Many Such Takes: Mom Showers, Fat Shot, Fish Photo, and More

The most unhinged discourse of the week, always free

May 18, 2025

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.

Mom Showers

This one was right up my alley, although the discourse itself feels a bit warmed over, if you will. It all started with sleep training discourse and I actually wrote about sleep training a while ago while making sure to carefully hedge and disclaim so I didn’t offend anyone.

But Twitter this week was not so focused on being polite. It all started when a new mom accidentally bonked her baby’s head into a doorframe from sleep deprivation and clumsiness, and vowed to start sleep training so she could get sleep again. “Sleep training” is a weird term, because it can refer to the more commonly used tactic of putting the baby in a crib and returning every few minutes to comfort them, or even staying in the room, or just leaving your baby to cry for hours. Of course, some moms see no distinction. Enter, Robyn:

Okay, seems like a pretty standard crunchy anti-sleep training tweet, not much to report here, right?

But drama accelerated when it became clear she wasn’t just talking about the “cry it out” method, nor was she talking about cry it out + other methods. She extended her judgment to mothers who would put their babies in a crib so they could take a shower alone. In particular, she told another mom she was a “shit parent” for putting her baby in the crib for a few minutes so she could shower.

It seems the fact that the room was dark is an important factor in the discussion, although being afraid of the dark doesn’t really happen until age 2.

Other people also seem to agree that the issue is the darkness of the room and that putting a baby in a room with the lights on would be different (???)

Although these arguments in the past have usually had people fighting on both sides, most mothers sided with the mom who needed to shower, even if they weren’t cool with sleep training. Because, you know, showers need to happen. Robyn’s counter-argument was that a baby should be placed in a bouncer next to the shower and that it’s “abuse” to leave a baby in a crib “unsupervised.”

This person is joking, although it’s hard to tell these days.

We even got some top-tier satire, although I regrettably fell for this at first:

A few folks extrapolated Robyn’s take to include crying in a car, or other scenarios where crying is inevitable, Robyn said this is different because the baby isn’t alone or in the dark. The dark seems to be a sticking point. Apparently a quick bathroom break would have been allowed if the baby had been in a well-lit pack and play with toys instead of in a crib.

Some people did agree with the idea that it was nutso to take a shower while your baby is awake and in another room, however. The culprit? Birth control!

Ready for my nuclear take? It’s worse for a baby to cry in a car seat than cry in a room alone. In the car, they know you’re there but you inexplicably aren’t holding them and they think you don’t care about them—attachment shattered. If they’re in a room alone, all they know is you aren’t there, so perhaps you’re just unable to hear them and therefore not to blame. It’s like if your husband is at work and unable to help you, verus if your husband sees you struggling but is scrolling Twitter on his phone right next to you. Ergo: Attachment disorder guaranteed from carseat crying, not necessarily from crying in a crib. Follow for more solid mom tips, and don’t remember to hate yourself!

Fat Shot

Another banger from our favorite standup comedian, Donald Trump. This week, Trump talked about a “friend” of his who got Ozempic (aka the “fat shot”) and described this person as a neurotic overweight billionaire. Is this friend…uhhh…John Barron by any chance?

Others, including Twitter’s own AI bot, thought the friend was Elon Musk:

Wait, I agree with that last one. And I wrote about it a while ago for free!

Something Seems Fishy…

While I previously wrote that photos are generally not becoming for men, I’ve learned that photos of hunting or fishing seem to repulse women on another level. The hunting thing could be related to a dislike of general right-wing-coded behavior, a dislike of guns, or maybe just empathy for the animal, but the hatred of fishing photos makes less sense to me because almost every woman who hates it isn’t actually against the concept of fishing—they just don’t want to see photos of it. Perhaps it’s just overdone, or speaks to a lack of a personality, or something else.

Well, the topic came up when a guy tweeted about another man (this man, crucially, isn’t part of the conversation himself, although I think he posted this to Reddit) who swiped right on over 2 million women and only got one date. The initial tweet was bemoaning how picky women are and how hopeless it is for average guys out there.

I’m no stranger to how online dating is very unfairly stacked against average men, but many people suggested more was at play here (after all, the guy isn’t bad-looking, and I know men who look like him who met their wives online.) It seems like his photos are…extremely fish heavy. In fact, the “devoid of personality” thing doesn’t really apply to him because it seems like fishing (and owning snakes) is actually a huge part of his personality.

Honestly, I was kind of on his side because I love a king with a special interest (also, side, note, people named “Hayden” are old enough to be online dating now? Scary.) But anyway, people focused especially on one particularly unforgiving photo in which he’s holding a fish and wearing a sweatshirt that says “Sitya Ass On My Face.”

One Twitter user noted that even though he only got one date, over 2,000 women swiped right on him, so clearly it wasn’t just the photos that were the problem.

Anyway, I think if he dropped the sweatshirt and added a few photos not related to fishing, he’d have a better shot, but clearly there is major attrition happening from match to date which needs to be examined. Good luck out there!