It’s a sad sign of our society’s estrangement from Christian Virtue that we assume children to absent from dentist visits. Their tooth loss is a reminder of their role as Biblical Guardians of Calcium. Just as a wife safeguards her husband from porn with her Body That Won’t Quit, so do our children safeguard us from the wicked path of tooth decay.
Why not? I was raised with family dental visits and my husband and I each take at least one kid when we go. It's more efficient than taking them separately to a pediatric dentist, who doesn't do anything differently except have a day-glo colored waiting room.
The key to taking eight young children on your dental visit is to maintain dominant eye contact with the receptionist as you tell your children that they will be their new mommy for the next hour.
Re: messy kitchen, I'm in a huge FB group for moms of high school/college and beyond aged kids. The husband/kids refusing to clean up after themselves is absolutely a thing. There have been multiple pics of a teen's bedroom that looks like Horders, so many that someone once suggested sprinkling black rice around the room, drawing attention to it, claiming it's rat droppings and finally the kid cleans their room. I absolutely believe that husband and kids left those dishes for mom to do when "she feels better". Bet the trash was overflowing and wet towels on the bathroom floor, too.
Re:eating on the subway, a granola bar, a hamburger, chips, sure. The key is: handheld, finished in a few minutes. Anything with a knife and fork is weird. Is he bending over to eat? I realize the burrito isn't actually touching where someone's butt was, but your face is now closer to butt space? What happens when someone wants the seat?
Re: workplace feminization, I refuse to believe there is a workplace so ruled by women (except perhaps the non profit sector, actual social justice work or feminist orgs) that it resembles a kindergarten. I work retail, and even though many managers are women, no one is singing kumbaya and talking about feelings. That author simply wants men to avoid being polite and respectful to their co workers.
I think part of the issue is about the definition of 'polite and respectful.' It's one thing to say you shouldn't sexually harass coworkers, and another to penalize disagreement with coworkers because being challenged makes them feel bad or makes others uncomfortable. CHH had an essay pretty recently about how a lot of women are pretty uncomfortable with debate, which in my experience is true, and when a workplace is ruled by people who are uncomfortable with debate (not all, but predominantly women), your career will take a hit if you challenge bad ideas. In an environment like that, of course any endeavor will be less successful.
This is also not just a gender issue- it's been found that in the airline industry, pilot-copilot teams from cultures where people are more comfortable with disagreeing with a superior crash less often, because the copilot and other subordinates are more willing to alert the pilot if something seems wrong. So basically, anything that systematically promotes forced consensus in the workplace rather than a culture of open discussion is bad- and this does include certain toxic male behaviors as well, especially the male tendency to create overly hierarchical structures.
Great point! Masculine unwillingness to challenge hierarchical superiors is a perfect counterpart to feminine unwillingness to challenge egalitarian group consensus, and both are equally bad.
Yeah, re: subway eating. I don't particularly care about the seat proximity (though I wouldn't personally use a subway seat as a table) so much as the fact that this is a non-handheld food being eaten on a, by definition, moving and stopping vehicle. That shit just takes one or two bumpy tracks to be a floor burrito. This is about as stupid if not moreso than the "controversy" about him eating rice though. Let the man eat in peace.
Eating on the subway is a crime. Really. You can get ticketed. And it should be. I take the subway every day and the last thing we need is more wrappers, used napkins, half empty cups (the other half spilled in the floor, ensuring that every Brooklyn bound passenger gets sticky shoes), and yes, half empty plates of food. These things happen but they are, believe it or not, uncommon, because of the law. And the prospective mayor shouldn’t be ignoring the law, because keeping people from eating on the subway makes our collective commute a little less miserable.
Agree. Subway food should be handheld, compact, not too messy and not too smelly. Like a pastry or a chips or something. Even a burger is borderline, though some kinds of sandwich are OK. It’s not about germs, it’s about consideration for your fellow passengers.
Yeah, it brings up interesting discussions about our own experiences with subway eating, but what it really shows is just that people are a little too fixated on critiquing every single thing this man does.
My favorite example was the goof who thought tweeting him images of bacon would be "triggering" to a Muslim. Mamdani's response was great: "my brother, this isn't garlic and we aren't vampires"
Yeah like I feel like, I dunno, make up companies don't have male QC chemists being like "I had to be too nice" or "I had to deal with women putting me down". People who complain about workplaces being too professional are bad people.
“Too professional” is not the thing people are complaining about, and “kindergarten” is completely the wrong analogy. The real failure modes that can occur in female-dominated workplaces are what you see in the nonprofit sector: an obsession with prioritizing the cause du jour (BLM! Free Palestine) over the primary mission of the organization, and the use of well-documented female forms of aggression to destroy your rivals (think Bari Weiss getting taken down on the NYTimes slack). A great example of both is the Blocked and Reported episode where that White Fragility lady conducted a series of sessions to root out racism in a theater company.
That said unlike Andrews I don’t think this is some inevitable consequence of women entering the workplace. What we’re talking about here is a small group of (mostly, but not exclusively) women who get enabled by an environment where any pushback against progressive politics is proof of racism/sexism. As long as there is a baseline expectation of professionalism we can have an environment that works equally well for men and women. Corporate America has already built up the requisite scar tissue, and are largely stepping away from the whole “bring your whole self to work and spend your days arguing about politics on the internal Slack” thing.
I think the way to frame it is that it is an inevitable part of women entering the workplace, but the way to deal with it is to try to eradicate unprofessional female-coded behavior just as unprofessional male-coded behavior has been sanctioned. The answer definitely isn't to start a free-for-all on awful unprofessional behaviors, it's to try to shut down middle-school style gossip campaigns as inappropriate for the workplace.
Robin DiAngelo (not sure if I spelled that right) is the White Fragility lady, IIRC. And I find it interesting that she was called upon to root out racism in a *theater company*, where, presumably, there are far more people who want to work there than there are job or performer openings. That seems to be what the Phoebe Bovy essay was getting at (though I could not read the whole thing), that people in ill-paid and tremendously oversubscribed creative and nonprofit fields are mostly women, AND have a very zero sum view of the opportunities to be had in their fields, so, while they may VOTE blue, they are red in tooth and claw, and “canceling” someone is less about really “eliminating -isms” as “eliminating the competition. More pie for ME!” In this house, we believe… our coworkers are competition and should be backstabbed.
