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The frog is considered a gay icon (Picture: Getty)

There are a number of unlikely gay icons in this world, from The Babadook to Peppa Pig, and it seems that frogs have made the list.

If youre a regular user of TikTok, you may have noticed that alongside videos of dancing and lip-syncing there is an abundance of frog videos.

Where dogs and cats reign supreme on other social media platforms, TikTok is full of sweet little amphibians. Sometimes its frogs sitting weirdly, sometimes its frog care videos for pet owners, sometimes its a girl raising hundreds of thousands of tadpoles in her back garden.

Not all of these videos are made by or featuring lesbians, but the two commonly cross over, with lesbian TikTok and frog TikTok inextricably linked.

Lets look at why.

Lesbian frog TikTok is a communion of two TikTok niches lesbians and frogs.

There are a number of subcultures to be found on the social media site, from alt TikTok to beans TikTok to the oft-maligned straight TikTok.

Because the platform alters your For You page depending on what you tend to like and interact with, groups formed based on what different people saw and found funny or engaging.

In this case, its being a woman who loves women and cute frogs.

Videos feature illustrations and crafts with frogs on them, funny frogs wearing funny outfits, and basically every manner of frog creativity.

The genre frog lesbian has fully sprouted, with the hashtag lesbianslovefrogs now boasting over 710,000 views, and a search for frog lesbian showing thousands of results.

There are a number of reasons why lesbians may gravitate to frogs (and not just because theyre cute and hilarious).

The frogs are gay meme came to prominence around two years ago when shock-jock Alex Jones claimed on the show InfoWars that water was being poisoned and was making the frigginfrogsgay.

His channel then uploaded a video titled Proof! Gay Frogs Are Real, cementing frogs status as gay icons forevermore.

Frogs have also been top meme-fodder for many years. Dat Boi, Kermit sipping tea, graphic design is my passion, froggy chair, and its Wednesday my dudes all had their moment in the sun (as well as Pepe, but the less we say about him the better).

In that sense, its understandable that TikTok (the social media site best suited to more surreal and younger comedy) would become the home of frog content.

Nearly half of those who use TikTok are under 24, and under 24s are the age group most likely to be queer. Ergo, frog lovers and LGBT+ people were bound to merge and become part of the TikTok canon at some point.

But why lesbians specifically?

Although frogs are gay (incontrovertible fact, please dont argue), the links between frogs and lesbians particularly might derive from an aesthetic movement titled cottagecore.

TikTok defines this as flower prints, knitting, plants and mushrooms. Basically nice, comforting, nature-based images and sounds to soothe us and be aesthetically pleasing.

i-D magazine spoke to one queer woman about why she identified with cottagecore so much, and she said: Lesbians tend to be oversexualised by the media. Cottagecore sees love as a connection between two souls.

Another stated, It especially makes me feel like the things I loved in childhood, like having farm animals and picking blackberries in the fields and getting lost in the woods, are cis- and hetero-coded. So for me, cottagecore is an ideal where I can be visibly queer in rural spaces.

In a world where we need to own a house to have a dog or cultivate our own gardens, frogs are one of the easiest ways to get closer to nature.

And if that desire (frog)spawns a new subculture where WLW and animals are celebrated and we get to see cute frogs on our feeds then that works for us.

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What is frog TikTok, and why does it so often cross over with lesbian TikTok? - Metro.co.uk