Many Such Takes: Reflect on the Blowjob, Barbie Dream Fest, Aham Biopic, and More

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—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!!

Reflect on the Blowjob

Unfortunately, almost all of this week’s Many Such Takes will be about this, but trust me, it’s worth it.

Basically, this week on Twitter, a bunch of radical feminists (who I’m clocking to be mostly in their teens and early twenties) declared that all heterosexual sex, especially anal and blowjobs, is abusive and/or coercive. This is actually nothing new—in 1987, Andrea Dworkin wrote in her book Intercourse that all heterosexual sex under patriarchy reinforces the dominion of men over women. The exaggeration of this statement, ie: “all heterosexual sex is abuse” came about frequently on radfem Tumblr in the 2010s as well.

For those unfamiliar with the concept of radical feminism, you probably have some questions. First of all, no, radfems aren’t “woke” or “SJWs.” They are frequently anti-trans, and some hold right-wing positions on immigration too. Second, you might be wondering what the hell their endgame is given that a lot of women enjoy having sex with men. Well, some of the radfems insisted that all women—even straight women—completely swear off men. (Many of the women saying this were lesbians, although I have to say, most lesbians I know do not spend this much time thinking about men or having sex with men.) But more commonly, they are basically saying, “Yes, have sex with men if you must, but you have to think about why it’s oppressive even though that’s not going to do anything beneficial for either of you.” I wrote about that before, actually.

I believe it all started with this take:

While there is a big enough radfem contingent on Twitter for some agreements, this mostly proved to be a jumping off point for jokes.

This one made me chuckle out loud:

And a surprising revelation from Aella :

But it was a particular “You can have heterosexual sex but you must think about why it’s bad” take that went the most viral. Most of the radfems in this discourse believed that women who said they enjoyed giving blowjobs, having anal sex, or engaging in any type of submission dynamic didn’t really enjoy it. A few conceded they might enjoy some of these things, but that consent and pleasure were irrelvant—they still owed themselves (or perhaps, the Twitter radfems) penance for these egregious sins.

So far, this particular tweet, especially the line “Enjoy the blowjob, but REFLECT on it” is the top contender for “new Twitter meme.”

As we might expect, Gen X and millennial women pushed back against the dogmatic cancellation of oral sex, but we were told we are simply too old and dorky to get it:

Heterosexual women notoriously hate submission:

It’s giving “Aaron Rupar taking a Twitter break on the day Trump got shot.”

There was a sub-discourse (no pun intended) hidden in all of this—someone argud that anal sex was uniquely unhealthy for women who had more fragile anuses than men, so you couldn’t draw a comparison to anal sex between gay men. Then, the same person who said “REFLECT on the blowjob” criticized trans women for defending anal sex because it was “Israeli” of them.

Most charitably, I can only assume that some of these women, given their age, had bad experiences with early exposure to pornography, or bad experiences with men, and this colored their perception of heterosexual sex. But hey, if they need actual evidence that women are actually enjoying sex with men, I have something on that coming Monday. Stay tuned…

Barbie Dream Fest

It seems like once a year, someone tries to throw an “experience” event in a large warehouse and it turns out to be a total shitshow. The first iteration of this was probably the infamous Dashcon Tumblr event that featured a solitary ball pit:

We also saw this happen with the Willy Wonka experience:

And in September of 2024, I covered the abysmal Bridgerton experience, which I would argue was worse than either of these things, and inexplicably included a stripper:

Anyway, this week we got a new one! Presenting, the Barbie Dream Fest:

Aham Biopic

The Lindy West drama (I wrote about that here) has died down somewhat, but some nuggets have come out this week that make me think I’d be able to win a Lindy West polycule trivia challenge. This week, most of the discourse has shifted entirely towards her spouse Aham who has been crashing out after sending a nasty, profanity-laden email to Scaachi Koul of Slate fame, after she profiled the throuple. The egregious error in her profile was that she failed to pay adequate respect to Aham’s work as a musician and instead referred to a “shared project” on which they (Aham and Roya) were working.

In particular, Lindy West’s husband, Aham, apparently released a biopic of himself (where he plays himself) in 2023, appropriately titled Thin Skin.

Of course, we got some great livetweets of the biopic from ashley ray who has basically been majoring in Aham Studies for the past week:

However, many people came out of the movie with one small “you have to hand it to him” which is that Aham is genuinely a very good trumpet player and is moderately sexy when playing said trumpet.

Funny Tweets/Other Happenings

Elijah Schaffer, the right wing influencer who got exposed for cheating on his postpartum wife (backstory here), is now prancing around with a gun and a Hitler mustache. We continue to monitor the situation.

Menswear Guy got yelled at for making light of the fertilizer shortage.

Great example of what it’s like to be on Twitter:

In case you missed it…