Many Such Takes: My Twitter Break, Christian Polyamory, Snakes, Friends, Total Power Exchange

Plus: I took two weeks off Twitter, and here's what I learned

Welcome to Many Such Takes! For those unfamiliar, this is a free weekly segment (I also do lots of other stuff—you can typically expect 4-5 paid posts a week too!) For Many Such Takes, I stay up to date with the latest and most chaotic Twitter discourse so you don’t have to.

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!!

My Twitter Break

The past two iterations of Many Such Takes are missing for an important reason: I got off Twitter! Partially, this was because we were traveling for the holidays and I wouldn’t have much time for scrolling, but also because I correctly surmised that Twitter was becoming a major time suck. In addition, I listened to the many of you in my comments section telling me that for the sake of my mental health and worldview, I’d do better to just ignore Twitter and get off the app.

I didn’t completely go off Twitter—I still used the website on my laptop to post my articles. But I deleted the app from my phone and refused to use the web app either, so my access was very limited.

I returned to Twitter on a particularly bad day—the day I published my article on men who focus a bit too intently on reducing the stigma of attraction to girls under 18. As I would soon learn, this is a very triggering topic for many people on Twitter. I didn’t read all the comments, and this is probably a good thing, but they were some variety of “If you demonize attraction to 17 year olds then people are going to make it illegal to date women in their twenties” and “You old hag, I’ll fuck as many 14-year-olds as I can.” Just a really lovely group of people who should absolutely be allowed within five miles of a middle school.

Anyway, obviously my return to Twitter was tinged with this very unpleasant experience, but a few things I noticed upon return:

• Everyone is angry or derisive. Maybe this is just my feed, but it’s basically a nonstop loop of people being angry. Some of them may be angry about worthwhile things, but that’s basically all I see. After a while, I start to feel angry too, but in a very addictive way, and then I want to scroll to see more people I can hate. I was sucked back into the app in a matter of literally five minutes.

• When you’re a Big Account, people talk about you all the time, and this is doubly true if you post often, and if you perpetually straddle two different sides of the genderslop wars. I’ve gotten to the point where I’m not really hurt by the stuff people say about me, especially if I know it’s not true, but it still feels addictive to keep reading it, especially if I know it’s stupid and begging for a funny reaction. For example, just the other day someone accused me of writing in defense of HR existing because I was trying to make companies hire me for being a woman:

The unfortunate thing is that I feel the need to keep going back to see what was said about me next, for no particular reason other than morbid curiosity. It’s a very maladaptive habit and it should be vanquished immediately.

• It’s gotten to the point where I can very easily tell when someone is posting inflammatory things from another country with the intent purpose of gaming the monetization system. Honestly, I don’t blame them. USD goes a long way in certain countries, and if I could be the richest person in my neighborhood just by making a few shitty tweets, I would absolutely do it.

Anyway, I will return to Twitter, but I may have to reduce my usage by only accessing it on my laptop. Now is a better time than ever to alert me to funny/bad tweets via the subscriber chat (I don’t check DMs; do not DM me.)

Christian Polyamory

Ugh, I feel stupid because I literally just covered a different non-Mormon Christian polygamous guy last time I published MST, but this one was so funny I had to do it again. Basically, this week, we got a new Main Character defending polygamy (specifically polygyny—multiple wives)

Two things about this were especially funny/awful. One was that—and I’m not trying to be mean here—he looks exactly like a Redditor who would just have a polycule. That’s about as far as I’ll go because again, I don’t want to be mean.

The second thing is that unlike someone involved in ethical nonmonogamy, he readily admits his wife (and the mother of his seven children) is actually really not into this, but that it’s not really her choice. Or his, for that matter:

When he was accused of just being horny and looking for a third, he offered up that actually, it’s not about sex at all. But he’s not going to tell you what it’s about. He’ll let you figure that out for yourself.

Some notable responses:

Hopefully not too narcissistic to add my own?

Snakes

It’s always a pleasure when I’m tagged in some absurd Reddit post that’s been crossposted to Twitter and this week was no exception.

This post (which I’m praying is a troll) is so artful because the only funny part of the post (husband is forgoing a second child so he can buy more snakes) is mentioned once, without any other information, and then glossed over. To me, this is extremely artful trolling, but clearly it was too artful because after sending this to my friend, she informed me that nobody on Reddit mentioned the snakes.

Friends

Can anyone figure out what offended a bunch of Twitter users about the below photo?

Well, several things:

And of course:

There was also this exchange, which I couldn’t find except in the screenshot (it was probably deleted.)

Luckily, the vast majority of comments were supportive. I’ll be honest—there is NO WAY I could get four of my friends to come over to my house at the same time without at least two of them being “out of town” or “totally slammed” with a mix of parents in town and kids’ activities, but you know what? Good for her.

Total Power Exchange

In the latest edition of, “I get it, but this is a bit nutso” we have a woman who is clearly into BDSM without realizing she’s into it:

Maybe she shouldn’t have ended her post with “call me crazy” because many people did, in fact, call her crazy.

Of course, even more people pointed out that actually, she just has a submission kink and wants a total power exchange 24/7 BDSM relationship. Only two problems there: very few men would actually want to undertake this degree of work (talk about invisible labor) and also, as I put it, the small fraction of men who would be down for this likely have other hoe-scaring tendencies (I believe I may have intercepted this turn of phrase about this exact thing from

Lila Krishna

.)

As it turns out (shocker) I wrote about this too, over a year ago: