When you think of the fashion industry, and Fashion People who are “in the know” you probably think of rich people. Or at the very least, young, artsy cosmopolitan people who are upper class enough to be adjacent to wealth even if they don’t actually have lots of money. Anna Wintour is famously not a woman of the people.

But there’s a new brand of fashion snob in town—okay, by “town” I mean “the Internet,” but bear with me—and their trademark is mixing the fashion snobbery of the cattiest editor at Vogue with seemingly-discordant far-left politics and a hatred of “capitalism.”

I’ve been noticing this archetype for a while now, where certain leftists have nominally divorced the concept of taste from money, and therefore feel it’s politically consistent to mock women who are conservative, or just seem vaguely uncultured and normie-coded, for their “tasteless” clothes—often clothes which appear inoffensive to 99% of the population.

Read more

I’m about to say something that may come as a shock to all of you—I was not well-liked as a child. I know, it’s impossible to believe that I, frequently crowned, “most annoying account on Twitter,” would ever have been bullied, but alas, I was! The bullying started when I was about nine and continued until high school, when I finally switched school systems. Then it reared its head again in college, mostly in the form of gossip, with one particularly interesting rumor about me engaging in an “Eiffel tower” with two guys I had actually never met. But as is the case for many formerly-bullied annoying women, things were socially the absolute worst in middle school.

Just to give you an idea of what this entailed: thankfully, it never got physical (it rarely does for girls) unless you count a couple pencils thrown in my direction—one of the few offenses committed by my male bullies (#MenInWomensFields). Pencil projectiles aside, it was almost entirely social/verbal warfare, committed partially by my group of friends but occasionally from girls who I barely knew. I received drive-by comments in the hallways about being an ugly, “slutty” freak. I was invited to parties that didn’t exist by people who hated me, I was “voted off” multiple lunch tables, and I was subject to wild sexual rumors—including one that I was “paying adult men to go down on me” (major questions about the upbringing of the twelve-year-old child who came up with that one!) even though I had never actually kissed anyone.

Recently, a paid subscriber reached out in the subscriber chat and asked if I had any tips about what my parents did (or could have done) to help me during this time in my life, because their daughter was experiencing social difficulties at school and they wanted advice. While my parents didn’t 100% solve my problems, they definitely helped—and I hope that by sharing these tips I can help parents of children who are being bullied.

Subscribe now

First of all, why was I bullied? Well, I’m annoying. I always have been, and it takes a lot of work for me to stop being annoying. A therapist once diagnosed me with “missed social cues” just a few minutes into a session. I have an uncanny talent for vaguely bothering people in ways that inspire immense rage. It’s probably why I was so good at trolling Reddit, channeling my ability to be annoying into a variety of fictional characters who were even more annoying than I was. But before I made a living off of being annoying, it was just a social detriment. I also had a particular way of dressing where I deliberately wore provocative or unusual attire, probably to piss people off, or perhaps so I would have a non-embarrassing explanation for why nobody liked me (See? I’m not actually annoying, girls are just mean to you when you look hot!!)

My parents were proud “be yourself” people. They thought that I was real darn nifty, and if other people didn’t think so, that was their loss (okay, this is what they said to me. It’s entirely possible my parents were like, “Why the fuck is our daughter so annoying?”)

But anyway, the “just be yourself” line is not terribly useful. Sometimes, nobody likes “yourself,” especially if you are in seventh grade when social suicide is as simple as having a dorky binder. Also, no offense to all the parents out there, but most twelve-year-olds think their parents are lame, so hearing that their parents think they’re cool is like discovering that AryanAurelius1488 thinks you’re a great ally to the BIPOC community. In fact, sometimes my parents would inform me that one of their friends thought I was “so pretty” or “so cool” and I would roll my eyes and say, “Is your friend Donna a hot 13-year-old boy? Didn’t think so.”

Subscribe now

It probably would have helped if I had learned the basics of social cues earlier (I had to painstakingly teach myself social cues at the age of 28) but I don’t know if my parents would have been good at teaching these things to me—or if I would have listened! For example, I had a tendency to talk too much, focus too much on myself, and put on extended comedic performances for which nobody asked. Perhaps my parents dropped hints that this behavior was unbecoming, but if they did, I did not notice. (Also, I now make a living doing exactly that, so perhaps it’s good they didn’t tamp it down too much.)

My parents also had some strategies that were funny, although I don’t know if they helped. At the very least, they didn’t hurt. My dad used to make me laugh by only saying my nemeses’ names in an “evil voice” so if I came home complaining about a girl named Stephanie Mariano, he would start doing a villainous cackle and bellow, “STEPHANIE MARIANOOOOO.” Meanwhile, when I was being bullied by a girl named Jenna in the seventh grade (name not changed because I am, honestly, still quite mad) my mom suggested keeping a document on my computer called the “Jenna files” and I would update it every time Jenna was a bitch to me. Not sure if this was a healthy strategy, but it did make me really excited to have more run-ins with Jenna so I would have more material for my file. Funny enough, Jenna stopped making fun of me around this time. It could have been sheer luck, or perhaps my eagerness to be bullied ironically made me less of a target.

But there was another thing they did that was especially helpful. I went to a school that was very “typical” in the sense that kids who played sports were cool and kids who did theater were losers. In fact, we had so little funding for our theater program that the annual musical production was performed on the bleachers. But my parents quickly realized that while I was “plankton on the popularity food chain at school,” as I put it, I was not considered uncool around other creative kids. The theater kids didn’t have any problems with me, although there were so few of them (and for some unlucky reason, very few in my year) that it wasn’t a good strategy for making friends. But my parents correctly surmised that the ideal way to improve my social situation was to get me involved in activities with like-minded kids outside of my school. They could not stop kids at school from bullying me. They could not force me to have the personality that appealed to twelve-year-olds who wore Armani Exchange. All they could do was create a separate environment for me—one with real-life kids my age—where I was cool.

I cannot cheer on this strategy enough. My parents enrolled me in a theater-based summer camp and an after-school writing class. Both of these institutions were totally unrelated to my school, so I could comfortably reinvent myself. And despite continuing to be unpopular at school, the bullying and exclusion didn’t bother me nearly as much because I had these other friends (and at one point, even a boyfriend) who knew the “real me.” I felt like Superman as Clark Kent, pretending to be the least cool girl at my middle school when I was actually a moderately cool girl at theater camp. In retrospect, this carries a parallel with secretly being Cartoons Hate Her when I was working in tech, with coworkers who hated me (probably for good reason) and repeatedly getting fired. I joke, but seriously—shitty things in your life can be ameliorated by the fact that things are going really well in your Other Life. You just have to make sure your kid’s other life is the after-school art class and not role playing Euphoria characters with Claude.

Although my high school experience wasn’t bad, my summers were spent at CTY, a college prep program endearingly referred to as “geek camp” or less charitably, an autism summit. To put things into perspective, the director of CTY warned us about “shoving friendships in other kids’ faces” because “not everyone can make friends.” The standards for “socially skilled” were pretty low. At this point, I didn’t feel the need to escape from who I was at school, but being “cool” (relatively speaking) at CTY was a fun escape from being medium-liked at my high school.

Of course, not every parent can afford sleepaway camp, but sleepaway camp is hardly the only option here. The goal is to give your child a second life surrounded by peers who appreciate them, so whatever is happening at school doesn’t matter as much. That can be at a community center class, or through any activity that occurs outside of school. When you’re in middle school, your social dramas feel like the be-all, end-all, and it’s much easier to give a kid an outlet of like-minded peers at some other activity than to insist, repeatedly, that none of this will matter in five years, no matter how true that may be!

