deep and expansive conversation, ‘Top Shaggers’ doesn’t tend to be my first port of call. When I told them about this article and asked what they thought about lads’ group chats, the general consensus was that it was ‘funny innit’. When I tried to probe further, looking for an exclusive insight into the male psyche, Harrison* sent me screenshots of more meme-laden group chats (which seemed to focus on camels and rare fish) that again made no sense to the casual observer.

 ‘What’s so unique about a lad’s one?’ Harrison asked, in all seriousness, as if he didn’t regularly send voice notes repeating the phrase ‘JAKE BUGG’ in a Nottingham accent.       

‘Female group chats are extremely different. We tend to be very positive and encouraging of each other.’ I replied.

‘Sounds dead. Where are the memes?’ another Top Shagger asks.

A Love Letter to Lads’ Group Chats

I fully expected to read a hit-piece exposing the dark underbelly of the lads’ group chat, but I couldn’t help laughing as I scrolled through the hours of random shit they’d sent me over the past two years.

And don’t get me wrong, I still believe there’s plenty that are rife with toxic masculinity and misogyny. We only need to look at the murders of Nicole Smallman and Biba Henry, where police officers shared photos of their bodies on two separate WhatsApp groups and called them ‘dead birds’.

Or even just last year, authorities discovered a Telegram group in Albania with over 100,000 male members that circulated pornographic deep-fake images of women and girls. Removing the element of face-to-face conversation can cause people to become keyboard gremlins, in pursuit of a cheap laugh by any means necessary. To elicit a round of ‘haha good one mate’ is the new medieval jousting competition, we’ve replaced noble steeds with notifications, and our weapon of choice is cutting social commentary we’ve cannibalised and regurgitated from Twitter.

A Full Circle Moment

I once dumped a guy because he was obsessed with being the funniest one in his work group chat. It completely killed the mood when all he wanted to talk about was how he’d “won the war of words” against the duty manager – his boss and part-time nemesis. Because the fact is, if you aren’t in the group chat to witness its unique set of rules, it doesn’t mean anything, you have no skin in the game, and honestly, nobody cares. Lad group chat humour doesn’t translate outside the confines of a phone, it’s a ‘banter mirage’; the more you try to pin it down and explain it, the further away it seems to the weary doomscrolling traveller. 

From being the butt (or boob) of the joke, to becoming part of the joke, my experiences of lads’ group chats have gone full circle. I say as long as they understand that women are human beings and don’t just exist as sex objects to men AND can list at least three female film directors, then they can keep lads’ group chats without the need for permits. Now sorry – actually – I’ve got to go because I’ve found a newsarticle containing the word ‘edge’ that I need to discuss at length with the Top Shaggers.