Now that we live in a world where men asking women out in real-life settings feels more awkward than ever, many men (especially those frustrated with dating or experiencing some degree of anxiety about rejection—aka, most single men) clamor for a world where the burden of taking the initiative is shifted to women.

It makes so much sense. Women reject men more often than men reject women, so presumably, more pairings would happen this way because fewer initiators would be rejected. Also, women, unless they are wielding a giant machine with “Scrotum Destroyer” printed on the side of it, generally do not make men feel unsafe, so there would be less risk involved for everyone (and besides, I have it on good authority that some men would be really into the scrotum destroyer.)

I’ve heard the following refrain from many men over the years: Okay, so making the first move is scary and women are afraid of rejection. Well, guess what? So are men! Why must men face the embarrassment but women get a pass?

So, if this is a genuine question and not just a rhetorical vent, this article will cover it, because there are several answers, all far more multifaceted than “women are afraid of rejection.”

Women do make first moves. They don’t make last moves.

Women are, basically, terrible closers. When men talk about women making the “first move,” they are imagining women approaching men in bookstores and asking them on dates, buying men drinks from across the bar, slipping their numbers to handsome waiters, and being the one to officially escalate a friendship with a coworker into something more. Some women do these things, but most don’t, at least not frequently. This type of initiative-taking is typically associated with men.

But these aren’t really first moves. These are last moves. Women do make first moves. The problem is, when men talk about “first moves,” they’re really talking about closing. Women are terrible at closing unless they’re selling you a revolutionary CRM system that’s completely disrupting the SaaS industry. As the saying goes, women chase a man until he catches her. Unfortunately, a lot of wires get crossed because men are bad at noticing that women are chasing, and women are bad at chasing, and even worse at closing.

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Autism is a hot topic on the Internet (or perhaps just my corner of it). Questions abound: are people pretending to be autistic “for clout?” How can you tell if someone is autistic or just really annoying? Is there an autism accent? Is the “autistic Barbie” offensive to children with autism too severe to play with Barbies? Is it “gentrifying autism” for people with level one or milder autism to frame autism as a superpower when it can be a disability for many others? Are autistic women “women?”

But I’m here to talk about a different question: the question of “Hot Autism.”

Obviously, any person with autism has the capacity to be hot, but in particular, there seem to be a lot of conversations about hot women with autism—more specifically, the idea that the combination of being hot and having autism makes the social consequences of autism worse because people can’t reconcile hotness with social weirdness. Some people have postulated that beauty becomes a curse when combined with autism, or that people viscerally hate hot autistic women in a way they don’t hate other autistic people.

Other folks respond to this content by accusing the creators of lying about having autism, or insinuating that if someone is not behaving exactly like a character from Love on the Spectrum, that their autism is being faked for attention. I disagree with this. I believe that these women have autism, and I understand that they probably face some degree of skepticism from people who have a particular stereotype of autistic people in their head which requires conventional unattractiveness.

What I don’t believe is that being hot makes their social problems any worse than those of non-hot autistic people.

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Surveys to Take

This week, I’d like you to fill out my super short anonymous sex survey mostly focused on hypotheticals (no experience required.) Everyone is welcome to take it, but I especially need more gay and lesbian volunteers!

33-Year-Old Woman

Latest in, “news that triggers me, specifically”: An influencer uploaded a video of her removing her makeup, intending show a realistic idea of what a normal 33-year-old woman can look like with zero filters, procedures or injectables. Twitter swiftly responded by informing the creator that actually, fuck your body positivity, you look like an exhumed corpse. (Thank you to…uh…Grind Culture for bringing this upon my timeline. I need to think about my life.)

As anyone could have predicted, the comments on the video were full of jeers from men and women alike, posting selfies to prove how much younger they looked than the woman in the video, almost none of whom actually looked much younger than their ages.

Of course, yours truly, a woman who is older than the lady in the video and decidedly looks worse than her through no fault of my own (I have been religiously taking care of my skin since I was in middle school, and have nothing to show for it!) began crashing out:

I’ve more or less written about this phenomenon before. Some women who would otherwise not consider themselves misogynists seem to have zero qualms about beefing with total strangers over how attractive they are, often with regards to how nubile they look. And on Twitter? Who the hell is this for? Like, good for you, PepeRapist1488 thinks you’re hot. Second, I also wrote about how people associate “aging well” with being a better or more deserving person (this is how you age when you’re #unproblematic!) and how aging “gracefully” really just means continuing to look young but without cosmetic enhancements. We should all be so lucky, darling.

Many of the same people who would never make fun of someone’s weight or other physical features seem to have no problem making fun of someone’s perceived degree of aging as some kind of cosmic justice. Many of the commenters determined, without any evidence, that the influencer had “partied too hard.” Of course, I expect it from porn-brained twenty-year-old guys, but I really feel like women in their forties should know better.

And—I know this is not a popular statement on the Internet where everyone “looks 16”—most people basically look their age, with minor tweaks that can be explained with styling or behavior. I’ve only seen a handful of people whose age truly surprised me, and one of them was senator Scott Weiner, who is somehow 56 years old:

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Speaking of men’s thirst traps…

Joe Biden’s “Sexy” Ice Cream

Say what you will about Joe Biden and his failures, but I don’t think anyone could accuse him of failing to get everyone really, really horny. Or at least that’s how J.D. Vance feels. He went on Rogan to complain that the Democrats positioned Biden eating ice cream in particularly “suggestive” ways, and it became a fun meme for a few days:

My favorite yet, a deep cut to an old clip of JD Vance chasing after his toddler:

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Trump’s 4th Term

Trump is kind of like that guy who says things like, “Anyone dare me to whip my dick out right now? Wouldn’t that be funny? lol” because he really wants to whip his dick out. More specifically, he’s joked many times now about running for a third term—or should I say, fourth term, because he won in 2020 too. STOP THE STEAL!

Truthfully, I do think he’s kidding, although I think he would like to remain emperor for life, in a perfect world. But alas. Anyway, kidding or not, other people took it…a bit too seriously, even going so far as to look into the potential “Pacific rules.”

Some real political theorists hashing it out over here:

Here is a particularly…inexplicable conversation about it, featuring a new type of guy…the MAGA Resist Lib:

Meanwhile, let’s focus on the important stuff, such as this tweet which came up a propos of nothing in the Year of Our Lord 2026:

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Kindred Nemeses

This will be a small segment, but I love it so much that I need to include it.

For those of you unfamiliar, Donald Trump and Rosie O’Donnell have hated each other for decades—something I wrote about here. Although they don’t spar with each other publicly very much anymore, clips of Rosie O’Donnell keep circulating which showcase an odd similarity between the two of them, as River Page eloquently points out (based on this 2000 video of Rosie, where she appears to be, inexplicably, fondling a giant dollop of skin-colored silly putty.)

The same general observation was made a little while back over a different video of Rosie:

Many such cases!

Funny Tweets/Other Happenings

I just love this:

I FOUND THE VACUUM CUBE PERSON I’M ALWAYS REFERENCING:

I found this video so funny:

Last but not least, Andrew Tate uploaded a video which appears to include a man in a black shirt walking around with no head:

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In case you missed it

As I’ve said many times before, I was raised secular. My parents were not Ricky Gervais tier atheists, but they were both more or less agnostic and felt strongly about not pushing any particular religion on me. They came from different faiths themselves (my dad was raised Jewish, my mom was raised in what she calls “Nearist,” because her family just went to the church that was nearest their house) and despite these different upbringings, they were aligned on raising me with a clear code of morality and ethics, but no particular faith. They wanted my religion or lack thereof to be my choice.

I discovered I was half-Jewish when I was about four or five. I’m not sure what this really meant to me at the time, because my dad’s form of Judaism was very light on the religion and heavy on the jokes and fun Hanukkah presents. I knew, probably from kids at school, that this was more of a religious thing for other people and I was curious about that. One day (and I actually remember this) I asked my mom, “Daddy is Jewish, so I’m half-Jewish, but what’s my other religion? What are you?” to which she replied, “English.”

