When I was first getting interested in boys and dating, I had absolutely no clue what boys said about girls.

Okay, I had some ideas. I heard through the grapevine that they thought certain girls were hot. They had some kind of NFL draft of the hottest girls in our high school and I discovered that was why they kept calling this cute sophomore “Reggie Bush.” I’m sure they said other things—far worse things—to which I was never privy. And honestly? If I had heard every weird, perverted or downright offensive thing that teenage boys said about girls, I think it would have fucked me up, and done major damage to my views of men as I got older. But luckily, I heard very little of it.

Similarly, I think it’s probably good that the boys didn’t hear what girls said about them. When my friend’s boyfriend broke up with her, I cheered her up by drawing a comic of him getting mounted by a buffalo (to think of all the money I could have made if I agreed to commission such images.) Most of the time, when we talked about boys, we were just bullshitting and being edgy to amuse each other—a phenomenon I refer to as “highfivesexuality,” or a proto stage of sexual development that should end by adulthood.

I also think it’s good that boys never saw or heard any of this.

Unfortunately, today, if you are on social media, you will be served a constant stream of the absolute worst of the other gender’s “locker room talk.” The stuff that young people are able to see just by logging into TikTok or Twitter for two minutes is worse than everything I ever heard boys say in four years of high school, even through gossip. And we’re kidding ourselves if we don’t think that experiencing the opposite sex this way—through their most inflammatory members saying or doing the most inflammatory things—is doing real damage to today’s young people and how they view the opposite sex, fueling myths and stereotypes that aren’t remotely true.

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I just finished reading The Last Straight Woman by my friend, , and I have to admit, the first feeling I had upon reading a couple chapters was intense fury that I had not written this book myself. Everything she said, I couldn’t help but nod and say, “Yes, YES!! This is what I’ve been SAYING!!!” (Except she’s been saying it longer and much better than I could have, and, so on.) She also made some points that never even occurred to me, but as soon as I read them, I was like Oh my God, I’m such an idiot that I never thought of this. It was like watching the most compelling horror movie ever (the horror being, I suppose, feminist manifestos insisting straight women could simply choose not to be straight the same way one could choose to stop buying one particular type of apple—yes, she cites this) where every plot twist feels like something you should have seen coming, but foolishly didn’t. And to make it worse? She’s hilarious.

When I first heard that Phoebe was writing a book about straight women, years ago, I had a brief moment of non-judgmental but confused curiosity where I was like, “Okay, what about them? The fact that they’re straight?” Thankfully, I did not have the standard Bluesky reaction of “STRAIGHT women? Existing and writing about themselves? a MONTH before Pride? How distasteful!” But anyway, “the fact that they’re straight” is actually…pretty compelling, at least the way she writes about it. Phoebe is not writing about how all women should be straight, nor is she writing about how straight people are oppressed. Just that most women are straight—and that a key part of being straight is (and I kid you not, hold onto your seats) actually being attracted to men.

Some of you unfamiliar with Phoebe’s beat might still be like, “Okay, and?” but there’s actually so much interesting content here that I found myself dog-earing nearly every page of her book.

In particular, the part that got me the most—and what most of this article will cover—was the way straight womanhood was presented during what Phoebe aptly calls the era of “Ban Men Feminism.” In particular, she references supermodel/activist Emily Ratajkowski’s Ban Men feminist book, My Body, and the entire Ban Men (but be hot while doing it, but NOT for men, in fact, it’s IRONIC, even if nobody can tell the difference) ethos. Emily Ratajkowski frames all men and all male attention in general as predatory and annoying, with this implicit assumption that all women could relate to such a plight. And she’s hardly the only one. Many straight feminist writers have theorized that we would all be much happier in women-only dance parties, indefinitely, deriving zero pleasure or arousal from men ourselves. While I think I can safely go on the record to say that most women do not look like Emily Ratajkowski, Phoebe points out that plenty of non-Ratajkowski-appearing women, like Lena Dunham, considered her book a great example of what “every” woman experiences—basically, yes, we’re “straight” but also, we’d be very happy to see all men disappear tomorrow so we could just sit around and drink wine together in peace.

Not to go all Tumblr on you, but I did not realize that female heterosexuality was apparently aromantic asexuality. To quote Taylor Lorenz, “People learn things on their phones every day!”

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For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a bizarre relationship with femininity, but not in the “I hate makeup and fashion, I just want to play sports” kind of way. Judging from how my husband reacts when yet another package from TheRealReal shows up on our doorstep (I swear it’s a good deal! That $40 skirt was $500 retail!) he probably wishes that I had a little more of that in me.

But no, I am not a tomboy—I think I’d need to be able to run a mile without passing out, or perhaps correctly throw one singular ball to qualify. I have no gender dysphoria, or any desire to be perceived as “not a woman.” If anything, it’s more of a gender dysmorphia—the opposite scenario—where I’m a cisgender straight woman, I want to be feminine, all my interests and desires and aesthetics are feminine, but I don’t see myself as feminine and I’m always pleasantly surprised when other people describe me as such. I feel locked out of femininity in an intangible way. I am an amorphous, blobby entity doing its best impression of a feminine woman and failing.