I think there’s something to this idea. I remember a few years back reading a story about YA/Goodreads drama and sensitivity readers, where one sensitivity reader (who was actually a dude!) more or less admitted to engaging in pile-ons as a form of taking down competition.
I can’t remember who said it, it was someting I read on a forum/ message board chain, but apparently a YA fiction author compared the atmosphere of YA Fiction Twitter to prison. Really. It was that cutthroat and “devil take the hindmost.”
The pic of him eating the burrito, if it is a burrito, looks staged because I can't imagine being able to eat that on the subway for long. Other than that I don't care if he eats on the subway because he's busy and has to eat sometime. People will gripe about about anything.
To me it looks 100% staged, which is why the whole debate strikes me as so silly. Clearly nobody’s eating with a knife and fork on a subway car while it’s in motion.
It’s a dumb photo opp, yes, like presidential candidates grinning around pork chops on sticks at the Iowa state fair, but that’s all it is.
Blaming wives on husband's porn addiction is part of this thing I noticed on Reddit like a decade ago: to a misogynist, no matter what, it is the women who are wrong.
No one would blame a wife's deficiencies on her husband not being a good provider or father, as CHH has written before, serial killer's mother's get a lot blame. Men can walk out, have shitty jobs, be awful at sex but you, wife, will still be blamed for it.
Honestly, if I'm getting involved with porn or has nothing to do with my partner and everything to do with me. While plenty of men will blame their wives for not putting out that might be due to any number of things: tiredness because of having to take care of the house and having no help with that, taking care of the kids and having no help, a mental health issue, an unresolved medical issue, a husband who thinks it's a wife's job to do everything around the house and he has no responsibility for any of that, and so many other possibilities. Yes, there are those wives that are just "bad wives" and there are husbands that are just "bad husbands" and neither want to work on fixing the situation. People want to blame others while not taking responsibility for their actions or inactions.
Is this a NY thing? People don’t eat on the Montréal subway, let alone use a seat as a table for a meal. The problem isn’t danger to the food, it’s making a mess that takes a seat out of use.
I am pretty sure CHH has touched on this, as well, in one of her posts on public disorder. You can’t get people out of their cars if they perceive public transit as disorderly (let alone dangerous). It’s not a lot to ask that public transit be safe, clean, not too noisy, and not smell bad or have threatening behavior not dealt with.
We talk about disorder aboard transit - I noted in another comment how much the issue of food litter went way, WAY down once more secure fare gates were installed in the system which services my area. I do think that it’s because the kind of people who fare-jump are also the kind of people who have no problem stinking up the joint with Eau de Fastfood, and then leaving the wrappings and scraps behind because it’s not THEIR problem to deal with. A whole lot of bad behavior on my local train system has diminished, just because spiffy new hard to evade fare gates were installed.
(I’m 100% sure that the Mamdani eating on the train shot was staged. But I still think that if he’s running for mayor, he should, as parents and teachers are always fond of saying, “set an example.” Don’t eat on the train, people, unless it’s an emergency - diabetics or hangry screaming kids get a pass.)
It genuinely would be very weird to see someone eating like Mamdani is in that picture. Most people don't eat on the subway but I'd expect a guy who did to have it in his lap? The reason isn't because of etiquette it's just likely to be annoyingly crowded to eat comfortably. But it's for instagram, so obviously it's posed and therefore kinda goofy.
It would be much worse if he were eating microwaved, reheated fish.
I'd say that on the subway during rush hour, overcrowding is my top concern, food smells are down the list. After hours in the evening, it's more so people ranting and raving, selling drugs, getting into fights, walking between cars looking for a drug deal liaison, etc. (These are Chicago Red Line concerns.)
Or someone on the red line walking from car to car selling booze and yelling, “liquor liquor liquor liquor”… okay that particular instance has only happened once to me but I laugh every time I think about it
I occasionally eat on the subway(generally falafel over rice from a street vendor). It happens but isn't super common. It's not considered some terrible faux pas unless you're messy or stink up the place, which a burrito isn't smelly enough to do.
Also, at least where I am, the kind of folk who eat like that on the train also leave their food containers and trash. It's not people just discretely having a snack or quick bite. They have big things and then you get on the train and see a bunch of trash, and food and liquid all over the seats.
Same where I live. Mickey D’s detritus everywhere, sometimes even lingering smells. Though since installing the new fare gates (now everyone will know which train system I’m talking about, lol!) which make gate jumping almost impossible, the amount of ketchup smears, crumpled burger wrappers and stray fries has gone way down, as well. Doubt it’s a complete coinkydinky.
I am not public-transit-eating coded, but I would die of embarrassment if I lost a stranger fry on the 'L' or whatever. It is your life's mission to recover and dispose of that errant fry, whatever the cost.
Thank you! Eating is against the rules for good reason. I am baffled by some of the responses I'm seeing on this thread from people who don't seem to grasp this or don't care.
(BTW I first experienced Montréal's subways on a 9th grade French class trip from Michigan -- a state with generally inadequate public transit -- and I was very impressed.)
I agree! Maybe it’s just because I lived in a city and didn’t have a car for quite a few years in my 20’s and 30’s. That means I got to take public transit everywhere. I will give passes to medical issues or if you have a kid who can’t be soothed any other way, BUT, other than that, water or mints only. I have seen and smelled far too many of other people’s messes that they just leave behind for the Cleanup Fairy or whoever to take care of. I’ve seen huge rats skittering around train tracks. (And since the new anti-fare-jumping gates they seem to have diminished in number.)
You’re not getting people out of their cars if public transit is nasty.
- I call bullshit on the woman's body being "just the same" . .if you have kids young and have lucky genetics you can avoid stretch marks, tummy flaps etc. but ain't no way her boobs are just as perky as before kid #1.
-Eating a burrito like that with a knife and fork can be messier than just going to town the old fashioned way. But unless you're on like an hour-long trip why not just wait?
