Many Such Takes: Thanksgiving Canceled, Millennial Marriage, Pit Bulls (Again) and More
The most unhinged discourse of the week, always free
Welcome to Many Such Takes, my twice-monthly roundup of Internet drama and discourse (mostly Twitter) and funny happenings online. If you enjoy a good guilty pleasure of unhinged discourse, this is for you. If it’s not your kind of thing, I implore you to check out my other recent articles, because while publishing 4-5 times a week, there’s always something for someone:
Relationships: Why don’t women make the first move?
Social dynamics: Why I gave up on throwing big parties
Fashion: 21 Outfits I wore in Paris this July
Personal essay: My “secret club” at theater camp got me in a lot of trouble
Parenting: Is it “outsourcing” to occasionally get help with your kids?
More relationships: Is the stereotype of women being “clingy” about marriage and babies still true?
While MST will always be free, the rest of my content—4 articles per week—are paid. As I said before, it’s a little bit of everything—mostly social dynamics (dating, friendship, marriage, etc) but also some fashion, and some random shower thoughts questions like what happened to picky eaters in olden times? If that sounds appealing, consider becoming a paid subscriber. I’m running a 30% off sale on annual subscriptions for the next week! (Even at my regular prices, I have some of the lowest $-for-article volume pricing on Substack, but a summer sale can’t hurt.)
Thanksgiving Canceled
Time for some good old fashioned Woke 1 discourse! Francesca Hong is a candidate running for governor of Wisconsin, and this week, some particularly memorable past moments of hers came to light. First, she previously described having a half-white son (who was presumably sired by the white guy she married) as an uncomfortable “proximity to whiteness.”
But most of the ire this week came from the fact that in 2020 (who amongst us was not a little insane in 2020) she proposed canceling Thanksgiving due to trauma imposed on indigenous “folx” by pilgrims who weren’t WEARING A FUCKING MASK:
I feel weird defending anything about this tweet, but considering it was 2020, “cancel Thanksgiving” likely didn’t mean getting rid of the holiday entirely, but staying home during that particular Thanksgiving. I’m sure many of you also think that’s stupid, but there is a meaningful difference between “canceling” in the covid sense, and cancellation.
But, as it turns out, she has ragged on basically every holiday, including a line about feeling “attacked” when non-consensually exposed to a Christmas-related imagery via a computer background:
So, how is she going to do damage control? During a relatively softball interview, she did a 180 and declared that while she is a bit of a “curmudgeon” about most holidays, her favorite holiday is Thanksgiving after all! Just say you hate indigenous folx and go. She then went on to very vaguely and oddly describe Thanksgiving in a way that only someone who never celebrated it would, summing it up as a “big event,” with very little detail indicating any real familiarity.
As I said, she talks about Thanksgiving the way Trump talks about the Bible.
More good takes:
Millennial Marriage
I was happy to see this topic in the discourse because this had been my beat for ages now. Some of my fellow millennial women pointed out that conversations about women of their generation “delaying marriage” are incongruent with the experiences of secular millennial women in the 2000s and 2010s: being called crazy if you wanted any commitment at all, with the understanding that men didn’t want to be married and would put it off as long as possible. Now, suddenly, women have “delayed!”
While I’m sure some women deliberately deprioritized marriage to focus on other things, my anecdotal experience of being a millennial woman was that nearly every woman wanted marriage more than her boyfriend did (a lot of time, even admitting you wanted a monogamous boyfriend made you seem “crazy”) and that anti-marriage sentiment was popular among lots of young men, not just the ones with options.
I wrote about this exact phenomenon here
She's Probably Not "Delaying Marriage."
You’ve probably all heard it from people in my general blogosphere—people (mostly women) need to marry earlier if they want to have more children. Ergo, they need to stop delaying marriage. Relatively unserious Twitter accounts will post photos of smiling blonde Mormon families and instruct their followers to “get married and have babies,” as if this were something they had been actively refusing to do despite constant opportunities. Especially if the target is a woman, it’s assumed that she could get married whenever she wants (and it would make her eternally happy) but for some insane reason she’s choosing to “do spreadsheets” or something.
This (very apt) tweet seems to have started the discourse:
Followed by this one, which really kicked shit off:
I maintain Lisa is correct! At least where I grew up, it was considered “crazy” to even mention you wanted to get married at some point, even if you were well into your twenties! Dating for marriage was considered so unhinged and weird that you would have to pretend you weren’t doing it, even when dating relatively older guys. I had a male friend in his early thirties—not particularly Chadly or tall or good with women, just a regular guy—who stopped seeing a woman because she mentioned marriage too early on, even though it was more generally speaking and not about marrying him specifically. Another friend (age 38 at the time) advised my husband to never live with a woman or get married, right after we got engaged (nice.) Anyway, MANY SUCH CASES!
I will say the trend seems to be shifting a bit, and Gen Z men do seem a bit more interested in marriage than their female counterparts, although things probably haven’t changed as much as trad Twitter would have you think. More about that here:
The Era of The "Stage Five Clinger" is Over
Believe it or not, we had our own version of “gender discourse” in the 1990s and 2000s. And yes, I was a child during most of this era, but this type of gender discourse was visible even to people who were not terminally online, because it was all over mainstream media and the general zeitgeist.