And being Jewish did feel like being English. For me, it was a culture, like any other that one might reference on Heritage Food Day in elementary school. Just as I did not attend church, I did not attend temple. I never learned Hebrew beyond what was necessary for an annual game of dreidel. Not a single word of Yiddish was spoken in my house except by my gentile mother who, by marrying my dad, had finally earned a pass to say things like “kvetch” for no reason. (I still recall her calling my second-grade nemesis a mieskeit, ie: Yiddish for chopped, kinda deep cut honestly.) We celebrated Hanukkah, but it was a very fun and secular Hanukkah where my dad did goofy voices for half the prayer to make us laugh, not unlike our very fun and secular Christmas, which contained more references to Burgermeister Meisterburger than to Jesus.

But I had some vague yearning for religion, in a way I couldn’t quite explain. I remember “praying” as a very young child, with no real clue of which religion’s God was hearing my prayer. Also, I’m pretty sure my prayers were mostly about unicorns and Barbies.

By grade school, I had discovered that Christianity was a thing, and that it was a thing my mother had experienced in a mostly negative way.

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One particular Mom Twitter drama has been seared in my mind for over a year. A remote working mom posted that she wanted to spend time with her young children throughout the day during her lunch hour or other moments of downtime, so instead of putting her children in daycare or hiring a full time nanny, she did something a little different—she hired a nanny to deal with the less meaningful moments of parenthood (such as vacuuming crumbs or preparing snacks) so she could save time on chores and spend more time reading, snuggling and playing with her kids.

She was told, by multiple people, that she “shouldn’t even have had kids.” What was the point, they asked, if she was just going to outsource it all?

And, well, drama like this is circulating now, in part thanks to a classic “rich people rage bait” Wall Street Journal article describing six-figures-worth teams of childcare professionals hired by “CEO parents.” And perhaps people are right to grimace at this extreme approach—it’s certainly not one I would take, even ifI had the money, which I don’t—but the discourse has spun into a variety of innocuous ways of getting help that apparently make having children completely pointless. Invariably, these people will say the same thing they said to the remote working mom: Why even bother having children if you’re going to have someone else do X for you?

The problem is, X can be just about anything. It’s gone so far as to encompass sending your children to school, something done by upwards of 95% of moms.

More importantly, the remote working mom in my initial story spent more time with her kids than basically all full-time working moms (or, ahem, any dads.) Most kids of two working parents, remote or not, are in some form of childcare and do not have lunch with their moms every day. It became obvious, almost immediately, that people weren’t angry at her for not spending enough time with her kids, even though they pretended that was the issue. They were angry at her for being in a privileged position (something she didn’t deny!) to be able to hire people for the less fun parts of parenthood. And despite being a SAHM who spends basically 24/7 with my kids outside the school year (in the summer, I have zero childcare) I couldn’t imagine any good reason to judge this woman.

From the trad crunchies to certain lefties who just hate parents, it’s fun to rag on lazy parents for outsourcing, offloading, or essentially refusing to parent their own children. And while people who have $250,000 teams dedicated to every aspect of childcare are going too far, the amount of people who truly outsource parenthood to that degree is a rounding error and not worth the moral panic. Instead, the label of “outsourcer” has creeped onto basically any parent (always a mom) who hires even one person for occasional help with something.

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Exactly a year ago, I wrote about the fact that women enjoy men spontaneously flirting with them more than the 2010s #BanMen feminism trope would have us believe. Despite loud voices overrepresented in the media insisting that “women just want to be left alone” unless they’re on a dating app (and maybe not even then) women in my surveys, as well as women I’ve known in real life, have expressed frustration with the fact that dating apps are the only place where they can expect to meet men. (79% of single women on a recent survey indicated they wish they were approached by men more often.) A few years ago, I spoke with an approachably cute girl in her mid-twenties—the type of girl who should have received lots of male attention—who told me that outside of dating apps, men did not speak to her at all.

There is some eroticism and excitement to meeting someone spontaneously and feeling a spark, or developing romantic feelings for someone you already knew through other means. Dating apps remove a great deal of risk and embarrassment, thus why people like them, and thus why they are increasingly becoming the only socially acceptable method of meeting a partner. But along with the benefits of reducing opportunities for embarrassment, apps eliminate spontaneous and exciting situations where your attraction to a person comes out of knowing them first and experiencing a three-dimensional version of them—the things that cannot be captured in photos—instead reducing everyone to a few lines of text and some images, which are particularly unforgiving for men in particular.

But when I wrote about the death of spontaneous flirting, some binary thinking emerged in the resulting discourse, and maybe some of that was my fault for how I worded things. When I said that women would like to be “approached” more often, some people (both men and women) had the assumption that I was claiming that every woman is attracted to a wide swath of men despite clear evidence that women are actually pretty picky, and that most women would like to be approached anywhere, anytime. Obviously, had I been arguing this, I would have been wrong. The reality is much more nuanced, but I fear that the “leave women alone” narrative and the rise of dating apps threw out the baby with the bathwater. The “baby” in this scenario, is the “warm approach,” where a shared social setting (or assumed-to-be-social environment between strangers) facilitates the approach and makes it less weird, even if some risk is still involved. (As any seasoned pickup artist will tell you, it’s a numbers game, and rejection will be the most common outcome.)

The vast majority of cold approaches (ie: approaching a complete stranger in a non-social setting, such as the grocery store or DMV) are unappealing. Perhaps a resurrected JFK Jr. with a British accent would be able to pull it off, but most men can’t—even moderately attractive men who would have success through other means. Context is very important to women’s sexuality, and women aren’t typically in a sexy mood while buying detergent. I never called for a widespread return of the abrupt cold approach, although I think some of these are better than none. Instead, we need more lukewarm or warm approaches, which can’t happen without people leaving their houses more often, doing more social activities, being more open to the risk of embarrassment or mild discomfort, and most importantly: having bigger platonic social circles in the first place.

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Believe it or not, we had our own version of “gender discourse” in the 1990s and 2000s. And yes, I was a child during most of this era, but this type of gender discourse was visible even to people who were not terminally online, because it was all over mainstream media and the general zeitgeist.

The dominant genderslop theory of the era was that women wanted marriage (but more specifically, a wedding, the groom himself was less important) and men wanted sex. It was assumed that women and men were engaged in some kind of nonstop bartering dance where women doled out just enough sex as was necessary to acquire marriage and money, and men doled out just as much commitment as was necessary to acquire sex. Under this framework, a woman’s ideal setup might be a monogamous marriage to a rich but castrated man, who lavishes gifts upon her but doesn’t bother her with all the icky sex stuff. And for men, the platonic ideal would be a naked mattress on the floor of a storage unit, a cold beer, and a rotating harem of impossibly beautiful and sexually adventurous women, ideally many at once.

Given that both of these outcomes were unattainable, men and women married each other because it was the least-bad option. But still, a terrible trade deal for both parties, or so went the trope. Women would have to endure a gross man pawing at them for fifty years, and men—largely seen as the gender who benefited less from marriage—would have to deal with nagging, monogamy, and boredom just so they could weasel in a crumb of pussy on their birthdays. At some point, it was assumed that over time the wife would get so old and fat that even the man’s desire for sex would wane, and nobody would be getting anything out of the marriage, hence the variety of cartoons which essentially boil down to, “My bitch wife is fat.”

This was the world in which I grew up—a world that told me that in order to find a husband, I’d have to trick him, or at least make it a really good deal for him (sex on demand? threesomes? going to the strip club with him and being “cool” about it?) because no man actually wanted marriage and parenthood for the joy or fulfillment of it. Nobody explained how this trickery would be done, because even in the “old” days of the 2000s, withholding sex specifically to get a marriage proposal was not a thing anyone was actually doing. In fact, some people encouraged young women to have sex more freely and cut back on the marriage talk because men just wanted cool, chill, low maintenance girls. As I wrote before, of the prototypical “cool girl:”

She was independent, but in a way that was thoroughly unthreatening to men: she was guaranteed not to bother them.