I would be remiss not to mention one area where I was especially lucky—I was in middle school in the early 2000s, when a lot of kids just weren’t on the Internet in any serious way. A lot of my peers were on AIM, but I wasn’t allowed. In fact, when a teacher attempted to do a lecture about the dangers of the Internet she asked us who was on AIM with a show of hands and everyone raised their hands except me. Still not sure what that was supposed to prove, but it did not help my bullying predicament. This dovetailed nicely with a rumor someone spread about me that my parents “couldn’t afford electricity” because when I had a friend over for dinner my parents, pretentiously, kept the dining room dark and lit candles. Anyway, TLDR: AIM would have been even worse for me than not being on it, at least at this age.

It’s hard to keep your kid off social media and I won’t pretend to know how. Anecdotally, I’ve seen parents have success banning phones in the bedroom at night. Even after I was allowed to use the Internet, I could only use the family computer in the kitchen. I’m aware this is just not how the world works anymore, but I have seen parents ban all forms of social media until sixteen and have strict limits on screen time, with quite a bit of whining but not a whole lot of Internet-based trauma. I really don’t want to lecture parents of much older kids than my own, but I can’t imagine the complaining about screen time would be worse than the outcomes of cyberbullying. And presumably, if your child is having fulfilling social interactions outside of school and the Internet, social media will feel less necessary.

Finding your child outside-of-school friends is especially important because especially for girls, one of the biggest anxieties involves losing their friends over rumors and gossip. The great thing about making friends at an after-school club or class is that not only can you reinvent yourself, but nothing at school will ever reach them. These friendships make school dramas genuinely lower-stakes, and this in turn makes the bullied child less of a target.

I hope my children don’t inherit my personality, and I hope they glide effortlessly through school with lots of friends, none of whom are ever a bad influence. Of course, I am prepared for the inevitability that at least one of my kids is bullied at some point. I know that would be heartbreaking and upsetting for them (and, not going to lie, for me as well) but I also know that I have a game plan—the same thing my parents did. Except for the candles.

Subscribe now

At the time, people told me I was too quick to dismiss women’s rage at Trump’s election (look, I was mad too, but not mad enough to go monkmode) and therefore too quick to dismiss the idea that straight women would stop having sex with men in droves, for an indeterminate amount of time, possibly forever. I maintain that I was correct, I apologized way too much, and the 4B sex strike obviously never caught on in any mainstream way, nor will it ever catch on in the modern-day US. This is true for many reasons, the main one being that women, even liberal feminist women like myself, also enjoy sex. Also, a “sex strike” with a solution of “just start dating women instead” is not palatable to most women, given that most women are, in fact, straight.

But let’s back up a bit, because sex strikes have worked before. In 2006, girlfriends of gang members in Pereira, Colombia stopped having sex in an effort to force a reduction in violence, working with support from the municipal government. This made a lot of sense because they speculated that men got involved with gang violence specifically to attract women, and by rebranding this behavior as unattractive, fewer men were inclined to partake. The strike successfully reduced the murder rate in the city by 26%. A 2003 sex strike in Liberia also helped put an end to civil war, although the sex strike was part of a larger movement that involved other protests and sit-ins.

But I’m just not buying that a sex strike will ever happen in the US, at least not anytime soon.

Before you “nobody is saying that” me, the 2024 election wasn’t the only time people called for a sex strike in the US, although it would be valid to question the legitimacy of these other calls to action. In 2017, Janelle Monáe suggested in an interview with Marie Claire that women go on a sex strike. In 2019, Alyssa Milano advocated for a sex strike to protest anti-abortion laws (a bit of a horseshoe abstinence-only thing, I guess). And this week on Substack, a piece by a bisexual woman who “decentered men” by simply dating women instead (it’s giving “still having sex”) called for a sex strike, assuming that straight women would stop having sex at all. (I’m not linking this piece, mostly because this woman doesn’t have a big following despite how often I’ve seen this article circulated, and it would be a #problematic power imbalance for me to inadvertently cause her to be brigaded.)

But the problem with these proposed American sex strikes is multifaceted. First of all, straight women also enjoy sex, probably too much to deprive themselves of it for an indeterminate amount of time with no clear endgame.

Second, successful sex strikes (and to be clear, there haven’t been that many) have existed on a relatively smaller scale, where the male partners of the women involved were the same men causing a concrete problem that needed to be fixed. Most of the women in favor of a sex strike are not married to the men who, even by their standards, “deserve” to be punished.

Read more

Stealing from Whole Foods is so hot right now. The latest Whole Foods stealing content comes from content creators Hasan Piker and Jia Tolentino, as interviewed by The New York Times (TLDR: Piker encourages all forms of theft, aka “micro-looting” as a form of anti-capitalist rebellion, although says he’s personally too scared to do it, and Tolentino brags about stealing from Whole Foods herself on several occasions.)

This conversation comes off the heels of another article about Whole Foods jail, which covered the trials and tribulations of Whole Foods criminals. A separate article entitled I Love Stealing From Whole Foods by someone under the nom de plume “Butt Town,” describes the thrill of shoplifting but at least has the decency to encourage Whole Foods thieves to play Robin Hood and give their swiped sushi counter unagi rolls and organic ginger kombucha to “the unhoused.”

While Piker and Tolentino encourage many forms of crime as a form of anti-capitalist rebellion in their interview (mostly stealing, but also the occasional assassination or pipeline bomb, if “justified”) Whole Foods shoplifting seems to be the main theme. And whenever this topic comes up, and some crazy radical says “stealing is bad,” they invariably get called a Karen, fascist or bootlicker, accused of believing shoplifting is worse than murder and genocide, and then accused of trying to prosecute some variation of “single mother on food stamps stealing baby formula.” And, sure, I’ll be honest—as anti-crime as I may be, I would look the other way if a poor person stole something from a large corporation for the purpose of feeding their family. There is a reason we are meant to be on the side of Jean Valjean while watching Les Miserables.

There’s just one problem—most of the time, that is not the profile of a shoplifter. In fact, shoplifting is a crime predominantly committed by educated middle and upper middle class people looking for a cheap thrill, and using the guise of anti-capitalism to justify their pilfered Prosecco.

Read more

Years ago, I remember being on Reddit and seeing a young woman post a general question to r/AskWomen: “Can a married man and a single woman be friends?”

Of course, everyone said they could be. Surely, only some Mike Pence fundamentalist whackadoodle MAGAT would say otherwise, right? But then one very smart commenter said something to the effect of, “Are you asking about a specific situation? Because if you are, there’s probably a reason you feel the need to ask and it’s probably not okay.” In the words of the prototypical Redditor: Holy intuition Batman!

OP proceeded to elaborate on the specific situation: she had become “great friends” with her married male coworker who was fifteen years older than her. He frequently drove her around and they hung out alone together on weekends. They had “cute little inside jokes” together, and he loved the way she “teased him.” Sometimes, they would just go on long drives together after work, chatting and laughing into the sunset.

Okay, pack it up! We’re done!

The Internet (and perhaps humanity at large) is generally divided over stories like this: was this guy a born sociopath who would have cheated on his wife no matter the circumstance? Or did he, perhaps, go into the friendship genuinely assuming it was innocent and ignoring any latent attraction? In practice, this means: if you want to avoid infidelity in your marriage, is there anything you can actually do? Many people vote no, on the count of cheaters being irredeemably evil, with a compulsion to cause selfish harm no matter what. But I vote yes—because I think cheaters are often regular people who don’t know their own limits.

To put it more simply, if you have a “work husband,” you may very soon have an “ex husband.” And now, I finally have the data to prove it.

Read more

We are in the Age of Personal Essay. Whether it’s a The Cut essay about how a woman saved her marriage by having her husband move into the pool house, Lena Dunham’s new bestselling memoir Famesick (which I am reading at the moment, like every other annoying person online) or, for that matter, Lindy West’s Adult Braces (far richer in online discourse than in…well, actual riches) the personal essay, or the longer-form memoir, is hot. And while some personal essays and memoirs are amazing, many others are…very mediocre.