Primetime
In case you missed it, there’s a A24 new movie on the horizon—Primetime, based on the career of Chris Hansen of To Catch a Predator fame. Chris Hansen will be played by none other than Robert Pattinson who does a…fairly convincing Chris Hansen impression despite not looking very much like him.
But perhaps the best Primetime discourse came from this tweet, which takes issue with the fact that a talented actor fell so far that he was “forced” to play a pedophile:
I couldn’t help but feel I was getting shades of “Sydney Sweeney is a pedophile because she played a character who sucked on a binky during a sexy video in Euphoria.”
This sparked some pretty entertaining responses:
But perhaps the best tweet about this movie came from this person, with 81K likes and counting:
Survyeys
I interrupt this programming to ask you to fill out my anonymous surveys!
Consider:
Pit Bulls (Again)
I am obviously no stranger to “aggressive dog discourse.” I was never a big pit bull person, but also didn’t care that much either way. I thought about pit bulls about as much as I thought about the Steelers, which is to say, almost never. If the topic came up, I mostly bought into the “it’s the owner, not the dog” thing because it was the line that was parroted around me constantly, and I even had people telling me it was racist—not dog-racist, but like, actually racist, somehow, to believe dog breeds had any inherently different traits despite being bred specifically for different traits, unlike humans.
Until I had kids. Suddenly, there were a bunch of pit bulls (often unleashed!) roaming around my neighborhood, and I was increasingly aware of just how badly that can go when little kids are involved. My husband was chased and nearly bitten by one on his run, and when he yelled at the owner for losing control of her dog, she burst into tears and was comforted by bystanders who thought my husband was a big ol’ meanie. Frequently, I cross the street to get away from one, and its owner yells after me that “she’s friendly,” as if I’m supposed to know that (or believe them, which, I don’t.) I’ve seen stories of pit bulls with aggressive histories erased and pushed onto families, only to kill their children. I’m aware that shelters are passing off pit bulls as other breeds to sanitize them for families who otherwise may have safety concerns. Consider me radicalized.
Now, I’m at the point where I view pit bulls more or less as domesticated tigers or assault rifles with their own free will, carrying a small chance they will randomly just snap and kill someone for no reason. Because, well, they sometimes do that, even when they’re raised by attentive, loving suburban families who would never abuse an animal. So much for “the owner.” As for chihuahuas being more aggressive, they have yet to kill anyone!
All that to say, this is basically the only Twitter hivemind topics where I think Twitter is much more sane and reasonable than the general population, who mostly, across political lines, believe that pit bulls are totally fine to allow around children because they have one and hasn’t eaten anyone yet. Well, pediatricians apparently disagree. But that doesn’t matter. Outside of Twitter, people think it’s crazy to be concerned about having your children around these things.
In case that rant somehow wasn’t enough for you, you can read more of my thoughts on the topic here.
But anyway, pit bulls are back in the Twitter discourse, because why not! They seem to connect everyone across the political spectrum, not easy to do on a place like X The Everything App, where nearly any position on any topic can have you hounded by people who are one crashout away from being sectioned.
I’ve rounded up some of the most insane/amusing takes, such as this guy who suggests that a child fleeing a pit bull should simply learn to stop being so afraid and the dog is only aggressively chasing them because they can smell fear (if this were true—and it may very well be—it’s an unintentionally great argument for “pit bulls are unsafe around children.”)
I can’t stop thinking about Crazy Zeke:
This one might take the cake for “bad takes:” If you live near a wacko who lets their pit bull roam free, the onus should be on you and your children to shelter in place indefinitely:
This is why I come to Twitter:
Anyway, because this invariably always comes back to “Other things are more dangerous” (and, based on deaths alone, yes) I will just leave this here:
I loled:
Funny Tweets/Other Happenings
For a while this particular video of a contestant from the TLC show, Match Me Abroad, was going viral on Twitter. I guarantee you that it goes in a very different direction than you’re expecting:
A good old fashioned parenting tweet:
Monitoring this situation:
And, last but not least, a “we should go to war” post from a man who is living in a country that is involved in wars, has an army, and has suspiciously not joined said army. Apparently, billions must die because of…*checks notes* too many men being stay-at-home boyfriends.
Some other free articles…
Why (Some) Women Get Obsessed With The Red Pill
It’s been Red Pill Week on Substack, and personally, I couldn’t be happier because this has been one of my Internet obsessions for a while. For those of you not in the loop, The Red Pill (or TPR) can best be described as a loose, unofficial ethos about the “true nature of women” (ie: dual mating strategy, amoral sexual p…
Free Article: People Are Still Privilege Checking
Hi free subscribers! Today, I’ve removed the paywall from a pretty popular article from a couple weeks ago, called People are Still Privilege Checking. Enjoy! Comments are now open to free subscribers too, so feel free to join the conversation or share around!
Why I'm Not A Republican
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I Feel Weird About Push-Up Bras
Recently, I read Viv Chen’s amazing piece about her experience as a “self-proclaimed bralette bitch” trying on the most dramatic push-up bras at Victoria’s Secret. I’m a big fan of her work in general (if you’re into fashion, you should subscribe!) and this piece was not only funny and well-written, but got me thinking abou…
In the Wisconsin debates, Hong's opponent should definitely wear a variety of Halloween costumes.
I just want you to know I heard trump speaking for the first time in a long time the other day and damn your trump voice is right on
It was like HE was doing YOU