But times have changed, or at least…the vibes and stereotype has changed. As the story now goes: marriage, once every woman’s rabid and singular focus, is now a one-way ticket to resentment, exhaustion and the “mental load,” while men, mooning over marriage and babies all day, get to bask in all the “free domestic labor.” Parenthood is a fun side quest for men looking to build a legacy as if they were in Crusader Kings and a thankless slog for women—just look at how men versus women talk about parenthood on Twitter, or even just the dynamic between Bluey’s parents. A viral video format shows a woman about to try on an engagement ring, changing her mind when she is overcome with horrific visions of domestic servitude. And the “trad” section of the manosphere surprisingly agrees with Invisible LaborTok, as they complain that modern women’s priorities (social media, frivolous travel and “girlbossing”) are wildly out of whack as they refuse to settle down and start a family—a desire which is now male-coded.

In the 2000s, men were simple creatures who just wanted sex and beer, if not for all these crazy bitches trying to marry them. In the 2020s, men are simple creatures who just want marriage and kids, if not for all these crazy bitches refusing to marry them.

But how did women go from being the ball and chain to being the ones afraid of getting saddled with one?

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So naturally, with all this cultural, historical and family-oriented significance, my mind was on one thing: what I was wearing.

We had limited baggage space so I had to be pretty intentional about a color palette for the trip. Perhaps in an ultra-tourist, cringe way, I decided to focus primarily on bright blue to match the Greek flag, but I also threw in some red just for fun. (I also just love blue and red together.)

For the plane ride from Athens (layover) to Mytilene, I wore this coord set that I sewed from deadstock cotton jersey from Lyrical Fabrics. As soon as I saw this print, I thought, “Oh, that’ll be for Greece!” I made everything a bit looser than my usual coord styles, and I actually like this fit so much more! The cropping saves it from being too “baggy” for my taste, but the looser silhouette feels more appropriate for an island vacation, perfect to throw on over a bathing suit or wear on a plane:

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On my first day of college, my psychology professor gave us all a written personality test. During our next class, he handed out our results and asked us, by show of hands, how many of us felt our results were accurate. Almost everyone in the class raised their hands, saying their results were some version of “eerily accurate.” Then, he revealed that the tests had actually been completely fake, and everyone had been given the same results. That’s right—everyone, from frat boys to sardonic hipsters to shy geeks—received the same personality results, and all of them felt these results were accurate.

How did all of these college kids fall for the same prank? Well, the personality test results were extremely vague. I don’t remember specifics, but I recall figuring that about 80% of it was true of me, enough to be “surprisingly good,” and then I disregarded the 20% that wasn’t quite right. But more importantly, the specific pieces that I do remember were all descriptions of victimhood—statements like “I do so much for other people and get less appreciation than I deserve” or “I don’t advocate for myself enough because I don’t want to disappoint people.” I realized that these narratives were things that most people believed about themselves, even though there’s no way the entire world is full of people-pleasers (If this were true, people would be, well, a bit more pleased.)

This is the same basic concept behind horoscopes—and by the way, I am not judging people who enjoy astrology for fun. But if you get your horoscope done, you will probably find that most of it seems basically accurate, regardless of what it says. Horoscopes or psychic predictions are rarely specific enough to be clearly false—and if you want to believe in them, you will. This is known as the Barnum effect, and it has kept many psychics gainfully employed.

I see the same sentiment repeated across social media and “TherapyTok,” attributing extremely common ailments—symptoms of “having a body and being alive”—to unrecognized trauma, or even traumatic events one doesn’t remember at all. (It’s giving Satanic Panic “recovered memories.”) This is not just about helping people with trauma process what happened to them and heal. It’s about convincing people that they experienced trauma even if they have no real reason to think they did, based on vague symptoms that could apply to nearly anyone.

Let me ask you: do you sometimes feel lightheaded when you get up too quickly? Do you occasionally have a stomachache? Do you sometimes have trouble sleeping? Does your neck sometimes hurt? Now, you might be saying, “Sure, but that doesn’t mean I had a traumatic childhood—I don’t have any memories of anything seriously bad happening!” But not too fast. Did you know that “not remembering much of your childhood” is, in fact, a symptom of repressed trauma too?

It’s no wonder that you can convince almost anyone they had a traumatic childhood, given that not remembering anything traumatic is now a “sign” that trauma happened. My psychology professor’s prank lives on, except now it’s on social media and people are taking it seriously.

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I’ve noticed something a bit weird about participating in your own heterosexuality as a woman: openly admitting you want a partner, and doing things to your appearance with the intention of attracting a partner (while being honest about your motivations) is not received very well. By anyone.

And yes, I know, straight people are not oppressed, discriminated against, or subject to “anti-straight” violence, and no, the existence of the gay purple Tellytubby doesn’t count (that reference, I fear, falls into the “too late” category). Yes, there will be a handful of radical gender separatist feminists who ask why straight women cannot simply “stop dating men,” as one could boycott a problematic retailer, but this is obviously a niche worldview that does not equate to systemic discrimination. Even within the most lefty enclaves of Portland and Brooklyn, just being a heterosexual woman isn’t a shameful thing.

Nobody is criticizing women for being straight, but people are disproportionately criticizing and analyzing straight women for the particular ways in which they “do” their straightness, particularly the degree of effort they expend on it—not just among wacky far-left college students, but among the normies and conservatives as well, just with different languages and words. The bipartisan message we receive: straight women can be attractive—in fact, it’s great if they are—but they shouldn’t have to try, and it should never be explicitly for men. (But men? Yeah, go ahead and talk about how you work out for the ladies, it’s fine.)

Look no further than the widely-inaccurately-used term “male gaze,” which has come to be short hand for “striving to look attractive to straight men” (and yes, I am also guilty of using it incorrectly despite knowing better! Listening and learning.) The term was originally an academic concept to describe media, but has become an undue burden on straight women to avoid one of the most fundamental and normal parts of any sexual orientation: trying to attract desired partners.

Apparently, women are not the only ones warned about “pandering to the male gaze” (aka, openly trying to look more attractive). With the new definition of “looking good in a way men like,” even looksmaxxing influencer Clavicular—according to The New York Times—is pandering to the male gaze. And to its credit, Cosmo (which, yes, still exists!) has picked up on how the “male gaze” as a term is now being used, ironically, to police women’s behavior more than anyone else’s.

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Recently, I read ’s amazing piece about her experience as a “self-proclaimed bralette bitch” trying on the most dramatic push-up bras at Victoria’s Secret. I’m a big fan of her work in general (if you’re into fashion, you should subscribe!) and this piece was not only funny and well-written, but got me thinking about my own very tumultuous and complicated relationship with these bras—not as a bralette bitch, but as a T-shirt bra tart.

If you can imagine it, despite all my self-deprecating jokes about my minuscule chesticles, having big boobs used to be a core part of my identity. Okay, let me rephrase that. I’m not talking about having actually big boobs, ones that feel heavy without a bra and cause back pain, the type of boobs that are impossible to hide even if you want to. I’m talking about proportionately big boobs. I know, if you’ve seen my outfit photos, you’re probably thinking this would still be impossible for me to achieve even with a push-up bra, but allow me to explain.

While my middle school years were plagued with fears that I’d never have boobs (and being made fun of by my classmates for “looking like a little boy” didn’t help) my breasts eventually materialized, right as The American Girl Guide To Your Body promised me they would. By high school, they still weren’t big, more smallish-average, but because I have a narrow upper body, they felt like a really good size for my frame. And then, two amazing things happened (for my boobs, anyway.) At eighteen, I went on the birth control pill which added about an inch to my bustline, and then I started playing around with push-up bras. Suddenly, I went from having fairly unremarkable-sized boobs to quite big boobs for my frame…in the right bra. I had never thought that having “big boobs” in any capacity was possible for me. But the minute it became possible, I latched onto this new identity.

I was born in 1989, so while I know the stereotype of millennials’ upbringing was that we all wanted to be stick-skinny size 000 supermodels with zero boobs or butt, this was…not my experience. At all. Girls with “Kate Moss” bodies were taunted for never being able to attract a straight man, or accused of anorexia. Perhaps it’s because I grew up in an area that was heavily Italian and Jewish as opposed to WASP, but the beauty ideal in my high school was to have boobs and butt that were proportionately really big for an otherwise slim body. I even recall going shopping with my mom and hearing another mother with her teenage daughter in the dressing room next to us, loudly joking that “these days, you want people to tell you your ass looks fat in those jeans.” (Read that in the most Jewish-sounding tristate area accent possible.) So while I have to respect the lived experience of feeling like the beauty standard was impossibly prepubescent, straight-shaped and malnourished, this could not have been further from my own experience. I try my hardest to remain credulous when women tell me they were bullied for reasons other than transparent jealousy, for having bodacious boobs and badonkadonks too big for their tiny waists. I try.

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I had always known push-up bras existed, but also felt they were, on some level, cheating. False advertising. And I wasn’t deluded enough to think I was only wearing them “for myself.” I was wearing them to look attractive, and I certainly didn’t want a guy to take off my bra and be aghast at the contrast. Yes, I had heard that a “handful was enough,” but certainly, one would prefer a bowlful if given the choice, no? And yet, a handful would seem just fine if you weren’t expecting more! As a result, when I first started shopping at Victoria’s Secret in high school, I drew the line at anything more padded than a basic T-shirt bra, and often chuckled smugly to myself as I fondled the ridiculous gel-filled padding in the push-ups. Who did these women think they were fooling?

But by the time I entered college in 2007, wearing a push-up bra seemed far more expected, and far less like cheating. Skimpy clubwear styles at the time, when advertised, often seemed to feature models with either obvious breast implants or some push-up apparatus. Victoria’s Secret was in its heyday, and almost every ad or fashion show featured bras with abundant padding. Push-up bras went from a shameful thing to a big open “secret,” like dying your hair or wearing heels. Suddenly, I started to wonder if I was restricting myself for no good reason. If everyone else was lifting their boobs to Victoria’s Secret Angel proportions—including the Angels themselves, who were often too skinny to have big boobs without padding—why shouldn’t I?

It’s impossible for me to get into the huge impact push-up bras made on me without getting a little TMI about my boobs, assuming that threshold has not already been crossed. Although I joke about how small they are, even after taking up weightlifting and breastfeeding two kids, my boobs are not literally flat. I have a five-inch difference between my ribcage and bust, so while they’re small, they definitely exist. The “problem,” if you will, is that they’re extremely far apart. My boobs never got the memo about covid being over, they’re still standing six feet apart in the CVS checkout line mumbling about how The Daily Show is the only thing “keeping them sane in these unprecedented times.” If I wear something low-cut without a bra, you don’t see any cleavage at all, you see ribs. So even if a push-up bra is not heavily padded, just inching my boobs away from my armpits makes a huge impact in how big they look (I achieve the same effect from many non-padded swimsuits, but last I checked a bathing suit top is not appropriate for day-to-day life.) Anyway, as soon as I realized the absolute magic of pushing them closer together, I had another thought: what if I also made them bigger, not just closer together? How far could I go? How big could I make them? And at what point would a man feel he had ordered a curvy woman on Temu and got…something else? (Okay, we didn’t really have Temu back then, let’s call it AliExpress.)

I became an expert in all the ways to make a push-up bra part of my everyday attire, and I really mean every day. I wanted to keep things consistent, so I only wore tops that accommodated a bra. I had my tricks to get around skimpy halters and tube tops. I invested in those Victoria’s Secret tops with built-in bras, a really good strapless push-up with non-slip elastic on the sides, clear straps for my regular push-ups, and an adjuster which could transform any bra into a backless bra. I was ready for anything the world could throw at me, at least if “anything” began and ended with average boobs. Sometimes, I’d look at girls—even girls with smaller boobs than I had—and felt jealous of them that they could “pull off” strapless tops, as if my push-up bra was inextricably fused to me.

And the people around me noticed. Because the birth control and push-up bra discovery happened around the same time—right before college—people assumed I had just gotten my boobs done. I logged into Facebook one morning before going to class and saw a DM from a guy who apparently went to my school but who I didn’t recognize, informing me he had been scrolling through my photos and noticed a “suspicious rate of growth,” asking if I had gotten breast implants. At another point, I was flirting with a guy at a party during my freshman year, and he expressed interest in going out with me, but first wanted to clarify that my boobs were real, because he had a rule against fake ones. In hindsight I think I was being “negged” and I don’t think this rule ever existed. I, regrettably, found myself explaining the mechanisms of the Victoria’s Secret Miraculous “add two cup sizes” bra as opposed to slapping him and storming off.

The night I met my husband, about a year later, I was wearing a dramatic push-up bra with clear straps under a Forever 21 “going out” top. A few photos were taken that night, and yeah, looking back on these bazungas, they looked not only like breast implants but like horrible bolt-on ones that might appear on a contestant on Flavor of Love named Candi. I wondered (and still sometimes wonder) if they had been the main reason my husband approached me in the first place. He insists that he’s really more of an ass guy, but given how dramatic they looked, I find it hard to believe they were not at least part of his equation!

Eventually, he saw what they really looked like, and he didn’t go fleeing for the hills (and neither did anyone before him, quite frankly) so I was correct that the push-up bra did not represent a degree of false advertising that would doom all my relationship prospects. But if the bra impacted anyone’s view of me, it was my own. I had become so inured to how I looked with a push-up bra that I almost forgot that I was wearing it at all. I began to view my “real” size as the size that my boobs were with all the padding, and on the occasion that I wore something without a push-up bra, I felt I looked horrifically masculine and unsexy, even though I used to be mostly fine with that size. As might refer to this phenomenon, I was experiencing “push-up bra dysmorphia.”

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It didn’t help that I often received the type of attention that a girl with naturally big boobs might have received, which I experienced on a spectrum from flattery to mild annoyance, but never deep shame. I know getting attention for one’s boobs is typically a negative experience for women, but given that I didn’t experience it at a disturbingly formative age, and given that I’ve always felt inadequate feminine, even some crass-but-harmless attention felt like a compliment. Most importantly, the attention validated my identity as a desirable, feminine woman—something I didn’t think I could be without huge boobs.

When I met my husband’s ex-girlfriend during a trip to his childhood hometown, she honked my boobs (I was wearing a Frederick’s of Hollywood mint green corset in an Ohio dive bar, God help me) and remarked that she was still waiting for hers to come in. (One bit of evidence that my husband might have been telling the truth about not being a boob guy.) Another time, my husband and I were at a restaurant when he went to the bathroom and overheard our waiter telling his coworker that he was having a hard time serving us because “I can’t stop staring at that girl’s tits.” Amused, my husband shared this information with me, and we both found it funny enough to make sure we rounded up our tip to a round number (with no additional cents) and we drew nipples on the two zero’s on the receipt.

But eventually, this phase ended. First of all, around the mid-2010s, the major body trend (at least in my cultural milieu) shifted to a disproportionately large ass, not boobs. (I had always wanted both, but the emphasis had previously been on the boobs.) This was a game-changer for me. Focusing on maximizing the size of my ass did not require any kind of clothing or padding apparatus (padding a butt seemed incredibly wrong in a way that a push-up bra didn’t) just an intense regimen of protein and weightlifting, and maybe gaining a couple pounds. I also happen to be a pear shape—almost all my weight is gained below the waist—so it felt like I had more of a natural advantage with ass than I did with tits. Of course, my ass still wasn’t big enough for my own unrealistic fantasies, but I found that maximizing—and dressing for—my ass was probably a more realistic goal for me than wearing a Miraculous bikini and having to press down on my boobs to wring out the water every time I got in the pool.