I suppose all forms of writing are like this. There are more mediocre amateur fantasy novels than great fantasy novels. But the personal essay is unique in that most people have the life experience to write one and the work ethic to complete one (unlike a fantasy novel, a personal essay is not typically 700 pages long and does not require the invention of a made-up kingdom with its own history and culture.) So we have a lot of amateur personal essays that are not-great. Maybe you wrote one that wasn’t great, or you’re trying to write one but you keep wondering why it’s not great. Well, I have some theories and suggestions.

Subscribe now

Allow me to make my case for why the hell you should listen to me. While I am nowhere near as successful as Lena Dunham, I have published twenty-four personal essays on Substack, including one viral personal essay that generated more revenue than a book I got published earlier in my career. Moreover, any writer who makes a living writing is probably worth listening to. You can be a mediocre lawyer and still make a living, but you simply cannot be a mediocre writer and make even 10% of a lawyer’s salary. At the very least, a lot of people have to think you’re a good writer for you to pull that off, and a lot of people being “tricked” into enjoying your mediocre writing is basically the same thing as being a good writer.

Perhaps because I’ve always just loved talking about and thinking about myself, the personal essay was an obvious choice for me when I first started writing. (You will notice that the most successful memoir writers are usually considered “insufferable” and “self-obsessed” by most people—this is not an accident, but more on that later.) Because I also share this tendency to be narcissistic and navel-gazing, I’ve been writing personal essays since I was about fourteen. And yes, anything you write about yourself—nay, anything you write at all—will probably be a bit embarrassing at fourteen. I am still kept awake at night by reminders that at one point, I had finished a 250 page draft of a dramatic memoir about, wait for it, my summer at theater camp.

But the thing about personal essays is that while they are somewhat “easy” to write (not a lot of research needed to write about something that actually happened to you!) they are actually very easy to get wrong, for the simple reason that usually, nobody cares—yes, even if you are writing about a shocking topic.

Shocking or not, do not assume that a traumatic event or otherwise Bad Thing is a good singular justification for writing a personal essay. As horrible as it sounds, the straight facts of the worst thing that has ever happened to you are probably meaningless to anyone who doesn’t know you personally. Of course, people can still write about upsetting life events, but people overestimate just how much the Bad Thing can carry an entire story. Bad things that happen to us feel enormous, and they feel like the worst things that could ever happen to anyone. But sadly, they’re not very unique, and when you write a story about your “toxic upbringing,” for example, you simply cannot expect that the sheer horror of having a body-shaming almond mom is going to be enough to hook people. Even if something really awful happened to you, it has probably happened to many other people too—assault, eating disorders, infidelity, abuse, divorce, the list goes on. These things can feel enormous when they’re part of your life, but people see headlines about these topics (and frankly, much worse) all day.

Subscribe now

Just an example of how shock value doesn’t necessarily translate to success: my most successful personal essay was about socially alienating people at one of my workplaces, and some runners-up included my piece about our neighbors threatening to sue us for a trivial amount of money and a piece about navigating my preschool-age son’s desire to pack his backpack full of genie lamps before school. I thought that my story about dating a guy in my teens who was obsessed with my mom would be huge because it was just such a weird thing, but it wasn’t significantly more successful than any of my other personal essays! The subject of my personal essays, it seems, is irrelevant.

The good news here is that you don’t need to justify your personal essay with a shocking thing. If nothing shocking has happened to you—or nothing you feel comfortable mentioning—that’s okay! The key is to zoom in on specific details (even if mundane) and focus more on your inner world than things happening to you—even if it makes you look bad.

David Sedaris is probably the king of this format. One of the reasons that I love the memoir format so much was that I was assigned to read a singular David Sedaris piece in tenth grade, and it had the same effect on me that cooler kids might get from listening to Nirvana or Elliott Smith. I was entranced. Yes, I was a fifteen-year-old girl dreaming of growing up to be a crotchety, neurotic gay Greek man. Most of Sedaris’ work is not about traumatic, intense or otherwise remarkable things. He derived a lot of his inspiration from his house cleaning work in New York City—hardly fascinating stuff. One of my favorite pieces he did (featured in his 2000 book, Me Talk Pretty One Day) involved a scene where he was riding a bus in Paris, and two American tourists began talking shit about him, believing him to be a French pickpocket. These types of specific moments really help to craft a good story. In Famesick, Lena Dunham writes extensively about her health issues and endometriosis. This is obviously an important part of the story, and that’s fine, but the recounting of her pain and illness aren’t nearly as interesting as her very specific description of her OB-GYN, a hilariously old-school Jewish guy who calls sex “schtupping.”

If you are a good personal essay writer, it won’t matter what you’re writing about. If your reason for not being able to write a personal essay is that “nothing interesting happens to you” then you’re either not looking closely enough, or maybe that just isn’t your genre. And if it isn’t, that’s fine. I cannot write a sex scene to save my life, and the one time I tried, I did….this.

“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do,” Dustin said as he took off his shirt. How could he, in all seriousness, say something like that? Especially while revealing his perfect fit-but-not-aware-of-it physique?

“Dustin…” she paused. “You know there’s no such thing as something I don’t want to do. With you, at least. I mean, there’s a lot I wouldn’t want to do with…” She tried for a moment to think of a less desirable person she could reference, who they would both know. “Kim Jong Un.”

“Right! Okay then!”

(I plead forgiveness on the basis that it was 2019 and I was under the impression that there needed to be explicitly-stated “affirmative consent” in every sex scene, and then wondered why nothing I wrote was hot. Then I got embarrassed that I was writing about sex at all, and compulsively added in increasingly ridiculous jokes, projecting my own humiliation onto the characters. All my sex scenes—literally all of them—involved one character nervously cracking unfunny jokes.)

Anyway, now that I’ve established you don’t need (and, in fact, should not) rely on an interesting thing that happened to you to write a personal essay, how exactly do you write a good one—one that makes people care?

The real drama of a personal essay is what’s going on in your mind, not what’s happening to you. Personal essays where the writer is devoid of agency are especially frustrating, because their own actions and thoughts are the most interesting thing, and all we get are “My horrible mother did this, my toxic sister did that, my evil ex-husband did this,” all while the main character is a barely-sentient rag doll just silently absorbing other people’s wickedness, often with some kind of “I went to therapy and realized all these people were evil” ending, which is still kind of the main character having something happening to them.

Subscribe now

Everyone is a little bit narcissistic, but the best writers of the personal essay always take it to another level—not that they think they’re better than everyone, but that they think about themselves a lot, and consider the inner workings of their own minds interesting, even if deeply flawed. Before you say that’s embarrassing to admit, that’s the point. If you aren’t willing to say things like, “I’m obsessed with thinking about my own mind,” then you aren’t going to write a good personal essay.

One reason Lena Dunham is a successful memoirist—even at the cost of most people hating her—is that for better or worse, she isn’t afraid to admit things about herself, and her own thoughts, that I think a lot of people would omit on sight. This is another pitfall of the personal essay—a lot of people who read it (if it’s actually raw and revealing) will come away from it declaring that you are “annoying.” Consider it an occupational hazard.

Now, say what you will about Lena Dunham, I’m hardly co-signing everything she’s ever said or done, but the most interesting parts of Famesick aren’t the fact that she wrote and directed a successful show at a young age, even though that’s nominally what the book is “about.” The most interesting parts are weird things about her mind, like the bizarre sexual fascination she has with Adam Driver (who she hired, so it feels kind of unethical, but interesting to read, nevertheless.) Reading about the origins of her relationship with Jack Antonoff were also fascinating—not because that relationship is especially interesting or unique (and in fact, the facts of the actual courtship are pretty boring) but what he means to her as she’s falling in love with him is interesting. The way she wrote about their first date was so vivid (despite not being particularly flowery with the descriptions) that I honestly feel like I have now gone on a date with Jack Antonoff. There is a scene where she and her Girls costars are on the red carpet, but the celebrity interactions she has are actually not nearly as interesting as everything running through her head while she’s there, and what she expects people will be saying about her.