-For a lot of couples porn (both video and booktok gooner lit) is a marriage enhancer and not some nefarious method of faux-cheating. If that's the case, the problem stems from the user, not the content. But conservative evangelicals for all their talk of sinning and responsibility always look for scapegoats.
I’m utterly convinced that a big part of Trump’s appeal over the last decade is that he serves the campiest drag queen shit to people who would not understand what that means.
Weird thing about the Stella Greeklastname essay is that she’s writing it like she’s robbing the cradle, but unless I’m reading it wrong she’s 30 and the Italian dude is 26?
That’s why I don’t think women are able to have an objective opinion on age gap relationships because they personally don’t have any desire to date younger so they naturally just see them as bad (though because there are younger women who date older men, you would think they could see the positives of such a relationship from the female’s side). Nonetheless, I think very rarely is the discourse done in good faith.
I dunno, I’m a dude and I’ve had two long-term relationships with women who were significantly older. Still good friends with both of them. Not a kink for anybody involved, most of their/my other relationships have been closer in age.
Ya, the key thing is that’s offline. I was talking more on the woke online discourse since age gap discourse has devolved into 3 year age gaps are problematic
It’s halfway true — you can technically still be fined, but it rarely happens these days. (The cops were stricter about it in the past, but backed off after a few high-profile incidents involving children and pregnant women.) But people still don’t eat on the train because there’s a strong social norm against it. A water bottle or a protein bar is probably okay, but anything more and you’re going to get glared at.
It’s like how we all know to stand on the right and walk on the left on escalators. The DC Metro takes its social contract very seriously, and even our more antisocial residents generally go along with it.
Conservative female misogynists are so, so weird. There was an essay in UnHerd earlier this week where a woman posited that saying the n-word with a hard r was indicative of a kind of boy "the good kind .. who thinks for himself and whose masculinity hasn’t been completely crushed by the Nurse Ratched types who lord over much of his life."
If a man wrote this, it would be fascinating psychological tableau. But a woman spitting such bizarre, specific, and imagined hatred is just... baffling.
Maybe I'm a Nurse Ratchet type but a man who just says slurs and mean shit for the sake of it is the kind of guy who also will find a lot of joy in just demeaning you. That stuff doesn't just stop at other people.
I wonder if that writer saw Jack Torrance using that racial slur in The Shining as a sign the racist ghost had driven him crazy and instead thought "what a nice young man who is so kind to his family."
I would say that eating on the subway is generally a no-no because it can be annoying to all of the other people with whom one is currently sharing a small space..but this is presumably some sort of photo op so no harm done most likely.
My impression of great feminization is… she may get at something but overall it feels like the right equivalent of galaxy brain take of Taylor Swoft but bc she didn’t go full on GroyperiluvHitler1488, it is treated as something serious…?
And lmao to the excerpt- does she think GenZ boss and mini girls have to be sued lol?
Somehow, this roundup seems much less unhinged than previous editions (which is honestly weird to say because it's pretty unhinged). Is this because you're not looking at Twitter from your phone anymore?
I like substack link roundups more often than not, but now i wonder if parenting/gender discourse is just too repetitive for me (maybe because you write all of it first!). Great Feminization makes me roll my eyes. Birth rate discourse, same. It's like I already know people's takes on it before I read the piece, because there's only so many ways to be interesting about those topics.
Thanks. My husband is really unhappy with his job and has been for years, and it took me months of prodding for him to finally make a phone call and schedule an appointment to have his medications evaluated. He just started an increased dosage last week, so I’m hopeful that’ll have some effect.
The weird part is that, from everything I know, it shouldn’t be hard for him to find a new job. He’s just kind of stuck in a mental rut. 😕
Isn't that the thing that makes depression such a bitch? From the outside, you (without a mindset colored by his depression) sees that this is tractable. But because the depression colors how he sees things, it seems hard to do anything...so he doesn't attack the issue...which makes it hard to do things...
Yep. I keep trying to get him to spend just fifteen minutes a day updating his resume - maybe that feels like too much and five would be better? I offered to sit in his office with him while he did it, too, in case that would help. He said no thanks, that was okay. 😕
He’s a very conscientious employee with around fifteen years of experience in his field, and when his company got bought by a bigger company, they gave him this huge bonus to stay on for at least a year. I’d hire him. 🙂
People get stuck in mental ruts. It's not easy to deal with. Depression is a lot to deal with though depending upon the degree of it. My bestie has a level depression that's off the charts sometimes where she literally can barely get out of bed let alone eat or take care of herself. She's been on medication since she was a teen and either the medication doesn't work or only lasts for so long until she needs to switch to another drug, and she's gone through almost all of them.
I'm sorry. I have ADHD and while I do let my dishes pile up from time to time this would be too much for me to handle. Yes, I would go crazy cleaning because it got this bad and that happened on occasion when my bestie and I lived together. Thank God it never got as bad as that kitchen.
I was going to shame that lady too, and then I noticed my dishwasher didn't run overnight. Now post-breakfast I'm about halfway to that photo (starting from clear countertops). Whoops
This is so not the point, but I am side eying the dishes picture for choice of dishes/food containers. I see a LOT of bulky stuff that doesn’t fit well in the dishwasher, or can’t even go in the dishwasher at all. Big water bottles, sandwich containers, etc. I get that this is probably for school lunches although there are more dishwasher-friendly containers out there. And anything with a ton of little parts that has to be hand washed is going to be scarce in my house. When I buy a food container or gadget I always think about it’s going to be washed and if I’m willing to deal with that on a regular basis.
Similarly, my first thought was that they own way too much plastic stuff. But I have an older house with a small kitchen, so I don’t really know what’s normal.
100%. The residual dishes in our sink (and fortunately they don't usually overflow the sink) are entirely "must-be-handwashed"...for me the trick is: find a podcast I really want to listen to and clear the backlog...
Trying to think of what I hate more, opening the dishwasher to find plastic containers turned over and full of dirty water that is leaking down onto the clean dishes, or separating a water bottle into 5 parts for cleaning and then having to reassemble it later.
LOL my kids call the overturned containers of gray water "bathtubs" and think it's hilarious. I'd take the overturned containers...I'll take the gamble that maybe next time they stay where I put them.