I can’t fully articulate why I feel like this. Factually speaking, nothing about me is clearly masculine. I’m average height. I’m thin. When other people hear that I feel this way, they either don’t know what I’m talking about, or they think I’m fishing for compliments because I want people to reassure me that yes, I am just a tiny, fragile, girlish little wilting baby deer with anemia and nobody could ever mistake me for big and tough. I swear, it’s not that—I know that this neurosis is silly. But I also have a feeling I’m not the only woman who experiences femininity this way.

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People are pretty familiar with the typical OCD manifestations—cleanliness and germophobia (of course), magical thinking rituals to prevent peril, and hypochondria or worries about health and safety (this is how it usually goes for me.)

But there are many other forms of OCD—intrusive thoughts and fears about more taboo things, things which most people are scared of mentioning. Thoughts that you might harm children are common among OCD sufferers, for the simple reason that this is the worst thing those people can imagine, so their OCD attaches to it. This is precisely how intrusive thoughts and OCD work—I was once in an OCD support group with a nice woman who often worried that she might cheat on her husband without realizing it, and eventually developed a terrifying obsession that she could, at any moment, become a cannibal serial killer.

A less taboo, but also less well-documented version of this subtype of OCD is a fear of cancellation, or having your life/career ruined by the hands of an online hate mob, usually for perceived bigotry. Unlike a fear that you are one bad day away from skilleting and filleting your neighbor, a fear of cancellation makes a bit more “sense”—far more people have been cancelled (as in, lost their jobs or entire careers, not “got yelled at online for two days”) often for seemingly innocuous or minor things, than become serial killers. (Take, for example, the young man who was famously fired for making a middle-school-tier sex joke to a friend at a tech conference, within earshot of a woman he’d never met.) One could not become a serial killer by accident, but almost everyone who has been canceled over online slights (or worse, behaviors out of context, filmed by strangers in public) did not think what they did was wrong. And at least for a while, openly expressing this fear, or any criticism of “cancel culture,” made you a target of this same culture which supposedly didn’t exist. Which was, to say the least, bad for people with this subtype of OCD!

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Since starting this Substack and writing about my difficulties making friends, especially as a child but also into young adulthood, I’ve bumped up against one theory over and over again: what if women have disliked me for no good reason at all, and they’re simply jealous of me for being hot?

Your words, not mine! Many of you have suggested that my social ills are a product of being too hot for my dorky personality (I concede my social skills were bad for most of my life, but my hotness, if it exists, is irrelevant.) Without getting into the nitty-gritty of whether I’m actually that hot, because obviously a lot of this is subjective and the only opinion that matters is my husband’s, you’re just going to have to take my word that especially in my teens and twenties, I was what one would consider “reasonably attractive”—not a model, but cute and in very good shape—and I struggled to make female friends.

Does that attractiveness explain why women typically haven’t liked me? Is this why, when I worked at a big tech company, I was the most hated woman in the office? The clues are all there: I’ve never struggled to make friends with men. My husband’s friends have all liked me. Women have, at times, spread baseless sexual rumors about me (shoutout to the girl who told my husband, right after he met me, that I was a “huge slut.” I would never be so forward as to directly ask him to rail my brains out, but you really helped us move things along.)

But I don’t think that’s it, and I don’t think this is the answer for many other decent-looking, yet friendless women. But I get it. It’s extremely tempting to assume it is.

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Lots of writers spend countless hours trying to get even just ten people to read their work. My brother, who has a day job he enjoys and zero dreams of becoming a professional writer, got pretty lucky: his writing debut will be going out to thousands of people and he didn’t have to kiss any asses or even “work his network.” All he had to do was occasionally text me back. Nepo baby alert!

Anyway, what follows is a short story my brother wrote, inspired by, and I quote “the fact that you vacation on Looney Island every few weeks.” He’s correct that I have pretty bad OCD, and as one of my top confidantes, my OCD is exhausting for him. So this short story is basically a way for him to vent about how annoying I am. When I first read it, I did not infer that it was about me and I said, “That poor woman.”

Although this story is clearly inspired by me, it’s not a 100% accurate, biographical story, and most of the things in this story are inspired by things I’ve done or said, but not things I’ve actually done. So please, no, “Did you really do that?” No, I didn’t.

Now, the last question you’re going to ask: “Why would you paywall your brother’s short story? I don’t give a shit who your brother is! Why would I pay for that?” The answer is simply because I’m not sure I want everyone on Twitter having this much of a peek into my mental illness. Self-preservation paywall only, folks.

Without further ado, this is my brother’s short story, Mommyland:

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Despite writing many personal essays and true stories, this is the story I’ve found the most challenging to write. In fact, I’ve written this story at least three times since my childhood, and scrapped my draft every time. The events are just so weird, the kind of narrative that conjures up statements like, “Wow, truth really is stranger than fiction!” or more realistically, “She obviously made this up.” But I think, thirty years after the events of this story happened, I’ve finally cracked it. I hope.

My public elementary school seemed to revolve around one particular main character—a second grade teacher in her mid-sixties, who went simply by the name “Doc.” She used this name because she was the only teacher to have a doctorate in education. Looking back now as an adult, I realized this must have been irritating as hell for the other teachers, one step less annoying than a Harvard-educated teacher showing up and declaring that everyone must call him Crimson.