The inner workings of your mind (which, as Patrick Star of SpongeBob fame might say, are an enigma) are going to be the most interesting and compelling parts of your personal essay, full stop. Yes, even if—perhaps, especially if—they make you seem like a bad person, or if they are “cringe.” If the goal of your personal essay is to make you look good, it will not be a good personal essay.

I’m reminded of a personal essay I read last year—and no, I won’t be linking it, and no, it wasn’t on Substack—which wasn’t badly-written, per se, but was crammed full of humblebrags about the author’s own beauty. Now, such a piece could have been entertaining if the author had admitted to being addicted to this sort of attention (because by the way she felt the need to focus on it, she was clearly addicted to it) and made a joke at the expense of her own vanity, but instead, she spent the entire essay talking about how she hated how everyone thought she was so hot, although not in those words. And despite “hating” that perception, the entire essay kept describing, in detail, how hot she was. I wasn’t sure what exactly I was supposed to piece together from this. In hindsight, I think she was genuinely hoping people would read it and then tell her she was hot.

The ideal personal essay writer will be narcissistic, but self-aware. Not necessarily self-hating in an excessively sad way, but realistic about one’s own flaws. If you have delusions of grandeur, you’re actually not thinking about yourself enough, because if you truly think about yourself, and how your mind works, as much as Lena Dunham or David Sedaris does, you will be able to identify a million dysfunctional traits or tendencies that you can ham up for your essay. And no, “being too easy on people who are mean to me” doesn’t count. Being a “people pleaser” doesn’t count. You cannot write yourself to be the Mary Sue protagonist of your story. If you want your personal essay to be good and memorable, you will need to admit things to your audience that you don’t even like to admit to yourself. I remember once seeing a piece where the author said that the term “guilty pleasure” is a misnomer because people use it to describe listening to Katy Perry, while his guilty pleasure is taking joy in discovering that random people on Facebook have gotten divorced. No notes.

Lindy West (per Adult Braces) kind of goes halfway on this, and I think that’s one reason her book wasn’t as successful as Lena Dunham’s. Lindy West is a great writer, and funny to boot, but most people came away from Adult Braces feeling that she was furiously attempting to prove something to the audience that made her seem more likable, or at least, less embarrassing (ie: “I’m in a polycule that makes me really happy and all of this is great, I promise.”) She weaves in and out of that sort of raw, unfiltered self-expression (great!) while also describing things from a perspective of someone who doesn’t sound like she wants to think about what’s actually going on in her own head. Whether it was true or not, people felt that she was trying to push an agenda and make a justification without a lot of self-awareness. (See: her example of judging a seven-year-old wearing a MAGA hat. This is a fine story to include, but she should have made it clear that the joke was on her, an adult woman getting mad at a child for his parents’ politics. Most people read this snippet, among similar ones, as her genuinely feeling superior to random people she met in “flyover country.” Which…is not funny, actually!)

People really don’t like this degree of half-self-awareness, especially if you’re also being defensive or trying to push a particular agenda. And I have personal experience with this mistake, too! A few months ago, I wrote Screen-Free Parenting is Risky, where I talked about my OCD focusing on the fear of my children getting injured, and where I defended neurotic helicopter parenting as the only way someone can keep their children alive without using copious screen time to keep kids in place and safe. In hindsight, this essay should have been sent to my therapist as a great jumping-off point for our session. But instead, I published it and I lost 54 paid subscribers on that post specifically because while people enjoy reading about how neurotic I am, they felt this one was making a case for my neuroticism being “correct” and being defensive about how everyone should act like me. People had a similar reaction to when I wrote about my husband being out of my league because they felt that I was probably being a little delusional (in the sense that we were better-matched than I was letting on) and defending this delusion instead of being honest about my own bias and self-image issues. So yes, you can make yourself unlikable, annoying, whatever—but you have to be fully open and honest about it, and if you find yourself defending your position or insisting that “even if this sounds crazy, I promise it’s totally legit,” it won’t read very well.

All this to say: you don’t have to present yourself as the biggest asshole in the world, but rather, if your personal essay presents you as blameless, especially if you are also devoid of agency and constantly having things happen to you, it will not be good. If your personal essay relies on shock value or plot points instead of your own inner world, it will not be good. If you go halfway with admitting vulnerability and flaws but then get defensive about it and try to prove that actually, all your neurotic beliefs are correct, it will not be good.

And ultimately, personal essays and memoirs are subject to what I will hereby refer to as the “Lena Dunham test.” If you receive a mix of tangible success (even in a non-monetary form, such as views or approving comments) alongside a wave of people calling you any of the following: insufferable, annoying, narcissistic, mentally ill, or self-obsessed, then congratulations, you’ve written a great personal essay.

You might also like…

We have less than a month until Mother’s Day (Sunday, May 10) and many (obligatory: not all) dads will find themselves in a particular situation: their wives will say they don’t really care what they do for Mother’s Day, and won’t have any ideas or suggestions. They will, almost definitely, say they don’t want presents. But the dads will think, okay, she probably still wants something.

Some dads may decide it’s too difficult to figure things out, so they might take them at their word and just do nothing for Mother’s Day. Other dads might just buy a present anyway, even though their wives asked for no presents. 99% of the time, both of these ideas aren’t what she wants.

But don’t worry. I will gladly be the facilitator who translates “There’s nothing I really want for Mother’s Day but maybe you could do something but I have no idea what that would be,” into a concrete plan. You don’t have to spend a lot of money to give your wife the best Mother’s Day surprise she’s ever had, but you do have to spend some time preparing and planning, which is why the process starts now.

First of all, to understand why her directions are so confusing, imagine that you have an eight-year-old child (maybe you already do.) Imagine that your kid wrote you a card that said, “I love you so much, Daddy! I want to be just like you when I grow up!” Most likely, this would make you pretty happy. But now imagine that you had told your child a week earlier, “I really want you to make me a card telling me that you love me and want to be just like me.” Would the card be nearly as meaningful?

This is basically why your wife is not telling you “Take me to X restaurant, do X for me, then do X.” She needs it to be your idea for it to be meaningful. Now, technically, what follows are my ideas, but she doesn’t know that.

Note that these ideas are centered around moms with younger children who are taking on some childcare duties, as opposed to empty nesters or moms of older and more self-sufficient kids. Also, all of this could work for a father too, so if you are planning way ahead for Father’s Day, this will be useful.

Read more

What follows is a true story, not that anyone should have a hard time believing it. You can also find other comedic true stories of mine here.

My son started at a part-time preschool when he was two—just a few hours a week and mostly for socialization. Given that this was my first foray into having a child attend “school,” I had it in my head that I needed to be the perfect school volunteer mom. Never mind that I was working full time remotely, and never mind that I had no reliable childcare outside of this preschool. For some reason, I was convinced I would be Queen of the Volunteer Moms, and this totally made-up thing was really important to my identity.

Why was this so important to me? Well, let’s put it into context. It was 2022, and for the past two years, the combination of my OCD and late-night breastfeeding scrolls through doomer Twitter had convinced me that even if I or a loved one had a mild case of covid, we’d suddenly drop dead five years later from some silently simmering complication. I wanted to avoid it at all costs. While my shoes quite literally collected dust, it wasn’t until 2022 when I started warming up to the possibility that I might socialize indoors with other people again. But because I had spent the first year of my motherhood completely locked inside with no outside social connections outside of my son’s pediatrician, I had zero mom friends. Making friends has always been hard for me, mostly because of my tendency to want to entertain people and be the main character instead of really connecting with people, so covid just made my existing social issues worse. I saw my son’s preschool as my one chance to make mom friends before it was too late. I had to make up for lost time—other moms had their Lamaze classes and baby yoga, and I had Eric Feigl Ding’s tweets.