I do all the cooking and dishes in my family, and our sink area looks like that within 12 hours of having been cleaned to perfection. I am cleaning up something that looks like that twice every single day. A big driver of this is that my wife goes through like 5 giant Stanley cups per day (I use the same one for a month before switching to my other one) and the kids go through like 5 cups per day as well, then baby bottles, then dishes from cooking, then encrusted cat food bowls. I am sympathetic with them about this kitchen and I don't think it takes long at all for a kitchen to get like that with kids and pets.
Yeah I do most of the dishes in my house too and I’m always a bit horrified at what it looks like when I come home from a work trip. And we have to run the dishwasher at least twice a day.
I've had versions of that experience in the past, to varying levels. And I've tried to confront myself about how much is my preferences vs whether I have a reason that I think my wife should consider. I try to remember that if I am asking the rest of the family to meet my standards of kitchen cleanliness, I am asking them to honor my preferences, not reminding them that they have failed to live by the One True Way® for kitchen cleanliness.
And if I come home from a trip and things are piled up, did I ever communicate that I would like things to be cleaner when I get home? Asking for that out loud would make clear that it really is an _ask_.
"Honey, I'm going to be away for a business trip for a few days, and in that time you'll be stuck doing all of the household and child care tasks that we normally share, while (let's be real) I'll be out drinking with my coworkers. Would you please also, while you're doing that, clean the kitchen so it looks really clean when I get home?"
I have to decide if that's something I want to ask for. If I say "no", I have to own it and not be like "I can't believe she did this" when I get home. If I do ask, I have to be prepared or her to say "no" and live with it, because it really is me asking for something extra, not "she should just do this."
The truth is when my wife has the kids on her own she _does_ clean the kitchen...she's just a bit more latent about it, which is her preference. "Kitchen is clean before I go to bed" is something I do for me; no one else asked for it.
Yes, there is a lot of stuff like that in my household too, the adults having different standards about different things. Generally, the only thing around the house my wife does that drives me insane is when she goes around the house and takes every towel (hand towel and otherwise) to wash, as she owns all laundry other than my personal laundry, but then she does not replace the towels anywhere. I find this to be unreasonable. Inevitably, I run to the sink to wash human or animal waste off my hands, my hands are dripping wet, and there are no towels to be had anywhere in the house. This happens on a weekly basis, and I only occasionally mention it to her because I don't want to fight a war over this.
Yet just today she gave me grief when we went to a 3-year-old's birthday party because I didn't put my son's sweater on before I put him in his car seat. My thinking was that it will be warm in the car and it will be better to put the sweater on when we arrive at our destination, an outdoor playground in 50-degree weather. She seemed to think my approach to this was really unreasonable and I had to draw the line on this and be like "you have to got stop prosecuting minor subjective different ways of doing things like this; by the way, you did the towel thing again and I didn't mention it because it's not worth disturbing the peace over."
A lot of this stuff I think is not specific to a romantic relationship but just to cohabitating with another human being. You have to learn to accept that different people will do things in different ways.
Yeah, I occasionally feel tempted to get out a big trash bin and just sweep all the dirty dishes into it with my arm.
I read once that Hasidic Jews often use paper plates and plastic utensils so they won't have to spend their entire life doing dishes. I recoil at this financially and environmentally, but I have become much more sympathetic to this as an approach to not spend half your life doing dishes so you can actually spend time with your kids.
So, dumb question: why is it that all these household members aren't putting their dishes in the dishwasher as they go? If you don't possess a dishwasher, why aren't they washing their dishes immediately after their meals? I find this confusing.
The issue is that the dishwasher only truly gets certain items clean. It also gets run at least once a day. But you can’t put baby bottles, kid cups that require disassembly, Stanley cups, pots, pans and other items that get very dirty in the process of cooking in it. We’ve tried putting everything in there and items that we’ve found don’t clean have to be hand washed, and this is a majority of the items.
Oof, that's rough, you could definitely use a better dishwasher- we also have a couple pans that I have to handwash for being too tall, but bottles and Munchkin cups are totally fine in mine (we don't have Stanley cups). I think if my family were regularly creating so much handwashing that the kitchen looked like the picture, we'd have to reevaluate how we're using dishes throughout the day. It's way too much!
Yeah, I’ve tried to make the argument several times that we don’t need to dirty as many cups as we are, but it is to no avail. And I don’t want to spend my capital on that.
The dishwasher was installed in 2021 or so and is pretty state of the art. Things just don’t get clean in there with how dirty and encrusted our dishes regularly are.
"Zero evidence" she had eight kids? What did she do with the kids?
well tbf they wouldn't be joining her at the dentist!
It’s a sad sign of our society’s estrangement from Christian Virtue that we assume children to absent from dentist visits. Their tooth loss is a reminder of their role as Biblical Guardians of Calcium. Just as a wife safeguards her husband from porn with her Body That Won’t Quit, so do our children safeguard us from the wicked path of tooth decay.
Amen
Why not? I was raised with family dental visits and my husband and I each take at least one kid when we go. It's more efficient than taking them separately to a pediatric dentist, who doesn't do anything differently except have a day-glo colored waiting room.
The key to taking eight young children on your dental visit is to maintain dominant eye contact with the receptionist as you tell your children that they will be their new mommy for the next hour.
Re: messy kitchen, I'm in a huge FB group for moms of high school/college and beyond aged kids. The husband/kids refusing to clean up after themselves is absolutely a thing. There have been multiple pics of a teen's bedroom that looks like Horders, so many that someone once suggested sprinkling black rice around the room, drawing attention to it, claiming it's rat droppings and finally the kid cleans their room. I absolutely believe that husband and kids left those dishes for mom to do when "she feels better". Bet the trash was overflowing and wet towels on the bathroom floor, too.
Re:eating on the subway, a granola bar, a hamburger, chips, sure. The key is: handheld, finished in a few minutes. Anything with a knife and fork is weird. Is he bending over to eat? I realize the burrito isn't actually touching where someone's butt was, but your face is now closer to butt space? What happens when someone wants the seat?