Over her many years at the school, Doc had become the figurehead of our school. She was, seemingly, exempt from the required curriculum. She taught niche topics unrelated to a typical second grade syllabus. She took her students on field trips that the other second grade teachers didn’t. She put on a self-written play and puppet show every year, and the other second grade teachers didn’t. She was revered as a sort of quirky maverick who didn’t play by the rules. To have your child in Doc’s class was a gift. But despite all her fun excursions and activities, she was not known for being an “easy” teacher. It was an open secret that first grade teachers did not place their remedial students with Doc. And given that I was a smart-ass seven-year-old, perhaps the only person at school who believed themselves to be more special, smarter, and more of a main character than Doc, I wanted to be in her class. Because she was so unusual, and because I was still reeling from social isolation after I told my first grade class that I was an alien in a skin suit (and they believed me, which is kind of on them) I was under the impression that Doc would see what was special about me—see past the bad parts that everyone else apparently saw, realize how kind and smart and special I was, and bring out the best in me.

The summer after first grade, when I was about to turn seven, I received a letter informing me that she would be my teacher. I cheered as the fictitious Crimson may have upon discovering he was admitted to his alma mater.

On the first day of school, I was determined not only to impress Doc, but to be her favorite. I showed up wearing a makeshift English boarding school uniform that I pieced together from a GAP Kids navy pleated skirt, some dorky sweater vest and a white poplin blouse. Knee socks and a hair bow may or may not have been involved. My heart raced as I stood in line behind the other kids, all of us about to enter the hallowed halls of Doc’s second grade classroom. Finally, it was my turn. I looked up at her, towering over me. I remember her being impossibly tall, but it’s possible my memory is skewed from having been a child and she was just average-sized. She had short, permed brown hair and heavy powdered foundation, high drawn-on brows, and red lips that befitted a Broadway actress.

Finally, I said what I had been practicing all morning: “Twelve times twelve is one hundred and forty-four.”

For some reason I expected Doc to smile, cheer, or do anything to assure me that I was special. Instead, she said, “Oh, great, you’re one of those.”

I quickly learned that “one of those” was a very all-encompassing term, because Doc found most of her students exasperating. Her reputation as a “tough” teacher was, if anything, undersold. She did things in our class that today might put a teacher on the local news. For example, we had two students in our class who came from other countries. They could speak English, but struggled a bit more with grammar and spelling. When one of them made a particularly egregious spelling mistake, Doc asked him to stand on his desk and bend over so she could spank him in front of the class.

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If you spend a lot of time online listening to men talk about dating in 2026, you will see many of them repeat that overweight women are “ruining” the dating landscape. Even men who claim not to be picky will say they “don’t ask for much”—just someone who is “fit and active.” (Cue: the guy from Love Is Blind who repeatedly asked women if he would be able to lift them onto his shoulders at a concert.) Others will cut to the chase with “no fatties.” They will tweet out photos of women they apparently deem too heavy to be on the apps at all, with the same degree of shock and horror as one might feel if they had seen these women not on a dating app, but hiding in their shower with a knife.

Of course, the Internet is primed to show us rage bait, and I have long believed these men represented a particularly nasty vocal minority—not that it was unusual to prefer slim women, but that it was unusual to be so incensed that heavier women exist at all.

But something still didn’t add up. If over 70% of the country is overweight, and the vast majority of people get married, aren’t these men actually far pickier than the average guy, despite claiming to be “not that picky” or even on the incel spectrum? The average guy, after all, is fat, and is married to a fat woman. Even when I interviewed a group of non-misogynistic incels, most of them subtly mentioned they wouldn’t date an overweight woman. And what about women? Surely, if women are the choosier sex, they’re choosy about weight as well. So why do we never hear them complaining about “too many fat guys on the apps?”

Luckily, I had lots of data on this—not just from my recent digital body type rating survey, but from other studies I conducted earlier. Finally, I have an answer to the question of just how much a dealbreaker weight is for men and women, and the nuance that everyone seems to be missing.

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Surveys to Take

First thing’s first, I need more participants for my extremely quick BDSM survey—but if you aren’t interested in BDSM, that’s fine. I’m looking to get all perspectives, even people who have no experience or interest.

Another cool one, available to everyone: my survey on first dates. No dating experience required! Married people can take it too!

I’m also doing one on gender and social media, which should be applicable to everyone!

Ube Ice Cream

It’s been ages since we’ve gotten good old-fashioned Peak 1 “cultural appropriation vis-a-vis food” drama. This was all the rage in the 2010’s, when all it took was one white person making noodles to spark discourse for days, or alternatively, just college cafeteria workers attempting to make a banh mi sandwich despite no Vietnamese ancestry. But since anyone who would get upset about such things sectioned themselves into Bluesky over the past year, I thought this type of drama just didn’t happen on Twitter. Until this week.

Presenting, the “ube ice cream” discourse.

It all started when a writer named Julian who works at an ice cream shop posted a photo of an ube flavored ice cream which he “developed.” Uh oh!

