Many Such Takes: 33 Year Old Woman, Trump's 4th Run, Kindred Nemeses and More
The most unhinged discourse of the week, always free
Welcome to Many Such Takes, my occasional (monthly? bimonthly?) roundup of Internet drama, funny tweets, and current events too obscure (and in some cases, stupid) to put on the news.
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:
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:
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:
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:
In case you missed it
The Era of The "Stage Five Clinger" is Over
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.
What I Wore In Greece
For my in-laws’ fiftieth wedding anniversary, our family (including my husband’s brother and his family) all went to three locations in Greece to visit my husband’s extended family who still live in Greece. In addition to Mytiline, where they are from, we also visited Athens and Naxos just for fun! (I don’t think I’ve ever seen a smaller airport. What is this, an airport for ANTS?)
"The Male Gaze" Was Never About Wanting a Boyfriend
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.
The 33-year-old lady literally looks like an actress from the CW (weird analogy maybe but you know what I mean. Gorgeous!), what the hell is people’s problem?!
So I'm 54, quickly approaching 55, so I'm a full member of the Crones Love Cartoons Hate Her Club. I say this with nothing but love, but if y'all sweet, smart, earnest Millennials don't figure out aging you're going to be so miserable in a decade. Youth is fleeting and culture is fickle. Anyone who's wasting their precious corporeal moments telling a 33 year old they're ready for the glue factory is missing the point.
Aside, I was 33 the first time a Millennial called me grandma. That Millennial and I are friends now, but I still tease her about it.