Many Such Takes: Forbidden Words, Hobbies, 9/11 Parties, Looksmatch Cheating, Patriarchal Girl

The most unhinged discourse of the week, always free

Welcome to Many Such Takes! For those unfamiliar, this is a free weekly segment (I also do lots of other stuff!) For Many Such Takes, I stay up to date with the latest and most chaotic Twitter (and now BlueSky) discourse so you don’t have to. If you see yourself featured here and you don’t like it, simply send me a Substack message and I will happily remove, no matter who you are or what you said.

And now, a few announcements:

• If you want to try out a fake dating app (yes, even if you are married) have a go at my dating app simulator, which will be used for future articles.

  • If you want your photos to be used for the simulator, you can submit here.

• I still need more respondents for my survey on married sex.

• Check out my personals ads of the week!

Forbidden Words

Have you ever seen anyone posting about people being “unalived” or “graped” and wondered why they couldn’t just talk like adults? Well, basically, this trend originates from TikTok censorship rules, but has become regular jargon especially among Gen Z. See below infograph about women who were recently “unalived.”

Anyway, a Twitter user asked the pertinent question, “Why are we doing this?”

The argument she received in response was that people would be suspended if they used the word “killed.”

There were many people who insisted that their accounts would be banned if they used the forbidden words, which led to some good takes:

Is it cheating to include my own tweet if it was mostly a setup for the person replying to me, who had the real good joke?

Other people thought that finding the term “unalived” annoying was insensitive to the people who were unalived because taking issue with the verbiage minimized the unaliving.

Anyway, I always thought this jargon was annoying but never said much about it because I didn’t want to touch these topics at all and I don’t really care what words people use even if it’s silly, but given that we are officially on the app where everyone saw Glenn Greenwald suck some guy’s toes in a humiliation kink ritual, I think it’s safe to say anything goes.

9/11 Parties

I’m sure she’s used to it by now, but journalist Taylor Lorenz was once again the main character when she said that it was a “boomer ass take” to be offended by jokes about 9/11 in 2025.

She then followed up with this, which many people took as a sign that she believed 9/11 was good (she neither confirmed nor denied that belief, but did say that she was neutrally reporting on how young people feel, not sharing her own beliefs.)

However, most people zoomed in one one particular detail—who is having 9/11 themed parties?

Writer Ben Dreyfuss began to conjure up an idea of what a 9/11 party faux pas might look like, and I joined in:

I guess we are kind of proving Taylor’s point about all the young folks making 9/11 jokes, although we’re joking about the jokes, so really we’re taking it very seriously.

Eventually, Taylor did release some images of 9/11 parties, although from the cake captions many of them seem to be birthday parties for people who happened to be born on 9/11. I mean, never forget, right?

Hobbies

Hobbies drama hit the TL today, and it started with a (maybe too) impressive LEGO project that apparently cost a man two separate marriages (need a source on this.)

A woman jumped in to say that this was simply too much—that her husband has an hour a day to himself for his hobbies but something like the LEGO project wouldn’t be sustainable. Another poster accused the LEGO guy of “weaponizing autism.” But then, my Substack pal

Lyman Stone

came in with a new take (subscribe to him if you don’t already, especially if you like statistics around family and fertility. He also helped me analyze my men’s fashion survey results.) Anyway, his take was that even one hour a day of hobbies was simply excessive, and if a guy has that much time he clearly isn’t pulling his weight:

He also mentioned that he thinks having a gym membership is a waste of time that would be better spent on having children or working:

While Lyman’s takes are usually pretty good (he’s not a rage-bait poster like a lot of the people who show up here) people definitely reacted to him in the classic Main Character way:

Lyman actually is a very devoted and involved father (yes, he tweets a lot, but so do we all.) He says that spending time with his kids is enough leisure time for him (he also mentions he enjoys making tea as a hobby, which is quick, efficient, and doesn’t take up inordinate amounts of time like gaming, golfing, or going to the gym.)

This was really interesting for me to see because this type of conversation usually happens between moms, when a mom says she wants to eat breakfast in peace on Mother’s Day and another mom says “My kids are the only thing that I want to enjoy on Mother’s Day, why did you even bother having kids in the first place?” In fact, one mom was shamed for working from home with a part-time nanny who helped out with food preparation because despite spending more time with her kids than most moms, she was “outsourcing” small fragments of it. (I wrote about that here.)