This particular preschool encouraged parents to stay with the children all “day” (it was a couple hours) until the kids were fully comfortable being left alone. Given that I was just as scared of separation as my son was (totally healthy, I promise) I was fine with this. On the first day, all the kids were accompanied by their parents for the full “school day.” I assumed this meant I would have plenty of time to socialize with other parents. I soon discovered that most of these people were not actually the children’s parents at all—and I thought I was being so woke by assuming that a bunch of white toddlers had been born to fifty-year-old Filipino women. Oh well. I would find other ways to make parent friends, I just knew it.

I tried to pal around with the other parents at pickup and drop-off, but I didn’t have much luck there. When I saw one mom drop her tiny two-year-old off with a comically large Thomas the Tank Engine backpack that appeared to be empty, I jokingly asked her, “What could that little guy possibly be carrying in there?” to which she answered, “His EpiPen.”

Read more

Another day, another girlboss article. (Orange you glad I didn’t say “Lindy West?” Just kidding, the article mentions her too.) I feel a bit weird writing about the new viral article The Myth of the Independent Girlboss because it was written by Inez Stepman, who has always been very pleasant and polite to me even when we disagree—so no, I have no issue with her personally, nor is this meant to be any kind of takedown. But her piece (and others like it, written by other women with, checks notes, jobs) leaves a major question unanswered: if “girlbosses” are a drain on our resources, propped up by the woke government and providing zero value (and as Stepman points out, millions of working women do deserve their paychecks) who exactly are the girlbosses pulling off this massive scam?

First of all, the term “girlboss” has never really been used as a self-descriptor by any woman in corporate except for the one woman who coined the term—Sophia Amoruso, the founder of the NastyGal clothing brand (and, dare I say, someone who by definition deserved the title in a non-derisive way because she ran her own company.) Other than Amoruso, “girlboss” generally became a buzzy term in the 2010s used to motivate stay-at-home moms to join MLM scams selling various crystals, oils and ugly leggings. But I suppose our now-cringe idea of a girlboss is a woman who:

• works in a high-earning white collar role

• is “powerful” in a career-oriented girl power sense, not some low-level pencil-pusher (think Sheryl Sandberg, per Lean In)

• has a job that doesn’t really need to exist

• is incompetent, or providing minimal company value and is only in her position because of DEI, government subsidies, or some other liberal scheme.

My argument is that this person—someone who fulfills all or most of this criteria—basically doesn’t exist, which is why nobody can drill down who the girlbosses really are.

Read more

For a while now, I’ve suspected that many people have simply lost their ability to differentiate between the depiction of something in film or TV, and the endorsement of that thing. These people also struggle to differentiate fictional characters from the real-life actors who play them.

We saw a little bit of this earlier this year when people were horrified to learn that Timothee Chalamet is not, in fact, a consumptive little French orphan boy, perpetually wearing a tattered scarf and writing poetry, but just some guy who thinks ballet is lame and Kylie Jenner is hot.

At the time, I didn’t even bother writing about this (that’s right, I publish almost daily and it didn’t even meet MY threshold) because I chalked it up to a specific contingent of especially weird Chalamet stans. But I was probably too quick to dismiss it—after all, I am old enough to remember when people held decades-long grudges against Lena Dunham for things she wrote into her TV show, Girls. People still deride Dunham for declaring herself “the voice of a generation,” even though this was a line she wrote for a fictional (intentionally annoying) character.

The latest show in the crossfire of the media illiterate: Euphoria. Specifically, Sydney Sweeney’s character, Cassie, and a new plot point where Cassie attempts to monetize her sexuality online via what appears to be increasingly ridiculous and degrading sex acts on OnlyFans (the one which has gotten the most publicity is some kind of BDSM puppygirl role play, another image from the show appears to depict Cassie attempting some kind of “adult baby” thing too.)

And people are mad. Outraged, even! The reasons they’re mad are multifaceted, and yet so, so incurious. They are mad that Sydney Sweeney would agree to play a character who does these horrible things (which is, in and of itself, questionable, unless we’re going to yell at Edward Norton for being “willing” to play a Nazi in American History X) but some of them seem genuinely mad at…Cassie? Like, the character? And others have gone full Qanon, convinced that the brief snippet of Cassie sucking on a pacifier is part of a mass grooming event to “glorify pedophilia” to the vulnerable twenty-five-year-olds forced to watch Euphoria (they can just ask their parents to change their HBO password, and any temptation will be removed!)

It almost feels too obvious to say, “None of these people are real and none of this stuff is being glorified just because it’s being shown,” but like, yeah. This is a fictional show full of fictional characters! Fictional characters do fictional things all the time! Some of these things are, checks notes, bad. This is why horror movies exist. I hate to break it to you, but you are NOT supposed to identify with Pennywise the Clown and it is #problematic in fact, to eat children in the sewers.

Read more

One thing I’ve always found funny in the genderslop/political wars is the way many right-wing men envision (get ready for a jump scare!) liberal, upper middle class or affluent urban women.

These women are, I’m aware, a bit of a sleep paralysis demon for this type of man—often taking the role that “cishet dudebro” took for leftist women in the 2010s, where any derision is fair and de-facto accurate because it’s “punching up.” As a result, the AWFLs (affluent white female liberals, with ”highly educated” implied) are on the receiving end of some stereotypes that are completely untethered from reality, usually juxtaposed against their supposed polar opposite: some kind of mythical, all-natural, nurturing, domestic goddess—variations on the “tradwife.”

Take, for example, the idea that “girlboss moms” neglect their kids all day to scroll their phones and use iPads for babysitters. In fact, poorer children (who are less likely to have educated mothers) get far more screen time than richer children. And being surrounded by affluent, liberal, urban…dare I say, girlboss moms, I can attest to the fact that many of them are more dogmatically anti-screentime than Evangelical homeschool moms in the ‘80s who thought Elmo was Satanic. Most of those crunchy Substack moms who keep removing various home items to mimic the hunter-gatherers? Not exactly MAGA. Best you’re looking at is “politically homeless” or “heterodox liberal.”

These are the moms who can afford to spend $200 on an extremely minimalist wooden dollhouse instead of a Fisher Price Little People barn, which is bound to be so overstimulating that if Wren plays with such a monstrosity, she will be on a dark path to other dangers, like the occasional Bluey episode. Next stop: heroin.

Wealthier, more educated moms are also more likely to breastfeed, and for longer.

I’ll concede that liberal women tend to be less religious than conservative women (shocker). All other things equal, a conservative woman will have more children than a liberal woman, is more likely to marry a man, and is more likely to be a homemaker. But the other variables typically associated with AWFL-ism (education and affluence) are also strongly associated with a lot of the hobbies, aesthetics and social behaviors we typically associate with tradwives. Putting it another way: even if you remove the “liberal” part, a lot of terminally online guys believe there is nothing more antithetical to traditional Western culture than a college-educated, affluent woman. In fact, these are the tradwives.

Read more

Also, in case you’re thinking of upgrading to paid, you will get access to CHH CHAT, a chat channel on Substack full of men, women, and people of different political affiliations and sexual orientations who manage to discuss hot topics like sex, dating, parenting, or even politics without killing each other. Join us!!

Subscribe now

Also, while you are here, please fill out my latest survey on infidelity, loyalty and monogamy. You do not have to have cheated or been cheated on to fill it out, but if you have experienced either of these things you will be extra helpful!

Albanian Eric Adams

We all know Eric Adams loves to say that New York City is the (insert city here) of America. It seems, in fact, that New York City is the Istanbul of America, the Athens of America, and the Seoul of America, among other things. Given Eric Adams’ love of the clitoris, one might argue that New York City is also the clitoris of America (it literally is.)

But no nation has gripped Eric’s Adam’s passion as much as Albania, where he just became a citizen. We have met Eric Adams at a very…Albanian time in his life:

He apparently visited Albania before, where he declared that NY was—you guessed it—the Albania of America. (I don’t want to be pedantic here, but Albania is not in America, so for the metaphor to make sense, New York City would have to be the Tirana of America. But I digress.)