My fashion also changed. In my boob era, my nightlife uniform was a mini low-cut bodycon dress, which could explain why I was confused for a sex worker on two occasions (that’s what my husband and I get for having a terrible sense of direction and getting lost in Central Park at 2 AM.) The 2010s brought around different trends which just weren’t as boob-forward: tight mockneck thong bodysuits underneath high-waisted skinny jeans with Jeffrey Campbell Lita boots, off-shoulder tops with chokers, maybe some side boob in one of those American Apparel bodysuits but not a lot of cleavage. As unfathomable as it once would have been to me, my arsenal of push-up bras gathered dust and became obsolete.

Then, I went off the pill to try and get pregnant, and I lost about an inch on my bustline, reducing my boobs back to their original high school size. I proceeded to have two kids a few years apart, and the advent of my nursing era and the covid pandemic meant that I just stopped wearing any kind of underwire bra at all. Push-ups were officially off the menu. It was all nursing or wireless T-shirt bras from here on out (and might I recommend Tommy John for that.)

But recently I wondered if maybe I was too quick to cast aside the push-up bras of yore. As Viv noted, more boob-forward styles seem to be in vogue lately, and what better way to wear boob-forward styles than with optimal boobs? My husband knows what my boobs look like now, and he’s seen them at all phases of life, in a variety of shapes and sizes, with two different children attached to them at different points, so if I’m engaging in “false advertising” I’m falsely advertising to people I don’t want to sleep with anyway. I purchased a few push-up bras off Amazon and figured I’d give them a try again, for old time’s sake. And even though these bras were much subtler than the monstrosities I was strapping to my chest in college, I figured they’d be fun to add a little extra oomph in those low-cut date night tops that allow my introverted boobs to hide in my armpits.

But just as I had once gotten used to how I looked in a push-up bra, I had become—thankfully—inured to my natural size over the years. I couldn’t help but find my new push-up bra silhouette to be a little absurd and cartoonish, in a way I wouldn’t describe a woman who naturally had boobs that size. Something about them on my body just felt wrong and imbalanced. Figuring my husband might disagree—he is a man, after all—I showed him how a plunging dress looked with a push-up bra and he just said, “Yeah, I think that’s a bit much.”

So, for now, my push-up bra era is largely over, although I’m keeping them around just in case I change my mind, or in case something compels me to go as Sofia Vergara for Halloween. And even if push-up bras were, in any way, “false advertising,” the only person I regret hoodwinking is myself.

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This week I’m trying something a bit new. Usually, MST is very image-heavy, which could make it harder for some readers to experience if they are used to listening to my articles on audio. This time, I’m going to include more text/commentary and fewer images, with links to where topics originated so you can catch up on Twitter (or elsewhere) if need be.

Onwards!

Surveys to Take

This week, I’d like you to fill out my super short anonymous sex survey mostly focused on hypotheticals (no experience required.)

In Case You Missed It…

Picky eating was in the discourse this week (because we took a break from age gaps, I suppose) and it spurred me to try and investigate what the hell “picky eating” looked like before the modern era. Was picky eating even a thing before kids’ snack foods? What about feeding disorders? And how did parents handle these obstacles, if in fact they did exist? I get into all of that and more in a more heavily-researched article, which you can read here. For another similar article that asks a weird question and answers it with tons of extremely bizarre research, check out my free article on what happens to male gorillas who can’t get any pussy.

Baby Registries

Last time you all read MST, one topic was wedding registries and why we should abstain from purchasing gifts for couples who got married later in life since they didn’t need anything new—with one person saying she would never buy a wedding gift for a couple that already owned an expensive espresso machine. Well, this wek, not much has changed, except replace “wedding” with “baby.”

One Twitter user issued her own hot take on baby registries: she did not want to purchase baby gifts for couples who had “waited too long” to have children, giving the apparently real-life example of some forty-year-old friends of hers who put a $3,000 baby stroller on their registry despite already having good jobs. She contrasted this with a (presumably fictional) couple who were younger and needed to pay for fertility treatments. When one person said that you don’t know everyone’s fertility story, OP responded that she actually knew the exact month that the forty-year-old woman removed her IUD.

Other Twitter users joined the conversation by, essentially, asking why these people are friends at all.

While I agree that nobody “needs” a $3,000 stroller, let alone someone who already has the means to buy a nice stroller for themselves, I agree with (per usual) on the topic:

Lena Dunham: Why Do Women Like Her?

I actually have quite an issue with the title alone, because as far as I can tell, lots of women still don’t like Lena Duham, but I’ll be honest and concede that Lena Dunham is having a moment right now. Not to make it all about me, but it kind of feels like how I went from being a social pariah in the seventh grade to, miraculously, becoming popular my last week of eighth grade right before I switched schools thanks to my solo performance in the spring chorus. Okay, fine, I’ve made it all about me, but I think Lena Dunham would understand.

Her newest memoir Famesick has been wildly successful, and despite spending a great deal of the 2010s repeatdly apologizing for missteps at the hands of the Internet mob, she appears to have come into her own and turned some (but not all) haters into fans. I’ll admit, as someone who did not have strong opinions about Lena Dunham (and mostly still doesn’t) I didn’t expect that I’d ever see her as a fashion icon, and yet…I kind of love this look.

But alas, not everyone appreciates her appeal. A Twitter user this week asked why women like her so much especially given that she is “ugly, fat and tattooed.” When a top comment replied that women like her because she’s talented, OP responded, “I love talented women, but not when they're all of the above mentioned things.”

Obviously, some trolling is at play here, but this embodies a phenomenon that’s bothered me for a while.

When we talk about “beauty standards” we often talk about a particularly unattainable ideal for dating—and this doesn’t make much sense to me, because refusing to date people based on their physical appearance is actually perfectly valid, and women do it all the time too. A man having particular dating standards—shallow as they may be—is his prerogative.

The problem, as I see it, are statements like the idea that Lena Dunham’s talent is obliterated by her fatness, or more generally, that women who exist in the public eye must be attractive to justify that existence, even if their work has nothing to do with their looks. It’s not a double standard for men to refuse to date fat women (because, of course, many women feel the same way about fat men, or short men, or whatever) but it is a double standard for men to tolerate or even enjoy fat (other otherwise not conventionally attractive) men in the public eye—actors, directors, writers, podcasters, etc—but demand that any woman in those positions must be hot.

But speaking of not-hot men…

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Jack Antonoff and Margaret Qualley

This week was a real treat for those who just read Famesick—not only did we get some Lena Dunham discourse, but her ex-boyfriend Jack Antonoff, who was featured heavily in the book, just announced a divorce from his wife Margaret Qualley—a divorce which, according to The NY Post, was initiated by Qualley.

I never had a particularly strong stake in this relationship, but after Antonoff was portrayed unflatteringly in Famesick, it seems that people are eager to celebrate the demise of his marriage in a way that feels slightly too parasocial, specifically zooming on on inappropriate looksmatching between him and his ex-wife and the rumors that he cheated on Lena Dunham with singer Lorde when she was of questionable age (presumably over the age of consent, but barely- time to ring in some new age gap discourse, baby!)

But by far, people seemed the most invested in making fun of him for not being hot enough for his wife—a funny juxtaposition, given that Lena Dunham wrote that she felt he was out of her league. But apparently he’s pulled baddies before, and dated Scarlett Johansson in high school? How the hell do you people know this shit?

The looksmatching issue still seems to be plaguing the Internet, as apparently a previous relationship with Lena Dunham makes it impossible to “handle” Margaret Qualley.

And this is how I discover that Adam Driver “hasn’t been seen in weeks”

And speaking of people who haven’t been seen in weeks….

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Where in the World is Mitch McConnell?

Is Mitch McConnell dead? Well, it’s complicated. He’s, arguably, more dead than Adam Driver (who is probably not dead) but less dead than Lena Dunham, who is definitely not dead.

He was admitted to a hospital on June 14 and hasn’t been seen since, stemming from what appears to be an incident at his home when he became unconscious. Some folks think he’s dead because 911 records show that CPR was administered, other people think he’s alive because it would be hard to conceal a death for this long.