People immediately jumped on him for claiming to have invented the traditional Filipino recipe, Sorbetes (sometimes referred to as “dirty ice cream.”) Part of this accusation came from the fact that he said the recipe was vegan, and sorbetes is usually vegan, which (in some people’s minds) sounded like he had invented a “vegan version” of a Filipino dessert that is already vegan.

He clarified that he was not claiming to have invented ube ice cream, but rather that he had to develop a specific recipe that would work with his workplace’s ice cream machine, because any ice cream made at his shop needs to be developed specifically for their machinery.

First, his initial attempt at clarification, slightly tongue-in-cheek:

Then, apologies:

This was…not good enough:

Eventually, Julian clarified that he did speak with Filipino chefs about the recipe, which I’m assuming he thought would absolve him—but not so fast! People got angry that he didn’t adequately credit these chefs.

At one point, someone attempted to mass-poison foreigners who might be arrogant and racist enough to want to try Filipino cuisine (thankfully, community noted almost immediately.)

Although honestly? This followup tweet should have tipped everyone off:

Then she got multiple responses telling her to use “Filipinx” which I’m assuming were jokes, but I’m not 100% sure.

Finally, we got some voices of moderation, such as the person who doesn’t want the ube ice cream guy to be killed":

And then, the best way to sum it all up:

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Ugly Sandals

I was actually so happy that this came up on the TL because as a very aggressive walker (I frequently walk 3+ miles a day, especially when traveling) it seems like if you want to wear anything other than sneakers or flat boots, you simply cannot find anything that is both aesthetically pleasing and comfortable. This has always been a huge frustration of mine during sandal season, and it was vindicated by this thread:

While many posters offered up options for sandals, others noted that all suggestions were oogly.

However, critics of the ugly shoes did not suggest prettier alternatives, which once again validates my whole theory which is that for truly long-term walking, you will simply not find a comfortable and pretty sandal. Or, at the very least, it will be difficult.

The best I can do is Vivaia, a brand a bit like Rothy’s in price, material and appearance, although in my experience they are more comfortable. I wore a lot of Vivaia on my trip to England and France last summer, and I did not regret it. For example, these sandals were somehow very walkable despite being slim/minimalist and not chunky or orthopedic (yes, that’s me, I had a really bad spray tan, don’t laugh.)

But even then, the struggle is real. Maybe instead of laughing at ugly sandals we should be acknowledging our own humility. Let she who can walk five miles in a stiletto cast the first “those shoes are ugly.”

Orgasm Gap

I’ve written before about the well-known heterosexual “orgasm gap,” or the fact that straight men are more likely to orgasm during sexual encounters than straight women (this gap is also wider for those on the Right politically, although not as much as you may think.)

The orgasm gap came up again this month, although I’m not sure exactly where it started. This viral tweet seems to be the catalyst, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a subtweet of something else:

The orgasm version of ube ice cream:

A few responses from the other side:

Somehow, I did not see this response, so I’m glad this Twitter user was able to surface it in a subtweet:

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Male Standards

Who is pickier, men or women? Okay, when it comes to all attributes, women, but who is pickier about looks? This seems to be the age-old question, and even members of the manosphere disagree on how much women care about men’s looks (the incels or blackpillers will say all women are singularly interested in 6’5” Chads, where more old-school red pillers believe looks outside of basic fitness aren’t as important as charisma and game.)

But overall, the manosphere is aligned on the idea that women’s standards are too high compared to men’s. This month, a Twitter user patted himself on the back for his (and other men’s) reasonable standards by posting an example of an “average” girl he would deign to date:

Men in the comments chimed in to point out that actually, they’d date this woman over an Instagram model, and we are supposed to believe both of these options are available to them:

At one point, some commenters asked him to clarify what about this woman was average:

Ooh! Bingo card filled! We have someone immediately projecting cuckoldry onto the situation:

It’s kinda giving (vintage CHH):

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Bryan Johnson Curing Endometriosis

Last time I published Many Such Takes, I covered eccentric billionaire Bryan Johnson posting about his girlfriend and co-founder, Kate Tolo’s top 1% vagina. (He meant her vaginal microbiome, not its appearance or…function, although I assume he’s happy with all of the above.)

This month, he took his special interest in his girlfriend’s pussy to the next level by making it his pet project to cure her endometriosis:

Okay, perhaps he did not specifically promise to cure endometriosis, but knowing him and his obsession with biohacking, this is the closest women will get to a cure, or even a halfway decent treatment. Endometriosis is profoundly under-researched, and a weird vagina-obsessed billionaire is really women’s only hope in this arena.

A few people were concerned about Kate’s privacy, as if this was not literally what she signed up for by choosing to date a man who publicly tweets about going down on her. In a way, we should all aspire to this:

All that effort and the betting markets still don’t think he’s likely to propose to Kate by the end of the year—in fact, this intimate peek into their lifestyle didn’t budge the predictions at all. A man will literally cure endometriosis before proposing to his girlfriend, I guess.

Part of a data partnership with Polymarket.