But the big question: WHY? Well, Twitter has some ideas:

The best explanation is that Eric Adams has simply been obsessed with Albania for a while. I can’t say I’ve ever seen the word “albaniaboo” before this but…I’m obsessed.

Subscribe now

Sydney Sweeney’s Waist

While I’m no stranger to talking about body shape in a way that reads as callous or geeky, this week Twitter really took it to a new level when Sydney Sweeney was body shamed for being too “rectangular.”

OP says she wasn’t hating, and just acknowledging that Sweeney is often wearing a corset to hide a straighter waist shape, which looks fine without shapewear too.

While the original post was probably meant to be a a bit of a jab (or was it? I honestly can’t tell) a lot of the comments were confused, given that Syndey Sweeney is thin. Sadly, I knew exactly what she was talking about because I spend way too much time thinking about this stuff—Syndey Sweeney has a body shape common in many thin women with naturally big chests (see: model Kate Upton) where most of the weight is gained on the upper body (the opposite of a pear shape) and the waist is less defined, even when thin. Commonly known as a “V” shape. But more importantly: this isn’t unusual, and having a straight-shaped waist is incredibly common even without big boobs. A lot of people truly seem to think your average woman would look like a Brazilian Instagram model if she was at an ideal weight. I wrote about this too—the average white woman is not “curvy” (re: waist definition) no matter what her weight is.

Of course, there’s always one person who needs to use this as a jumping point to brag. Yes, I have the perfect body. I exist. Don’t erase me <3

People got so scientific with it that I thought there was transvestigation afoot:

Anyway, given that last year I saw a post making fun of peak ‘00s Halle Berry for being “rectangular,” I maintain that even more than weight, our waist/curve obsession is getting out of hand:

Subscribe now

Date Feedback

In case you thought being ghosted was the worst way for a date to end, you haven’t gone on a date with this guy yet, who informed a woman that he didn’t find her attractive and that she needed to go to therapy to do some inner work—and I feel like that description is not doing justice to how unpleasant such a message would be. And they say chivalry is dead!

The denizens of Twitter were not amused:

However, let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. Upon hearing more context, it sounds like his date went so badly that we can at least understand where he was coming from. A woman who bursts into tears on a date (assuming this is actually true) probably does need to do inner work.

I maintain the text and the decision to post it were #weird, which actually has me wondering if they’re a better match for each other than OP believes.

Meanwhile, elsewhere on Twitter, this girl is getting the reverse treatment:

Microdrama: Illegal Shoes

If you thought women’s fashion was restrictive, take a look at men’s—every day I’m learning about a new fashion faux pas that millions of men are unwittingly committing. Today, it’s light warm brown dress shoes:

And whatever, whatever you do, don’t get the ones with a sneaker sole. This one I understand.

OP clarified that the issue is with shoes that are “too orange-toned,” and not all light brown shoes. Luckily Menswear Guy was there to clarify:

Subscribe now

Funny Tweets/Other Happenings

I can’t explain why I laughed out loud at this one, but I did:

This poor unfortunate Spongebob plush:

An interesting female dating strategy:

In case you missed it…

We’ve heard a lot about millennial feminism recently (in part from the best writer and most profound intellectual voice in media today: me) and now that I’ve gotten my share of attention, I hereby declare this discourse cycle done.

But all this talk about millennial feminism got me thinking more about the era that defined it: the 2010s. Otherwise known as the era when I, and many other millennials, were in our twenties. Specifically, I started thinking about the fashion of this era, which took up all my headspace that should have been spent learning how to drive or not getting fired from my jobs.

The fashion of any time is defined by its young people (and this is painfully obvious to me now, given my newly-minted status of “chopped unc.”) As a result, when we think about the fashion of the 2010s, we can’t not think about BuzzFeed listicles, TV shows like Girls and Broad City, and brunch restaurants with names like Bacon Skank and Slippery Taco. My generation is infamous for being uniquely “cringe,” and I have to say, the emblems that came out of the 2010s are not doing us any favors in that arena. Plus, it’s a rule of fashion that anything from about ten years ago gives modern-day people a bit of a visceral ick. As a result, it’s hard to be totally objective about 2010s fashion. A lot of it just feels embarrassing.

But some people have nostalgically asked where it went. For example, why don’t we have twee white girls with bangs and skater skirts anymore? I’ll tell you why, as a recovering quirked-up white girl myself: if you present this way in 2026, people make fun of you and call you a quirk chungus cringe millennial, and frankly, there’s only so much of it we can take before we just throw on some dark brown wide leg Aritzia trousers and call it a day.

But, if I dare say so myself, the tryhard-quirk-chungus-cringe that feels unique to the peak millennial era—the very vibe that people conjure up to ridicule us—was why our fashion was so good. Or, better yet, our lack of constant, nail-biting, head-swiveling obsession with cringe was why it was good. Cringe may be bad, but you know what’s worse? Being too afraid of cringe to have fun.

Read more

I have a few pet peeves when it comes to television. First—why is everyone a writer? Why the hell was Andi Anderson of How To Lose a Guy in 10 Days fame repeatedly trying to shoehorn dry political articles into a beauty and dating magazine? But today, I want to talk about something else: when TV shows (especially for children) anthropomorphize some animals, while keeping others consistently animalistic. I know, I know: who cares? The answer: me, and presumably other losers.

It makes sense to have a children’s TV show feature primarily animal characters, because kids like animals, and animals are cute. But what happens when those animals interact with other animals? Questions abound.

There are obviously several strategies to mitigate logical snafus vis-a-vis the humanoid nature of certain TV cartoon animals. One strategy is to anthropomorphize just one particular animal, while keeping the rest of the show set in the real world. A show that does this right is Curious George. Curious George has taken the angle of only somewhat-anthropomorphizing the titular main character, while keeping all other animals unambiguously animals. George also isn’t fully humanoid the way Peppa Pig or Spongebob are (more on them later, I have more thoughts on this than I do on Lindy West) but Curious George functions more like a clumsy, pre-verbal toddler than a monkey, which suits the intended audience of the show.

For example, while George doesn’t speak, he completes arts and crafts projects, engages in science experiments, and does other things that even an intelligent ape wouldn’t be able to do, on par with the skill level of a three-year-old. But George has “animal friends” like Charkie the dog and Gnocchi the cat—and those animals are clearly more animal-coded than George, which is pretty appropriate given that apes are more intelligent than dogs and cats. Gnocchi is not completing science projects, let alone going to the moon. Gnocchi is a fucking moron.

Subscribe now

There were a few close calls, for example, like when George snuck into the zoo at night and came upon a cage full of orangutans, or when a group of tamarins told the Man With the Yellow Hat’s camera in the forest and George had to try and get it back. But this universe still works if you assume George is a particularly special monkey (not to be a pedant—although you’ll see I will be particularly pedantic for this entire article—but George’s lack of tail means he’s an ape, not a monkey).

Then, there’s the Zootopia angle—just make everyone an animal. Granted, there are some inconsistencies in Zootopia’s world. Nobody knows what the predator class eats or what the food supply situation looks like, but that can be easily handwaved away with the fact that everyone just became a vegetarian. Look, you’ve got racist snake apartheid already, so I don’t think vegan lions would be that much of a stretch. (When animals go #woke, a true story. What’s next, Judy Hopps coming out as nonbinary?) but overall, Zootopia has consistent logic.

Zootopia and Curious George are also consistent about the size of the animal characters—a painfully under-discussed topic. In Curious George, animals are all the size they should be relative to humans and to each other. In Zootopia, the mice and shrews are correctly scaled to be much smaller than the polar bears and tigers. Peppa Pig, on the other hand, shits the bed in the scaling arena. Look at how a child-age elephant is the same size as a child-age rabbit:

Peppa Pig also has a goldfish, who is somehow immune from the laws of logic that rule the rest of the Peppa Pig universe. Peppa’s goldfish is not only a pet who can’t talk (let alone in a British accent) but is correctly scaled, unlike all the other animals! However, this logic might make some sense—all the humanoid characters are mammals, so perhaps in this world, the “underclass” of correctly-scaled, non-speaking animals has to be limited to non-mammals. Fine. Whatever.