Re: workplace feminization, I refuse to believe there is a workplace so ruled by women (except perhaps the non profit sector, actual social justice work or feminist orgs) that it resembles a kindergarten. I work retail, and even though many managers are women, no one is singing kumbaya and talking about feelings. That author simply wants men to avoid being polite and respectful to their co workers.
I think part of the issue is about the definition of 'polite and respectful.' It's one thing to say you shouldn't sexually harass coworkers, and another to penalize disagreement with coworkers because being challenged makes them feel bad or makes others uncomfortable. CHH had an essay pretty recently about how a lot of women are pretty uncomfortable with debate, which in my experience is true, and when a workplace is ruled by people who are uncomfortable with debate (not all, but predominantly women), your career will take a hit if you challenge bad ideas. In an environment like that, of course any endeavor will be less successful.
This is also not just a gender issue- it's been found that in the airline industry, pilot-copilot teams from cultures where people are more comfortable with disagreeing with a superior crash less often, because the copilot and other subordinates are more willing to alert the pilot if something seems wrong. So basically, anything that systematically promotes forced consensus in the workplace rather than a culture of open discussion is bad- and this does include certain toxic male behaviors as well, especially the male tendency to create overly hierarchical structures.
Great point! Masculine unwillingness to challenge hierarchical superiors is a perfect counterpart to feminine unwillingness to challenge egalitarian group consensus, and both are equally bad.
Yeah, re: subway eating. I don't particularly care about the seat proximity (though I wouldn't personally use a subway seat as a table) so much as the fact that this is a non-handheld food being eaten on a, by definition, moving and stopping vehicle. That shit just takes one or two bumpy tracks to be a floor burrito. This is about as stupid if not moreso than the "controversy" about him eating rice though. Let the man eat in peace.
Eating on the subway is a crime. Really. You can get ticketed. And it should be. I take the subway every day and the last thing we need is more wrappers, used napkins, half empty cups (the other half spilled in the floor, ensuring that every Brooklyn bound passenger gets sticky shoes), and yes, half empty plates of food. These things happen but they are, believe it or not, uncommon, because of the law. And the prospective mayor shouldn’t be ignoring the law, because keeping people from eating on the subway makes our collective commute a little less miserable.
This is basically the subway version of eating cereal with milk in a moving car on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
Agree. Subway food should be handheld, compact, not too messy and not too smelly. Like a pastry or a chips or something. Even a burger is borderline, though some kinds of sandwich are OK. It’s not about germs, it’s about consideration for your fellow passengers.
I would not eat a burrito on the subway.
Yeah, it brings up interesting discussions about our own experiences with subway eating, but what it really shows is just that people are a little too fixated on critiquing every single thing this man does.
My favorite example was the goof who thought tweeting him images of bacon would be "triggering" to a Muslim. Mamdani's response was great: "my brother, this isn't garlic and we aren't vampires"
Yeah like I feel like, I dunno, make up companies don't have male QC chemists being like "I had to be too nice" or "I had to deal with women putting me down". People who complain about workplaces being too professional are bad people.
“Too professional” is not the thing people are complaining about, and “kindergarten” is completely the wrong analogy. The real failure modes that can occur in female-dominated workplaces are what you see in the nonprofit sector: an obsession with prioritizing the cause du jour (BLM! Free Palestine) over the primary mission of the organization, and the use of well-documented female forms of aggression to destroy your rivals (think Bari Weiss getting taken down on the NYTimes slack). A great example of both is the Blocked and Reported episode where that White Fragility lady conducted a series of sessions to root out racism in a theater company.
That said unlike Andrews I don’t think this is some inevitable consequence of women entering the workplace. What we’re talking about here is a small group of (mostly, but not exclusively) women who get enabled by an environment where any pushback against progressive politics is proof of racism/sexism. As long as there is a baseline expectation of professionalism we can have an environment that works equally well for men and women. Corporate America has already built up the requisite scar tissue, and are largely stepping away from the whole “bring your whole self to work and spend your days arguing about politics on the internal Slack” thing.
I think the way to frame it is that it is an inevitable part of women entering the workplace, but the way to deal with it is to try to eradicate unprofessional female-coded behavior just as unprofessional male-coded behavior has been sanctioned. The answer definitely isn't to start a free-for-all on awful unprofessional behaviors, it's to try to shut down middle-school style gossip campaigns as inappropriate for the workplace.
Robin DiAngelo (not sure if I spelled that right) is the White Fragility lady, IIRC. And I find it interesting that she was called upon to root out racism in a *theater company*, where, presumably, there are far more people who want to work there than there are job or performer openings. That seems to be what the Phoebe Bovy essay was getting at (though I could not read the whole thing), that people in ill-paid and tremendously oversubscribed creative and nonprofit fields are mostly women, AND have a very zero sum view of the opportunities to be had in their fields, so, while they may VOTE blue, they are red in tooth and claw, and “canceling” someone is less about really “eliminating -isms” as “eliminating the competition. More pie for ME!” In this house, we believe… our coworkers are competition and should be backstabbed.
I think there’s something to this idea. I remember a few years back reading a story about YA/Goodreads drama and sensitivity readers, where one sensitivity reader (who was actually a dude!) more or less admitted to engaging in pile-ons as a form of taking down competition.
I can’t remember who said it, it was someting I read on a forum/ message board chain, but apparently a YA fiction author compared the atmosphere of YA Fiction Twitter to prison. Really. It was that cutthroat and “devil take the hindmost.”
The pic of him eating the burrito, if it is a burrito, looks staged because I can't imagine being able to eat that on the subway for long. Other than that I don't care if he eats on the subway because he's busy and has to eat sometime. People will gripe about about anything.
To me it looks 100% staged, which is why the whole debate strikes me as so silly. Clearly nobody’s eating with a knife and fork on a subway car while it’s in motion.
It’s a dumb photo opp, yes, like presidential candidates grinning around pork chops on sticks at the Iowa state fair, but that’s all it is.
Agreed.
Blaming wives on husband's porn addiction is part of this thing I noticed on Reddit like a decade ago: to a misogynist, no matter what, it is the women who are wrong.