Problematic Age Gaps

Just in case you weren’t done with the genderslop, we had drama this week when a Twitter user complained about a prom photo of teenagers that featured no grown adult men dating the girls. You had to be there, I guess. I covered it in more detail here:

Funny Tweets/Other Happenings

Nobody should be surprised by this, but the fruit AI videos are now doing fart porn:

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Each month, I cover all my favorite fashion from the previous month—not only my favorite outfits, but my favorite sewing projects, because a good portion of my clothes (not to mention my husband’s and kids’) are homemade. Perhaps you didn’t subscribe for fashion, but the good news is that fashion is only about 10% of my content, and with 4-5 posts every week, there’s bound to be something else that you like. (Please don’t be mad at me for the fashion. Please.)

Best Fits

I sincerely apologize to anyone who eagerly opened this article because they saw that I posted a “thirst trap” (your words, not mine) in the form of this jumpsuit, which was my big sewing project of the month, and they expected more of this:

Unfortunately for those people, most of my clothes look more like this, although for anyone interested in the craftsmanship of the jumpsuit I will be providing fabric recommendations and such.

Anyway, if you are still interested despite the fact that what is to follow is entirely fashion-oriented with nary a boob to be found, read on.

One of my favorite outfits this month was this orange getup, comprised entirely of second-hand items (the top must have been $20 thrifted, the skirt was $40 at TheRealReal—and look at those fun flower appliques!) I wore this for a child’s party with an orange theme. And a pop of blue courtesy of Vivaia sandals.

I also wore this to checks notes take my kids to the park? IDK man, I need excuses to wear fun clothes I guess. Fun fact: with the exception of the top (Aritzia) all of this is also second hand! The bag is a vintage Coach Soho bag for which I’ve found myself reaching constantly, and the belt was this cool piece I found at a random vintage pop-up. I had been searching for a metallic Western-inspired belt for ages, so I was thrilled to stumble upon it.

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I wrote about age gap relationship shaming a few weeks ago—mostly the fact that it exists to protect an individual’s desired dating market by enforcing a consequence for failing to settle down young. Most commonly, we see this with women shaming older men who date younger, but that’s probably because those relationships are just more common than the reverse. As I covered, older women dating younger men are subject to the exact same treatment, with many critics calling these relationships “hagmaxxing” and accusing the women of failing to get married at more acceptable ages because they were too busy “competing with men on the job market.” (Show me on the doll where the employed woman hurt you.)

Age gap relationships between consenting adults (I’m talking 10-15+ years, not 5) have their own challenges and are not the desired scenario for your average young person, but they are typically harmless, some turn out great, and it’s stupid to moralize about them. However, I never thought I’d see the day when people attempted to shame relationships for the participants—in these recent cases, two teenagers—being too close in age.

I won’t post photos of the children involved because, well, it’s weird, but all week I have been repeatedly bombarded with the same prom photo of four good-looking teenagers with the caption:

The stark physical difference between young men and young women of the same age is severely understated. Relationships with significant age gaps are very obviously biologically advantageous.

Big asterisk on “significant age gaps” because the guy who posted it is in his mid-twenties, not his forties (I am laughing at the idea of trying to convince an eighteen-year-old girl to ditch “boys her age” and settle down with a “real man,” and that real man is a 24-year-old named Aiden.) However, several other men who actually were much older agreed with him. In their minds, the boys looked obviously underdeveloped compared to the girls, therefore, something was wrong with the girls wanting to date these boys instead of men old enough to be their dads. Notably, nobody could explain what sinister force made these “unnatural” relationships happen.

The “biological advantage” of breaking up these teen relationships so the girls can date older men is nonexistent, really, unless it’s a euphemism for “that kind of relationship would make my penis happy, personally.” And while shaming relationships with large age gaps is a strategy to protect one’s desired dating pool, the same is true of shaming relationships between two teenagers who are too close in age. If your desired dating pool is “teenage girls,” that is.

Perpetuating the myth that teenage girls don’t find boys around their own age attractive, or that young men are “worthless” and shouldn’t bother even attempting relationships until they get older, is a very obvious form of intrasexual competition. #MenInWomensFields.

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When I started sixth grade, the students from four neighboring elementary schools combined to attend the local public middle school. Knowing this meant an opportunity to reinvent myself, I made up a few rules to curb my social ineptitude that got me bullied in elementary school: gently smile to say hi (no maniacal waving), don’t tell babyish stories about my family, stop trying to be funny, and most importantly: only wear clothes adorned with butterfly motifs, because then I’d be known as the “butterfly girl” instead of something embarrassing.

Despite the failure of this manifesto, I took a similar approach at the age of twenty-six, when I started working for an advertising firm called Zapify. Although Zapify was a startup, it was the biggest company in my career history--about two hundred people, with multiple offices--so I knew that this workplace might also be an important social hub for me. I was part of a friend group at the time, but I felt more on the outskirts than an actual member, much younger than everyone else, and rarely taken seriously. My rules for Zapify were simple: don’t do anything weird, don’t get drunk at company events, ask other people about themselves a lot, and attend all the happy hours even when you’re tired. The mission: have a great group of girlfriends who liked me as much as I liked them, and who could open the door to fun gatherings and parties.