Subscribe now

Peppa Pig also goes to a zoo in one episode, but the animals she sees in the zoo are all non-mammals, and correctly scaled, assuming the mammals are meant to be the size of human children. The one exception is the crocodile, who works there but was just chillin’ in the penguin exhibit under the guise of “feeding the penguins.” Sure, dude. You were obviously there for your own reasons, but okay.

Anyway, the zoo episode makes some sense because the animals visited are more primitive (penguins, butterflies, turtles) and non-mammalian compared to the humanoid ones, with the exception of the crocodile. But the book on this topic displays Peppa visiting…monkeys?! I’m sorry, but monkeys are far more evolved and intelligent than most mammals and should be the last ones to exist in this hypothetical zoo!

Things really start to fall apart when most if not all animals are humanoid, and multiple types of “pets” exist in the cinematic universe, without any clear logic applied to which animals get to be humans and which animals have to stay animals. No show has been able to get this right because it is, frankly, a ridiculous premise.

Take Spongebob Squarepants. Now, I love Spongebob—it’s arguably the best children’s show in history—but this is basically my only gripe with it. Aside from the narrator, Patchy the Pirate and (maybe) the Flying Dutchman, there aren’t really any humans on the show, and that’s fine. Between you and me, I’m actually no fan of the Patchy episodes and I find that this breaking of the fourth wall is distasteful and annoying. Keep me in Bikini Bottom with the big Hawaiian flower sky, thank you. Anyway, Bikini Bottom is meant to be an undersea universe where sea animals are the humans, with the exception of one squirrel (Sandy, who has to wear a dome of oxygen to survive.) And Spongebob is somewhat biologically accurate, given that it was created by a marine biologist. In Spongebob, we’re not supposed to care what’s going on above the sea, so it doesn’t really matter. The point is, sea creatures are human.

But Spongebob is not consistent about which animals are animals versus humanoid. Peppa Pig got around this question by making a mammal universe where less intelligent, non-mammal creatures are pets, but Spongebob can’t do that, because most of the characters are in the “would normally be pets” category. As a result, you’d figure that pet status would be assigned based on which sea creatures are the least sentient—but it isn’t!

First of all, one of the least sentient sea creatures in the entire world is a sea sponge, and the main character is one. His pet? A snail—a far more evolved creature! But early episodes get around this irony by making Gary, Spongebob’s pet snail, secretly much smarter than he is:

Keeping it consistent, all the other snails in the show are pets. But there are other animal-animals, such as worms, which are usually treated as aggressive canine-type animals:

And of course, jellyfish are wild animals, who can occasionally be “milked” for jelly, but not kept as pets:

Then, there’s Mystery the Seahorse, who Spongebob kept as a pet for a brief time:

Now, all these creatures are more evolved and intelligent than the sea sponge, or for that matter, the sea cucumber. And what do you know—a sea cucumber is a humanoid celebrity in the Spongebob universe, and decidedly NOT a pet. What’s he famous for? Catching jellyfish!

I know, kids aren’t watching Spongebob for any of this to make sense. Spongebob frequently leans into absurdity (for example, with Mr. Krabs, a crab, fathering a whale with an unknown mother.) But for some reason I’m stuck on the inconsistent rules (or should I say, lack thereof) about animal identity versus human identity.

But perhaps the most egregious example of inconsistent anthropomorphizing is from an old Nick Jr. show called Maisy, which ran for only one year (1999-2000.) The fact that I remember this—from when I saw it on the air, as a child—is a testament to how ridiculous it was.

By the way, in case you were going to make fun of me for watching a preschool show as a ten-year-old, I’ll have you know I was supervising my four-year-old brother at the time. But did I secretly kind of want to watch his baby shows? Of course I did. Did I sometimes pretend Steve of Blue’s Clues was actually talking to me because I didn’t have any friends? No comment.

Anyway, Maisy was a bit Peppa Pig adjacent in its simplistic animation and animals-as-humans universe. But it basically committed all of the logical sins outlined in this article. First of all, Maisy had inconsistent scaling of animals, although not identical scaling like in Peppa Pig, which makes the inconsistency seem less intentional. Like, okay, let’s make the crocodile and elephant bigger than the mouse, but barely? Sure.

Also, note that all the animals are walking on two legs, except for the elephant. Why? Nobody knows! And despite the fact that the elephant can’t walk on two legs, he can ride a bike.

Subscribe now

Maisy also fucked itself by making all types of animals humanoid—reptile, bird, mammal, whatever. This meant that they had no underclass of animals left over to make pets. As a result, it’s just a complete clusterfuck. Despite Maisy being a mouse, and friends with a childlike duck who is the same size as she is, she has a pet-human relationship with a rabbit who is smaller than she is.

But the worst example of all—the scene that has been seared in my mind for more than twenty years—is the fact that she and her duck friend go to a farm and milk a cow and ride a horse! Who, might I add, are also inconsistently scaled! That cow is supposed to be far bigger than twice the size of a mouse.

Now, for the best part—despite Maisy’s best friend being a duck, there’s another episode where Maisy “visits ducks” who are like, actual ducks. Of course, out of an abundance of caution for the traumatic impact of seeing one’s brethren shrunken down and reduced to quacking cretins, her duck friend was absent from this episode:

I’m not sure if kids really care about this. To test this theory, I asked my Youth Correspondent (aka, my five-year-old son) whether he was bothered by the fact that Spongebob featured inconsistently-anthropomorphized animals. He said, “I don’t care.” Perhaps I should take the hint, but for now, I will continue to stew over Maisy’s insane duck episode from twenty-seven years ago.

You might also like…

While OCD is a pain in the ass in many ways, I don’t think I can overstate that the most annoying part of it is the fact that it can trick a person into believing the same horrible thing will happen (or did happen, unbeknownst to us) no matter how many times that fear failed to materialize in the past. With OCD, all logic goes out the window when your Favorite Fear is in the spotlight. It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve been wrong before—this time it’s different.

Read more

Between the backlash to Lindy West’s questionable polycule (okay, I promise this is the last time I mention her—I think) and baby radfems on Twitter cancelling blowjobs, the discourse seems to be at a place where “millennial feminism”—or more vaguely, the sex-positive and anti-traditional (yet definitely not radical or gender separatist) feminist ethos of the 2010s, is under a microscope.

While I wrote about millennial feminism myself not too long ago, taking the stance that it had its problems but is still better than sourdough tradwife freeuse-as-Godly-mandate LARP or the cancellation of heterosexual sex as abuse and 2-year age gaps as “grooming,” I realized it was too unofficial a concept and too diffuse to accurately characterize. It was impossible to perform an autopsy on millennial feminism precisely because it was not a cohesive movement, and I kind of regret attempting that. But one particular subtopic of this era keeps popping up—hookup culture. Or at the very least, the idea that millennial feminism was (or wasn’t) responsible for it.

First of all, hookup culture doesn’t really exist anymore, because young, single people today are having less sex than ever. I’m aware that people like Clavicular and Myron Gaines believe that every decent-looking college girl is being “flown to Miami” (why is it always Miami?) but most single young women aren’t getting much action at all. But it did exist, although I’m aware many people still insist it was a fever dream we conjured up by watching too much Girls and reading too many R-rated confessional essays. But I would say hookup culture, as the dominant cultural vibe in media and secular urban centers reached its peak somewhere between the late ‘90s and mid-2010s—and yes, it was real, even if you personally did not interact with it.

But how, and why?

