The Out-of-Touch Adults' Guide to Kid Culture: What Does '7x7=49' Mean?

This week's collection might seem like a random assortment of odds and ends, but there's a throughline: vibes and absurdism over logic and order. Slang words like 7x7=49 and lowkenuinely don't make logical sense, but they are intuitively perfect. The Sea Lion is a purely absurdist anti "dance-craze" taking over TikTok, and Pizza Movie takes "drug flick" tropes to surreal new levels. In other words, Gen Z and A are not trying to make sense of anything anymore. What does the "7x7=49" meme actually mean? This piece of math-slang is growing popular on TikTok as a way of explaining what women find attractive in men. It's about how the equation feels. 7X7=49 makes intuitive sense in a way that something like 51÷3=17 does not. It's an attractive equation, so it's becoming a shorthand way of saying "man that is attractive in a self-evident way." Here's an explanation: And here's how the phrase is used in meme videos: Because young men are in a very dark place right now, this generally silly meme is being misinterpreted and overly explained to mean "women are attracted to numbers themselves , so men don't have a chance," in videos like this: But it's more about how some things are just right and require no explanation, as you can see in this compilation of other "attractive things that aren't attractive in a way you can explain." On a deeper level, seeing 7x7=49 as "attractive" is an example of " Ordinal Linguistic Personification " a kind of synesthesia , a sensory cross-over …