On my first day, the recruiter, Charlie, introduced me to my team, which consisted of my boss, Ji-hoon, and the other two salespeople, Derek and Jim. Nice as they were, I was not invested in making close friends with single men at work. I was ruthlessly scouting for women—a group of bubbly, energetic women who would say things like “Sunday funday!” and invite me and my husband Nick to a rooftop party with bottomless mimosas.

At lunch, I spotted my new friend group. Just like in middle school, I could easily tell they were the “cool kids” of the office. The ringleader was a woman around my age named Taryn who looked surprisingly normie for San Francisco--chunky highlighted bob, heavy eye makeup, weird purposefully-wrinkled mid-calf boots over skinny jeans that made her look a bit like Peter Pan meets Home Depot Karen--but I could tell she thought she was cool, as did everyone else, and as a result, so did I. Her sidekicks included a few of the other office-hot young women and one gay guy. I would manifest this into existence, I decided.

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Seemingly every month or so, Twitter is overrun by “DoorDash discourse,” which nearly always goes the same way: the majority of people believe that DoorDash (or any other on-demand food delivery app) is a nice treat to have, but not a fundamental human right. Then, a smaller but very loud cohort of people insist that these apps are simply the only option for a significant number of people, and even if one could theoretically cook, it’s an indictment of America, capitalism, or the elites, that every single person in the country cannot afford a daily private chauffeur for a hoagie.

The excuses are endless for why restaurant delivery is not a luxury and is in fact a pressing necessity for the proletariat: yes, DoorDash is expensive but “groceries are too,” so what does it matter? Lots of people can’t cook because they “can’t afford all the right spices and don’t know the right recipes.” (All this screen time and yet, they are incapable of looking up a recipe.) Lots of people can’t cook because debilitating ADHD prevents them from cleaning up afterwards. Lots of people are allergic to food that was previously frozen or even refrigerated (thank goodness restaurants never use anything that was previously chilled!) Lots of people can’t cook because they work multiple shifts, have no mouth, and suffer from long hantavirus.

This conversation comes off the heels of businessman Kevin O’Leary admonishing middle class young people for regularly spending $28 on lunch, to which leftist Twitter personality Sean McCarthy retorted, “Lunch just costs $28 now.” This conversation dragged on around Twitter for several days. For the pro-DoorDash folks, any suggestion to cook your own food or bring your own sandwich to work, was the equivalent of being commanded to eat gruel on the floor of the Victorian workhouse.

Eventually, we came full circle to the point where the pro-DoorDash contingent were genuinely agreeing with the sarcastic idea that under a utopian socialist government where people were paid fairly (except, I imagine, for delivery workers and restaurant workers), everyone would have a Ferrari. (Go ahead and be a socialist if you want to, but I should remind you that socialism doesn’t mean everyone would be rich.)

On the one hand, it’s easy to laugh at these people. Anyone with a basic understanding of addition knows that cooking your own food, provided you are not making lobster truffle mac and cheese topped with ossetra caviar, is significantly less expensive than ordering out. And while a very small minority of people might be too severely disabled to prepare their own food, DoorDash has only been around for thirteen years. People survived cooking their own food, heating up frozen food, and maybe ordering the occasional pizza for most of modern history—and Gen Z spends the smallest proportion of their food budget on groceries compared to all previous generations, with a much higher percentage spent on restaurants and delivery.

A lot of the indignant rage over DoorDash being “too expensive” seemed to come from people who believed the baseline for a Tuesday lunch at work should be a seared steak salad with avocado and fresh pomegranate seeds, not a chicken sandwich. And when it comes to home cooking, anything short of something that would appear on the cover of a magazine displayed at the microlooting station—sorry, I mean the Whole Foods checkout—is Soylent Green dystopian slop.

You will never catch me blanket-condemning treats, and maybe I’m just saying this because I’m hungry right now but I would love a seared steak salad. But this is not how most people eat throughout the week, or even on the weekends. Perhaps due to constant mainlining of social media, some young people have been conditioned into believing that the baseline expectation of a meal—whether you’re cooking or ordering out—should be one of indulgence. Perhaps we should blame all those “day in the life” TikTok videos which purport to be showing what it’s like to work at a tech company, but are instead highlight reels of all the various expensive liquids and solids consumed by a woman with vocal fry.

(Before anyone yells at me for being “out of touch,” because I want the masses to eat dust sandwiches, I can confirm that my weekday lunches are far from luxurious—I usually make my own Greek yogurt cucumber soup or gazpacho which costs about $7 per serving, and basically never order out for lunch, nor did I for the thirteen years when I worked in an office. Back when I worked office jobs, I usually brought my lunch from home—usually pasta or a salad—and occasionally I’d go to Chipotle.)

Our expectation of restaurant lunches (or gourmet home cooking) is not unlike our perception of something else that has been built up to unattainable, ridiculous heights on social media to the point where people just don’t think they can: marriage and parenting. Our extremely modern high standards for what marriage and parenting look like makes people believe they can’t do it, can’t afford it, and that any compromises in this area are akin to eating a singular boiled hotdog for dinner.

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I have been the Twitter Main Character twice this year, and somehow both times involved sexy metallic clubwear.