Some people argued that men spending lots of time on their hobbies and leisure time was more common in the good old days:

As it turns out, Lyman has quite literally written a book on this topic and knows that most of human history wasn’t spent at social clubs or on hobbies:

Given that Lyman is a pronatalist (not one of the weird trad ones) some people shot back at him that he was making parenting look less appealing by confiscating people’s hobbies:

This is where I actually started agreeing with Lyman, because he’s completely right about this part. I wrote an article about it! A big reason that people don’t have kids (or just have kids later) is because there are too many fun and interesting things to do instead of having kids. Too many LEGO villages to build. I’m not sure if I’d call three hours of Sims time “degenerate” but Lyman is technically correct here.

I also think the anti-hobbies take makes more sense in the framework of dads who spend all weekend golfing instead of spending time with their families, or dads who don’t pull their weight because they’re addicted to porn and video games. Lyman later explained that hobbies which benefit other people (such as cooking) don’t count toward the one hour of degeneracy, although people took issues with fitness being included in that category.

Ultimately, Lyman summed up his haters in a pretty succinct way that I think covers Twitter in general, prompted by someone referring to him having dinner with his daughters as “slavery.”

Looksmatch Cheating

Do you ever feel like certain celebrity drama is being astroturfed to you, and you find it hard to believe anyone actually cares about it? That’s how I feel about all the Justin Bieber/Selena Gomez/Hailey Bieber stuff, which I’m 99% sure is orchestrated by the PR teams of at least one of those parties. But this week, I saw the TL filled with opinions about a couple I had quite literally never heard of:

Some people didn’t read the caption and believed that this was a gender transition before/after. But a lot of people seemed familiar with the couple. Apparently, the woman is thewizardliz and she’s a YouTuber. The man is her fiance, who cheated on her when she was four month pregnant. She apparently exposed him on Instagram this week:

Anyway, the women of Twitter weren’t only outraged at the cheating. They were outraged that a guy who “looks like him” cheated on a woman who “looks like her.” I guess the assumption was that they were wildly mismatched in the looks department, and therefore it was especially horrifying to see that he cheated.

This feels right up my alley for discussion, so let me just say a few things:

• Beautiful women get cheated on all the time because cheating often isn’t related to a partner’s physical appearance (I have confirmed this with studies!! More to come!)

• He obviously is good-looking, but even very good-looking men usually can’t serve a face card because they can’t buy Instagram face via fillers and Botox without looking androgynous

Anyway, we also got some great takes from Insane Twitter:

In all seriousness, I feel genuinely horrible for thewizardliz, whether her fiance was a 3 or a 9. She is currently selling her engagement ring for over $100K and donating all of the proceeds to charities that benefit single mothers.

Patriarchal Girl

Just as we were all recovering from the discovery that Patriarchy Hannah was someone acting out some kind of submission kink, we’ve been graced with a new weird uncanny trad poster: Patriarchal Girl, who is posting stuff like this:

Ironically, there’s a CHH article about this exact topic. Anyway, even without reading my article on this topic, many people noticed that if the women were to stay pure, there would be nobody with whom the men could gain experience.

Anyway, I think it’s safe to say we’re dealing with an engagement monetizer and/or a man. Keep scrolling, ladies, don’t get too mad.

As it turns out, this traditional wife is following loads of horny accounts, specifically one who is “cock-obsessed and mentally ill” with a “misogyny kink.” Like I said before, is this trad stuff really just BDSM?

Other Tweets/Funny Happenings

We now have thumb-sucking wellness influencers.

I’m deeply jealous of this person who witnessed their Uber driver sexting, because they now have the best story to tell people:

I only found out about this via Twitter but apparently there’s ableism discourse on Bluesky because people were making jokes about Elon musk peeing his pants:

You need to see the video to truly appreciate it, but I actually laughed so hard I cried while watching this video of a preteen girl hijack an airplane and force them to listen to her singing the Moana theme song. It’s also something I would have done. (As if the 9/11 parties weren’t bad enough, now we have a new airplane-related calamity for our parties.)

In case you missed it…