No one would blame a wife's deficiencies on her husband not being a good provider or father, as CHH has written before, serial killer's mother's get a lot blame. Men can walk out, have shitty jobs, be awful at sex but you, wife, will still be blamed for it.
I was just on the Chicago subway, it was explicitly against the rules to eat on board. Makes sense to me!
Honestly, if I'm getting involved with porn or has nothing to do with my partner and everything to do with me. While plenty of men will blame their wives for not putting out that might be due to any number of things: tiredness because of having to take care of the house and having no help with that, taking care of the kids and having no help, a mental health issue, an unresolved medical issue, a husband who thinks it's a wife's job to do everything around the house and he has no responsibility for any of that, and so many other possibilities. Yes, there are those wives that are just "bad wives" and there are husbands that are just "bad husbands" and neither want to work on fixing the situation. People want to blame others while not taking responsibility for their actions or inactions.
Is this a NY thing? People don’t eat on the Montréal subway, let alone use a seat as a table for a meal. The problem isn’t danger to the food, it’s making a mess that takes a seat out of use.
I think it was for a photo op. I can see the argument of it being inconsiderate to other people but not that it's DANGEROUS to himself
My reaction was second-hand smell!
Mine, too! Pee yew. That and “I hope he’s not getting rice and salsa on the seats, other people have to sit there.”
Anthony LaMesa has a lot to say about bad behavior aboard mass transit:
https://anthonylamesa.substack.com/p/working-class-people-deserve-peace
and this week
https://anthonylamesa.substack.com/p/yes-transit-stations-must-be-policed
I am pretty sure CHH has touched on this, as well, in one of her posts on public disorder. You can’t get people out of their cars if they perceive public transit as disorderly (let alone dangerous). It’s not a lot to ask that public transit be safe, clean, not too noisy, and not smell bad or have threatening behavior not dealt with.
We talk about disorder aboard transit - I noted in another comment how much the issue of food litter went way, WAY down once more secure fare gates were installed in the system which services my area. I do think that it’s because the kind of people who fare-jump are also the kind of people who have no problem stinking up the joint with Eau de Fastfood, and then leaving the wrappings and scraps behind because it’s not THEIR problem to deal with. A whole lot of bad behavior on my local train system has diminished, just because spiffy new hard to evade fare gates were installed.
(I’m 100% sure that the Mamdani eating on the train shot was staged. But I still think that if he’s running for mayor, he should, as parents and teachers are always fond of saying, “set an example.” Don’t eat on the train, people, unless it’s an emergency - diabetics or hangry screaming kids get a pass.)
It genuinely would be very weird to see someone eating like Mamdani is in that picture. Most people don't eat on the subway but I'd expect a guy who did to have it in his lap? The reason isn't because of etiquette it's just likely to be annoyingly crowded to eat comfortably. But it's for instagram, so obviously it's posed and therefore kinda goofy.
It would be much worse if he were eating microwaved, reheated fish.
I'd say that on the subway during rush hour, overcrowding is my top concern, food smells are down the list. After hours in the evening, it's more so people ranting and raving, selling drugs, getting into fights, walking between cars looking for a drug deal liaison, etc. (These are Chicago Red Line concerns.)
Or someone on the red line walking from car to car selling booze and yelling, “liquor liquor liquor liquor”… okay that particular instance has only happened once to me but I laugh every time I think about it
I occasionally eat on the subway(generally falafel over rice from a street vendor). It happens but isn't super common. It's not considered some terrible faux pas unless you're messy or stink up the place, which a burrito isn't smelly enough to do.
Also, at least where I am, the kind of folk who eat like that on the train also leave their food containers and trash. It's not people just discretely having a snack or quick bite. They have big things and then you get on the train and see a bunch of trash, and food and liquid all over the seats.
Same where I live. Mickey D’s detritus everywhere, sometimes even lingering smells. Though since installing the new fare gates (now everyone will know which train system I’m talking about, lol!) which make gate jumping almost impossible, the amount of ketchup smears, crumpled burger wrappers and stray fries has gone way down, as well. Doubt it’s a complete coinkydinky.
I am not public-transit-eating coded, but I would die of embarrassment if I lost a stranger fry on the 'L' or whatever. It is your life's mission to recover and dispose of that errant fry, whatever the cost.
Same! I don’t want to be That Person. Even if nobody knows it was me.
Thank you! Eating is against the rules for good reason. I am baffled by some of the responses I'm seeing on this thread from people who don't seem to grasp this or don't care.
(BTW I first experienced Montréal's subways on a 9th grade French class trip from Michigan -- a state with generally inadequate public transit -- and I was very impressed.)
I agree! Maybe it’s just because I lived in a city and didn’t have a car for quite a few years in my 20’s and 30’s. That means I got to take public transit everywhere. I will give passes to medical issues or if you have a kid who can’t be soothed any other way, BUT, other than that, water or mints only. I have seen and smelled far too many of other people’s messes that they just leave behind for the Cleanup Fairy or whoever to take care of. I’ve seen huge rats skittering around train tracks. (And since the new anti-fare-jumping gates they seem to have diminished in number.)
You’re not getting people out of their cars if public transit is nasty.
I think it's pretty odd to eat anything requiring cutlery on the subway. If I were eating a burrito, I'd be eating with my hands.
- I call bullshit on the woman's body being "just the same" . .if you have kids young and have lucky genetics you can avoid stretch marks, tummy flaps etc. but ain't no way her boobs are just as perky as before kid #1.
-Eating a burrito like that with a knife and fork can be messier than just going to town the old fashioned way. But unless you're on like an hour-long trip why not just wait?
-For a lot of couples porn (both video and booktok gooner lit) is a marriage enhancer and not some nefarious method of faux-cheating. If that's the case, the problem stems from the user, not the content. But conservative evangelicals for all their talk of sinning and responsibility always look for scapegoats.
-Trump is such a queen.
I’m utterly convinced that a big part of Trump’s appeal over the last decade is that he serves the campiest drag queen shit to people who would not understand what that means.
Weird thing about the Stella Greeklastname essay is that she’s writing it like she’s robbing the cradle, but unless I’m reading it wrong she’s 30 and the Italian dude is 26?