The first time, I posted a somewhat silly, sleep-deprived question about the appeal of a tight, short silver Gucci dress featured on the runway. Baddie Twitter wound up roasting me for being a dumpy mom who should keep her middle-aged nose out of fashion and leave it to the fashion girlies.

This encounter left me wondering if maybe I, cringe millennial mom as I am, had misjudged the dress. I love to sew, and I sew a good portion of my own clothes, so what if I sewed my own metallic, bodycon, Gucci-inspired dress? Would I dare? As I perused some slinky metallic knits on Mood Fabrics, I realized that perhaps the correct move would be a metallic wide-leg infinity jumpsuit—think Cher, disco Diane von Furstenberg, you see the vision—which would still qualify as sexy nightlife attire but would be modest enough for a lounge or restaurant and a little more appropriate for my thirty-six years of life. And unlike the dress, it would carry zero risk of exposing my literal ass cheeks to unsuspecting restaurant patrons. (I have a sizable rear and a long waist, which is really a recipe for becoming an accidental flasher.)

I’m afraid some of my male readers may have drifted off or started thinking about the NBA playoffs. Please come back. The cuck stuff is coming. I am laying the groundwork, which unfortunately for you involves fashion. It’s almost over, you can do this.

Anyway, one day I carved out some time to design, cut and sew the perfect nightlife jumpsuit in material inspired by the Gucci dress. And, voila:

I sent this photo to all my female friends, but was so excited about it (it’s literally the best thing I’ve ever made for myself) that I posted it to Substack and Twitter too. And although I’m not exactly surprised by the reactions, I became the Main Character again for an entirely different reason—being so indecent and immodest to post such vulgar filth when I am a married woman with children. Does your husband know you dress this way?! people incredulously asked, as if the desired occasion for an outfit like this is not, quite literally, “to wear with my husband.” Why no, my husband has no idea I dress this way! I have my clandestine sexy wardrobe for my secret husband-free excursions, like going to the dentist to get scammed into another “deep cleaning.”

While most people were complimentary, a sizable minority were fairly convinced that any man who “allows” his wife to wear something like this (my husband, in fact, asks me to wear stuff like this) is either a clueless chump whose wife is getting off on Internet creeps jacking off to her, or has a cuck fetish himself. The Twitter mind cannot conceive of a man who wants his wife to look hot and either doesn’t care if other people see, or deliberately wants people to know (The words “arm candy” and “trophy wife” used to mean something. RETVRN.)

As much as objectification has its problems, it’s far preferable and healthier than the growing trend I’ve noticed (far beyond me and my jumpsuit post) where even the most mainstream, safe-for-work depictions of “sexuality” are twisted and contorted until they can resemble cuckoldry. No matter what, someone is being wronged—the person’s partner, the people seeing the image, whoever they can imagine first. Either the viewer is being wronged because the woman is sleeping with everyone but him, or the woman’s partner is being wronged because she’s trying to sleep with everyone but him. Either way—an attractive woman is no laughing matter! Can’t you see there’s a person who is theoretically getting cucked right now, in my imagination?

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CHH and I had dinner with another couple last weekend. The guy built a multi-tab projection model to gain an edge in our 9-category salary-capped fantasy basketball league. He asked to see my Paris restaurant list, took one look, and told me I was insane.

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In case you missed it, Alex Cooper of sex-positive podcast Call Her Daddy fame has announced her pregnancy, or according to one highly publicized accusation on Twitter from Brad Wilcox of the Institute for Family Studies, “quietly got married and had a baby” despite hypocritically preaching the gospel of casual sex. (I won’t spend this article dunking on him specifically—he’s deleted the tweet so best not to pile on.)

But just to get one thing out of the way, none of this was done “quietly.” Cooper’s 2023 wedding was covered in Vogue, and her pregnancy wasn’t incidentally spotted by paparazzi, but announced by a PR team with professional maternity photos. She has openly mentioned her husband multiple times on her podcast. One must wonder if Brad Wilcox also considers Gilbert Gottfried “softspoken.”

But anyway, Wilcox wasn’t the only one to react with surprise or even anger at Alex Cooper’s baby announcement, given that she has made a public persona out of being a sex-positive woman who runs a podcast that basically consists of women’s locker room talk. Famously, she gets famous women to admit naughty details of their lives, such as Katy Perry saying that if her then-beau Orlando Bloom had washed the dishes, she would announce, “Get ready to get your dick sucked.” Well, at least we know Justin Trudeau is having fun!

The main accusation is that Cooper was “hypocritical” to create content that presented casual dating in a positive light while getting married and having a baby. By secretly choosing a traditional path for herself, she has apparently been living a double life and lying to all the impressionable women who consume her content.

But the people angry about Alex Cooper’s life decisions are not genuinely concerned for her fans. They want Cooper (and women like her) to suffer the consequences of playing the field and failing to settle down as young as possible—which, by the way, is the same revenge fantasy often used to shame age-gap relationships. But Cooper’s timeline is far from unusual, and her decision to date around and then get married to a man she met at the absolutely decrepit age of gasp twenty-six, is actually incredibly common. Many women who date casually, or who sleep around, still get married—some on a relatively typical timeline—not to “beta chumps” who don’t know any better, but to men who have lived similar lives, who had similar timelines in mind.

For many casual daters, often upper middle class educated young people in cities, marriage is still the goal, but they view their young adulthood as the time to date around—not instead of getting married, but before it. It’s not a luxury belief to enjoy casual sex and then get married. It’s just what lots of people do.

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Sometimes, I write about my OCD—all the early signs of it, how I suspect everyone on Reddit has it, how it manifests as health anxiety, and most of all, how nobody around me can stand it. And today—how it was doing really well until, thanks to the notorious hantavirus cruise, my Twitter algorithm turned into what I am calling the HantaZone Situation Room.

Generally, if I’m not writing about my OCD at any given point, things are going pretty well for me. For the past couple months, this has been the case. I have a good therapist who specializes in the most proven technique for OCD—ERP, otherwise known as exposure-response prevention, where you deliberately expose yourself to things that make you anxious and then avoid doing maladaptive things to reduce the anxiety.

But the biggest challenge of ERP is actually doing the exposures—including when things are going well for you. This is doubly true if your OCD subtype is something unrelated to a tangible phobia, where you could theoretically go months or longer without actually encountering a trigger, and when your trigger cannot be self-imposed. (Since my OCD revolves around rare fatal diseases, I have a hard time triggering myself on purpose by thinking about diseases—it has the same effect as trying to tickle myself.)

Therefore, after a period of peace with my OCD, I usually become complacent. I no longer worry as much about whether or not I’m engaging in reassurance-seeking or other maladaptive behaviors, because on some level, I believe I don’t have OCD anymore. But of course, at some point, a trigger will show up and pull me back into the insidiously sticky vat of molasses that is my OCD, and having forgotten the importance of the whole “response prevention” part of ERP, the obsession will consume me effortlessly.

That’s what happened this past week, courtesy of hantavirus and (of course) Twitter.

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Last week, I covered the fact that liberals and conservatives generally find different body types arousing to different degrees. If you missed it, I strongly suggest you read it, but if you were waiting for part two, here it is! Today, I will get into a different survey of over 4,000 respondents, and how politics influenced the actual sex they are having (yes, even in 2026, some people are still having “sex.”)

For this survey, I focused on the most recent sexual encounter, knowing that if I asked people to generalize their sex life, it could be up to guesses and estimations. (If someone asked you “How often do you give oral sex?” for example, unless you do it daily or never—looking at you, DJ Khaled—you might answer incorrectly.) So I asked people everything I could about the most recent encounter—who it was with, how enjoyable it was, what they did, how much they enjoyed it, whether they climaxed, and more. Earlier I analyzed the results of this survey without politics in mind, and I discovered that sex was surprisingly good for married moms over forty, so there’s that.

But today is about the sexiest, steamiest topic of all: our political alignments. And we will finally have the answer to my teaser question on Twitter yesterday about conservative men eating pussy, which…many people got wrong:

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At only thirty-six, I feel a bit silly writing anything about aging at all. I’ve always held the belief that you can’t really know about how you’ll feel about aging until you’re actually old, and despite everyone over thirty reaching certified chopped unc status with the zoomers, we really aren’t that old.

But I see women my age—and younger!—write about “aging tips” as if they had already been through the trenches of menopause, osteoporosis, and season 64 of Criminal Minds. And 99% of the time, these women are not musing on the wisdom and life experiences that come with age, or even ways to stay healthy and live to see great-grandchildren. They’re literally just talking about hotness: currently being “hot for their age,” doing things to remain hot, being hotter than when they were younger (guys, I literally look the same as I did when I was 27, two years ago!) and being unafraid in the face of aging because—you guessed it—they are confident that they will stay hot. And they will stay hot gracefully. Unlike all those ridiculous older women on the red carpet who, for some insane reason, choose to get cosmetic surgery, they will glide into old age looking effortlessly and eternally thirty-eight. Geez, why didn’t I think of that?!

It was Mother’s Day this past weekend, which meant many denizens of the Internet took it upon themselves to post photos of their mothers for all to see, and, you guessed it—several women posted how hot their moms look for their age and how, as a result, they aren’t afraid of aging. INSPIRING: This 28-year-old isn’t scared to get old because her mother still looks forty!

Look, I’m not above vanity. For several years in a row, I kept my waist and hip measurements in a spreadsheet so I could optimize for peak waist-hip ratio. I used to wear a steel-boned corset to the gym, which was…a choice, I suppose. Although I still haven’t opted for any injectables, I have been wearing retinol since I was nineteen. All this to say: I’m not above wanting to look young and hot. But we should be honest with ourselves about that. It’s giving the same cognitive dissonance as, “I don’t pay someone to rip my pubes out for icky men, I do it for my sensory disorder that only applies to pussy hair, so it’s actually feminist and self-actualizing.” I’m aware this makes me the friend who’s too woke and the friend who’s not woke enough, but so be it.

Celebrating the youthful beauty of particularly lucky (or rich) older women is not the same thing as busting any kind of ageism stigma, and it certainly has nothing to do with celebrating aging or being unafraid of it. In order to fully accept aging—something I believe very few young people have actually done—you have to accept eventually not being hot.

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