If I absolutely had to guess, I would venture that he’s not dead, but on some kind of life support, which is a theory supported both by the CPR news and the fact that nobody’s heard anything from him or his team. And others have speculated that we’re in the middle of a Weekend at Bernie’s situation.

It also seems that several Republican senators are tweeting the same potentially fake copy-paste story about speaking with Mitch McConnell over the phone. Yeah, sure, I spoke to “Mitch McConnell”—he goes to another school in Canada and he’s an Abercrombie model!

Naturally, this became a new copypasta:

Betting markets have approximately 56% odds that he “steps down” from the Senate before his term ends in January 2027, although they’ve been careful to include “other reasons” alongside formal resignation.

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Funny Tweets/Other Happenings

This tweet actually made me guffaw out loud:

• Just when you thought Biden saying there were “at least three” genders was his all-time best moment, an old video has resurfaced of him jovially blaming Elton John for government spending on HIV.

• Donald Trump is on Truth Social posting photographs of walls:

My brother was a severe picky eater, for his entire childhood. Every day, my parents would provide his safe foods for him—cereal for breakfast, often a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch, and either pizza or unseasoned baked chicken breast and steamed broccoli for dinner. I can still vividly recall my mother fashioning a mini baking sheet out of aluminum foil for his nightly bone-dry chicken, a defeated look on her face. And my first thought was, I will never let my kid do this to me.

But parenthood humbles you, and as it turned out, my brother wasn’t just a picky eater. He had a generalized feeding disorder that went beyond stubbornness. He would gag when pushed to try new foods. He had anxiety, gagging, texture sensitivities and found even some typical childhood foods repulsive (to this day, he loathes ice cream cake.) He would have gladly skipped a meal, or even multiple meals, if he found the food intolerably disgusting—and he found lots of foods disgusting. In a moment of weakness, my mom exclaimed at the dinner table, “You don’t like anything!” to which he, about four years old, incredulously responded, “I like fings. Like chips.” (He did not even get chips very often, and he would have made a more compelling case had he invoked the steamed broccoli.)

I later went on to have a child with the same basic issue, and much like my brother, his safe foods aren’t “chicken nuggets.” In fact, my child will not touch chicken nuggets, but loves to snack on extremely healthy (and extremely bitter) cacao nibs. He had another phase marked by an obsession with pistachios. For two years, he would eat up to five scrambled eggs every morning, before one day grimacing at the sight of them, never eating them again no matter how many times they were offered. His picky eating is not driven by a diet of processed sugar. When he started at a school that provided free lunch, I asked his teacher if I should pack him a separate lunch to accommodate his eating issues. She laughed and said, “If he’s hungry, he’ll eat! I’ve never had a picky eater in my class who wasn’t eating something new after a week with me!” I was excited that this woman might actually hold the key to his feeding issues, especially given that we had gotten nowhere with two feeding therapists already. After two weeks, the teacher was urging me to pack him “anything” he would eat in his lunch box, nutrition aside. Apparently, he was the first kid she had seen who would gladly not eat, even when hungry.

To this day, we serve him his few safe foods (which, thankfully, include some healthy things) while consistently offering new foods in a low-pressure setting. We’ve made some progress (he’s eating apples, dried fruits and more varieties of nuts, although, as Trump would say, “not with a lot of enthusiasm”) but most of the time, our goal is simply to make sure he’s eating. And we have the stamp of approval from his pediatrician, which makes us feel a bit better.

I’ve now experienced enough not to judge my parents for “catering” to my brother’s picky eating. It was obvious, in my brother’s case at least, that “you eat this or you starve” would have resulted in his starvation. Perhaps not starvation to death, but eating the bare minimum for survival and having inadequate energy and stunted growth.

But it got me wondering—what the hell happened to kids like this before the advent of “safe foods?” For most of human history, we didn’t have the capacity to procure preferred foods for children, whether that was a processed mango-flavored pouch or a bespoke nut and seed smoothie with Greek yogurt, as my son drinks. “You eat this or you starve” was quite literally our only option for most of human history. So I did some research to try and understand what happened to picky eaters in the days of yore—and I learned some pretty surprising things!

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Earlier this year, I wrote There’s No Way Every Man is Avoidant Attached, about the fact that men who are simply not-that-interested in a particular woman are recast as “avoidant attached” so that the woman in question can maintain (at least for a while) a relationship that probably should have ended, or absolve herself of responsibility after the fact. At the time, I wondered if straight men did anything like this, but straight men don’t have a habit of posting about attachment theory. So I shrugged it off as something weird that only women do.

After all, “fake” or exaggerated and speculative diagnoses is a tendency that, at least if you go by the stereotype, is more of a woman thing. When people post about parents with an insufferable desire to be “special” getting their high-functioning kids diagnosed with autism (note that I do not agree with this descriptor) they are usually referring to the mothers, not the fathers, even if in reality, both parents of mildly autistic children are often involved in the diagnosis. When people refer to adults who make a self-diagnosis “their entire personality,” they are typically referring to women with ADHD or mild autism, not men. The idea is that women crave attention and have a stronger desire to be a special main character than men. And perhaps, inundated with this stereotype, I didn’t stop to think about the speculative diagnosis that men are handing out like candy—borderline personality disorder.

About as frequently as women claim to have dated an “avoidant attached” man, men will claim to have dated a “BPD” woman. And, similar to how women discuss tips for avoiding the avoidant-attached, men warn each other to steer clear of women who appear that they might have BPD.

There’s just one problem—a lot of these women don’t have BPD.

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Today, I will start by walking you through my favorite moment of my favorite episode of my all-time favorite TV show, Peep Show—something which unlocks something very important and fundamental about one of my all-time favorite topics: being yourself.

Peep Show is basically a lower-budget, drier British Seinfeld set in the 2000’s, starring two friends and roommates: Jez, the free spirit who, well into his thirties, believes he is one big break away from becoming a famous musician, and Mark, a buttoned-up, geeky loan manager who would much rather be a world-renowned historian.

It might seem implausible that these two men are friends—and at times, they loathe, taunt and sabotage each other over their remarkable differences. In one memorable episode, Mark gets fed up with Jez mooching off him and forces him to interview for a job at his stuffy bank. Terrified that the (actually disastrous) interview is going “too well,” Jez randomly makes a weird face at his interviewer to freak her out so he can continue his position as a layabout.

But they keep coming back to each other, time and time again, because they need each other in the delicate balancing act that is their decades-long friendship. On the occasion that Jez spends time with his even-more-Jezzish burnout musician friend Super Hans, things get out of hand (in one episode, the two go on a drug and alcohol fueled bender and wind up giving each other blowjobs after destroying the apartment.) Jez needs Mark to keep him from hitting rock bottom and winding up in rehab, and Mark needs Jez to occasionally push his boundaries so he tries new things. But crucially, Mark needs to remain Markish and Jez needs to remain Jezzish for this relationship to work. The goal is not for them to change into one perfect man who is both free-spirited and responsible, but to continue balancing each other. This is confirmed in a later season when Mark and Jez briefly part ways and Mark houses a new roommate who is basically a redheaded version of himself. He tires of this man so quickly that after his new roommate refuses to move out, he calls Jez and Super Hans to kidnap him and force him out of the apartment in a sleeping bag.

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I am a Mark. I know this may surprise you because I’m a creative, so I should be a Jez. But I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, a “free spirit.” Respectfully, get that shit out of here. Yes, I love to talk and make jokes and I like to wear bright colors but I am perfectly happy to die of old age never having tried magic mushrooms. I do not like dancing in the rain (I don’t even like getting wet.) I have never, and will never, go to a music festival that involves being in a desert, sweating, getting sunburned, or taking a long train crammed full of other sweaty people on their way to the aforementioned festival. When my brother visits a new city, he occasionally reports back to me that I would “love it” and so far the only times this has happened has been in Singapore and Copenhagen, his reasoning being, “It was safe and clean.” (My mom said the same thing when she visited South Korea.)

I may not be a loan manager, and I may not be a historian, but I am a Mark, through and through (including the fact that Mark is prone to neurotic freakouts from time to time, or the fact that he handed over his belongings to a guy on the street who aggressively demanded them without a weapon- this happened to me once too).