I would feel that way with a 4 year age gap lol (I also think she's 31)
I once got accused of grooming my husband cause he was under "brain development" age of 25, being a baby of 24. I was 27. What a sicko
Did you rent a car for him?
I'm calling the police right now!
Tbh that age gap seems small enough that I wouldn’t really think to mention it in most contacts
That's my take. Now, if it were like a reverse Leonardo DiCaprio, then I'd feel a bit differently.
That’s why I don’t think women are able to have an objective opinion on age gap relationships because they personally don’t have any desire to date younger so they naturally just see them as bad (though because there are younger women who date older men, you would think they could see the positives of such a relationship from the female’s side). Nonetheless, I think very rarely is the discourse done in good faith.
I dunno, I’m a dude and I’ve had two long-term relationships with women who were significantly older. Still good friends with both of them. Not a kink for anybody involved, most of their/my other relationships have been closer in age.
Ya, the key thing is that’s offline. I was talking more on the woke online discourse since age gap discourse has devolved into 3 year age gaps are problematic
I mean I guess if you factor in the average emotional maturity it could be more like a 35 year old dating a 22 year old but still
The DC Metro fines people who eat on the subway since it can attract bugs and rats.
Wait, there are subways that have rules... that get enforced??
There are two possibilities
1) an actual transit system in a major American system enforces rules against antisocial behavior
2) someone is wrong on the internet
One of these is more likely than the other
It’s halfway true — you can technically still be fined, but it rarely happens these days. (The cops were stricter about it in the past, but backed off after a few high-profile incidents involving children and pregnant women.) But people still don’t eat on the train because there’s a strong social norm against it. A water bottle or a protein bar is probably okay, but anything more and you’re going to get glared at.
It’s like how we all know to stand on the right and walk on the left on escalators. The DC Metro takes its social contract very seriously, and even our more antisocial residents generally go along with it.
I've lived in the DC area for nearly 20 years and I can't actually remember the last time I saw anyone eating on the Metro.
Conservative female misogynists are so, so weird. There was an essay in UnHerd earlier this week where a woman posited that saying the n-word with a hard r was indicative of a kind of boy "the good kind .. who thinks for himself and whose masculinity hasn’t been completely crushed by the Nurse Ratched types who lord over much of his life."
If a man wrote this, it would be fascinating psychological tableau. But a woman spitting such bizarre, specific, and imagined hatred is just... baffling.
Maybe I'm a Nurse Ratchet type but a man who just says slurs and mean shit for the sake of it is the kind of guy who also will find a lot of joy in just demeaning you. That stuff doesn't just stop at other people.
My money is on it being written by a conservative man in digital drag.
I wonder if that writer saw Jack Torrance using that racial slur in The Shining as a sign the racist ghost had driven him crazy and instead thought "what a nice young man who is so kind to his family."
I would say that eating on the subway is generally a no-no because it can be annoying to all of the other people with whom one is currently sharing a small space..but this is presumably some sort of photo op so no harm done most likely.
yeah clearly nobody else was there lol. I even think eating on the subway is "likely fine" but it depends on how disgusting the food smells lol
like if I had to bet they had food on the run and someone thought it'd make a good pic for instagram. political campaigners live weird lives
My impression of great feminization is… she may get at something but overall it feels like the right equivalent of galaxy brain take of Taylor Swoft but bc she didn’t go full on GroyperiluvHitler1488, it is treated as something serious…?
And lmao to the excerpt- does she think GenZ boss and mini girls have to be sued lol?
Somehow, this roundup seems much less unhinged than previous editions (which is honestly weird to say because it's pretty unhinged). Is this because you're not looking at Twitter from your phone anymore?
I like substack link roundups more often than not, but now i wonder if parenting/gender discourse is just too repetitive for me (maybe because you write all of it first!). Great Feminization makes me roll my eyes. Birth rate discourse, same. It's like I already know people's takes on it before I read the piece, because there's only so many ways to be interesting about those topics.
Maybe!! Now I have to scroll Twitter. Very intentionally on my computer to find this crap.
This is what I want to do, but first I have to clean up all the stuff I've been piling on the computer desk....
She Scrolled For Our Sins
That’s what my kitchen looks like every damn day. My kids and I all have ADHD and my husband is going through a depressive episode.
I'm sorry :(
Thanks. My husband is really unhappy with his job and has been for years, and it took me months of prodding for him to finally make a phone call and schedule an appointment to have his medications evaluated. He just started an increased dosage last week, so I’m hopeful that’ll have some effect.
The weird part is that, from everything I know, it shouldn’t be hard for him to find a new job. He’s just kind of stuck in a mental rut. 😕
Isn't that the thing that makes depression such a bitch? From the outside, you (without a mindset colored by his depression) sees that this is tractable. But because the depression colors how he sees things, it seems hard to do anything...so he doesn't attack the issue...which makes it hard to do things...
Depression is the mental equivalent of trying to wade upstream against a current of sewer water. Smelly and hopeless.
Yep. I keep trying to get him to spend just fifteen minutes a day updating his resume - maybe that feels like too much and five would be better? I offered to sit in his office with him while he did it, too, in case that would help. He said no thanks, that was okay. 😕
He’s a very conscientious employee with around fifteen years of experience in his field, and when his company got bought by a bigger company, they gave him this huge bonus to stay on for at least a year. I’d hire him. 🙂
People get stuck in mental ruts. It's not easy to deal with. Depression is a lot to deal with though depending upon the degree of it. My bestie has a level depression that's off the charts sometimes where she literally can barely get out of bed let alone eat or take care of herself. She's been on medication since she was a teen and either the medication doesn't work or only lasts for so long until she needs to switch to another drug, and she's gone through almost all of them.
I'm sorry. I have ADHD and while I do let my dishes pile up from time to time this would be too much for me to handle. Yes, I would go crazy cleaning because it got this bad and that happened on occasion when my bestie and I lived together. Thank God it never got as bad as that kitchen.
