After a single woman posted a video sharing what a day in her life was like, she was swiftly met with backlash.
Julia Mazur, who goes by the username @pmdpod on TikTok, recently spoke with Insider about the online vitriol she faced after posting a seemingly innocuous video about her day-to-day. In her videos, Mazur typically shares the perks of being a single woman without children in her late twenties, in hopes of reaching an audience of like-minded twenty-somethings who may find her content relatable.
On 3 September, Mazur posted a video that went viral for all the wrong reasons. The 29-year-old showed viewers how a Saturday in her life typically unfolded, discussing what it was like to have no husband or children, and no errands to worry about.
She began by explaining that she slept in until 10 am because she had attended a Beyoncé concert the night before. When she woke up, she proceeded to lazily scroll through her social media feed, taking advantage of no responsibilities to anyone else but herself.
Mazur then documented her spontaneous decision to learn how to make shakshuka for breakfast, before spending the rest of her day lounging around and watching television.
In the video, Mazur also reflected on not feeling “further along” in her life as she neared 30, and compared herself to her fellow twenty-somethings who are married with children.
“The effortlessness and ease of my life, just kind of focusing on myself and the shakshuka I wanna make, or the Beyoncé concert I wanna go to, really pays off when I’m hard on myself for not being where society tells me I should be in life,” she said in the clip, as she focused on the upside of being single and child-free.
The video has since received nearly 480,000 views and 5,200 comments on TikTok.
While the initial reaction was “extremely positive,” according to Mazur, things took a turn when her video was reposted to X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. One user, who goes by the name John Lekach, received around 1.9m views when he wrote above the video that he was “not impressed” with Mazur’s lifestyle choices.
Lekach’s post was then shared by right-wing political commentator Matt Walsh, who has 2.4m followers on the platform. “Her life doesn’t revolve around her family and kids so instead it revolves around TV shows and pop stars. Worst of all she’s too stupid to realise how depressing this is,” Walsh wrote.
Walsh’s comments received 34m views and as 3,600 quote reposts, many of which consisted of misogynistic commentary and name-calling towards Mazur. His remarks also led Mazur to become a target of online abuse. Speaking to Insider, she revealed that multiple users found her Instagram and commented with slurs and cruel words, one saying that she should “have fun dying alone in regret.”
After being subjected to so much vitriol, Mazur decided to “delete the TikTok app on [her] phone to protect [her] mental health.” But amidst all the bullying, she found that there were people who had her back, including Shark Tank personality Mark Cuban and Washington Post journalist Jules Terpak.
“Says the guy who’s life revolves around Twitter/X,” Cuban responded to Walsh’s post, while Terpak wrote: “This girl has just 7k followers on TikTok where the video has 150k views and the comments are all civilised. But on Twitter, there are countless reposts garnering millions of views with much of the discourse being straight up evil.”
Terpak added: “She’s just trying to find peace in her journey - she never said she doesn’t want a family. She’ll find her way.”
The journalist continued to lambast the conservative commentator, writing: “Soulless Matt Walsh of course follows his tweet up by ironically saying that the video is ‘Absolutely soul crushing.’ ****ing culture war clickbait ****wad.”
As for the online support, Mazur said: “That made me feel safe to come back to the internet and make my rebuttal video on TikTok, which led to a lot of public support which I am so unbelievably grateful for.”