Hookup culture was not simply the acceptance of the fact that sex is fun, and women shouldn’t be ashamed of enjoying it, or that it was okay for consenting adults to have casual sex. If that was all “hookup culture” was, I’d have heartily endorsed it. But to its credit, hookup culture was also not the express forbidding of monogamy. Even in its heyday, people still got married. When you criticize hookup culture, its defenders (who also insist it never existed) are quick to strawman your argument as “they made it illegal to have a traditional marriage.” Which, obviously not.

Rather, hookup culture was the normalization of casual sex as the default within certain secular, young populations (especially college students) and the rejection of the idea that sex should carry any particular emotional weight. If you wanted monogamy, hooking up for a while beforehand without any discussion of commitment became a normal, expected stage before you became a couple. You didn’t have to do this in the sense that nobody would imprison you for abstaining, but it made dating a lot harder outside of religious communities, especially for teenage girls and college-aged women who never knew anything else.

Read more

Subscribe now

Mexico City Fits

Mexico City is really nice in March—this is the time of year that the Jacaranda trees are in full bloom. The weather was absolutely perfect—low to mid-70s. This was obviously very pleasant, but also opened up some great spring/summer fashion opportunities!

For our first dinner out with my husband and his coworkers, I wore this fun green/ivory knit set that I got second hand ages ago (it’s from some no-name brand, but it’s 100% cotton and I always reach for it.) The shoes and bag are both Sezane.

Read more

To curb my phone addiction, I deleted Twitter off my phone, figuring that if I was only able to access it on desktop, I would think twice before opening it. I mean, if you have a funny thought, is it really funny enough to warrant going all the way downstairs to get your laptop? On second thought…

Anyway, an unexpected (and by that I mean, extremely predictable, actually) side effect of no longer being addicted to Twitter is that now, I sometimes absent-mindedly open my phone and go on Facebook. Yes, the app full of people who don’t exist, trying to scam each other.

But because of the way the Meta algorithm works, most of the content I see is at least somewhat tailored to my interests. My personal Facebook is basically inactive, but on the occasion that I post or search anything there, it’s usually related to parenting. As a result, almost all the Facebook Reels I see are parenting-related. And since I’ve been watching more of them, I’ve come across one troubling trend: moms who are homeschooling specifically to avoid being lonely after their kids reach school age, and encouraging other moms to do the same.

Read more

Hello young people! I wanted to draw attention to something that happened a few months ago. I released a reader survey, and I saw that a proportion (not gonna say how big. It’s giving “nonzero amount”) of my followers are part of the COOLEST generation of all time—Gen Z. So I’m gonna take the Gen W and announce that there’s a new, hip place for these youngsters to hang out.

Not me releasing a new chat channel!! Presenting CHH ZoomerZone, a new channel where Gen Z trendsetters can talk about all their favorite topics—from Labubus to Skibidi Toilet. No CHOPPED UNCS allowed!

And given that I’m too chopped of an unc to possibly moderate such a place, I hired a Zoomer Correspondent, Aiden Wozniak, who at the age of 30.5, is totally plugged into the zeitgeist of the zoomers—no cap! Now, I’ll hand the mic over to Aiden. Take it away, Aiden!

ZoomerZone is gonna be lit, y’all. It’ll be the perfect place for zoomers to talk about being zoomers—without all those cheugy Karens and opps getting in the way. This chat has so much rizz, it’s gonna eat and leave no crumbs! Bet.

But more importantly, ZoomerZone is gonna be a break from all that brain rot and cortisol spiking on TikTok. We’re gonna talk about real issues—climate collapse, late stage capitalism, whether or not disabled people deserve to live (aka, whether or not DoorDash should be free for people with ADHD) and of course, Sabrina Carpenter’s insidious autopedophilia. Don’t forget our Fashion Fridays, where we’re all gonna be looking SNATCHED and serving cunt. You’ll be catching feels for ZoomerZone in no time.

It’s my hope that ZoomerZone will help guide my fellow young people in a positive direction without any of that busted, cringe millennial scolding. For example, we have a fancam of AOC set to K-Pop music with some bussin’ captions about why you should say no to vaping.

Now, you might be asking: what about keeping ZoomerZone safe? After all, we have to make sure that there aren’t any twenty-nine-year-olds attempting to groom minors (twenty-four-year-olds) in ZoomerZone. So we’ve created two tiers: ZoomerZone and ZoomerZone Silver, for elder zoomers (over 25) who may pose a threat to more vulnerable ones. For those of you who find any social interaction unsafe, enjoy our subchannel, ZoomerZoneZero, where you can just chill out by yourself and not talk to anyone—which is highkey valid!

More deets to come—see you on the flip side over at ZoomerZone!

(Happy April Fool’s Day!)

Subscribe now

You might also like…

But first off, why did I get so addicted in the first place?

I can thank Twitter (or as some might say, X, but I refuse to say that because it feels wrong) in large part for the success of this Substack. Many of my earliest successful posts were based entirely on Twitter discourse. Sometimes, this reliance on Twitter for topics was a detriment—at least once in every comments section, someone asks, “Is this a real thing that’s happening or just imaginary entities on Twitter?”

Anyway, I mostly found Twitter really fun! I have over 50,000 followers (TBD how many of them are real people) and reliably had a viral tweet every month, maybe even every week. I’m sure if I opened Twitter right now, something would make me laugh. And we used to have great apolitical Main Characters that were so fun to watch. Exhibit A:

Exhibit B:

Who could remember the day Trump got covid? The SLAP? The “fingering in the Turning Point USA conference lobby?” I could go on. Anyway…

Subscribe now

When my Twitter account got hacked about a year ago (I wrote about that here) I considered getting off Twitter and gave the socially acceptable reason that I felt bad patronizing a website with Nazis on it, plus my customer service experience vis-a-vis my hacking was terrible, ameliorated only by the fact that I know someone who used to work there. But ultimately, as embarrassing as it is to say, the Nazis weren’t enough to get me off the site. First of all, they exist everywhere, but also, the worst people of Twitter kept me coming back, because for better or worse, the worst people of Twitter repeatedly say unintentionally hilarious things because they’re stupid.

For a while, my Twitter feed basically looked like this:

• This is the way *photo of Rhodesia*

• The flu is actually just low progesterone and you can cure it by guzzling bison testicles.

• We found a pedophile online and stripped him naked in our bath tub full of nacho cheese 😂😂😂 watch here 😂😂😂

• Anon, get a girl pregnant when you’re 19 and broke. Have 15 babies. Work four jobs and never see any of them. Die in a ditch somewhere. This is the way.

• Elon Musk: me when the libtards are mad: 🤣🤣🤣

• Seed oils are actually lindy. Your grandpa used seed oils. It’s not the seed oils making you fat and gay, it’s the Red 40. Stop chugging the GoyPigment

• Pussy from an Asian girl in a Himmler costume > > > >

• Tragically, this devoted and beloved father of three was inflated to death in the balloon factory. WATCH THE VIDEO HERE *video of a guy being inflated to death begins autoplaying*

And I…kept coming back for more. A lot more.

See, ultimately what I found so addicting about Twitter was not only the ridiculous content (which inspired jokes) but the fact that every time I logged in, no matter how little time had passed since my last login, I’d have 20+ notifications of people engaging with me. Keep in mind I did not enjoy all of these engagements. Some were nice, some were rude, and some were uncomfortably parasocial or just gave me the creeps. I didn’t know I could change my notification settings, so I was straight up rawdogging the most insane people on Twitter screaming at me (I guess on the bright side, I got so much of it that I couldn’t read every comment.)

I was, as a Twitter power user might say, swarmed with goymessages. And while I joke about Twitter being full of nasty haters, 95% of my interactions were positive, so it didn’t feel like that big of a problem. But of course, that 5% was interspersed with a few…not many, but enough…extremely rude goy-nasties. And while you might think such behavior would be enough to drive me from the site, I think the occasional rude comments—and the thrill of responding to them—are actually what felt so addicting about it.

Read more