I’ve noticed that it’s much easier to appear authentic (or at least convince people you are authentic) if you are a Jez. Nobody questions whether the guy dropping acid in the yurt is “being himself.” Of fucking course he is, because why else would someone do that? But Mark? He just needs to “loosen up and let go!”

In one of the earlier episodes of the miraculously eight-season show ( basically unheard of in this genre of British TV) Mark finds himself up against a predicament to which I can relate. He hacks into his crush, Sophie’s, emails (okay, I haven’t done that) and discovers that she likes him, but wishes he were more “fun,” lamenting that he’s so uptight all the time. Naturally, Mark decides to change Sophie’s perception, viewing his uptight nature as something he must shed so he can be more fun. He goes up to her mere minutes later holding some kind of party kazoo and suggests they “do matey things” together, to which she joyfully invites him to her dance class.

What follows is perhaps the greatest scene in all of TV history, and I’m not exaggerating. Mark expects that Sophie’s dance class will be a nice, conventional salsa class. But he has read the schedule wrong. On that particular day, they are doing something they call “Rainbow Rhythms” which looks like this:

As Mark puts it, this is his personal nightmare. (Unsurprisingly, Jez, who has come along, is having a great time.)

But what’s especially frustrating about Rainbow Rhythms is that it encourages everyone to “let it go” and “be themselves,” insinuating that if everyone could just get rid of all of society’s expectations and rules, that they’d all enjoy writhing around like lunatics. And sure, this is true of some people. Jez, who isn’t terribly inhibited to begin with, immediately lets loose. But this…isn’t who Mark is. Mark isn’t bound by society to be uptight. He just is uptight and finds all of this a bit clownish.

But in effort to seem “fun” to Sophie, he purposefully dances as ridiculously as he can just to show her how uninhibited he is. He is doing this as a calculated move, not because he actually likes it. And, because this doesn’t come naturally to him at all, he dances a bit too crazy and Sophie is a little icked out.

Later, everyone in the class holds hands and gently discusses “how they experienced the class.” One participant, Gwyn, remarks that there was “a lot of new energy in the room, and some of it was so Rainbow Rhythms, and some of it was so not Rainbow Rhythms,” subtly staring at Mark. The class sagely agrees. Mark speaks up and says, “Why don’t you just say who you’re talking about? You’re talking about me, aren’t you?” Gwyn says yes. Mark continues: “I’m sorry if I didn’t do it right. I’m sorry if you assume I eat red meat and don’t necessarily think money or Tony Blair are a bad thing. But if there isn’t room here for people who stand against everything you believe in, then what sort of a hippie free-for-all is this?”

This episode is not about hippies, or about crushes, or about funny dance classes. The episode is about authenticity. And while people like Gwyn feel strongly about how important it is to be “true to yourself,” they are not including people like Mark in the equation.

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Toward the end of the episode, Gwyn invites Mark (by way of Jez, and more importantly, Jez’s hot hippie girlfriend Nancy, who are also in tow, and Mark’s crush Sophie) to his lake house. Gwyn’s lake house was acquired after “energy,” in the form of money, “flowed toward him” after his parents’ death. No notes.

Anyway, at the lake house, Gwyn starts trying to initiate group sex via a seemingly innocent game of spin the bottle. Once it becomes clear what’s happening, Mark and Sophie realize that neither of them is really quite this free-spirited. They sneak out together and sit by the lake together, sharing their own, much more vanilla, romantic moment.

The hippies (Gwyn, Jez, Nancy) are no more “themselves” than Mark or Sophie. They may be more thrill-seeking, and they may like different things, but they are not more authentic. And Mark—stuffy as he may be—is being himself.

I related so hard to Mark in this episode. I went to a real “kooky creative kid” school, full of kids who wanted to try every drug under the sun, many of whom wanted to bum around in hostels throughout Europe after graduation instead of going to college straight away (I now enjoy travel as an adult who can afford to do it comfortably, but when I was younger and didn’t have money I was so aghast at the idea of staying in a hostel—full of strangers! with smells!—that I figured I just wouldn’t travel at all.) I did not want to try hard drugs. I did not want to sleep with indie rock stars. I did not, and will not, have any kind of psychedelic “experience” unless it is administered in the most clinical, Huberman Lab kind of way, and is guaranteed to cure my OCD. I have never found the concept of a threesome interesting, if only because I imagined it would be very hard to reliably wear condoms, I might get my feelings hurt, and I am not the least bit bisexual (okay, maybe I’d let her do things to me, but I’d be self conscious about how unfair it was for her.)

As I said before, I am a Mark.

I struggle to understand whether being particularly uptight is a “me” thing or a “my OCD” thing. Sometimes, it’s hard to tell! (Second idea: does Mark have OCD? There are signs! He canonically feels bad for underwear he doesn’t wear, just like me!) But certain preferences of mine are likely unrelated to my OCD. I like to be indoors (or outdoors in a very specific temperature range), I do not like animals touching me and I think kissing a dog on the mouth is disgusting, I like to dress up and don’t like to stain my clothing, I like to shower frequently enough to feel confident that I don’t smell bad, and I do not want to smell anything bad wafting off anyone else—in fact, I take other people’s bad odors as a personal affront. For all of these reasons, it’s obvious I would struggle deeply at Burning Man, and I think it’s now obvious why I hated living in San Francisco so much.

For much of my life, I worried that my love of the clean, safe, and comfortable was an inherently bad tendency that I needed to drop—not that this was part of me but that it was a bad habit, akin to nose picking or thumb sucking. I kept watching romantic comedy movies where the woman we were supposed to root against was the one who was afraid to get dirty, stupidly wore heels on a hiking excursion, and who didn’t want to “break a nail.” In fact, growing up, my slightly-tomboyish mom warned me repeatedly about this tendency of mine. She told me that most men really want women who aren’t afraid to get dirty, who will play a rousing game of touch football, and who get ready for dinner in five minutes by throwing on jeans and a T-shirt. This was decidedly not me. She framed this type of woman as who everyone would be if they just “let loose” and stopped being so uptight and prissy, but she did not take into account that maybe being prissy was just who I was.

I’m sure my mom thought this was a wholesome, feminist message, even if framed in the context of appealing to men. She gave birth to a hyperfeminine daughter who, in her words, she “didn’t know what to do with,” and thought that steering me towards being just a bit less fussy and high-maintenance would help me. And yes, when this tendency of mine makes it hard to function—when I’m on the verge of having a meltdown because there’s too much sand on my feet, or when it’s time for dinner and I only have five minutes to get ready—I have to just be flexible and moderate my emotions and behaviors. But none of that changes the type of person I am! I am not the girl who wants to go to the dog park on a first date. I am not the girl who shrugs it off if she bites into a hotdog at a baseball game and squirts mustard all over her shirt (as if I’d ever go to a baseball game on my own accord!) I know I’ve joked that “be yourself” is bad advice if “yourself” includes really egregious social skills, but in this case, my desire to be clean, safe and well-groomed is not something I believe needs to be changed. Just like Mark and his desire not to have group sex at the lakehouse.

So—for all you Marks out there—all the prigs who would much rather be at a nice restaurant, or even just drinking tea at home, than out white water rafting or dropping acid in the desert—feel free to be yourself. And anyone who won’t accept it isn’t so open-minded and free-spirited after all.

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A few years ago, I made a sweeping statement on Twitter which I now regret, and not because any kind of mob demanded an apology. I declared, very confidently, that men are much hornier than women.

I don’t think I was entirely wrong. There is not, last I checked, a booming industry of women paying for men’s used underwear. If a man wants to make money as an OnlyFans performer, his best bet would be to market himself to gay men, not women. Women do not seek out casual sex the way men do. To lure men onto apps and websites meant for casual hookups, a large number of female bots must be deployed. And famously, when social scientists ran an experiment by having an attractive person proposition random college students for sex, the woman had a 75% success rate and the man had a 0% success rate. (I can’t stop thinking about that study without imagining what the decoy told the men after they said yes—did Ashton Kutcher suddenly appear to punk them?)