I was going to shame that lady too, and then I noticed my dishwasher didn't run overnight. Now post-breakfast I'm about halfway to that photo (starting from clear countertops). Whoops
This is so not the point, but I am side eying the dishes picture for choice of dishes/food containers. I see a LOT of bulky stuff that doesn’t fit well in the dishwasher, or can’t even go in the dishwasher at all. Big water bottles, sandwich containers, etc. I get that this is probably for school lunches although there are more dishwasher-friendly containers out there. And anything with a ton of little parts that has to be hand washed is going to be scarce in my house. When I buy a food container or gadget I always think about it’s going to be washed and if I’m willing to deal with that on a regular basis.
Similarly, my first thought was that they own way too much plastic stuff. But I have an older house with a small kitchen, so I don’t really know what’s normal.
I don't know how little their kids are or whether breaking things is an issue, but glass is really a great material. :-)
Same, my house is over 100 years old and has a kitchen to match. Sometimes I have to remind myself of that when stuff piles up.
Yes! Nothing beats a Mason jar that can go right into the dishwasher.
100%. The residual dishes in our sink (and fortunately they don't usually overflow the sink) are entirely "must-be-handwashed"...for me the trick is: find a podcast I really want to listen to and clear the backlog...
Trying to think of what I hate more, opening the dishwasher to find plastic containers turned over and full of dirty water that is leaking down onto the clean dishes, or separating a water bottle into 5 parts for cleaning and then having to reassemble it later.
LOL my kids call the overturned containers of gray water "bathtubs" and think it's hilarious. I'd take the overturned containers...I'll take the gamble that maybe next time they stay where I put them.
Hahah well at least they are creative about it!
(Before anyone tells me that not everyone has a dishwasher, there is one visible in the picture!)
I do all the cooking and dishes in my family, and our sink area looks like that within 12 hours of having been cleaned to perfection. I am cleaning up something that looks like that twice every single day. A big driver of this is that my wife goes through like 5 giant Stanley cups per day (I use the same one for a month before switching to my other one) and the kids go through like 5 cups per day as well, then baby bottles, then dishes from cooking, then encrusted cat food bowls. I am sympathetic with them about this kitchen and I don't think it takes long at all for a kitchen to get like that with kids and pets.
Yeah I do most of the dishes in my house too and I’m always a bit horrified at what it looks like when I come home from a work trip. And we have to run the dishwasher at least twice a day.
I've had versions of that experience in the past, to varying levels. And I've tried to confront myself about how much is my preferences vs whether I have a reason that I think my wife should consider. I try to remember that if I am asking the rest of the family to meet my standards of kitchen cleanliness, I am asking them to honor my preferences, not reminding them that they have failed to live by the One True Way® for kitchen cleanliness.
And if I come home from a trip and things are piled up, did I ever communicate that I would like things to be cleaner when I get home? Asking for that out loud would make clear that it really is an _ask_.
"Honey, I'm going to be away for a business trip for a few days, and in that time you'll be stuck doing all of the household and child care tasks that we normally share, while (let's be real) I'll be out drinking with my coworkers. Would you please also, while you're doing that, clean the kitchen so it looks really clean when I get home?"
I have to decide if that's something I want to ask for. If I say "no", I have to own it and not be like "I can't believe she did this" when I get home. If I do ask, I have to be prepared or her to say "no" and live with it, because it really is me asking for something extra, not "she should just do this."
The truth is when my wife has the kids on her own she _does_ clean the kitchen...she's just a bit more latent about it, which is her preference. "Kitchen is clean before I go to bed" is something I do for me; no one else asked for it.
Yes, there is a lot of stuff like that in my household too, the adults having different standards about different things. Generally, the only thing around the house my wife does that drives me insane is when she goes around the house and takes every towel (hand towel and otherwise) to wash, as she owns all laundry other than my personal laundry, but then she does not replace the towels anywhere. I find this to be unreasonable. Inevitably, I run to the sink to wash human or animal waste off my hands, my hands are dripping wet, and there are no towels to be had anywhere in the house. This happens on a weekly basis, and I only occasionally mention it to her because I don't want to fight a war over this.
Yet just today she gave me grief when we went to a 3-year-old's birthday party because I didn't put my son's sweater on before I put him in his car seat. My thinking was that it will be warm in the car and it will be better to put the sweater on when we arrive at our destination, an outdoor playground in 50-degree weather. She seemed to think my approach to this was really unreasonable and I had to draw the line on this and be like "you have to got stop prosecuting minor subjective different ways of doing things like this; by the way, you did the towel thing again and I didn't mention it because it's not worth disturbing the peace over."
A lot of this stuff I think is not specific to a romantic relationship but just to cohabitating with another human being. You have to learn to accept that different people will do things in different ways.
Yeah, I occasionally feel tempted to get out a big trash bin and just sweep all the dirty dishes into it with my arm.
I read once that Hasidic Jews often use paper plates and plastic utensils so they won't have to spend their entire life doing dishes. I recoil at this financially and environmentally, but I have become much more sympathetic to this as an approach to not spend half your life doing dishes so you can actually spend time with your kids.
So, dumb question: why is it that all these household members aren't putting their dishes in the dishwasher as they go? If you don't possess a dishwasher, why aren't they washing their dishes immediately after their meals? I find this confusing.
The issue is that the dishwasher only truly gets certain items clean. It also gets run at least once a day. But you can’t put baby bottles, kid cups that require disassembly, Stanley cups, pots, pans and other items that get very dirty in the process of cooking in it. We’ve tried putting everything in there and items that we’ve found don’t clean have to be hand washed, and this is a majority of the items.
Oof, that's rough, you could definitely use a better dishwasher- we also have a couple pans that I have to handwash for being too tall, but bottles and Munchkin cups are totally fine in mine (we don't have Stanley cups). I think if my family were regularly creating so much handwashing that the kitchen looked like the picture, we'd have to reevaluate how we're using dishes throughout the day. It's way too much!
Yeah, I’ve tried to make the argument several times that we don’t need to dirty as many cups as we are, but it is to no avail. And I don’t want to spend my capital on that.
The dishwasher was installed in 2021 or so and is pretty state of the art. Things just don’t get clean in there with how dirty and encrusted our dishes regularly are.
Thanks for the shout out, based CHH!