It’s tempting to look at all this evidence and deduce that men desire women, and women don’t really desire men. Or at the very least, women desire men but only Glen Powell as a sadistic aristocratic vampire, so their desire never winds up sparked by anything in real life. Ergo, the everyday experience of heterosexuality is men lusting after women, and women recoiling and fleeing into the forest to locate the nearest bear (and they would, a bear has got to be at least seven feet tall. Grizzlymogged oncemore!)

But perhaps the most commonly-used argument to defend the idea that women don’t really find men sexually attractive, or experience any degree of the sexual desire men do, is the cold pizza theory. Basically, men will take any woman, in any scenario, because they see woman like pizza and all pizza is basically fine, even if it’s cold. (More proof that I am not a man: I do not like cold pizza, even in the literal sense.) Meanwhile, women require that specific conditions be met for them to be aroused. Using the pizza analogy, women might not even want hot pizza…if it’s the wrong crust thickness, the wrong sauce, or if it’s Domino’s.

Ergo: men like “pizza” more than women do.

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Oh no, the fashion roundup! I’ve gotten some feedback on these monthly fashion articles, where some people just really hate them, subscribed for social commentary and personal essays only, and really do not want to see them. On the flip side, I’ve had other subscribers say, “Hey, why aren’t you doing more fashion? We miss the fashion!” (I promise you the latter group of people actually does exist and is not a group of big strong manly men with tears in their eyes begging and crying like dogs.)

So far, it seems like most people don’t have strong opinions either way, but for now I will keep doing monthly fashion roundups (that’s right, monthly, maybe twice a month, it’s not that much) for the people who enjoy them. If you don’t enjoy them, rest assured there will be other content throughout the rest of the month—typically around than 15-20 articles) which will appeal to you more.

Anyway, this summer, we are spending a lot of time in Europe. Most of this time has been spent in Paris, although we just got back from visiting my husband’s relatives in Greece along with his parents and brother’s family, to celebrate his parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary. (And, by a sheer stroke of luck, we left for Greece right when the heat wave hit Paris.) So, for fun, I thought I’d make the fashion roundup this month oriented around our trip and around (as always) some cool brands I discovered! Today will cover Paris, Greece coming soon!

My Favorite Outfits

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As I’ve written about many times before, I have not always understood social norms the way other people do. When I was fifteen, the therapist who diagnosed me with ADHD noted my “missed social cues” immediately in our first session, leading me to wonder (for twenty years and counting) what social faux pas I had committed to a therapist in just a few minutes.

It’s likely that I was born this way, but I was also raised in a slightly unconventional family where being a kind person was deeply valued but following particular rules of etiquette was not as important, or at least not as drilled into us. (There were some exceptions though—when a kid told me I did a good job in the second grade school play and I said “I know,” my parents kindly reminded me that I should have said “thanks.”)

But other rules escaped me until adulthood. For example, I somehow made it to age nineteen before realizing that I should thank people who pay for a dinner. Up until then, almost all my dinners out were with my parents, who, it seemed, did not expect me to thank them for feeding me, especially given that I was a kid. Perhaps someone else would have picked up on the fact that if someone other than your legal guardian pays for your food, you should thank them (and perhaps other families required that children thank their parents for meals). But I did not. It wasn’t until I had been dating my husband for a few weeks when he asked me why I never once thanked him for paying. My only explanation was, “Well, I did offer to split it.” Once I realized my error, I was humiliated and horrified, so immediately the next time I was out to dinner with my dad and he offered to pay, I thanked him in such a formal manner that he looked slightly taken aback.

Aware that my brain was missing either some key information (or some key pieces), I started asking my husband to give me feedback after we had been at a party or gathering, so I could understand if I said or did anything off-putting. He agreed to do this, and there were times when I discovered I was breaking other social norms too. And now, thanks to a controversial Twitter post, I’m discovering that many of the well-meaning things I’ve done to show empathy in the past are actually also bad.

So for this post, I’d like to sort out the social rules that I still don’t fully understand, and have the great people of Substack weigh in to vote on them.

Is it “demanding emotional labor” to give gifts?

Recently, a woman (who I won’t link here because I don’t want to pile on) went viral on Twitter for gifting a new friend a few pages of poetry she wrote, among a few other small things, after hearing she was “going through something.” The friend—who may have been more of an acquaintance—rebuffed this gesture and called it weird, deeply shaming the OP. (My take: they are equally weird and deserve each other. Everyone knows the acceptable thing to do is say, “wow, thanks!” and then slowly fade away if it really freaked you out.)

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I’ve heard a particularly common complaint from many young men in my mentions: any kind of dating advice geared towards men emphasizes personal responsibility and self-improvement, while dating advice aimed at women consists of, “you’re amazing, don’t settle” with a side order of, “if any man doesn’t think you’re amazing, he’s a jerk.”

I have a feeling these guys aren’t really deep into women’s relationship spaces, because this isn’t even a very accurate depiction of what it’s like now, but for argument’s sake, I will concede this particular type of advice exists among the myriad of disparate modern dating advice for women—for example, dismissing any man who isn’t interested in you as avoidant-attached. And if you’re a man, not a woman, you will only see the parts of women’s dating advice that incidentally appears in front of you.

But what we are seeing today (and what is now receiving unsurprising backlash) was simply a different form of backlash to dating narratives millennial and Gen X women received in their teen years. From the 2000s to today, women’s dating advice experienced the same transformation that body positivity did—mainstream sources overcorrected toward a supposedly empowering, milquetoast feminist message, while the less politically correct content thrived in disperse and unregulated social media environments.

There is no better place to understand this transformation than Cosmo magazine.

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A while ago, I wrote about when I was bullied by way of severe exclusion at a former workplace—a story of the depths of my unpopularity which, paradoxically, was my most popular personal essay of all time. You can read the entire story here, but the only part that you really need to understand for this article is that I worked at a large tech company where most of the other women in my department were, for lack of a better word, “normies,” and despite my best attempts to befriend them, they immediately surmised something was wrong with me and excluded me, going so far as to attend a party I threw but exclude me at my own party so they could take Instagram photos of each other on my balcony. And all of this without the Trump impression!

At the time (and honestly even now) these women felt to me like the bottomless mimosa-drinking version of the ten-headed rat king from The Nutcracker—a grotesque conglomerate of identical, soulless pieces. They wore similar clothes, they talked similarly, and on the rare occasion that I learned something about them, it was always something utterly unsurprising, such as “I enjoy traveling” or “I love dogs.”

But I am, as is everyone, an unreliable narrator. I did not know these women very well because I never got the chance. Perhaps, had I presented myself differently and earned some degree of familiarity with them, my impression of them would have been more nuanced. (Maybe we still wouldn’t have gotten along, but I’d have understood them to be fully-formed humans.) Maybe my view that they were all the same, and contained nothing interesting or unique, says more about me than it does about them.

Women (and occasionally men) like this are ridiculed all over my segment of the Internet, mostly full of people who had not-so-great experiences in middle school and still hold some of that trauma despite finding it embarrassing to do so (I include myself in this, by the way.) It is devastatingly humiliating to say, but I immediately clocked all of those women as former popular girls, and I probably was right because my husband (a former popular kid himself) did the same, and he did so with no deep-seated animosity against People Experiencing Popularity.

This mindset into which I, and to which others like me have fallen, goes a bit like this: we are weird. Even if you can’t tell we’re weird by looking at us, we are, and this makes us different (and perhaps a little special and “superhuman.”) But most people aren’t weird like us, most people are normal. Normal people are boring. Normal people drink from Stanley cups and think that going to Target is the highlight of their week. Normal people like sports and don’t read books. Normal people never have a single, interesting thought, nor do they have any hobbies or obsessions. It’s okay to be nasty to normal people because they don’t really have feelings like the special weirdos and probably hate us anyway, for some shallow reason. Can we, in good conscience, call normal people “people” at all?

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